For whatever reason, my father sat picking the black paint from under his fingernails and refused to meet the Dutchman.
I came out of the house squinting. The daylight dazzled me; it was dark where we worked, so dark that now my father was lifting his pages up to his nose and peering at them. Feeling unsteady on my sandals and displaced—as if I myself were cut out of a book of pictures and pasted onto this scene—I set out.
I was a simple townswoman in my indigo blue cotton-print kimono and jacket, with a few coins and some papers tucked in my sleeve. Neat enough: hair wound tight in a bun at my neck, no makeup, not slender but rounded now. I passed through a market and bought myself some grilled eggplant and tofu mixed in a sweet, peppery sauce. Delicious.
I sucked my fingers, one after another. I didn’t get out often enough. I concentrated so fiercely on my work. Now I could see changes out here in the big city—more countryfolk surrounded the vendors, if that was possible. Women in clusters crowded a fabric seller’s stall where bolts of patterned silks and velvets were stacked up to the roof. There were wooden toys for sale everywhere, spinning tops and something you rubbed between your palms to make it fly up into the air. Howling dogs and competing vendors and chains of monks.
This was the life my father couldn’t be without. I too could enjoy it. A man hailed me from across the aisle—the candy vendor who faithfully delivered Hokusai’s order of sweets.
“How’s your old man?”
“Excellent!” I gave my tight smile. It was an unfamiliar feeling on my face. “Better and better.”
Only his friends knew about the palsy. The sweets were part of Hokusai’s plan to cure himself. I waved and strode past, breathing more deeply, feeling proud on my errand to the Dutch. I thought, it is true that I am only a woman and I have a thrusting chin and a shabby kimono, but I represent the finest artist in the land, and this is the proof.
The guards at the Nagasakiya bowed me in. And I was in his presence.
The Miracle Doctor astonished me. He was tall and not red-haired at all. His hair was golden, like sheaves of grain. He had broad shoulders and a narrow waist and long, thin legs. His eyes were an intense blue. He towered over me but bowed to my height and looked at me openly, kindly.
My little lecture to myself had worked. I was not intimidated. In fact, I was awash in his glory. I felt accepted by those eyes. I softened. My face came unstuck from its rigid, defensive expressions. My eyes cast modestly down, I found myself eager to talk.
“My father, the great master, is at this moment deeply engaged in a large work and unable to be here.” Sanba had told me I had dimples in my cheeks that I could use to my advantage. I used them, probably for the first time ever.
The Dutch doctor showed no surprise. I was astonished to be speaking Japanese with a barbarian. And we understood each other! What he didn’t say in words, he indicated with his deep-socketed eyes and giant brows, which lifted and lowered to add feeling. Oh, what a beautiful man he was. Hardly a man: like another creature altogether, a finer one.
Usually the Japanese did not examine him; he examined them. But this young woman stared openly. He could see her tracing his face, and he felt its difference from hers: his shaggy eyebrows where she had a small, thick ridge indicating she was unmarried; the caverns of his eyes, darkened with lack of sleep, where hers were bright sharp stones that seemed to pop out of their lids.
Hokusai’s daughter was small, and not as feminine as some of the women here, yet was possessed of a certain charm. Her face was diamond-shaped, wide at the jaw with a square-ended, thrusting chin, giving her an inquisitive look. She had large ears and a voice pitched strangely low for a Japanese woman. She was not well dressed, which must have been an artist’s affectation. Nor did she bow.
He found her lack of shyness refreshing and mildly challenging. She spoke to him as an equal, a thing he had never experienced before with a Japanese woman. She said her father was in his sixty-seventh year.
“An old man!”
“He has boasted that since I was born,” said the daughter. “But now it has become true.”
“What is he working on?” he said.
“Beautiful women not so much any longer.” She became a little vague. “Peasants in the countryside, views of natural wonders . . .”
He asked to see some of Hokusai’s paintings, and the woman said she would return. He went to his desk to take notes for the book he would one day write about the Japanese people. What was this pride in being old? He had heard it said that death was the high point of a man’s life. And this lack of respect for conventions by the artist’s daughter? They were eccentrics—if such a thing was possible in Japan.
So many contradictions! The government, of course, was two-faced. The announced strictures were extreme. Yet punishments were applied only in opportunistic circumstances. He was summoned here and then ignored. He was not to explore, but official scientists called on him with official questions. The Japanese navigated these layers without much difficulty. But he found them inexplicable.
Take Japanese women, for instance. The rare sophisticated woman ran a family inn or store. Others, earthier, were skilled in weaving or silk production. But even the most independent of them withered in the presence of a male relative. Women, he observed, had no social context of their own. They rarely appeared alone in public; it was positively Arab that way. Here was the greatest puzzle: there appeared to be no coercion. Women were willing partners in their own invisibility. Why was the Japanese woman so dependent, her very existence defined by obligation?
And yet, as he had seen today, why was the opposite evident, at least this once?
He put down his pen and laid his head on his Western pillow in his Western bed, carted all the way from Nagasaki. He might learn more from this strange daughter when she returned.
W
HEN I TOOK
paintings to the Nagasakiya, he offered me tea. And a sweet cake that I found delicious. The Miracle Doctor told me about his journey, about how, at each stop along the way, he had pulled out his telescope and looked at Fuji-san in its virgin beauty. He measured it again and again and wrote down his observations while he was being carried in the sedan chair he called his flying study.
“But was the height of Fuji-san different, from different places along the road?” I said.
“Of course! It depends on where you are looking from.”
This astonished me. I thought the mountain must always maintain the same height. He laughed to see my pondering. “Of course it is a trick of the mind. Don’t you see?”
“The mountain is a god,” I observed.
“It has no magical powers,” he said shortly. “But it appears to change when our position changes. It is we who go up and down. So we were actually measuring not the height of the mountain but the lay of the land.”
“I see,” I said, and I was beginning to.
“I hid my compass in my hat,” he confided. He was so proud of this contraption that he showed me the tall black felt with its pocket inside.
“Compass in your hat!” I was amazed. “Is it a brain you wear outside your head? Does it help you think?”
The Dutchman did not laugh. “I don’t need help in thinking. Only in measuring.”
He was marvelous to look at and so curious. And I thought he was good. He wanted to do good. But he lacked caution.
“It will not go unnoticed,” I murmured, my face bending low in front of him.
“Unnoticed by whom? Your authorities allow me to do what I wish. My curiosity arises from my great respect for your people,” he said.
“It is not for people to be curious.” I used a term that meant a lowly person.
“I am not lowly,” he said. “I am a scientist.”
“The laws . . .” I began and bowed again.
“These laws are not serious. They exist, but no one pays any attention to them.”
He elaborated.
“Laws,” he spouted, “they are ignored. For instance, the law against smuggling. Everyone knows the
opperhoofd
goes out and comes back laden with trinkets. The
opperhoofd
is not searched.” The doctor made a joke. “When he arrives back at Deshima, he is very fat. Then he goes to his chamber and disrobes, and suddenly he is thin.”
I laughed because he seemed to expect it. I said that he had learned to speak Japanese well. I asked him how he had done it.
“Hanging on the wall in my toilet, I have a copy of the poem children use to memorize the syllables.”
I cackled at the picture this conjured.
He looked startled at my outburst, but so was I. Why so frank?
“In my sleep, I work on vocabulary,” he said.
“How?” Hokusai would be interested in that. If he could figure out how to draw in his sleep, he would do it.
“I say word pairs as I’m drifting off.”
We were suddenly struck dumb. Our conversation had got off to such a fast start; it had hurtled, and now we were embarrassed.
The doctor suddenly seemed to wonder about me.
“Are you married?”
“Yes.” It was simpler to tell this little lie.
“Did you choose the man you married?”
“I chose him after I met him in my father’s art classes.”
“This is unusual,” he said.
“My father knows me well,” I said.
“Did you study in the classes too?” he asked.
“I did, when I was younger. But now I teach the classes. My father is very busy. Hokusai had decided it was my job to pass along his method.”
Silence. I could have told him more about that, but he didn’t ask.
“Are you married?” I asked him.
“I have a Japanese wife.”
It was a puzzling answer. Yes, he was calling her his wife, but at the same time he was saying she was Japanese, which seemed a qualifier. “Does that mean yes or no?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said stiffly.
“Do you have a Dutch wife as well?”
At this he laughed.
“No, Otaki is my only wife. We have a child. I love them both very much,” he said.
I was charmed by the way he said that. I knew no man who spoke of love so simply.
The doctor wanted famous views of Edo. He wanted festivals. He wanted pictures that showed our rituals. He wanted these in watercolor. I agreed that Hokusai would paint them. We settled on a good price. In exchange, he offered to provide us things from Europe. I said, as courtesy required, that we wanted nothing. Then von Siebold mentioned the color
beru.
Ah, now that was different.
I knew this color. We called it Berlin blue. It was a new blue from Prussia, very expensive, very strong. It had appeared in our markets only a few years ago. Painters in Osaka used it for actor prints. Here in Edo, the rebel disciple Eisen was using it on fans. He was clever, that man. The grains of the pigment were very fine, and it printed more smoothly than our dayflower or indigo. Our blues were fugitive—they faded. But
beru
was long lasting.
I told the doctor that
beru
was too expensive. We couldn’t even afford it for a painting, where we would use a very little. For a print it was unthinkable, because of the quantity we’d need.
“No, no,” he said. “It can’t be true. Nothing can be too expensive for the great master.” He wanted to give me gifts. Though I demurred, again for manners, he produced a little
beru
right then. And some Dutch paper. And a pencil.
As I made my way back through the twilit streets, a little more lurid as dark grew, with performers japing, drums beating, hawkers insistent at the end of day, I wondered why he had given me the pencil.
I think it was because we had spoken of painting in the Western style, and of the straight lines used to draw buildings, pillars, and furniture. Von Siebold’s draftsman used a pencil, and he thought Hokusai might use it to make his paintings.
But I used the pencil. First I held it lightly and reverently in my hand, knowing that his long, slender fingers, his surgeon’s fingers, had touched it. Then I began making lines with a straight edge to draw in the scaffolding around my figures. Over the pencil lines I used the watercolors. The results were mixed. I had asked Hokusai to paint, but he would not.
“These are for the Dutch doctor,” I reminded him.
“You do it, and get the students to help,” he said. “Stupid foreigner. He won’t know the difference.”
I
RETURNED WITH PAINTINGS.
Von Siebold smiled more kindly on me each time I saw him. He cleared the room of his learned hangers-on. We fell into conversation, as if we’d done this often.
He liked
Sudden Shower:
the peasants bracing themselves as a cloudburst broke over their heads. It was a common enough scene in Japan, but he didn’t know that.