I put my hand over my mouth. It was a gesture all women made to stop their tongues. Was I becoming coy as well?
“But, please, don’t listen to advice from me,” I said. “My husband wouldn’t.”
“More fool he,” said Eisen, who knew Tomei’s work. “Please continue. I can’t divorce you because I have not had the pleasure of marrying you. I would beg you to be my wife, but you would refuse me,” he said, gallantly. “I am a dissolute and a poor artist. And anyway”—I had wondered if he would mention it—“I’m married.”
“A minor detail,” I said.
With Eisen, I returned to the teahouses. We drank and shouted and made rude jokes. The courtesans came and went, their soft hands wafting like smoke. The censors were dogging our tracks, making every kind of legitimate picture a crime. The men painted
shunga
for private customers. Eisen said, “Why don’t you do it too? Hokusai used to be one of the best.”
The sake drinkers laughed. “How could she paint them? She is a woman like a man. What she knows about love and sex would only fill a walnut shell.”
I smiled in what I hoped was a mysterious way.
“She has an imagination, doesn’t she?” said Eisen, pushed to defend me.
“That’s more than you could ever expect from any woman.”
I inclined my head to the side, on that sharp angle that could mean anything. But on the way home I was dejected.
It was Eisen who encouraged me. “They think you’re a manly woman? Who better to illustrate a book of laughing pictures? You know both sides.”
T
HE NEXT DAY
he came to get me as soon as night began to fall. We went to the market that had sprung up on the grounds of the Asakusa temple. We sat under a wooden awning at a little restaurant that sold
nara
tea. This was tea poured over rice, a proper meal. The sake was not good, but it was cheap. Eisen seemed nervous. The serving girl knelt beside him with another serving of sake.
“Should you wish to undertake the
shunga,
I believe I can help you with your research,” he said.
It was a proposition. When we rose, Eisen rocked back on his heels and reached for my elbow.
“Come,” he said. “We’ll go to my room.”
We hastened, wordlessly, down through the covered stalls, barely nodding to the other artists we passed along the way. What could we say if they asked us where we were going?
“You are so serious,” I said.
He was poking his hearth to get a flame up. His rooms were more elegant than mine. I stood, still wrapped in my cloak, which I had also put over my head and ears.
“Ei!” he said. “What do you do to me? You are not beautiful. You are not what a woman should be. You are not helping now to stoke my fires. . . . But I want you nonetheless.”
“I’ve heard it all before,” I said. “Until you get to the part about wanting me.”
He gave up with the hearth and turned away. Behind his back, a small orange flame jumped.
“It is the triumph of the intelligence over the merely carnal,” he said. “Was your husband your first? Or do I have some early deflowerer to match?”
“You do.”
He guessed. “Sanba? He was the age of your father, wasn’t he? Well, I am much younger.” He laughed at himself then.
The room was growing warmer.
He came to me and opened my kimono with his hands. He found my undergarment and loosened it. His fingers went down my belly. It was round and solid.
I put one hand behind his neck. He began to bow, his spine curling under my fingers. His mouth, his eyes, and then the top of his head brushed my lips. I pulled the kimono loose from my shoulders and pressed his head to one side. My nipple was standing.
“Where did you learn to do that?” he said.
“I didn’t learn it. It came with desire.”
His head moved over to the other one. “Same thing?”
My kimono settled halfway down my arms and chest, as it was tied around my waist. I had been initiated when I was barely older than a child. But that girl had died with Sanba. Now I was a woman.
He turned me to the back. His hands moved over my shoulders and down my spine, feeling each protruding knob of my backbone. My skin rose to his touch.
I wondered if it was possible to faint from desire. In a play, it would be. “Perhaps we are in a play,” I suggested.
“I am,” he said. “I always am.”
He parted my kimono further, over my belly. I reached back to touch his. The belly was coiled as if a hairless beast slept just under the skin. I arched my back and pressed my neck into his chest. He put his lips on my nape and moaned.
“I will lose myself,” he said.
I parted my legs.
That was the beginning of our two-brush production.
Eisen was a tall man. While standing erect, I could rest my head on his chest. When my father was gone, he sometimes stayed all night. In the evening after work, he would drink. I had a little sake too. Then he liked to make love. I studied him: his feet, curled with muscle tension as he loomed over me; his face, that fixated stare men get as they approach their climax. He kept his eyes shut. I kept mine open. I examined his member, which I had not had occasion to study before. It was like a salamander, moving blindly with its smooth, wet head.
His thighs were lean and straight, much straighter than the average man’s or than my father’s, which were bowed. His buttocks were not hard or round but tucked under, a little wide and smooth. His chest too was smooth, his nipples dark, large, and flat. His kimono remained on at all times, as did mine: my room was cold, and the erotic potential of our dress enormous. The soft material slid away from your skin, opening, letting hot body parts meet.
I was full figured; he was thin. I liked his boniness. I liked his hard shins, his hip bones, and his elbows as they pressed against me, navigating my softness by feel, inching toward where he needed to be. He did not rush once he was there, which made me happy. I liked the pushing, and finally his arched flop; he looked like a fish that has been pulled from the shallows.
He was funny and he was available; we fell into the habit of each other. I was not in love, as I had been with Sanba—as I half thought, sometimes, I had been with the Dutch doctor, whom I had met for only an hour three times, five years earlier. Being in love was a foolish idea, as my father said—a fashion, a swoon courtesans used to distract themselves from the awfulness of their lives.
We shared no dreams or longing. With Eisen, it was a coupling of needs with requirements. Freed from the urgency to please the man because I “loved” him, I did what I wanted. This was very different from giving myself, or submitting, or becoming limp and docile in the belief that it fueled male desire. It was by accident that I found I could enter into a roll upon the mats with a cool head and all my curiosity intact.
“Why don’t you try pressing from the front?” I said when he pursued me from behind. “Not inside, just outside, like that.”
“You have the tricks of a courtesan,” he grumbled, complying and laughing as he did.
“I know nothing! Nothing! I’m just trying to feel good.”
He told me about women who sat unmoved by men’s attentions, reading books while they were being made love to. But I was the very opposite. It was not lack of interest but close attention that he saw in me. I was having ideas for pictures while we were making “love.”
I tried being on top, and he found that entertaining too. “I must make a note,” he mumbled as I let the breast of my kimono open toward his lips. “This is really rather good.”
The kimonos with their happy, graphic possibilities heightened the pleasure. It was fun to feel as if I were in the pictures I had designed for so long.
Together, Eisen and I took on a
shunga
commission. The private buyer could afford the fifteen pages of large canvas in four colors. He wanted a silly story under the title
Images of a Couple.
I remembered what I had seen as a small girl. With Shino in the brothel, I’d witnessed people rolling together, men mounting girls, girls’ feet in the air.
We were paid well, and for a time I had plenty to eat. My father had returned to Uraga and I sent money to him by messenger. We got more commissions. I found my father’s designs for couples in love positions and began to use them. But my own way of seeing began to appear on the pages. My figures were rounder than Hokusai’s. The world was a fishbowl, and the man—whichever man—was on the outside, looking in. The woman was on the inside, swimming in it, knocking against the glass. Perhaps drowning in it. Their robes ballooned around them.
We made up a story about a courtesan and her client who went out on a date on the Sumida in a small boat with a roof. The man paid a tip to the boatman so he would let them take the boat by themselves while he waited on the pier. Eisen wrote the dialogue. I had to remind him to keep it short.
COURTESAN:
It’s such a nice prow. Give me one more, one more time of nice harpooning.
MAN:
Port the helm! Port the helm!
COURTESAN:
Like this? Like this?
Shortly thereafter, the
bakufu
outlawed the little covered boats, permitting them only on rainy or snowy days for the purpose of transportation.
We were in the midst of yet more hard times.
W
E SIGNED A
book of
shunga
together. We wrote in large characters on the cover
In-yo wago gyoku mon ei,
meaning, “Joint work by man and woman.”
Gyoku-mon
means “jewelry.” A woman was a possession, a jewel of our
mon
, our gate, or name. On one page the man and woman were having sex under the heating table
.
I drew a book on the quilt, half falling off the table. On the top right corner of this painted book, we wrote: “Written by Shishiki Gankou and Josei Insui.”
Shishiki Gankou was one of my father’s names, which he had sold to Eisen when we needed money. Josei Insui meant that the painter was a woman, Ei.
It was Eisen who convinced me to sign that little book within the book with my own name.
Before too long, Eisen and I had a contract to do another work. It was to be called
The Sexual Joy of Women.
We were sitting around thinking up ideas.
“What would make a woman happy in congress?” he asked.
“To have a lover who was all fingers coax her to conclusion without entering her.”
This was how we thought of the octopus.
Our story was based on a folktale. The heroine was an
ama
diver who was abducted and was being escorted to the palace of the King of the Undersea. The octopus was her escort. He had his young son with him. He asked the
ama
what she would like. She asked him to make love to her. It was originally a tale of female self-sacrifice: she was pleasing her escort. But in our version, the
ama
was adventurous. They paused in the lee of some rocks, and the octopus served her there with his great wide mouth and his eight tentacles.
Eisen wrote his usual ludicrous dialogue: he tucked it in all around the great reclining forms of the woman and her bulb-headed amorous friend, which I drew.
SQUID MAXIMUS:
My wish comes true at last, this day of days; finally I have you in my grasp! Your “bobo” is ripe and full. How wonderful! Superior to all others! . . . All eight tentacles intertwine without and within! How do you like it this way?
MAIDEN:
There! Good, good. Aaaah! Yes, it tingles now; soon there will be no sensation at all left in my hips. Ooooooh! Boundaries and borders gone! I’ve vanished!
SQUID MINIMUS:
After Daddy finishes, I too want to rub and rub my suckers at the ridge of your furry place until you disappear. . .
I took the design to the publishing house. The publisher assumed my father had done it. He said, “That Hokusai! He has the most grotesque imagination! He will think of such horrors!” He shook his head over the design, but he took it. “Has he gone too far this time?” murmured the publisher. His cheeks had become frozen. “This poor
ama
diver is paralyzed with fear.”
“No, no,” I offered. “I can assure you, she is in raptures.”
I
DIDN’T SLEEP, WITH
my father snuffling and kicking on the other side of the room. In the morning he was down on his knees as usual, chuckling over his brush sketch of the god of good fortune—jovial and busy, his Hotei looked quite a lot like Hokusai himself.