These were the men I had seen in the entry rooms of the Nagasakiya. “What for? What does Mamiya say that Globius has done?”
“He traded maps of the secret reaches of the kingdom to the Miracle Doctor, who would have taken them out of the country had not the god of the sea risen up.”
How quickly they dropped their sophistication and spoke with the old beliefs.
“Someone has informed on him. Someone he trusted.”
The tailor beside me spoke. “These are the intrigues of the powerful, always trying to do each other down! Who cares?”
A somber, downcast line of geishas moved in silently and disappeared behind the rolled blinds on the stage. Then the blinds were lifted to reveal them. I watched their white faces: how garish they looked. I recognized their special gaze, false but pleasing to men. I wondered how men could be so easily fooled, or if they were fooled by the geisha’s forced delight.
The music began. I swayed in my own world, like the soothsayer at the foot of the bridge with the crowds clattering past her. I moaned too, perhaps. We had been drinking all day. The smoke from the fires and the pipes hung in the damp air: my legs felt cramped. I stood and excused myself.
In the enclosed garden two old pine trees leaned together, one with a thick limb that grew horizontally, nearly on the ground, for the distance of ten long steps at least. This limb was propped up with bamboo crutches. I loved to stand in that little courtyard. There was a cat, winding himself along the wooden poles, then darting under the planks. Rain was falling; thunder came and, close after it, lightning, which set our fellow listeners to a frenzy of murmurs and oaths to protect themselves. Better yet, drink up.
Inside, the men came to lift the small tables away for dancing. My father and I paid for our food and pushed our way out through the sweating bodies to the street. The rain had stopped. Everything was shining through the fog. The lanterns at intervals over the narrow walk threw their yellow light down, making a pattern of light and dark.
We looked overhead for the Seven Stars. But they were not there. We had a long walk ahead. My father was slow and one leg dragged. He leaned against me. We were both silent as we breathed the night air and stepped in and out, in and out of visibility. The boatman was kind and took us down the river near to our new house.
I
T WAS WEEKS
again before I could leave my father. But some small work at last found us—a pair of demon quellers for a temple fair—and two students came to complete it. I made my way to the Ichibee bookshop, where the gossip from Nagasaki would be fresh. The postal runners had been slowed by uprooted trees on the Tokaido. But finally they had arrived. They had little news. I asked about von Siebold’s wife. Was she hurt? And the child, who must now be four years old? No one knew. What about his collections? His paintings—our paintings (my paintings)? Had they been on the ship that blew ashore?
The Dutch scholars who gathered there were not sympathetic. They pronounced the Miracle Doctor’s powers evil. He had committed many transgressions. Measuring the height of Mount Fuji was perhaps the worst. These were men who had flocked to his door—publishers, medical men, merchants. Artists who had tried to sell him their work. How quickly they deserted their hero. It was, I realized, a form of self-hatred. The all-knowing Dutch doctor would now fall into the hands of the same powers that kept us ignorant.
“But I saw you lined up outside the windows of the Nagasakiya,” I said to one of them.
“You must be mistaken.”
I understood that these men thought there were spies among us. But could I be one? They went on listing his crimes.
“He had a detailed map of Edo.”
“He had a linen cloak bearing the imperial coat of arms.”
Collective gasp of horror.
“How did he get that?”
“Genseki gave it to him in exchange for medicine to dilate the pupil of the eye.”
He had a copy of the shogun’s secret map of the island of Karafuto at the edge of Russia. The Europeans called the place Sakhalin and thought it was a peninsula. Von Siebold’s copy was even better than the one held in the Imperial Library, they said. Mogami made it, and Mogami traded it. Now he had confessed and called von Siebold a spy.
But why had Mogami turned?
Because he himself was caught.
Mogami accused Globius as well. Globius had been discovered with a book about Napoleon and a map of St. Petersburg. This was taken as proof that he had been supplying Japanese maps to the foreigners. He had been thrown in jail. His teeth had been smashed in the initial beating. This was so he could not bite off his tongue.
The court astronomer’s crime was punishable by death. He was under watch so he could not kill himself.
Ah yes, that pleasure would belong to the shogun.
T
HE CIRCLE OF
those under suspicion grew. Soon, fifty people—half the learned entourage of the shogun—had gone to jail.
The Miracle Doctor was taken in handcuffs on the long journey back to Edo. The old information that von Siebold had gone to school in Germany and spoke High German better than he spoke Dutch was dredged up. He must be a spy, they said. He had aimed his telescope and his sextant at Fuji-san. He had been in the shogun’s library. He was asked, again and again: “Are you spying for the Russians?”
“I have never met a Russian.”
“Why have you stolen the linen coat decorated with the imperial coat of arms?”
“I have not stolen it. It was given to me.”
“Who gave it to you?”
Von Siebold would not name Genseki the court physician or explain what they already knew: that it was given in exchange for the recipe for the medicine that dilated the pupils of the eye so that Genseki too could perform the magical eye surgery.
“Why did the court physician want your medicine? Is it superior to Japanese medicine?”
He knew there was a wrong answer to that one. All cures came from the divine, with the shogun’s permission.
“It will work with a little skill and your gods’ permission.”
“Why did you measure the height of the sacred Fuji-san if you are not a spy?”
“I propose no illegal use for this knowledge,” he said. “I measured it for the pleasure of knowledge.”
It went on for a year.
W
E WERE NOT
there to see the end. Our temporary rooms far east of Honjo were not far enough out of the way. Our trade with the foreigners—always an irritant to the authorities—had become an offense. One day a messenger from the shogun came looking for my father. He unrolled a picture. It was one of the studio works.
“Why did you paint the walls of the castle and give it to the foreign spy?”
Hokusai was insulted. He had never seen this painting. It was one of those that were intended to illustrate how we lived. It was not very good, I knew. The black stone walls loomed and in front of them was a fire, that was all. In my mind it was a fire of woodcut blocks; it had to do with the censors. My father had never paid any attention to it, in truth, as I had painted it. And it just so happened that his symptoms were rather bad that day. “Thz pchr not me-me-my-mine,” he said. “ ’Tz bad. You c’n see, no”—he rattled his hand as if he were signing his name—“n-n-no.” He made the gesture for stamping. His eyes looked ill that day, round and popping. It was clear he could not have done the work.
I sat with my head bent and my eyes cast down: the gloomy, divorced daughter. When the messenger was gone, I laughed and clapped, and my father rolled on his back and kicked his feet. What a joke.
Nonetheless, that night we walked out of Edo. We had discussed it: while one messenger might be embarrassed to accuse a sick old man and his strange daughter, the next might not. And now that it was known where we lived, there would surely be more visits.
Hokusai was feeling lucky that we had no possessions.
“You see, Daughter, we would just have to carry them on our backs,” Hokusai said. He was markedly improved.
We turned our backs on the sprawl of wooden houses and the black, curving walls of the shogun’s palace. We took the ferry as far as we could. Then we began to walk, as we had walked before. We passed the jail. We passed the Punishment Grounds. There was a body on the cross. The birds were crazed with it. Strips of flesh lay around its feet, too big for their mouths.
Hokusai laughed. It was this laughter that had confused me when I was a child. He had compassion, but he was ruthless. He had no feeling for the dead but a great deal for the dying. The dead were completed. Only the dying were in pain. And the living.
I wept for the loss of my window on the world.
He made that gesture with his shoulders, bringing them up to his ears. It was comical. Defiance gave him energy. He was suddenly himself. He staggered and stuttered no more. He put his elbow in my ribs.
“The spirit of protest is in you, Chin-Chin. I breathed it into you. That is why you look so funny.”
Tears ran down my cheeks. He shook me by the elbow. He peered into my eyes, and then he saw what he was looking for.
“What have you done? Did you fall in love with another man you cannot have?”
I began walking furiously.
We were on the Tokaido heading for the sea at Uraga. The Old Man did not hurry and he did not slow. He did not tire and he did not stop. Perhaps he leaned on that long stick of his, perhaps he pushed himself forward with it, but he maintained an excellent pace. At the top of the hill he turned around and walked backward, fixing the city in his gaze. I sped up and passed him. When we came to the checkpoint, he performed a perfect imitation of himself in his palsied state, staggering and slurring. I held him upright and became invisible, one of the nameless women who helped the aged. The guards waved us through. We walked until the city was nothing but a soiled spot in the distance.
I protested our leaving. “We won’t hear what happens to him.”
“Yes, we will,” said Hokusai. “I’ll return by night and hear the gossip.”
M
ONTHS LATER THE
Miracle Doctor was judged and found innocent of spying. His crimes were committed “in an excess of scientific zeal.” Takahashi, known as Globius, died in prison before the sentence of death could be brought on him, and his son was banished. Genseki the court physician was removed from his post, and his son was punished.
Von Siebold was extremely lucky: he was merely expelled. He left Edo in disgrace and was ordered never to return. I could not explain this clemency to the barbarian when the Japanese were so terribly punished, but perhaps the truth was what von Siebold had always said—that the laws did not apply to him.
Rumor said that back at Deshima, the doctor had searched the walls for the maps he had hidden there, only to discover that rats had eaten his cache. Incredibly, the crates of Japanese objects that had been seized in Nagasaki were restored to him. But—I asked my father—what about my paintings? Where were they?
“You must dream the answer to that,” Hokusai said to me. “Otherwise, we will never know.”
I tried to dream, but less than the knowledge of my paintings’ fate I wanted to see my tall, golden man again, he who spoke to me of Shakespeare and women’s lives. Maybe my false pretenses were the reason why the dreams did not come.
I tried calling the paintings. What has become of you, promenading courtesan? Samurai horses? Some of you were seized, I know, because the picture of the castle walls was in the hands of the guards. Were you returned to the doctor, as the gossip said? And now where are you? Decorating the shogun’s inner chambers? In the belly of the great sailing ship returning to Europe?
In the fire?
But my inner eye remained closed.
In the depths of December, the Miracle Doctor sailed away from Nagasaki on the frigate
Java,
bound for Batavia. His wife and daughter came out in a small fishing boat to watch. They said that he carried their portraits bound into his shirt next to his chest, and that as the sails filled with wind, the Miracle Doctor hung over the rails and wept.
I wept too.
M
Y FATHER STAYED
in Uraga and I returned to Edo. He was perhaps in danger, and we spoke of it as if he were in exile. But I think he wanted to see the ocean and Mount Fuji. He was ready to start the series he’d planned of the sacred mountain. I had to take such work as was available—nothing much.
The first thing I did was move back into our old quarter of Asakusa. There, I was not lonely. I could resume teaching some of my old students. I took my tea and rice and small grilled fish on the street. Breakfast, enjoyed before nerves interfered with my digestion, was my favorite meal. Sometimes I had a “dancing
unagi
,” an eel grilled and then fried so it wrinkled. It was crunchy outside but, once the crust was gone, smooth and sweet on the tongue.