I went back to my painting of courtesans and lattice. Over the women’s heads I wanted stars like the ones I had seen in the countryside. Little sparks, like moth holes eaten in the fabric of a dense wrapper. I wanted light to come through them, light from another place. I didn’t know how to make stars on a night sky. I was trying when a scratch came at the door. Another New Year’s visitor.
I slid the screen away. She had a white cloth wound over her forehead and tight under her chin. It fell over her shoulders and her chest. Under it she wore an ordinary short coat, a padded skirt, white
tabi,
and thonged sandals. But nothing could disguise her, not the nun’s hood or the wet mud of the roads. She carried a bamboo flute.
She bowed low. I bowed lower. Hokusai remained on his elbows on the floor and did not look up. I was filled with emotion. I signaled the nun to enter the room.
“Hey, hey, Old Man,” I said. “You have a guest.”
He looked up. He could not stand.
Shino bowed low and congratulated him on his health, his home, his good fortune.
I noticed suddenly that it was too cold in our room, and that it was bare. We had nothing—only the orange crate nailed to the wall with the statue of Nichiren in it—and my hair was unkempt.
I stirred the fire. I called the neighboring boy to bring tea.
“We can only burn the charcoal dust because anything else makes him cough,” I said.
Hokusai squatted, never letting go of his brush, moving it. He was silent.
“I was in my fifteenth year,” said Shino, “when I was sent to the teahouse to get a special tea for Fumi of the Corner Tamaya. When I was there, I met an artist.”
“I was in my forty-fifth year,” said Hokusai. “I carried the child Chin-Chin on my shoulder. My new wife had given her to me. I was selling my pictures in the Yoshiwara.”
“I had been sentenced to the Yoshiwara to serve as a courtesan for raising my hand to my husband. In fact, I had sliced his ear. I had been a lady-in-waiting at the shogun’s castle.”
“I never knew that!”
“There was a time I was to be a polisher of mirrors in the shogun’s court,” he said.
He looked up, into her face. He made circles with his hand in front of his chest, then he stopped and peered into the circle that he had just rubbed clear, and he frowned and began to rub it again. He spit and rubbed, peered and rubbed, and pursed his lips.
“In the shogun’s palace there were many idle women. The young ones were beautiful. And lonely.” He grabbed at his crotch and pulled and laughed. “There were many secret places in the shogun’s court—rooms and rooms, corridors going on forever. You could slide into a cabinet.”
Shino was quiet, getting used to the way he was.
“Lots of laughing going on in the shogun’s court,” he said, again gesturing obscenely.
“So I’ve heard,” I said.
“What do you know?” he accused. “What do you know about men? You are Oei of the strong jaw, who does not like men.”
“How can you say I don’t like men? I devote myself to you.”
He gave his gummy grin. We were trapped in our madness and showing it to our guest.
“Shino has come to see us,” I said.
“I am pleased.”
But his mind, on seeing her, had begun to speed backward. “It was discourteous of me to turn down Nakajima after he adopted me,” said Hokusai.
“Why did you do it, then?” I asked.
“I didn’t want to polish mirrors.” He looked at me as if I were stupid. “Never again would I be responsible for the cleanliness of a thing, an object, or a place. Never again have to turn my back on people because they were powerful. So I got freedom.” He laughed. “Freedom to look, without hiding my face.”
We were silent.
“But the shogun’s ladies, they were good. They bought the
shunga.
Without them we would have lost it all. Everything killed off by the censors.” He looked at Shino and came back to today. “Ei is my sun and my moon. And you are Shino, my star.”
I left them together and went out to the
ageya.
I passed the kitchen and, greeting the owner, left my outer jacket and went to the Fishnet Room, where, as usual, men sat at the low tables smoking and roaring with drink. I slid to a seat against the wall.
“There she is, the most famous woman artist in Edo. Of course, the field is not large,” came the voice. “How many women artists can there be?”
Hiroshige moved sideways to make room for me.
“As many as can be spared from the beds of the men of Edo,” I replied. “Beds where most of them toil in obscurity.”
He gave me a pained smile. He hated anyone to best him, even with a line.
“There are many women, you are right. But only Oei was chosen for the
Illustrated Manual.
I wonder why.”
“Could it be because of her parentage?”
The men’s foreheads gleamed in the lamplight, their eyes shone. But their mouths were lost in the dark. I drew smoke into my chest.
“No, it cannot. And anyway, who cares about old Hokusai? He has lived long, but he is no source of inspiration today.”
Hiroshige was my senior but only by a few years. Now he fancied himself the king of
ukiyo-e,
the famous printmaker of famous places. Of course, he was only copying what my father had done fifteen years before.
“Oei was chosen as a novelty: a woman to do the drawings, that’s a good idea,” he continued. “And it worked. But it can’t be repeated.”
“Yet I would welcome the chance to try,” I said.
“It is a beautiful book. Oei-san did a good job,” came another voice. Eisen. Always my defender.
I watched the samisen player, her white and downcast face intent on the strings. The sad words from a very old song.
Gallantry and love affairs
Are only while we live.
We will die at last, will die.
Come let us drink our fill, carouse,
We know no tomorrow.
I made my way out to the wooden walk above the sunken garden. A giant metal lamp, saved from the fire, cast its light down into the gnarled tree roots. A cat sprang up and brushed my legs; I picked it up and stroked it. Raindrops, half frozen, glittered on the ends of the pine needles. Fallen needles gave a copper sheen to the earth. Some were carried in the trickle of water that snaked between the great bulging roots.
A movement disturbed the dark at the far side. Two figures parted, men in bulky costumes. Lovers? Or samurai conspirators? One and the same, these days. Both were doomed.
I recognized one. It was Sakuma, Kozan’s teacher from Obuse. The conspirators had such bold plots: they would break the Tokugawa. More and more one heard of Western ships touching down on the eastern shores of Japan, of their sails trembling beyond the reach of our guns. Von Siebold had told me, twenty years before, that our system could not hold back time. But I had lived so long this way, it was hard to imagine it could ever end.
A
taiko
drummer, laughing loudly, burst out of the
ageya
hall onto the walkway. He had removed his shirt in the heat inside. His skin shone, rich and bronze. The party followed him outside.
“Give us a verse, Oei!”
The men pulled me back inside. “I will,” I said. “I will.”
“Will it be lewd?”
“For lewd, you won’t beat the Old Man.”
In front of me appeared a small water dish, rice paper, some black ink. I pulled a brush from the folder of brushes I carried inside my kimono.
“Try this,” said Eisen. He showed me a strange device. It had the hairs of a brush. But it had a thicker stem, not the usual lacquered wood. It had a hole and a tube you squeezed. He showed me how to fill it with ink.
“I got it from Hiroshige. He invented it so he could sketch on the road.”
Two boys dressed up as girls got up to do a song. It was very sweet. One played a little tinkling flute while the other minced.
You are divine.
You are perfect for marriage.
You have class.
I have only one thing to ask.
Do you take it in the ass?
Their faces were all angles, the lines of nose and eyes like warriors’. My fingers itched to draw them. But who would buy a drawing of these faces?
Eisen and I took a rickshaw to the Ryogoku Bridge to see the New Year’s fireworks. Bundled onlookers filled the long arc of the bridge, which stood on its many thick wooden legs high over the wintry Sumida. The surface of the river was placid and boats large and small were anchored, waiting for the show. We stood at the high point—the boat with the fireworks discharger was beneath us. At the signal, balls of gold and red flew high over our heads, curved, and began to fall, shedding colored fire.
Eisen brought his drinking flask up to his mouth. “I loved you once,” he said. “But you were spoken for.” The river flowed silently in the darkness, a black lacquer base for the flowers of light and fire that plumed above. Who had spoken for me? Hokusai, of course. My father.
“My father says he will not die. But death is approaching. And so we wait and pretend it isn’t.”
“It is the pretense that exhausts you,” said my good friend.
I looked farther over the railing into the black. Eisen was my old friend. Yet there would be no confiding. I tried it this way: “The repose of old age, he doesn’t experience. He forgets. He insists. He changes his mind. He tries to run. He cannot walk. I obey his every word; I don’t expect him to be wrong. He is mad. So I am mad too.”
More fireworks arced over our heads, bursting with the accompaniment of the roars of the crowd. Below, on the moving water, the boats rocked in their straight lines as people stood to watch.
“He is angry because he is dying. And you are not.”
It began to snow, the flakes spiraling down from a great height, past our faces, falling to the water. I patted my friend’s arm, grateful for his presence.
We said good night. I would walk and walk as the night gave way to the dawn. At first the snow melted away into blackness when it hit the road. But it kept falling. When I reached the temple at Asakusa, snow was catching on the branches of the pines and there was glittering ice underfoot.
B
UT IT WAS
not my father who died first. It was Eisen.
So he too was gone, my great friend.
The year did not improve.
My father became more frail and more insistent. He lay all day on the thin mattress we had unrolled on the tatami mats and now never rolled up.
One day was worse than the others.
I called the boy to get the doctor. Shino had given me money, which I had hidden from Hokusai so he would not spend it on sweets or throw it at a vendor who came to collect. The doctor came.
“There is nothing to be done,” he said. “It is old age. It cannot be escaped.”
Later, Hokusai woke up. He began to beg. He could do so much if the gods would only give him ten more years. He could become a great artist. He begged for ten, then eight, then, wheedling, even one. One more year, and he would become great.
It broke my heart to hear. He could get everything he ever wanted from me, but the gods were not at his beck and call. Immortality was not to be granted, not in this case.
I sat beside him and listened to him bargaining with the gods.
“If I can’t go on as Hokusai, I agree to become an elephant or a blind man, a turtle or a fox.”
“A fox is good.” I said this to ease him, but he was angry. He turned on me.
“Hereafter my failures will all belong to you, Ei. And your success will belong to me.”
What could he mean? But I knew. That his bad works would be understood to have been from my brush, and my best would be assumed to be his. And it was probably true. I dared a sardonic laugh while I admitted as much. That set him off.
“In my next life there is one thing I will not be: a father. This link of me to you will not survive death. This tie will die. I will be free of you!”
He wounded me. “Die, then!” I said. “I shall have no father. Die and thereby un-father me,” I sobbed.
“I shall, and un-daughter myself.”
We were silent for a few minutes. Then he thought better of this plan and tried to win me back.
“But what am I without Ei, my daughter? She brings my tea. She knows my stories. Every picture I draw is carved not in wood but in her mind. She came from me . . .” But he couldn’t stay on this positive line. “From all the wasteful seed. The sons and daughters. Of all of them, why this one?” he raged. “This aberration, this woman-not-woman.”