“I made a nice little design of girls catching fireflies,” he began. She looked bored. “And women caught in the rain on the bridge . . .”
Mitsu grunted. “That one you could sell to the shop that rents oiled-paper umbrellas. Let them put their sign on it.”
He sighed. “It’s a thought. I could design umbrellas. Now that the publishers have stopped printing books, since the edict.”
“Temporary. It’s only temporary. The
bakufu
will let up soon. They never pay attention to us for long.” She scoured my father’s anxious face and seemed to take a kinder interest. “Why don’t you try famous courtesans looking in mirrors? That’s what people want.”
He groaned. “Everyone does that. Utamaro does that.”
She shrugged. “Well, then, you have to do it better. Even the wealthiest are difficult to please these days. They don’t think it’s smart anymore to spend all their money in the Yoshiwara. They all want a bargain.” She said this with disgust and followed it with a hissing sound. She folded her hands righteously. “Yes, my dear fellow, I do believe you have missed our golden days. Business is very difficult, very difficult.”
Her jowly face swung side to side.
“You’ve got to do something to make yourself stand out,” Mitsu was advising my father. “I’ll tell you what—”
He wouldn’t listen. He never did, to my mother or to anyone. A gust took the lantern, and it cracked against a roof pole, sputtering. The gaudy light swung back and forth, back and forth. We stood, both of us, looking at its red-edged shadow. Then we moved on. In a teahouse some other artists bought us tea. My father wouldn’t take sake. We sat and it was peaceful there, with the movement of hopeful travelers in the street, the occasional stately passage of a fine courtesan, the undercurrent of drums from the brothels, the low murmur of the waitresses. The voices that roared up in sound and then abruptly cut off, as if the singer had fallen down a hole.
It was nothing Mitsu said that helped him; it was walking here, being here. It was the fever of money flowing and the wanting. It was the people my father wanted to make pictures of—not the prostitutes, though he’d done that, or the actors, the famous people. It was the ordinary ones—people who worked with their hands and their bodies, the ugly and misshapen ones, the funny and beleaguered ones. That’s what he wanted. But who wanted to buy those pictures?
W
E HAD COME
to the Yoshiwara in the late afternoon. It was the third month, and the day of the Lantern Festival parade. We sat on the side of the boulevard waiting for the parade. It hadn’t started, but already people had gathered. Every teahouse on the boulevard had hung a lantern with blue and black patterns under its eaves. The courtesans and their attendants would march in their giant costumes with royal pomp from the brothels to their places of assignation.
My father had his sketchbook. He commanded me to stay right there! Then he forgot about me.
The courtesans came out of the high-class brothels next to the boulevard. There was a man with a great iron spear in front to lead them and then a lantern bearer, although it wasn’t dark yet. They stood with their child attendants in their brilliant kimonos of silk and velvet in colors so deep I thought the seas and the skies had been emptied to make them. There was a cart with more women, their faces painted white, playing samisens. Drummers began pounding their rhythms to speed the heartbeats. Acrobats flipped in a series of circles, like the wheels of an oxcart, from hands to feet, hands to feet, all around the cluster of exotic women.
The first childish girls wore pounds of lustrous clothes and makeup, but they were nothing compared to the top-rank women, who towered on clogs as high as my forearm was long, with hair like wasps’ nests speared with many golden sticks. The top courtesan, the
oiran,
was stupendous. Everyone gasped to see her. She paced with infinite slowness, balancing on one foot most of the time, while a man walked behind her holding an umbrella over her head. Then more followers—the housekeeper, the teahouse workers, and then another courtesan in her enormous shoes and her enormous hairdo.
I ran along beside them. I quickly caught up because of their special step, the figure eight, which meant they had to swing each foot in two circles and then out behind in a jaunty kick before planting it. It made them very slow. Some of the courtesans were very fresh and new. I tried my best to catch their eyes, but I could not. I was not certain they were human. The children in their entourage pushed each other and wailed. They were not allowed to look at anyone. I ran back to my father. It wasn’t the performers he was drawing, of course. It was the watchers.
Among the watchers, and the subject of my father’s brush, was a blind man with his cane.
He was bald; he had shaved himself as a sign of his blindness. This was the custom. And he was massive. His head was like a large egg tipped back on the top of his neck. The oval of his chin jutted forward and the larger oval of his crown slid backward. His eyebrows were black, thick, and short, and they curled over his squinting eyes like sleeping dogs. His prominent ears were immensely complicated whirls of flesh. On one of them he had hung his rosary; I suppose it was a good place to keep it, if you were blind. You would always know where it was. He had big strong hands like paws, and these he kept aloft, as if he were afraid of misplacing them too. The wrists were high, and the backs of his hands and his long, fat fingers flopped softly.
The instant I saw him I hated him. I hated him because he made me afraid, and my father had instructed me never to be afraid.
There were two ways of living for blind men. One was to be a moneylender. A blind man was the only person among the townsmen who could buy a license. Handling money was a despised activity, officially, and the
bakufu
assumed that this shameful occupation would keep the blind in their place.
But who cared about the official position? Money was running wild. Merchants were not ashamed to exchange it. They were, every year, louder and prouder. They dressed in fine coats and sported like lords. The real lords, we heard, were threadbare in their homes as well as in their hearts. Surviving on loyalty, duty, and the labor of others was harder and harder for the high and mighty. And so the blind moneylenders were busy. There was demand for their services. And they too became rich. Rich enough to eat and drink and spend a night at the Yoshiwara, to buy a courtesan.
But this particular blind man was not wealthy. There were a few other ways of life open to the blind of our city. These were hairdressing or otherwise working with the body. One way was to be a masseur. I decided that the blind man worked soothing the muscles of sumo wrestlers. That explained why the beefy hands—draping off his wrists in front of his chest—flexed and pulsed while the rest of him was still. He was watching the parade intently. The expression on his face was assessing, appreciative, like the faces of the sighted men beside him. He was thinking of skin, of flesh: I knew it.
The slit of visible eye was white; he had no pupils. Maybe those were rolled up to the inside of his head. His lips were apart, and top and bottom together made almost a circle; they too were fat and short. His nose was broad and stopped above his lip, leaving a wide, blank space there. It was a blank space that was the same as the blank space that was his entire face.
He could have been praying, but I doubted it: he didn’t look religious. He was sucking in the courtesans’ presence; he smelled them, he heard their breath, he felt their tension. He was taking them into his body.
It gave me a cold feeling. The women could not hide, even from the sightless.
A
NOTHER TRIP NORTHWARD.
I was older now. I ran alongside my father as he strode to the dock. I jumped from the shore onto the ferryboat he was boarding, taking my chances over the span of cold, dirty water. He put out his hand to steady me without really looking. I sank down into the bottom of the boat between his knees to keep warm. It was nearly winter.
Once we stepped back onto land, hunching against the wind, we headed away from town toward the Yoshiwara.
The publisher’s shop was just outside the Great Gate. I peered across into the brothel quarter. The street was gray and wet. The moat was brown, stirred up because of the rain. One courtesan was picking her way home, clogs covered in mud, bare feet white with streaks of dirt. Courtesans were not allowed to wear
tabi,
socks. Mine were not clean, but at least I had them. It was a strange hour, before midday, the Hour of the Snake. Normally no one of any importance was around, but today the caterers were lugging crates of tofu from the shop. Mitsu was washing her front steps, and men from the neighborhood association were stringing lanterns among the bare branches of the trees.
My father took a seat at the teashop next door to the publisher’s. The waitress set a cup of tea in front of him and gave me an almond cookie. Hokusai was cold, dirty, and thirsty. But he could not drink; his mind was occupied. I wanted him to at least put his hands around the warm cup. He told me to be quiet. I made myself small.
A balding, worried individual appeared beside us, polishing the top of his head with a hand, the hair there being sparse; maybe he thought it was dust and he was trying to rub it off.
“You disappear for weeks on end, and now you come to dig me out at my grandmother’s teahouse?”
“If I don’t ‘disappear,’ how can I get my work done? I have new designs.”
The publisher paced to the door. “If I had any sense, I’d drop you.”
My father dimpled in a way calculated to charm. “But you won’t, Tsutaya, because I’m good, correct?”
“Let’s see what you’ve got. Then I’ll tell you if you’re any good.”
My father bristled, but he opened his satchel. He put the designs on the table out of my reach. I could feel the tension. The bald man came and stood over us. The pictures were of courtesans under the moon, courtesans with flowers, courtesans walking by the canal. “Hmmm,” he mumbled reluctantly. And “Hmmph” and “Hmmmph.”
More pictures, then: of foreign men riding on horseback—Koreans, they must have been. Of teahouse girls.
“Give me lovers’ suicides,” said Tsutaya.
Hokusai lifted some papers. Boys gathering leaves. Children at the seashore. Tsutaya cleared his throat with impatience.
This man was an adopted son of the great publisher Tsutaya Juzaburo, whom the artists still lamented. He had died ten years before. The artists said he was a genius. I had heard the men talk about him. Myself, I wondered. He was the son of a brothel owner. They were mean, greedy men, I knew that. This Tsutaya’s father had had a bright idea, that was all. He bought the rights to publish the
saiken
guidebooks, with their tiny writing and columns full of symbols giving a prostitute’s rank, how much it cost to buy her for a night, and what she would do.
The
saiken
were popular. When a
tsu
—that is, a sophisticate—comes through the gate, he wants to know about the courtesans for sale. He buys one of these little books. You can see him walking along, his head bent over the pages, his ears red with excitement, his breath coming shallow and fast. He could collide with a lamppost, or even with the famous courtesan Hana-ogi on her way to a teahouse, and not know it.
We watched them often enough, my father and I. My father would yell out, “Fool! Reading the map when you should be enjoying the view.”
The guidebooks sold not only to newcomers but to regular customers as well, because they wanted to know how their sweethearts stood up in the ratings.
And naturally the
saiken
were of interest to the prostitutes themselves. They looked themselves up to discover if their value was rising or—more likely—falling. They were always getting older, and this was noted in the
saiken,
even though the ages were never accurate. The guidebooks were advertisements, not truth. They didn’t exactly have the best interests of the customer at heart. They represented the best interests of the Yoshiwara merchant.
So the little book would say something like this: “Misty Moon is eighteen years old and has rounded breasts but a slim figure and teeth with a space between the first two. Her look is demure, but her temperament is fiery. . . . Easy to please and passionate in her response . . .”
This was a load of night soil, but never mind. You had to buy the book to read it, and everyone wanted to read it. And if you’d already bought one, you probably bought another and another, because you had to have the latest. The
saiken
had to be edited and released twice a year. New girls debut, and old ones die or—rarely—retire.
Of course, if you knew anything, you knew that the
saiken
’s truthfulness was limited, to put it nicely, because Tsutaya had a lot of people to please: the brothel owners, the teahouse owners, the clients themselves. But the
tsu
didn’t think of this. He read and his mouth gaped and his mouth watered and he believed.