People would walk by and pick up these pieces of paper knowing the great master lived within, uncrumple them, and hurry away gloating over their prize. After seeing this, I began myself to slip outside when Hokusai’s eyes were closed, pick up the balls of paper, smooth them, and hide them.
N
OW BEGAN THE
most difficult period. We moved three times in that next-to-the-last year, from Honjo across the Sumida back to Asakusa, first to Tamachi, then to Umamichi, and finally to a tenement on the grounds of Henjoin Temple. There we remained, finished with running. We had accepted our fate. We were strangely calm.
The Kabuki theaters near Nihonbashi had burned, and they were moved to the Asakusa temple, right near us. We were on the margin of respectability, surrounded by entertainment and by water—canals, the river, marshes.
In the city it was said that Hokusai was able to work without glasses and walk long distances every day with back unbent. But that was a dream. In darker moments we faced the truth. He could not leave home again. We declined an invitation to return to Obuse. My father lay or knelt in our tenement, and I sat beside him. I was nearly fifty years old. “Lucky me, I still have a father to make me feel young,” I joked, although in truth he was killing me.
I saved my thoughts for Eisen, again my friend. He had given up printmaking with Hiroshige and now wrote novels. The occupation suited him. As he grew older, he took younger and younger women as his bedmates. I bumped into him on the street with one of them. He shooed her away: “Go! Be gone! Here is a real woman I want to see!”
We gave each other small, broken hugs and parted again—the prostitute, I could see, darting out to join him from some shopfront where she had waited. It didn’t matter. I had the sense that I had disappointed Eisen by not becoming famous enough. Perhaps I had disappointed Sanba too, wherever he was: “You have an important life to lead!” he had said.
Was this my important life? Or was there another that had eluded me? My days had all come down to this: ghost brush, muse, and nursemaid to the great man. As he faded, my love grew stronger. If I ever wondered what it was for, this endless labor, this ill-paid work, I had only to look at his beloved face and know I would do anything to disguise the helplessness there. My work did not matter. To quote Sadanobu, “There have been books since times long past and no more are necessary!”
I saw it now. Making pictures resulted in nothing more than making pictures. There was no reward. If we were lucky, the earnings helped us survive as long as the work demanded. There was no virtue in it. Only a few knew my work, but they respected me. A soft life, fame? Grand ambitions had never been mine. They had been my father’s, but he was wiser now and thought only of improving his art.
But then, strangely, work came my way.
I illustrated a tea dictionary that was much admired. Then came the
Illustrated Manual for Women.
I was happy with my new commission. I made elaborate small figures in the intense colors that were my trademark. I put my heart into it. It was better, more concentrated, more original than it needed to be.
For the opening spread I created a crowd, an array of dark-clad women. One was a courtesan with fourteen hairpins and a hemline recognizable as the Hokusai-Oei look of controlled frenzy, kicked up on the side so she could do her figure eight step. One was a nun with a black hood over her hair. One had a toothpick held coquettishly to her mouth and two black dots on her forehead. Another was a woman from the countryside in plain cotton; another wore a kerchief, while one had very long, black straight hair tied in a bunch, coming together below her waist.
I showed all the tasks and ways of women in my town, some of them so unfamiliar to me. Bridal processions, the debut of a courtesan. (“What’s the difference?” Eisen joked.) Table settings. The right way to apply makeup.
Outside, autumn deepened. In rare moments a shaft of sun would strike the earth, exposing the rubble of our lives. The treetops were frail crowns of black against the sky, but their lower halves held on to browning leaves. They seemed to be captive, while their leaves skipped away, free at last.
I got up early, went out to get tea, and came back. I worked until twilight, then dried my brush and saw my father off to sleep. Small white flakes whirled in the air, landing on my cheek and turning to water. I worked quietly beside Hokusai’s mattress on the
Illustrated
Manual for Women.
Disciples dropped in. Katsushika Isai had taken over our work in Obuse, having traveled there with Juhachi-ya. That made me jealous. The young man Tsuyuki Kosho had also been to Obuse and had dealings with Koyama the rice merchant. Isai said that my father had given him his seal, Hyaku, one hundred years. It made me uneasy. I did not believe this was so.
I drew a rectangular tray. I put nine round bowls on it in three rows of three. I made another rectangular tray: six round bowls on that one, in one row of three, with one on its own, and a row of two. Perhaps these represented different meals. I drew a large bowl with a fish lying on it, the head and tail drooping off the edge, and a tray with a hen, small thing, beak off one side and tail feathers off the other.
This was the way not to do it: clumsy housekeeping, a classic sketch that should have the
X
drawn through it.
Here was a woman serving from a bowl of noodles. Would she eat those noodles herself? No. She was holding them high over the bowl with her chopsticks up around her eyes, the bowl at her chest, a baby on her lap. The people sat at small, individual black tables with a tray top on which were plates of fish and bowls of rice waiting to be served.
The seal of Hyaku had been for the future. The future was in my hands. I would speak to my father about it. But my father was difficult to make sense of these days.
I made pictures of shells and spiny creatures, a picture of a schoolroom—children working on figures on the floor, learning to write the characters. A large standing abacus to one side. And in front, with his back turned, a sleeping bald man—ah, the teacher!
I drew the steps in making
sakura
cookies: four women picking cherry blossoms off a branch and saving them on a cloth. Another leaning with both hands on a big rolling pin that has a lump of dough wrapped around it. It was a beautiful scene, more beautiful than such a handbook deserved.
In small frames, usually at the top of the page, I made icons for trees, mountains, ferns, scrolls. Lanterns, butterflies, hills, holly, birds in flight, a flute, wooden clappers, a kitten with a ball of wool, pine needles. Grasses, tree trunks, a thatched pavilion.
Along the frame I drew crowds in little shops, bolts of fabric piled one on top of another, men displaying the fabrics, women choosing. Diagrams: how to fold paper, the latest way to tie the obi. I had never had the slightest interest in these feminine accomplishments. But I was good at “small,” and they were fun to draw.
I drew a temple. I put candlesticks on tall stands and, along the roof beams, bits of folded paper, hanging. Women with long hair, a thick wall of it hanging past their knees, tied only once, at the waist, in the style of the nobles. Another sunk into a deep bow with her fan to her face. The deities were at the top of the frame, floating in clouds.
I drew the game of incense identification. A woman poured a bit of scent on each of several handkerchiefs. She came before her lover, who was relaxing on his futon, knelt with the handkerchiefs and wafted them past his face. She let her sleeve fall open so part of the fragrance he caught was her own. Lily or rose petals or pine boughs in the snow or almond blossom.
I thought of other scents: behind the brothels in the Hour of the Snake; in midmorning the stench of vomit and night waste; the remains of a feast, fought over by dogs.
Or the smell of age, the smell of my father wasting on his cot. The smell of his clothing, the smell of our room, of cat piss and confinement, of stale food wrappers.
Gusts of wind knocked the dry leaves off their perches and sent them protesting against the thin wooden walls and screens. I felt closed and heavy and motionless, like a stone in the bottom of a river.
Yet I found a kind of peace illustrating that manual. Nostalgia filled me and rose like a net billowing overhead. Women’s lives: wonderful and terrible. And mostly strange to me. Yes, at one time I had a husband. I remembered the dull workings of his brush. “You’re beautiful,” he had said to me once. “You could just relax for a while and be beautiful.”
My father thought me ugly. But I wondered why I had taken his opinion and not the opinion of my husband, who may have been a fool but who loved me.
Other women had children: I was barren. Unlike Shino, who had earned her barrenness in the Yoshiwara, I came to this state naturally. The gods had seen to that, and I was grateful.
I drew the life cycle of an egg. First a sphere with two circles within, then an egg shape, then that egg shape with separations as head and two legs began to sever their shapes from the egg. Then there were five: head, arm, arm, leg, leg. A curious leaf-shaped or star-shaped figure. Then this figure stretched out more: head, arm arm, leg leg, and trunk. On the next page I would at last show that it was a boy with a full head of black hair, standing on two legs.
Babies became children. Those could be nice. Or not. I had painted them for the Dutch doctor. I had Tachi; she came to me. Mothers, sisters, another joy of women. I had no one left. Even Shino was gone. I drew a mendicant nun with her bowl.
In one final sketch toward the end of the book, I had some fun.
Two gardeners, one leaning over his shovel, the other pouring water from his wooden ladle out of his wooden bucket, were planting cherry trees on Nakanocho Boulevard. Their legs were knotted and their buttocks bare with a strip of cloth between them. A young woman leaned out a windowsill above, flirting. Not recommended behavior.
I completed the commission. The book was printed in large quantities. It was a success. Everyone spoke of its beauty. My name was on it, and my signature. I was almost famous, and we ate well for a time.
S
OMETIMES THE OLD
man was almost as he had been.
Hokusai got up off his mattress, his blanket in his fist, his eyes big with wonder at yet another day given.
“Greetings on the last day of the year,” he said. “Where is my
shochu
?”
“You know where your
shochu
is.”
Not wanting to stop my brush, I jerked my hand toward the jug. He gave me a sidelong, low-lidded look, sticking out his scrawny neck like a turtle, and went to get the ladle. Dipped it, filled it, drank two ladles one after another. His eyes watered, and I could practically see fumes coming up his throat.
“Is there breakfast?”
“I went to the stall and got a pork dumpling,” I said, somewhat grudgingly. “He boiled one just for me.”
“What is that you are doing?”
“Twilight at the green houses,” I said. “The women on display in the latticed veranda. The men looking in.”
He looked at my paper. “Affecting.”
He burped up more fumes, went to the door, slid it open, and looked out. With his bandy legs apart, he held on to a buttock cheek with each hand and squeezed. He forced air between his buttocks so that it rattled. And he laughed.
“Perhaps in this new year, I may die.”
This dying talk was an idle threat. Hokusai did not wish to die.
“Death will cut into your drawing time. How is your leg?” I said. He was rubbing the side of his hip. When I asked, he stopped.
“I think I will go up to the mountains again and see Kozan.”
“There you go, making promises you won’t keep,” I joked. But as I said it, I felt sad. He would never go there again. He attributed his weakness to the storm in Obuse, the return of the lightning. “I was paralyzed,” he often said. But this time he could not walk it off. His Chinese herbs and exorcisms, in the form of paintings, had no more effect.
“I tell you, King Emma of Hades has built himself a little house in the country. He wants me to do a little scroll painting for him. Remember, Daughter, when they carry me away, to put my drawing materials with me!”
He looked at me so sharply I knew he was serious.
“I will.”
The fierceness left his face and he was immediately joking again.
“I expect I’ll have a nice little place on Inferno Road. Happy to see you if you pass that way!”
“You may go to hell, Old Man,” I said, “but you won’t stay there long. You’ve never stayed anywhere long.”
He came back in and folded himself on the tatami beside me. I braced for the inevitable end-of-year discussion.
“Dear Father, today is the day we dread. The day we try not to imagine. But it has come. It’s time to pay our bills.”
“Why do you bother me about money, Ei?” He gave me a look that said it was all beneath him.