And do you know the very worst of it?
The hall fell silent.
Von Siebold saw the guards turning a man away from the City Gate. He was cloaked for travel and worn out.
“What is wrong, my friend?” He peered into the grizzled face and saw bruises. He recognized the man: a translator from the shogun’s entourage.
“You have to watch out for these translators,” called a listener, obviously a practiced one, from the front rows. “They are always two-faced.” I was immobilized with dread. This was a masterful story. It was too good to be invented. It had to be true.
The doctor invited the traveler inside to get warm. He had brought a warning: von Siebold’s home was going to be searched. The translator himself had been arrested and beaten. “I was freed only because I promised that I would come here and find all your maps and pictures so we can use them as evidence against you.”
“Then you must save yourself,” said von Siebold. “But first we will make copies.”
His most important map was of the Russian islands far to the north of our capital. The two of them sat up all night and copied it. The original he placed where it could be found. The copy he rolled in a can and stuffed in a hole in the log wall behind his piano. Here he also placed certain other papers, including pictures he had bought showing the shogun’s castle and secret rituals of our people. They were so valuable that he had not sent them to the ship to be packed: he imagined he would carry them in his clothing. He hid daggers in the flower containers, in case he needed to defend himself.
Two days later, von Siebold watched as the guards found his precious maps and took them away.
“Did they find and confiscate the pictures he bought from Edo artists?” I shouted. The storyteller looked through me as if he knew. But how could he?
“Not yet,” he said.
The guards laughed at his hidden daggers. Then they sat down at the gates of Deshima and forbade him to leave the island. Every week the soldiers pull him from his desk and march him up to the governor’s house, where he is asked the same questions. He refuses to admit he has done wrong. He names no one.
I
WENT HOME SLOWLY
along our street with my packages. The wind whipped at the laundry—little children’s shirts—that was strung on poles. The feral cats were out prowling for fishbones. The always curious neighbors squinted at me. One woman was at the well, raising a bucket by the pulley wheel. She pulled it toward her while the wind pushed it away. All of these details were clear in my mind.
A young woman knelt in front of a fulling block with her pounding tool raised high.
Whump,
whump,
it went as she brought it down time and again on the cloth stretched over the block in front of her. She looked purposeful and even happy. Her baby sat propped in his bucket beside her. A larger child sat on the edge of the house swinging her feet over the mud.
Von Siebold names no one, I thought. I believed it: the man had character. But there were our paintings. Not signed but perhaps recognizable as by Hokusai. Would we too be arrested?
The woman beckoned me. “There was a big noise from your rooms,” she whispered.
My heart thumped.
“There was?” I said. I suddenly had no feeling.
“A man came out running,” she whispered. “I haven’t seen your father since.”
Our screen had been left open. I stepped up. The wind was stirring the old bamboo-leaf food wrappers scattered on the floor. My father was on his elbows and knees with his bottom in the air, peering at a painting on the floor.
“Old Man?” I said. “Did you have a visitor?”
He did not reply. I saw that his hands were not moving. He was just propped there. I stuck my toe into his side. He did not move.
“Hokusai!”
He toppled over sideways.
Everything went black. I must have called for help: the neighbor sent her children for water while she ran to the apothecary. I held my father’s head in my lap.
I waited for hours for a sound. Then he called for his
shochu.
He drank the potato liquor and pretended nothing was wrong. He said that he was sleeping, and what was the problem? But I knew who had been there.
The orphan son of my sister O-Miyo and Shigenobu had progressed from being a bully to being a gangster. True, he had learned from a master: his father had beaten my sister with his fists while she was making the evening meal. The boy had clung to his mother’s kimono while Shigenobu threw cooking pots at the walls. He had forced O-Miyo to stand outside in the cold while he and his cronies sat around the
kotatsu
drinking. The boy’s name was Shigeshiro. My father mumbled excuses: his parents had divorced.
“So what?” I used to say to him.
And he had come to us before, several times at this address.
My name for him was Monster Boy. Every time he showed up and stamped on our tatami with his dirty sandals, my father greeted him with a face wreathed in smiles and a handful of money. He loved him. Loved him silly. Never stopped.
“Old Man, beloved old father. Hokusai,” I warned, “you are a fool. He is going to throw that money away after we work all day and half the night to earn it. He is the Leech Child.” That was a figure of myth. He was born of deities but had to be cast out because of his actions.
That was the last time Monster Boy came.
“Yes, but you see,” said Hokusai triumphantly, “look what became of the Leech Child. He was transformed. He is worshipped as Ebisu, one of the Seven Lucky Gods.”
“Well, I don’t think this one will be.”
“He is a good boy. You must have patience.”
I put my head in my hands. My father was so stubborn.
“I am going to set him up as a fishmonger.”
“Old Man, you’re dreaming. He won’t do one day of honest work.”
“Ei is a hard woman.” He stared into the air as if speaking to an ancestor. “She hoards my money.”
“You forget that it’s my money too. I mixed the pigment. I painted the bridge and the cherry trees myself. I designed the women.”
But I was not to mention these inconvenient facts.
“The apprentices will do the work if you don’t wish to,” he muttered, shuffling out to make water behind the tenements.
“You forget we have no apprentices at the moment!”
The young man had come back only hours later.
“We have nothing for you,” I said.
“You have nothing,
izn it?
” he said, addressing my father, whom he found to be more receptive. “You are the famous artist, they say. You get paid a lot of money for these things. Where’z it gone, then?” He drove his toe into a pile of design sketches. I said to myself, Remember fear? How the bullies want us to feel it and we must not? Nothing ever frightened Hokusai but Monster Boy. His fear was caused by his love. This was a weakness in him, this longing to see something good in his grandson. I was not similarly afflicted. I stood over my father.
That day, when Shigeshiro was gone again and Hokusai was sitting by the coal fire, I put a cold cloth on his bruised cheek.
“Oh, he is a good boy under all of that,” he said.
“You never felt that much love for me,” I marveled. “You old fool.”
Hokusai did not answer for a while. Then he said, “I don’t need to. You’re strong.”
So that was my problem! “You love him because he’s weak?”
“He’s my burden. He’s my curse for all the things I’ve done wrong. He’ll improve; he’ll grow up.”
“He won’t, Old Man. He’s a lost cause,” I said.
So he had come again. “You don’t fool me, Old Man. I know who’s paid a visit,” I said. Despite the disgusting fact that this gangster bully had beaten up an old man with palsy, I was glad it was the devil we knew and not the guards.
When Hokusai had his potato liquor, he was much better. Then I told him the bad news.
“I dreamed of waves last night and the Dutch doctor in them,” I said.
He rubbed his cheek. He rolled his tongue. These were exercises. But I knew he was listening.
“More than that,” I said, “today in the streets I heard the crier. He had news of the doctor. There was a typhoon in Nagasaki and his ship has crashed on the shore, so he cannot leave Japan. And he has been investigated. All his treasures are confiscated.”
My father was superstitious. This happens when you are sick and always praying for respite. He stared at me with rounded eyes. “You ’a soo-sssooo-ayer.”
“I see things,” I agreed. “But not soon enough. We are in danger. We have sold him our paintings. They may be on that ship.”
W
E ELECTED TO
move house, again. This time we chose a part of Edo we didn’t know at all.
We had several robes each, a tea kettle, cups, and our painting things. I called a bearer for my father, an incredible luxury, and carried the rest through Honjo and then farther, to where the back streets were not so crowded. The little dark rooms that we stepped up into from a back street were identical to the ones we’d left. But no one hailed me when I went out for grilled eel. We didn’t even tell our publishers where we were.
But we were too starved for news to stay hidden for long.
“You always said the best place to hide is out in the open,” I said to the Old Man one restless morning. “And no one will be looking for us in the place we are most expected. Can you walk?”
To my surprise, he got to his feet easily. We walked across to the river, my father with his straw hat low over his face and leaning on the
bo.
We took the ferry to the Yoshiwara. Just at the gate was the big banquet hall.
The wooden noticeboard in front announced the event: “Today, Poetry Party, 3:00 p.m.”
I loved the
ageya.
It was huge, one hundred tatami mats. From the street you saw only dark slats of wood with squared-off lattice windows made blank with white paper. If you looked up, you saw the roof tiles on the first and second stories, curved to ripple like small waves; the ends were impressed in the owners’ crest—mulberry leaves under a temple roof. Bronze lanterns lined the wall that faced the street.
The inside was cool, freshened by the high roof with its slit opening for smoke. Filtered daylight fell on the wooden floor near the windows, but the center was dark. I could just make out the racks on the walls, where the swords of visiting samurai lay harmless side by side.
As we entered, voices chimed out, “Hello! Welcome!”
“Hokusai! Old Man, what are you doing? Have you designed any new prints? Are you working on a book?”
“No, no,” my father said. “Nothing new.”
“Never quite what one had hoped, this life,” said the owner.
From the entry I could see into the kitchen with its cauldrons of steaming water, the iron kettle, the bucket and well. Cooks moved deep in concentration, their sweatbands printed with the temple and mulberry. The owners came hurrying with hands together to greet us.
They were the fifth generation; they had rebuilt the
ageya
on the ashes of the original after it burned with the Yoshiwara. We went down the hall to the Fishnet Room, with its ceiling made of woven strips of wood. On the walls were paintings of Chinese children playing with kites, touched with gold leaf but sooty and dark. I lit my pipe. The press of bodies increased. No one said a word about our notoriety or mentioned our friendship with the Dutchman who was now a prisoner of the realm. We were welcomed, the two of us.
Poor Waki the tattooist was still showing his watercolors: he had no talent, but he was determined to make his name. After him came a literary-style brush poet, some parodists, more painters unrolling scrolls.
All afternoon we drank tea and ate soba noodles, my father’s favorite. We ate pickles and grilled fish. As the light failed, the waiters brought in tapers so we could see our fellow artists gesticulating in their hour of glory.
Finally, it was night and the little candles on the low tables gave a glow that outlined every head, every set of shoulders, every forehead with gold so it stood out against the dark. The high ceilings rose above, and through the air holes I could see stars. It felt like earlier times. I knew that this safety was a temporary thing, and so I loved it all the more.
Into our midst with a clamor of greetings and cries for drink came a group of scholars of Dutch. They had news.
“Court Astronomer Takahashi, known as Globius, has been arrested! He has been denounced by Mamiya the explorer!”