“An instant so fleeting only a genius could have caught it,” I said, showing him the gestures of self-protection against wind and water, the onslaught so frequent in our land. I enjoyed the charade. It was a picture Hokusai had designed but left to me to put in the color.
We discussed my father’s genius. So unconventional! How refreshing his vision was; how, of all the Japanese artists, Hokusai was the one whose name would one day be known in Europe.
Von Siebold’s secretary wrote down the particulars of the sale. The doctor smiled warmly at me, which gave me the confidence to ask my question.
“You are a learned man,” I began.
He nodded. No argument there.
“In England,” I said, “there was a great writer, name of Shakespeare. Do you know him?”
He was surprised by my topic. “Any educated man knows the works of Shakespeare. We studied him in school.”
He struck a pose.
“ ‘What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and motion how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!’ ”
Oh, he was like an angel himself. It was the one word of English I understood. I clapped my hands. It made tears spring to my eyes, that man reciting the strange words that rolled and tumbled together. The secretary chuckled. I had never heard the language before. Sanba loved Shakespeare; that’s how I had heard of the greatest playwright in the world. Perhaps a few of his plays were read here, by the scholars in Dutch. But Sanba was no scholar; he was a scavenger of names and fame and knew nothing of the man’s work, only that he was great.
“That is wonderful,” I said carefully. “Can you tell me about the man?”
“What?”
“Can you tell me, for instance, if this Shakespeare had a daughter?”
I don’t know what question he had expected next, but it was not this one.
“A daughter?” he said. “He has been dead two hundred years.”
“Yes,” I said, “but . . .”
“Little is known about his life.”
One of the other Dutchmen in the room came and spoke in von Siebold’s ear. Perhaps he understood my question.
“It is possible that he did have a daughter,” said von Siebold.
I smiled. “And she wrote for the stage also?”
No need for consultation this time.
“No.”
“But she helped him with his writing?”
“No, no.”
I was shocked and disappointed. “Why not?”
“Maybe she didn’t know how to write.”
“The daughter of the great master was not taught to write?” I had thought these Westerners were highly civilized.
“I doubt it. Shakespeare was a simple man from the provinces. This daughter, assuming there was one, may have learned to sign her name. Or maybe to write simple things, like a list of her possessions.”
“She would not be required to help him with his work?” I had spent many hours imagining this woman. I felt certain she existed.
A light came in his eyes. He thought he understood me. So I was interested in the role in her father’s life taken by this mythical daughter. His smile became broad.
“He went to live in London and left both wife and daughter behind,” he said gently.
“Oh! But how did he manage without her?”
He tipped his head. He spoke as if not wanting to disappoint a child. “We are imagining this,” he cautioned.
“My father,” I said, and I knew I had given myself away but threw all caution to the wind, “my father had three daughters. Still not enough.”
Von Siebold laughed. I laughed with him.
“Of Shakespeare’s daughter, we have no information,” he said firmly.
No information. I was stunned. I had not imagined a great life for her. Only a little one. But not that fate. To be utterly unknown. To have one’s labor for the art forgotten. To have one’s very existence in question.
“England is not like here. Shakespeare’s work was not a family project.”
“No?” I didn’t believe it. I sat trying to absorb it.
He was clearly puzzled. “What did you think she did?”
Sanba had talked about the great dramatist of kings and wars; the Kabuki actors discussed him too. He wrote many plays, and to do that he would have had to have a daughter at his side. She might have helped with the work if he went out of town, on the road or gathering information. Or if he had too much writing to do at once, he would lay out the pattern and she—
“No one but the great man himself could have written the plays,” said von Siebold. “No daughter, even if he had one, had anything to do with it.”
I saw he had missed my point entirely. “Of course,” I said. “And she would never have said anything but that that was the case.”
He looked at me keenly.
“It seems a waste.”
A dubious smile played around his lips. Was I teasing? “A waste of what?”
“Of her great talent.”
He looked blank.
“In Japan we make sure that such skill descends in families,” I said.
“Anyway,” he said apologetically, “there is no such woman. We don’t know that she was ever born.”
I kept my teeth covered, as they were bad. My time was up. “I am very grateful for your thoughts.” I bowed. I promised to be back. I left, disappointed but somehow stirred inside. I had not realized how backward these Europeans were.
I traipsed down the street deep in thought. Since I first heard Shakespeare spoken of as the man who understood great and small, I had likened him to the Old Man. He taught his daughter to write. When a child, she was made to do errands for her father, and she did them willingly because she understood his art better than anyone. He shared his insights, his rages against the world. He was not a worldly man, because his head was in the clouds, and his daughter became sharp with tradesmen and competitors who would have cheated him. In this way, the daughter was a true disciple, and always loyal.
Because Shakespeare-san was difficult. The master could be erratic; they often were. Had the daughter been of the same temperament as he—unwilling to please for the sake of it, hating pretense—she would have had to hide it. She would perform duties for her father not because of deference or duty but because if she didn’t, the work would not be produced. The work was their livelihood. And she believed in its worth.
But this daughter—all right, if she did not exist, then perhaps I would have to speak of myself—this daughter herself was capable of great work. But she rarely had the time to concentrate on it. The more she helped Hokusai, the greater he became and the lesser she became. As he grew greater, she grew older. That was the real question. When would it be her time?
W
ORD CAME FROM
the Nagasakiya that von Siebold had a gift for us.
I went to pick it up.
“For your father,” he said. It was a supply of the paint called
beru,
the vibrant blue that did not fade. In quantities enough to make anything we wanted.
I touched the packet. I rubbed the fine, fine particles between my fingertips. As the primary grinder of pigments in our house, I was fascinated. It would save me a great deal of work. It would also make wonderful sky and sea.
“I can’t accept this,” I said, pushing it back to him.
“Yes, you can,” he said, pushing it back toward me. I was confused because his hands touched mine.
“Do you know the story of how it was discovered?” von Siebold said, covering this awkward moment.
“No.” I passed a small amount of the pigment between my forefingers and thumb. I rubbed it onto the top of my hands, the way actors tested their white makeup. It went into the lines of my skin. It was that fine.
“Scientists made it by accident. They were trying to make red. Isn’t that funny? It has iron in it, I suppose,” he said. “Please accept it; I am eager to see what your father can do with it.”
He had forgotten that I was a painter too.
He squeezed my hand.
I took the packet.
A
WEEK LATER,
I returned to the Nagasakiya. I presented him with the first of the paintings: my father’s print
A View of Both Banks of the Sumida River,
an older one, but we still had a copy. He wanted a beauty, a
bijin-ga,
so I sold him the silk painting
Courtesan Inspecting Her Coiffure.
We said it was by Hokusai, but it was studio work. I felt a little guilty. I had not had time to use the
beru
yet.
This time he showed his pleasure at seeing me. He smiled widely and took each of my hands in his.
The place was quiet; it was as if the Dutch had been forgotten, stranded in the midst of the clogged streets of Edo. His secretary served me coffee that was rich and bitter. The doctor showed me his specimens. He had a collecting album, each page a little pocket into which was tucked a dried, pressed flower. We looked at a hairy primrose that grew only on a mountain in the Kiso Valley. He showed me dried blossoms of the early blooming Yoshino cherry, leaves of the Zelkova tree, a large
kanoko
lily, and some seeds of a hydrangea. That was his favorite; he wanted to name it after his wife, Otaki. He grew them on his prison-island and sent the seeds, and even the living specimens, to Holland. He collected tea plants as well and sent them to the Dutch islands.
“The exotica of Japan,” he said dreamily, “going out into the world. Flowers, tea, your father’s pictures, your ways, of which I will write in my book.”
“Our ways are exotic?” To me they were harsh.
“Oh, yes. They are exotic and even bizarre to our eyes. But this will end, with the foreigners coming and our ways coloring the water as tea leaves do.”
I smiled at his metaphor. It was something he was learning from our speech, I felt. “Will foreigners come?” I wanted it but could not believe it would happen.
“It can’t be helped. They will come here from all over the world. The shogun cannot keep the walls up around these islands forever.”
T
HE SHOGUN TOYED
with the Dutch. The official visit was delayed further. Crowds collected in front of the Nagasakiya. The Dutch were easy to see, in their locked house.
“The Dutchman told me about beautiful things that he collected along the road,” I said to Hokusai. “He found a giant salamander, longer than my two arms stretched apart. Its head is flat and triangular, like a stone arrowhead made by the Indians of North America.”
I had visited half a dozen times. Then I came home and told my father stories. I liked being the one with stories to tell. I repeated the one about the emperor Napoleon, who defeated the king and queen of France and who lost his power once he lost his wife. I told him about ice, and how it could be made and stored in a special box with electricity. I told him that there was a wild man with long hair who walked through the forests of the New World sketching birds that no one had ever seen before.
When I went next to the Nagasakiya to deliver pictures, the doctor had a question for me. On his journey to Edo he had left the expedition to visit a magistrate. He had discovered that after he left, the
bakufu
put the magistrate under house arrest. He was concerned.
“What law did the magistrate break?” he asked, sincerely puzzled.
“He talked to you.”
“But many people talk to me! You are talking to me.”
“It’s true,” I said. “It may seem that there is no law, or that no one obeys it. But don’t be mistaken. The laws exist. They are kept secret.”
He rocked back on his high heels. “Secret laws! What is the point of that?”
“To instill fear! The shogun is a stalking tiger. The tiger can be very patient. His prey can mosey along or skip and run. It does not matter. Suddenly he takes a step too far and the tiger pounces.”
He examined my face.
“You will make a note for your book that this Japanese woman has nonsensical and primitive fears,” I said. “But you should take heed.”
Von Siebold was taken with the women in the many pictures I brought showing our rituals, like
Two Women and a Boy at the Time of the Boys’ Festival
and A
Merchant Making Up the Accounts at the End of the Year.
It seemed we had a friendship, despite our differences.
We talked then about slavery. The sale of the Negroes of Africa to work as animals on plantations in the Americas. I said I abhorred it and I said this with disgust.
“People are not to be bought and sold,” I said.
His hand twitched as if he wanted to take notes. “You display an unusual passion,” he said.
In my visits to von Siebold I saw Mogami Tokunai with his imperial guards, also Mamiya Rinzo: these men made maps. They had official roles in the palace. My father knew them from the meetings of the Dutch scholars, but neither recognized me. As I passed them, I felt fear. Maps were forbidden to us. The shogun received them from the gods. I supposed the men who copied these god-given maps had curiosity, like the rest of us. But at what cost?