I stopped at the tiny bridge that crossed the still canal. It was evening, and the moon was high. It slipped between the rooftops and lay on the still water, giving a little light to this dark place.
I saw a woman come out of the doorway and begin to walk along the path, close to the wall. She was wrapped in a cloak and quick as a cat, but her long, straight back caught my eye. Before I thought about it, my lips were speaking.
“Shino!”
She did not turn around. She did not stop but slowed just perceptibly.
“Shino! It’s me, Ei.”
“I know,” she said. “One does not forget that voice.”
I understood then that she had been avoiding us.
“Don’t you want to look at me?” I said softly. I was so much older now, thirty-seven. That meant she would be forty-seven. She walked like a girl. “Have I angered you?”
She looked away, toward the lighted, busy streets. She reached into her sleeve as if looking for something. “Don’t stop here,” she said. “You’ll give us away.”
Give who away to whom? I did not understand. She was free, and probably wealthy.
“Walk past,” she commanded.
I walked past, a few feet from her body.
“My husband doesn’t know I’m here.”
I felt a surge of my old hatred of this blind man.
“But can we meet?”
“Not tonight. Come tomorrow. I’ll take precautions. Go to the house you saw me leave, at twilight. Cover your head. There will be candles. Follow them.”
As I approached the narrow canal, I noticed that the little noodle house I had thought abandoned had a shingle. It read:
THE SIGN OF THE NIGHTHAWK.
The window papers glowed: there was candlelight within. I put my face near the door and scratched and said a soft “Good evening.”
The door opened. Eight female heads turned in shock.
“It’s all right,” said Shino.
She stood among a clutch of haggard women. They were seated on old sake barrels. They held mirrors, and the tongues of candle flame reflected off the surfaces around the room, like yellow birds. She wore an apron. She hardly looked at me. With a paintbrush and a pot of rice powder she was buffing the cheeks of a woman much the worse for wear.
“Pardon me for the secrecy,” she said pleasantly. “But as the prostitutes are illegal, helping them is illegal too. My husband does not approve.”
I saw faces scarred, toothless, and pockmarked—blemishes that were indeed the sign of the nighthawks. But they were laughing and flushed; there was heat in the room from a charcoal burner. Shino’s helper was making rosebud lips out of narrow, lined mouths. One woman took softened wax from a candle, shaped it between her thumb and fingers, and set it on her nose, the end of which had been eaten away, I supposed by syphilis. She patted away with her wax, adding bits, squeezing with her thumb. I wondered how it would stay on.
“So this is your vice,” I said, taking refuge in the rough irony that was my father’s. “Good works. I knew you’d still be misbehaving.”
“Nor have you lost your edge,” she said.
I wanted to take her in my arms and embrace her. But eight women with half-made faces listened.
Shino’s long face was fuller and she had stopped hiding her strength: her gaze was frank and humorous and to the point. Her married status still surprised me, the shaved eyebrows and blackened teeth. Her hair had gone from its deep, rich black to gray—gray at the top of her head and over her ears, black in the large, loose knot.
“It suits you, married life,” I admitted. “Though I still feel, after all this time, unfairly cut out of it.”
“It was not my wish,” she said. “But necessary.”
To cut my father out, yes. But me? Why me? Was the blind man so vindictive? I didn’t ask.
“Are you happy?” We both said it at the same time. Our audience of haggard and half-made faces laughed. It was strange speaking in front of them, but I could see Shino would not be moved from her task.
“I am very happy,” she said.
“I too. And your esteemed husband?” I said without a trace of irony.
“He remains well, the gods willing. And your father?”
“The Old Man is often on the road. He has had success with his
Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji
and is in excellent health despite his years.”
“Astonishing,” murmured Shino, “and I would love to hear more about you. But the women must get ready. They need to be out for the evening soon.”
The woman who was trying to fill the hole in her nose called out for help. But Shino was doing hair, rolling tangled lanks of it and pinning it up. I stepped in, and that was how I found myself rolling tiny bits of warm wax and plugging them into an eroded nose. When I was finished, both the nighthawk and I were pleased.
“You’re good with a brush. Draw some lips—make them tiny and red.”
I supposed the women had once been beautiful, at least beautiful enough to sell themselves. Now they could not practice in a brothel. Shino helped make them presentable enough to catch a client on the street for a few small coins. When they left, cheerfully enough, for their evening’s work, I sat on a rice caddy and took the tea she offered.
“They’ll eat tomorrow,” she said.
“You keep them working,” I observed.
“If they had any choice, they wouldn’t be doing it. And every day brings hope—the makeup brings hope.”
I listened. Shino’s eyes were glowing. She had plans: she was trying to convince a brothel owner to let her open a hospital.
“Please excuse the drama of our little subterfuge. But my husband sometimes has me watched.”
I supposed that he was ashamed she had been a courtesan.
“No,” she said, “it’s because he gets his licence from the shogun. I endanger him with the work. My friendship with you would be even worse. The North Star Studio is always under suspicion. Hokusai paints in the Western way. He sold to foreigners.”
“You’re not afraid to help the nighthawks, but you are afraid to see us?” I was wounded, and tears came to my eyes.
“I haven’t forgotten you,” she said. “I buy every little piece of work you do—a print or a handbook, even the
shunga.
”
“Under my father’s signature?” I said.
“I know the difference.”
I
REFUSED TO
accept Shino’s ban. I went past the little house now and then. I drew rosebud mouths in crimson, and with a tiny razor I cleaned up the napes of women who needed hair to grow in the two points that marked a virgin. She always pushed me out of there as quickly as she could. The last time she was truly angry with me.
“I said you must not come!”
I stayed away for a long time. When, months later, I walked along the narrow canal, I saw that the house was dark. The Sign of the Nighthawk was gone.
And there were no more commissions for paintings of Yoshiwara beauties. The fashion then was for Chinese legends—safe subjects, nothing to do with the regime. I was lucky to find a rich patron who wanted one.
I
WAS ALONE IN
the North Star Studio when Matsudaira Sadanobu came to visit. He was old and fat. His retainers filled the doorway and frightened my neighbors. He bowed in humble fashion and asked for my father.
“I never know where the Old Man is. He is on his travels,” I said shortly.
“Your father was beloved by shogun and commoner alike,” began Sadanobu.
“Ah, but apparently not by those in between,” said I, “the administrators, the councilors, the censors?”
“Yes, by all. We all loved him.”
I took note of the past tense. Did this man know something that I didn’t? I called for the neighbor’s boy to get us tea.
“I am a writer,” said Sadanobu, warming a little. “I understand the difficult life of the artist.”
“Oh, yes. I recall your written works,” I said as we waited. “There was that famous line you wrote in the edict announcing the Kansei Reforms: ‘There have been books since times long past and no more are necessary.’ ”
He flushed. “That was long ago. Force was needed to save the people. The city had become decadent. History will judge us. I did not want to leave such art as you people created on the record.”
“You were afraid of history.”
“But I understand that my actions created harsh times for writers and artists. I have come to offer my apologies.”
Apologies? We were not ready for them.
“I understand that Hokusai is not well. I myself am near to death. I would like to see him before I die.”
Hokusai was going to die? Was that the rumor?
I retorted: “Hokusai will outlive you. He has already outlived two wives and all my sisters. They died in their twenties, but that is the life of the poor, is it not? He may even outlive me.”
Sadanobu endured my cold words.
“If you seek forgiveness,” I told him, “better to go to your temple. You will not find it here.”
“I want to undo the wrongs I have done in this world before I leave it.”
“Only a man of exceptional arrogance could even imagine that was possible,” I said.
His voice rose alarmingly. “You hold on to the past. That’s not what your Buddha preaches. I loved your father, as I loved the other artists and writers.”
“And that was why you handcuffed us?”
“Yes,” said Sadanobu, “that was why. To prevent harm. You expressed the evil and the corruption within us. We had to stamp it out. But it was not personal.”
“Our hunger was personal. Our hiding was personal. Unfortunately for us, it is all personal. Who is senior councilor now?” I said. “Not Sadanobu. Who is shogun now? The corrupt Ienari. But who is Hokusai? Hokusai is still Hokusai.”
Beads of sweat formed where the fat man’s hairline would have been had he not shaved it. I saw he did not look well. He may have been near death, But I had no sympathy. My heart was a stone.
“I thought he had changed his name to Iitsu,” he muttered.
“No,” I said, to further confound him, “Iitsu is me.”
Despite my brave words, the censors were breaking us down. I wondered, sometimes, if the age of the
ukiyo-e
was coming to an end.
Hokusai was writing an introduction to his book
One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji
. I smoked my pipe.
“I believe there is nothing of great note in the things I drew before my seventieth birthday,” he said. “In my seventy-third year, I finally apprehended something of the true quality of birds, animals, insects, and fishes and of the vital nature of grasses and trees.
“I expect that in my eightieth year, I’ll have made some progress. In my ninetieth, I will have penetrated even further into the deeper meaning of things. In my hundredth year I shall have become truly marvelous, and at one hundred and ten every dot and every line I make will have a life of its own.”
How he tempted the gods!
The first two volumes of the book were finally published. The third volume was advertised and the blocks cut, but there was no money to print it.
There was another crackdown, an earthquake. And then the rain came. It rained out the crop. The harvest was only one-quarter what it should have been. Summer abandoned us the next year and the next. The
bakufu
told us the gods were punishing us for our corruption. The price of rice multiplied three times. Peasants were dying in the countryside; people said bodies were stacked at the sides of the roads, to clear the way for others to walk.
Hungry people do not buy pictures. What hungry people do is borrow from moneylenders.
E
ISEN AND I
had spent the evening drinking and were walking home through the temple grounds. A storyteller had propped himself up at the foot of a tree and was beckoning all passers to gather in front of him. I seemed to recognize the man. He had thick hair and a stocky body and he could throw his voice.
“Listen to me! I have a story of true events. It has happened in our city. It is a story of the blind moneylender.”
It was pouring rain, as usual. Our umbrellas were drums. The peonies were soapy ruins on the path. I took Eisen’s elbow. “I want to hear this.” The storyteller had hooked me with his eye. He began.
The blind moneylender was a large and canny man with an acute sense of smell. He would have known that the pack of thieves had targeted him that night. He would have heard them following him at a distance, laughing about how they would torture him with knives.
He was a brave man too. And he loved his wife, who had been a courtesan. He had bought out her contract, and the two lived happily together.
The blind man led the thugs away from his home. He went slowly along the Dike of Japan until it narrowed and took a hard right-hand turn. He knew the space by the smell of the lacquer trees and the sound of the carts, the horses, and the feet going by. He stayed near to the sound, knowing that if he was alone, they would attack.