Hokusai had perhaps died and gone to heaven and arranged for me to join him. Tachi had been met with kindness and had full days flying kites with other children. We had a little house a short distance from Kozan’s studio with this running gutter beside it. He had taken on a big job, painting the ceilings for two carts for O-bon, the Festival of the Dead. He had made a fine design of waves. But his eyes were not sharp, he was too weak, and now he was stumbling with the palsy. Grinding up the pigments was hard work, and he was not used to it.
The waves were choked up in wooden frames.
“Those are different from the waves at Uraga,” I said to him. “They will be very difficult to run through,” I joked, teasing him. “If you lie down at the edge of the sea, you will be tossed in among them.”
He grunted. “A-a-angry wa-waves,” he admitted. “Crowd of them.”
In one of the panels, the waves went around in circles. In another, they were heading straight up, as if to swallow the viewer.
We named those
Masculine Waves
. The ones that tended inward we named
Feminine Waves
. We worked and we laughed together. Or I laughed and he gave his bizarre, twisted barks. I was happy that he recognized two energies, the female and the male. I felt that he was telling me he knew me, deeply, as an artist.
Kozan himself painted the frames. He put angels in them in the Western style.
Sometimes in the evening we visited Kozan in his studio. He played the three-string koto, looking out the second-floor window. From here we could see the estate, the neat, narrow passageways between warehouses, the tousled fields, and the road. We could see the pine trees tied up with their triangles of rope so the branches would not bend. If anyone came along that road, we would see them before they saw us.
The room also had a secret door. The door was hidden inside a cabinet and led to a secret staircase to the outside. He could escape unseen, if necessary.
I looked into the faraway mountains, marveling that I had come through them. Like the glass prisms in Western books, they shattered the light, becoming transparent against the bright slabs of sky.
When it got dark, Kozan lit the small lantern and showed us his books. They were written in Dutch, but there were pictures. Some were of guns—long and short, large and small. We would surely be punished for seeing these things. I was more interested in the box that made pictures, called a camera. Kozan took pleasure in my amazement.
I had the quiet, those days up in the mountains, to consider myself. I was content. I had no longing. And strangely, men had changed in their attitude toward me. They respected me. There was something tentative, even careful, in their treatment of me. I had changed in my aging. Perhaps they saw something they liked.
Another wealthy patron by the name of Sakai Yoshiaki came from Matsumoto. This man’s home was here in the mountains, but he had a shop in Edo near the bridge to the shogun’s castle. He had many prints by Hokusai, including all forty-six views of Mount Fuji. But meeting Hokusai was not the purpose of his visit, I could see. It was a pretext. A certain nervous excitement was in the air, and I knew the men spoke about politics. Sakai was a sympathizer with the forces that wanted to open Japan to the world.
W
E FINISHED THE
waves. I began to make the deep red we needed for our new project, the ceiling of a temple outside of town. We were also writing a manual about color, which my father wished to have published, perhaps to lay claim to these techniques in the face of any imitator who might follow.
A shy boy approached. This was Iwajiro, second son of Koyama, rice merchant and miso maker, owner of Juhachi-ya, a well-off citizen of the town. He wished to learn painting.
I agreed to teach him, and we met often at his house. The young man showed some talent. I corrected his grip and the pressure of his fingers on the brush and set the number of repetitions he was to make of a bamboo branch. As he worked, I looked through the openings in the screens toward the center of the town.
Two samurai rode through the gates. They dismounted and handed off their horses and disappeared into Kozan’s studio. One was Sakai. The other seemed to know his way in the little town.
“Who is that man?” I said to Iwajiro.
He looked up.
“That’s Kozan’s teacher, Shozan Sakuma.”
I was impressed and frightened. I knew about Shozan Sakuma. He was a learned man, a
rangaku-sha.
But he was dangerous. He had a school in Edo and spoke against the isolationist policies of the
bakufu.
He wanted a state where our spiritual knowledge combined with Western practical knowledge.
A lookout scanned every direction, turning and turning like a windmill. Hours later they emerged, with Kozan, who saw them off, clapping their backs and wearing a pleased and secretive look.
“Old Man,” I chided my father when I got home, “you are a sneaky old thing. Here I thought you had a peaceful mountain refuge. Now I discover that this little town is a nest of enemies of the shogun.”
He smirked and kept on drawing his demon-quelling lions.
“You side with the rebels. And you never admit it. You are afraid it will limit you as an artist. I know you.”
He only laughed. He had no sense of danger, and he felt no responsibility to tell me when he led me into it. When he was playing around, he made a stamp with the sign
hyaku
, meaning “one hundred”—the age he wished to be, but not the highest age he wished ever to be. He hadn’t even begun to use that yet.
But there were other times when, in the abrupt darkness that came as the sun disappeared behind the mountains, he admitted the day would come when he was gone.
“Chin-Chin, wha’ w’ you do wh-when the Ol’ Man’s gone?”
“I’ll do just fine. Just as I have been.”
He drew little receipts for our payment. He put his face in profile at the top, a cartoon, himself bald and wrinkled with some straight hairs sticking out the back of his head. His ear was a huge upside-down snail. His eye socket was deeply set, his nose straight, and his chin a wobble sinking into his neck.
Underneath he drew me. My face was like a mask. I had a great, wide forehead from which my hair sprang back in waves. I had a dot of paint between my eyebrows; my mouth was a firm, straight line, tending neither up nor down. Strong-jawed woman.
“You ma’ a paper li’ this e’eryti-me. Ma-mak-ke sure get pay.”
He put his stamp on it: “Hokusai, age 88.”
Ganshoin Temple was a small, pretty Buddhist temple. It sat beside a small pond that was noisy with frogs in the spring. The temple was very old and had been rebuilt a few years before. Kozan hired Hokusai to make a Ho-o bird for its ceiling.
The Ho-o is an auspicious bird, a phoenix that lives so long that plants begin to grow on its body. We put three kinds of plants in the design. We put leaves of the
goyo no matsu
, the five-needle pine. These looked like scales or feathers of the bird laid closely one on the next. We also added fine green laurel leaves and then, finally, two big brown leaves of a plantain plant. One of the plantain leaves overlapped the other. This left a space the shape of a large triangle between them. We looked at this space and noticed that it looked like Fuji-san, the symbol of our country.
We drew the pattern in black ink. This ceiling painting was to be enormous, the size of twenty-one tatami mats. Takai Kozan liked our design very much and asked us to mark in the colors.
When it was time to paint, our helpers laid twelve large cypress panels on the floor, four across and three along. We made a copy of our original design in
sumi
ink on the twelve boards. I mixed the paints—first the white layer to cover the whole surface. Then, one board at a time, I applied the reds, yellows, greens, and blues—
beru,
of course and another, very bright. Finally we decorated the Ho-o bird with small bits of gold leaf.
The bird was fierce and tightly coiled, his beak up against his back, his eye powerful and black. He seemed to stare at me no matter where I stood in the room. We called it
Ho-o Staring in Eight Directions.
My father rested a great deal; he directed me, pointing this way and that and pretending to be scandalized if I took a shortcut, scolding me lavishly, occasionally offering a single word of praise. At times he knew he was growing weaker and accepted it. Some days he was confused and could not find his outer garment or was unable to get up off his knees. Then my heart broke.
On other days he turned on me with a face of stone and would berate me in a poisonous voice. He made me so angry. I would think to myself,
Fine! It is time he went! This is too difficult.
Always after one of his angers he would laugh like a baby, his shoulders going up and down, his face crinkling up between mouth and eyes. And I would melt and fear the day he must go.
T
HE HEAT BROKE
with a wild storm that heralded autumn.
It started with a column of gray cloud in the distance. I was walking by the river when the wind hit my back, pushing me home. In our little house I found my father asleep. The wind played around the outside, rustling and pushing, banging a loose gate, making the branches of the pine sway. I placed our painting goods under the mattress. I feared that the roof would fly off.
The bombardment began, a chorus of clattering. I couldn’t imagine what was coming down. It sounded like little wooden balls. They struck the metal pots outside the door; they struck the roof and made a different, deadlier sound. And now they struck the rocks, which began to chime. Were these the bullets from Western muskets?
I looked out and saw round white ice balls falling and leaping back up from the ground, demented. Hokusai pushed himself erect and rubbed his fists in his eyes and began to chant his sutras loudly in time with the battering.
It was like a rain of arrows. I covered Hokusai’s old bald head with my arm; I was hiding, but I wanted to see. The noise was astonishing. My father cited punishment from the gods and thought they were trying to kill him.
“Th-thun-thun-der gods are c-c-coming for me!” he cried. I knew well the story my father told of being struck by lightning and thrown into a rice paddy. For years he had boasted: heavenly fire had touched him once and left him shaken but alive, and now he was safe from it. “They cannot kill me,” he had said. He was Raijin the Thunder God.
But now the story changed.
“I was too proud! The thunder gods are coming to punish me!” He was frantic with fear, and he made Tachi cry. She hid under the desk while the storm went on and the Old Man gibbered on the futon.
In the face of this, I had no option but to be practical. “It’s weather, Old Man,” I said. “Only weather. It came from the mountains,” I kept saying. “It will go back there.” But I too believed in omens. I was afraid that the politics of our host angered the gods.
At last the town was completely still. I looked through the paper windows, some of which were torn, and saw piles of the dangerous white shot everywhere. “Stay inside! Come away from the window!” Tachi cried.
More thunder rolled in. The lightning followed—forked, ragged shoots that crossed the open sky in one flash and were gone. The rain began after that. “This is too much!” We held each other under the onslaught.
Finally the storm passed. Hokusai fell asleep, but I stayed awake. Later the storm returned. This time there were no strings of white fire. After the rage and growl of thunder, the sky itself went an all-over daylight white, throwing all the trees and buildings and even their tile roofs into instant visibility, as if day had flashed on and then gone out. The whole sky was white now, and then black, and then white again. Shadows burst up and then dissolved.
I paced our little hut. I looked out the paper windows. I wished I could paint what I saw: the village frozen, the Kozan house, the houses of the elders, the simple farmers; every one was silent. Where had the people gone? How had this storm disconnected the threads of our community so no one even looked out?
I waited for the flashes that made shadows appear and gave trees and houses a dark presence in precise outline. Each time, I tried to remember how it had looked before the light went out. The storm went on all night, and rain fell, melting the hail. In the morning I was exhausted from lack of sleep, and so were all the people in the town.
In the morning my father was unable to get out of bed.
I knew it was time. We would have to go back to Edo.
W
HEN JUHACHI-YA DEPOSITED
us in Edo, I installed my father in our tenement. If he did not lie down or stay propped against a wall, he fell down. Whether the
yoi-yoi
palsy or the touch of the Thunder God, something was getting him in small, stealthy attacks.
We went back to the daily exorcisms. He would concentrate fiercely, make a lion image in only sixty seconds, then struggle to his feet. He would go straight out into the alley, crumpling the page and throwing it down to the ground. Sometimes his hand was so shaky that the brush picture was illegible.