“He has provided for me, and I am to drop everything to get there.”
“What is there to drop?”
“Everything! The North Star Studio, our commissions, my students,
keshi ningyo
dolls . . .”
There was something else. I had a new and very young friend. Her name was Tachi, and she was my niece, the daughter of my brother Sakujiro. Sakujiro had gone up in the world as we had gone down. He now worked in the counting houses of the shogun. His wife disapproved of me, but the little girl came to visit when she could.
“If you are robbed and killed,” my friend said, his misbehaving eye smiling, “I will tell the story. You will enter legend this way.”
I laughed with him. “I have already entered legend. I am the devoted daughter of the Old Man Mad About Painting. I am Iitsu, the secret brush. I am She Who Paints But Does Not Sew. And now I am to be disguised as a merchant’s daughter.”
“You’ll talk like this.” He put on his female voice; he drew a cloak over his head, pulled in his chin. He simpered in high tones. “I must travel from Edo to our home in the mountains because my old father is ill. I am not harmful to anyone.”
Then he jumped to his feet and leered down at me, a
bakufu
guard at the post station. “Where is your husband?”
Again, the cloak transformed his face.
“I have no husband. What man would marry me? I am strange.” He allowed a little drool to escape the side of his mouth and crossed his eyes.
He puffed himself up. “The woman is simple. Let her pass.”
But it was just a game. I knew how to speak like a merchant’s daughter: I taught such women every day. I was not afraid. But I resolved to ask my brother if I could take Tachi with me. She could speak for me. I knew the girl was curious about the outside world. He would say yes, not because he wanted to please me or even her but because he was a snob, and we would be visiting a respectable samurai family, a rich man.
I
PULLED TAKAI
Kozan’s letter out of my kimono. The head carter read it, looked me over, and gave one short, sharp nod. Kozan was the boss, and this was the cargo he wanted.
He cast a scant look at little Tachi, wrapped and still beside me.
“My daughter,” I said.
The oxen were bellowing and thick-skinned and black with road dirt. The men who drove them were no different. One of them lifted me and plopped me in the cart. I would ride with the brass temple bell and the bales of silk and the farm implements. Tachi was lifted beside me. She sat on a pile of books and prints with a wrapper from Ichibee, the
rangaku
bookseller.
My plain indigo kimono was hidden under a thick cloak. My head was wrapped in the scarf Kozan supplied. We approached the checkpoint. When I was a child, I passed here disguised as a boy; now I passed as a samurai woman.
We traveled beside the coast. I gazed at the waves, remembering my father jumping in the foam. I told stories to Tachi. At night we came to a post station and pulled up at an inn. We two went off to a room of our own, our bodies cramped and sore.
We began to follow a river upstream. Fuji, the Peerless Cone, was to the left. Then it was gone and the black, jagged rows of rock stood up, sawtoothed and vehement. Through the gaps we saw white peaks. The men sang oxen songs. I learned to arrange the bales so my bones remained intact despite the jogging.
This was the world beyond Edo. This was what the people longed to see.
Even now, in late March, there were patches of snow. The sky was
beru,
and the wind was a melody from the
samisen
of a sad courtesan. Down and up the old trail went, full of stones that had been turned by hooves. We came to Magome, a staging town. Shops stuttered up beside the steep road, selling straw sandals and wooden kitchen tools. I bought a pair of sandals. At a bookshop I saw a fake Hokusai print with thick lines, bad color, and blocks that were not aligned. Years before, we had an apprentice we called Dog Hokusai. Apparently he was still at work: his forgeries sold in the country, while my father and I could not get work in Edo.
We passed a wheel with a thick tongue of water turning it. The men pointed: “Snow is melting on the mountaintops.” We stopped to eat tofu broiled in brown sugar and noodle soup with mountain vegetables. Houseboys from the inns offered prostitutes. Juhachi-ya didn’t stop. Priests and pilgrims gathered at crossroads. The Eighteen shouted for them to make way for our wide and implacable beasts.
After this town we would come to the steepest part, the pass.
“Strange Daughter,” the carters called, “you can get down from the cart now.”
Tachi jumped down too. The sandals were good and my feet flattened out to meet the stones. The men sang and we marked time by hitting the side of the cart. Bearers passed, going the other way. Far away, farmers worked in their fields, which were narrow and snakelike between ridges. A
sashiba,
a gray eagle, flapped in a tree above my head. It chased a smaller bird and seized it. Up and up and up.
My chest began to heave.
“Nearly at the top,” one of the men grunted.
We sat on a stone bench, four men and Ei and a child. A waitress came out of a tiny hut to serve us tea. It was familiar to me, and then I knew. My father had drawn this scene: the delicate waitress, the teashop veranda perched over the edge of the steep cliff, the blue hills far off and green ones nearby, and the road beaten flat as a silk ribbon heading through the trees. He had come before us. We were in his footsteps.
From this point, we had to walk a path curving along the edge of a hill. Beside us was empty space. Tachi and I held on to each other.
There was a wall of trees growing far down the hill to our left; to our right, more trees on the uphill slope. The sun pushed through the thin trunks and scattered rays at our feet. The curve was long and spectacular; I felt as if I were walking around the balcony of a giant theater. The treetops swayed like heads in a crowd of thousands. Plumes of bamboo leaned and sighed in the wind. What was to come? What was to come? The path sloped a little and then a little more. My sandals slapped and slapped harder as my weight pushed me downhill.
I steadied myself against the cart. This was the world and I had only had reports of it before. I had only mixed its colors before. I saw the fat groom brushing the fatter samurai horse beside the inn; the carpenter dropping his tool in the water as he tried to fix the narrow wooden bridge. I imagined my father sleeping in the pine needles. I saw Hiroshige with his sketch pad, remote and serene, sketching the distant views.
We reached the top of the pass. I listened to the wind. The men untied the oxen. They put their headscarves in the stream and tied them on again.
“Going down is the hard part. Keep out of the way.”
They tightened their belts. They got in front of the cart, shoulders pressed to the boards.
The goods slid forward. The bushels strained against their straps and the barrels rumbled on the wood. The load had been heavy to bring up, and now it wanted down in a hurry. The hindquarters of the oxen snapped from side to side. The carters hopped behind the cart, using their weight to pull it backward so it didn’t break its traces and crash into the oxen. When the path curved, the cart veered to one edge or the other. The carters swore and leaped and hung from the covered wagon.
Tachi and I followed behind.
The oxen plodded on, seeming not to notice the mad dance, the loud protests from the wooden wheels, the dragging and hopping of the men to keep the cart in the track. The men stopped and wet their foreheads. They swore and drank water and started again.
We came to the Spirit Trees. This was a famous place. There were two trees here that were inhabited by spirits. One was the vengeful ghost of a woman who was murdered. The other was her husband, who was the guilty party. For all the caravans, it was the place of resting. There was a small inn and an
onsen,
a hot spring.
The sun was slashing horizontally through the bare tree trunks by this time. The carters took off their harnesses, and the oxen were sent to the stable. The Eighteen were known here. The lead carter explained that I was “an item due to Koyama. His daughter, they say.” Large wink.
“More like his mother.”
The innkeepers exclaimed with delight over Tachi and took her off to the kitchen for food. I heard them singing and laughing. The carters began to drink and the prostitutes arrived, bringing mountain soba with mushrooms. I ate my noodles alone, sucking them up loudly. The innkeeper watched over me. The sun disappeared behind the hills, and the trees were now in darkness.
There was a strange welling in my chest, as if I had been struck on the breastbone. This feeling had come several times since I got my father’s letter. I never wept. At home, in the dark studio with my father, tears were like jewels; they glittered, out of place, a luxury from another sort of life. But this huge, black place welcomed them. I wiped my face with my sleeves. I smelled the cool damp of the earth.
Half a dozen carters went to the bath. I half-saw them scrub themselves over hot stones with little cloths. In the velvet darkness they climbed into the water. They lay with their heads back and their feet stretched out in the pool. They let out gusty cries of exhaustion.
“Come and join us, Katsushika Oei,” they said.
They knew my painting name?
“You are the daughter of the famous Old Man. Come and join us. We will greet the gods in the middle of the night.”
No one was there. Only the murdered woman-spirit in the trees and her murderous lover, now in petrified reconciliation. And I was old, after all; they were no sexual threat to me or I to them.
I took off my kimono, so I wore only my underskirt. I walked with a small washcloth to the water’s edge. I squatted, a shadow in the darkness. I pulled off my undergarment. I could see only the outline of my legs and my arms but not the flesh of my body. I could feel the steam coming from the hot water and it beckoned me. The air was cold and intimate on my skin.
There were pine torches by the doors of the inn. But none shone any light here. The carters’ dark faces tilted side by side among the rocks. I slid in; the water was as hot as any wood-fired bath. With my hand, I brushed something bobbing on the surface, and I almost screamed. I thought it was a male organ, and from the way the men guffawed, they meant me to. But it was a small wooden cup filled with sake floating on the surface of the water.
I downed it and reached for a refill. The men’s voices rose into the canopy. I lay my head against the stone rim of the bath. My body bobbed like that wooden sake cup; my body and the cup and the water were the same.
The moon appeared. Everything was silver and had a shadow. The trees were shedding their bark in long strips, and these hung down like hair on long, straight, thin necks. I looked straight up into the nets the treetops spread. The stars winked through steam and leaves, sly and quiet.
This was the world and I was out in it.
“Here is the freedom, Strange Daughter, that you have longed for,” the world said to me.
“Thank you,” I replied.
The men filled my cup. I became a firefly, lighting in and out of the conversation, there and not there. I smiled into the darkness. My father would not live forever, even though he wanted to, even though he prayed every day that he be allowed to. Why should he be? I did not wish for his death. But I wished for a life that would stretch beyond his. Was that so wrong? I wished for my own life. That night, I saw it winking, almost within reach.
J
UHACHI-YA SLEPT ONLY
a few hours and packed up at dawn. A soft rain was soaking the bamboo. Its golden tassels leaned out from secret centers. We moved down through the narrow river valley, reaching a one-street village lit by red lanterns at dusk. A mist hung over Tsumago, caught on the top of the hill. But the sky was lifting: it would clear. I went to a roadside shrine and purified myself. I prayed thankfulness for this beauty. I prayed forgiveness for thinking of my father’s death. He would be impatient to put me to work.
When we arrived at last in a dusty cloud at Obuse, Juhachi-ya put me down first and then unloaded the rest of the bundles in front of Takai Kozan’s storehouse. The women took Tachi off, making a fuss over her. My father came to greet me. He looked older, bent and wizened. “Oei, Oei,” he called, as if I were a long way away.
I took his hands. They were cold.
“Hey, hey, Old Man. How about it?” I said.
“I ya’ ya’ yaaam g-g-goood,” he said. “Bu-bu-but I fell off th’ la-aa-aader.”
It was what I had feared. His palsy was back.
I
SQUATTED BY THE
little gutter of running water. I dished up several cups of it and then rocked back on my heels. The town was on a flat plain with an orchard. White mountain peaks stood up all around—an orange glow came off them as the sun rose. Steam rose from the little stream, and there was a thin edge of white on the grasses. Yet the afternoon would be hot. There was a rumble of wooden barrels from the direction of the sake factory.