One day I saw a man waiting in the courtyard of the Nagasakiya. The servant called him Globius. Many Japanese had asked for Dutch names and been given them. This new-naming was popular now even among the highborn. “Who is the man they call Globius?” I asked my father.
“You saw Globius there?” said Hokusai. He whistled. “He is the man who reads the stars for the shogun.” So it went as far as the stars, this eagerness for Dutch learning. I remembered what von Siebold had said about the Dutch flaunting the laws while the Japanese turned a blind eye. I disagreed. There was no blind eye. The eye blinked, but it missed nothing.
I made my thanks to von Siebold. Then I told him I had an additional, special painting for him. I told him that it was a gift. I did not think I could bear to have him see it and not know I painted it. I had made it especially for him, painting it on silk, not the Dutch paper. It was modeled on a picture of a young courtesan my father had done ten years ago. I had the sketch. But I had turned her around and given her a face that showed how she felt, and even how I felt. I had worked long hours on this painting and I loved it. I called it
Promenading Courtesan.
I was proud of that painting and I wished it luck as it went out into the world far away, the world of Europe.
I held it on my two palms, stretched my arms toward him, and bowed. It was the way samurai bowed to their swords.
Von Siebold thanked me graciously. He unrolled it and looked at it carefully. “This painting is like a jewel,” he said.
I bowed my head, just a little. It seemed he understood it was mine.
“Why is her head inclined sideways?”
“We often take this shape.” To me it was a broken shape, but I did not say so. “She is on parade,” I said, “in the pleasure district.”
“I suppose it is a matter of training,” he said slowly. “The women are subjected to much that is abhorrent.” He was at his note-making again. “The Japanese woman,” he said, “is quiet and obedient. She is always concerned with the welfare of others. Never with herself.”
I wanted to fall over sideways, as I did with my father when something preposterous was said. I did not.
“You live among women,” he said. “Truly, maybe you can help me understand. How can they be so selfless?”
Had he tried that opinion on my husband? Had he seen my sisters? Had he heard my mother lambaste my father? Perhaps I would have to agree with the Old Man: von Siebold was a fool. A likable, romantic fool. He could never tell a real Hokusai from a fake.
I cleared my throat with a little cough. I wanted to speak frankly. But I could not. Here was a stranger to our land, and it shamed me to speak about our realities. And in what sort of code were we communicating? Was he speaking about the suffering of the women in the Yoshiwara, as I was? In short, I was at a loss for words. “Perhaps we are not taught that we have a self.”
“Then it is good teaching. These women are so gentle,” von Siebold pressed. “How is it created in them?”
I thought of the exhausting nights, rising and moving from one man to another. The training, from childhood, that men must come first. The small rebellions stifled, one by one; the self-denial turned to ritual.
“Through great brutality,” I said.
He stared at me. “You speak like a monk.”
I was happier because he seemed to be listening. “You don’t see everything, even with that thing in your hat.” I teased him as I teased my father. “
I
am not docile or gentle.”
“No,” he said, musingly.
This was always my problem: being a woman and not being one. It opened up some kind of wound. I felt raw. I felt desire. I backed away and turned my face down and to the side.
“How has the training of Japan failed in you? You’re different. A bohemian, perhaps? The avant-garde? You’re like a whole new species.”
“Is the new species me? I often think it is the other.” I was careful. You never knew who would hear. “Some men in Japan think they have the right to distort the habits and instincts of other human beings for their own pleasure. That is your courtesan you see there.” I answered with a laugh. “I am not new. I am a very old species. Like the giant salamander. Unseen, but there. A woman who has not been domesticated.”
“I suppose your father is responsible,” he mused. “The court painter, able to be his own man.”
He still thought Hokusai was a court painter! I shook my head. “Aren’t the docile women odd? You talk of species. This woman,” I said, nodding at my poor courtesan, “this species is against nature. It must forgo any pleasure of its own. It must serve, and suffer, so the needs of the male are fulfilled. No animal is like this. This is the idea of selfish men. Where do they get the right?”
“Oh, my,” he said. Or something like that. Had he seen my touch on the scroll? He asked no more questions. Of course he had much on his mind. But none of the paintings was signed. Hokusai always signed his work. You would think that even a foreigner would insist. But perhaps he thought we were protecting ourselves from the shogun’s laws.
When I came next with our last finished works, von Siebold confided that he had arranged to trade with that same Globius, the court astronomer. Globius had a map of the islands to the north. Von Siebold had a map of Edo, as well as a map of the whole nation of Japan.
“This will not be looked upon lightly,” I protested.
“Why? Knowledge must travel!” His eyes lit with fervor. “People want to know. Laws that stifle the curiosity of man are futile laws and cannot last.”
“But you yourself can’t make an end to ‘futile laws,’ as you call them.”
“It’s only a map.”
I had to tell him that pictures and words on paper inspired the rage of the shogun almost more than anything else. I didn’t understand it myself, but I had learned that it was true. “They are afraid of what is written with the brush. This is why artists are jailed.”
He looked blank.
“They are afraid of years to come,” I said. “They are afraid that eyes from another time will look back and judge them for the way we are. Did you pass the Punishment Grounds? The heads on poles, the flayed corpses on their wooden beams?”
“Yes, we did. Our guards said the display was to make us feel safe.”
“Lucky you didn’t see Hokusai among those remains,” I joked.
“You exaggerate.”
“No,” I said as simply and as firmly as I was able. “You have not felt the awful power of Japan pressed down on you.” And in my mind I thought,
Not yet you haven’t
. I prayed he never would. “We sometimes also think the shogun is sleeping.”
Von Siebold’s long, deep-set eyes flickered, but he smiled still. He felt he was above suspicion.
As we sat, envoys were discussing the shrinking copper trade. Doctors were gathering to make a presentation about acupuncture. These conversations were not known to anyone. They did not have a material being, so he did not have to keep them in his luggage. He said things into the air. He believed they dissipated like fog, like the spray off the waterfalls.
“I never did meet your father,” said von Siebold, seeking my eyes, as if through them he could see into my heart. He took one of my small hands between his two large, white hands. “But perhaps I have met the better part of the painting team.”
My heart warmed. But I chided myself. He was flattering me? Or being flirtatious? “My father has been ill,” I said, “but your
beru
has cheered him.”
I wondered if I had thanked him enough. My father
was
improving; maybe the doctor really did work miracles. I walked away. I met two geisha coming in. They were entertainers who would dance and sing and serve them drink. Not courtesans, but a cut above. Still, he would not lack for stimulation.
That was the last time I spoke with him.
His much-delayed audience with the shogun took place. Immediately afterward, the Tokugawa were finished with the Dutch. They were no longer welcome in Edo. There was a rush to get them out. Von Siebold and his entourage marched out of Edo without the pomp of his entrance, the doctor a full head taller than the rest, with his long, kind face quite absent of expression. I was just a woman at the side of the street in the crowd when I last saw him.
Spring turned to summer. And here I was in the walled-in world. Despite his protestations of love for Japan, von Siebold would go back to his country. I consoled myself that he had my pictures. I pictured his life: he made visits to his wife and child every day; he had his school near the waterfall and the many Japanese doctors who learned the operations that had made him famous. He loved us, but he would be gone. “Our” pictures would go with him.
And now I had a little, high-up window in the walls.
L
IFE, LIKE ART,
is full of incident. For some people more than for others.
My father’s life, like his art, was broad, scattered with figures, events, characters, exertion everywhere—up planks and up mountains, across rivers, on platforms—twinkling and never dull. There was no emphasis. Everything was in competition; anything could distract the eye. A little man at the edge of the paper carrying a bucket will be given his humorous face and his odd posture to amuse. And in the center a woman bid her lover farewell. These were equal in importance. The whole place is buzzing. At any time, in any place, someone was putting out for the audience, and none of this merited his indifference.
But my life was not.
Not that way.
My life was like a painting on silk, intense but softened. It was a dark splatter of blood on an empty canvas. Examined carefully, it was not just a splash but a cluster—figures pushed together, too close, against each other. These figures are distinct; they are technical; they are dark and deeply impressed. But they float in space, mere space, empty space that makes them severe. Beyond my immediate world was emptiness. Great events and signs were absent for years on end. Then they all came at once.
M
Y FATHER WAS
not much better, although every day he rose to say that he was cured. The censors continued their attacks, and times were dark. Often, as I worked on small commissions, I returned in my mind to my conversations with the Miracle Doctor and to the scenes he had conjured: kings and queens of Europe swirling in each other’s arms in a place called “ballroom.” A man in a great forest drawing the birds as they nested. Wild people wearing feather headdresses and building conical houses of animal skin at the foot of giant mountains, each peak as high as Fuji-san. The idea of the world beyond our gated and moated city gave me comfort, I suppose.
I hoped too that one day I would come across Shino on the street, her shaven eyebrows and simple hairstyle leaving her face all the more visible. I even wondered if I had passed her, one year or another, and not known her.
We were sad, which was why my father and I maintained our little games. Hokusai massaged his tongue. He stuck it in and out, and I laughed at him. He put it to work again telling ghost stories. There was one about sailors who drowned in a typhoon. It took more patience than I possessed to listen to him, but I begged it from the gods. Suddenly he was all I had, and I was all he had.
“Their b-b-bodies were ca-arried aw-way by the w-w-waves! Bu’ lader, much lader, their gho-oo-osts were seen in the w-w-white foam. And they were sin-sin-s-singing!”
His goofy laugh was stretched out of shape. I made tea of Chinese herbs for him, while he chanted—in his drunken way—the Lotus Sutra. He stood on his head and swung his feet; his balance was better that way. I had to duck-walk across the room or get hit by a flying foot. He stood on one leg with the other folded on his thigh, holding the wall. He fell like a rubber man and could not get up. He moaned and spit. He got me to rub his feet and had the herbalist come to stick paper poultices on his back, with magical inscriptions written on them. He prayed to the North Star whenever he could see it. I made pigments while he made circles to retrain his hand.
His heart was sick too. He had taken on the name Iitsu, meaning “one again,” six years before, in anticipation of a new life. But his renewed youth hadn’t materialized. He was well past sixty in years, and most of his peers were dead. He had illustrated books; he had made instruction manuals; he had created
shunga.
He was tired of the city and its vices. He wanted to paint the seas and the skies; these subjects had been difficult to do, with our fugitive blues.
Now here was
beru,
a new toy, and the Old Man came slowly alive. He prepared for a day of painting by rubbing the muscles of his feet, stretching his leg up to his nose, and hooking his arms around his back while opening and shutting his mouth. Our studio was quiet. Shigenobu was gone, my mother and sisters dead, my brother apprenticed to an account keeper. The men who had thought to learn from Hokusai had moved on. I got Hokusai’s ink ready and his water. He made a hundred sketches, but his hand would not do what he willed it to. He gazed at Berlin blue to spur on his recovery.