Delicious. I sucked each finger and let it go with a pop. I said good morning to the candy seller, who was my father’s friend. I got back home just as the students were arriving.
Mune was still with me, and although she did not have the talent her mother had, she was a good painter. She had directed her friends toward me. I set them to work, sketching, copying, designing. I moved among them on my knees, edging the cats off the papers, telling them to be exact, making them repeat and repeat. We smiled together.
“You will learn to move the brush through the air without thinking, as a swallow moves its wings.”
One of them would bring me lunch from the stalls—eggplant, if I was lucky. But it was expensive and I always demurred unless they insisted.
Sometimes pictures flew into my head. But a student would look up with a question. I tried to save the idea in my mind’s eye. But the next day would be the same: no time to put my pictures on paper, full of teaching and commissions (thankfully, commissions).
The times were difficult, of course. Hokusai’s old apprentices began to show up, looking for work—Hokuri, Hokuryo, and Hokusen. Even the pupils of pupils made their way to see me some days—Kakusen, who was a pupil of Hokumei’s, and Keiri, who had studied with Hokkei. But I was on my own and strangely content. I did a series called
Lives of Flourishing Women,
thinking, for once, that I too was flourishing. Some people compared it to my father’s work and said Hokusai was getting old. But he wasn’t getting old; he was growing younger.
He crept into the city now and then on moonless nights, arriving by boat at the fishing piers at the mouth of the Sumida. From there, wearing a bumpkin’s hat and leaning on the
bo,
he mingled with the crowds heading north on the riverbanks. He kept his head down, He chanted constantly to keep his palsy at bay. “
Atanda, atanda, atanda-bate.
”
In the alley the neighbor women might be sitting on the edge of one of the houses, keeping out of the way of their drunken husbands. They were not fooled by the hat. “Hey, hey, Old Man,” they would said. “Old Man coming!”
He really was Iitsu now: “one again.” “You are blessed to have such a father,” said the candy seller, awestruck by Hokusai’s great age of seventy years. He had left so many lives behind him. He had begun his magnificent series of views of Mount Fuji. The cost of
beru
had dropped, so we could afford to have prints made in it. I thought of the blue eyes of my lost Dutch doctor every time we did.
I
T WAS AN
early winter twilight. My students folded up their bundles and chimed their good-byes. Mune was the last. She touched my hand affectionately. “You’ll be all right?” were always her final words.
I pressed more charcoal into the
kotatsu
and settled under the blanket. I asked the boy next door to bring me tea. I now had a few hours to paint for myself. But someone coughed discreetly at my door.
“Who’s there?” I threw my best low, masculine voice across the room.
“Eisen, come to see you.” I heard his laughter. He was not fooled by my manly tones.
“Strange hour to visit,” I said ungraciously, sliding the screen open.
Eisen’s samurai background ensured that he had lovely manners if he was sober and impeccable manners if he was drunk. We both understood why, years before, he had left the North Star Studio, choosing to learn elsewhere. He was restless and talented. Hokusai had kept him down too long, and Eisen sprang up in the world once he left us. I supposed he had merely come to give me his news. These days he was successful. He too used
beru
—in fact, he had used it first. We spoke about the sudden drop in its price: now everyone would be using it. We chatted awhile, and as I did not offer him anything, he bowed himself out.
But not long after, in the late afternoon, Eisen appeared again at the studio door. In that hour we were all women, cleaning our brushes amid chirps of tired conversation. He looked around and took the mood of the place. “What are you hiding here?” he said, and “Your cherry tree is ravishing.” He picked up a cat and massaged it behind the ears in a way I took note of. “I am despondent. What are we men to do when the women refine their skills to such an extreme?” He stirred up the younger female students, flirting with even the plainest and shyest girl, who could not raise her eyes from the floor. Mune, confident in her role as lead student, played along. “If you are asking for advice, you might drink a little less and work a little more.”
He inclined his large and shield-shaped head in her direction. I found myself charmed. His rough edge disguised polish within, just the opposite of most people those days. “Ah, I thank you for your kind observation,” he said. “I am going to seed, it is quite true. I have decided, however, to put up no fight and to watch with detached curiosity as life’s temptations get the best of me.”
Titter, titter, went the ladies.
He helped me chase them out into the smoky decline of day, as if he thought one or another of them might take advantage of me. As I rolled up the papers, he said, “Shall we go out for a little drink?”
I spoke more crossly than I intended. “You don’t need any more, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
He saw that I was not amused. He apologized profusely and left. There! I thought. I have got rid of a pest.
But I looked for him the next day. When I heard his soft cough at the
shoji,
I opened the screen rather quickly, which action was not lost on him. He tried to hide his small smile.
If I was not mistaken, that look of pleasure was gladness in seeing me. He was a little disreputable, with graying hair, noble thick brows cutting straight across, and a hawklike nose. His deep, resonant voice was clogged with smoke. He apologized for the day before.
“You mentioned, Oei-san, that I did not need any more drink. I have no wish to argue with a lady so assured. And I hope you will excuse my saying so, but I very much do. It is precisely when a man has had a lot that he has need of more. Don’t you agree?”
He never used five words when fifty would do. How could I resist? And why should I anyway?
We sat in a teahouse and drank cup after cup of sake. I knew that my large ears burned red. I knew that my laugh—“
ak, ak, ak, ak
”—sometimes ending in a little explosion of smoke from my pipe, was not feminine. But I forgot how very unattractive these traits were. We talked about who was painting what, my father’s Fuji series, which new prints we liked and which we didn’t. He returned me to my door by moonlight and went off.
The next day I wandered into a bookshop to look at Eisen’s work. I found his print of Hana-ogi VIII, the most recent incarnation of the great courtesan. She had a shovel-shaped face which was very much like his own. She looked haggard, dogged, and beautiful. I studied it with admiration. How did he do it? There was much said in the plain white space he’d left for her features and much in her hectic clothing. He had far more feeling than his clever chat let on.
I picked up a directory he’d written of floating world artists and was astonished that he spoke of me: “Ei, the daughter, works under her father. She is an excellent painter.”
Not many men would have said that.
The next time he came, I offered him tea and called the boy next door to get it. He looked around at the little burner. “Are you cooking something?” he said hopefully.
I thought I should put him straight. “Pigment is the only thing I ever put on a burner,” I said.
“Let’s talk about your pigments, then,” he said. “How do you prepare them? You take such care.”
“It’s my job.”
It had been just a task when I first worked for my father, but now I was an expert and the process gave me pleasure. My colors were deep and clear, the envy of other artists. I had my own technique to get the paint thick and the colors dense. It was not a recipe I shared. I simmered the mixtures of lead and seeds, as I was doing now. I added secret ingredients and then took a further step that no one knew of.
“Apprentices could do that.”
“Hokusai likes it better when I do.”
“I bet he does.”
Another night he said, “Why don’t you sign your beauties?”
Maybe he was trying to stir up trouble. But I chose to believe he was only curious. “Why should I?”
“If you did, you might find out that you have quite a different style from your father.”
“That is the question, isn’t it?” My father worked in a thousand styles. “My colors are my signature.”
“Why should your father take the credit for them?”
“Because he is Hokusai. He is Iitsu, at the moment.”
“And you are Oei.”
“I am his daughter. Helping him is my duty.”
“Duty!” he scoffed.
That word belonged to the other side, the neo-Confucians with their old, repressive ways. We both saw the bankruptcy of that world. I admit I felt sheepish invoking it. Yet the new ways that we artists touted might change a great deal, but they did not erase the family.
“Maybe he takes you for granted.”
“So he should. Unlike others”—a little dig there—“I would never leave him.”
“You left your husband.”
“That was different.”
“Why?”
A pointless question. I shrugged. “A husband is dispensable if he is not loved,” I said.
“Not many women would say that.”
“Not many women would have the choice.”
He laughed.
I continued. “A husband can be left, but a father cannot. He is always attached. And my father perhaps more than some. He made me an artist. He loved me despite my unbeautiful face and ‘manly’ nature.” Of course, so did Tomei, but somehow that didn’t count.
“Was Tomei not good to you too?”
“He was,” I said. I knew it was unfair. “I have no answer.”
“I’m glad you said that. Love is mysterious and there should not be answers.”
By then we were tucked under the
kotatsu,
with its mixed cold drafts and hot spots, his head one way and mine the other. My fingers were curled around a teacup and his around a sake bottle. When he mentioned love, I thought of the Dutch doctor. I thought of how my father had told me I always loved men who were taken. Was Eisen taken? I believed so. He had a wife. His hand was straying inside the collar of my kimono. It was not the least hesitant, making bold incursions inside my wrappings.
“If the two of you, Oei and Hokusai, were married, it would be different. You could be his silent partner. But you are not married! You are grown up, an adult. You should have your own name. You could be famous.”
“What a ridiculous thought!”
“You are a better painter than he is.”
I knew I was a better painter. Technically. More patient. More precise. Hokusai knew that too. But that didn’t mean I was a great painter.
“Painting is not all of it,” I said, pulling myself up to sitting. “He can draw and perform, and he imagines strange things . . .”
“Yes,” said Eisen, “he is Hokusai and you are not. But you are Oei and he is not. You understand women, you can portray humanity, you have a finer line, and you cook excellent pigment!”
I nervously retied my obi. I thought of the examination the Dutch doctor had put me under: he’d said that Japanese women became powerless in the realm of the emotions. That was my realm. I knew what it looked like: deep red, blue you could drown in, the green of thick forests. I even knew what it felt like. Or I had known, years ago. Maybe I had forgotten. I was the painter of intensity, not a native of that world. Was I too powerless in that realm?
Eisen reached for his sake. “You are so unconventional in some ways, and then you are so conventional,” he grumbled.
I took my pigment off the heat. It would now go underground for sixty days—the secret I was not telling him.
I
T WAS A
few weeks before I saw him again.
As the last of the students left, I pulled my winter wrap around me and stepped out the door. The air was chill; there was the smell of charcoal burning and whiteness everywhere. The lanterns winked like fireflies all along the street. Suddenly he was there.
We took a ferry up from Yanagibashi to the Yoshiwara gate. The water was inky and the passengers silent. We walked side by side over the arc of the bridge and through the Great Gate into the pleasure quarter; our clogs beat on the hollow structure. I hadn’t been down the boulevard for a long time.
Ahead of us were the dark, shuttered sides of the little wooden houses. It was quiet. I had never before seen signs in front of the lower-class brothels:
DISCOUNTS OFFERED FOR SPECIAL SERVICES.
We passed Mitsu’s shop. She had become a doom crier.
“You, you come here! I want to talk to you,” she said from her doorway. “Do you know?” she whispered melodramatically, her eyes huge, her lips stretched. “The end is coming!” She peered. “Do I know you?”