The foreign ships had arrived.
The Old Man would have said my witchery brought me here, for this moment. And he would have been laughing if he were here. He would have been running and jumping if he could. I stood still, awestruck. It was happening. Hokusai had missed this moment, and by only four years. “And frequent visits to Japan of foreign ships”—in Obuse he had written this line as the ending of his death poem. Later, in Edo, when he was near to death, he had taken it out. Hedging his bets, as always.
“Hey, hey, Old Man,” I shouted so he could hear me from hell. “How about it?”
I was so lonely, suddenly, standing there. I missed my father, and I missed Eisen, and I even—reaching back into the moments when the idea of the West had first entered me—missed von Siebold. He had foreseen this too: we had spoken of it. It was as inevitable as death, as life. My old life and its people were becoming relics. A new world was advancing on us. I was here and alive, against many odds. Why had I, almost alone among those I loved, been chosen to survive to see it? I wanted to shout to Shino, but she was far away from here. Tucked up in her old temple above Kyoto, she was, I hoped, safe from the strife that would take us all.
Standing on the Miura hill, with the inevitable presence of the enemy, the conqueror, the liberator beneath me, I imagined the Dutch doctor tracing these inlets and bays that led into the heart of Japan. Some people said that the foreigners were using the maps von Siebold had obtained by treachery to find their way to our ports. Was it true? I could still see his hands, strong and long, with flat-ended fingers, wily and intelligent. I could still see his beautiful wide brow and his long thin lips that seemed to be smiling on me from far away, reassuring me.
Now I alone was present as the black ships came. I felt the wind and threw back my hair, which was blinding me. I knew by their huge white breath, by their pushing forward in the night against the wind, against nature itself, that the ships were not to be stopped. The shogun’s efforts would be for nothing. The foreigners were coming, and they would break open this little world.
I wailed into the wind, truly a witch. Longing and fear filled me. Longing to be let loose and fear of the redheaded barbarians, of soldiers with guns, of samurai at war. Longing to see someone I had loved. My men! They had all deserted me. Why me? Why had I alone lived to see this?
If these ships could sail upwind, then anything could happen. Perhaps I could see those lost men again—von Siebold, my father.
The black ships, three of them, were there, and then the mist rose and the moon was hidden and they were gone into darkness. There was nothing but a blank page of gray and black from sand to sky.
The wind dropped suddenly.
I could hear voices, horns, the bellows of animals. On my hilltop I paced in their invisible presence. I spoke urgently to my father: “Old Man, Old trickster! Exile in sleepy Uraga? I doubt it. No. You knew this was coming. You and those samurai, plotting. You were looking over the waves. You always yearned for the Western world. You wanted to be famous there too. Now look: the barbarians are coming! You hoaxed me, you hoaxster.”
I saw in my mind the secret staircase from Takai Kozan’s studio in Obuse. His retainers scanning the roads. I remembered sitting in the company of Shozan Sakuma and looking at the book with drawings of how to make the new thing called a camera. Sakuma was now sentenced to house arrest for nine years for preaching treason. Kozan would be happy. He and my father. Why did they choose a phoenix to be painted on the ceiling? Did it conceal a message? Japan was burning and would be destroyed, but it would be reborn, like the phoenix. Uraga was the place where this fire had been sputtering for years. Now it was about to burst into flames.
And my brother had urged me to return to Uraga for safety!
It was a wonderful, terrifying joke.
Buddha teaches that there are phases of everything imaginable. All that appears to be solid is in flux and might even be imaginary. Waves are driven by some energy from the deep, and also by wind. They become foam and fog.
Then something more solid moved. The ship was alongside the hills! The pitch of the waves rocked it. It was like a clumsy brush, like the reed broom that Hokusai had used to make that giant Buddha, writing history.
At the narrowest part of the channel now there were gun batteries on the hills on both sides. The shogun had ordered that any Western ships reaching the narrows be fired on. But no guns fired. The black ships moved invincibly, upwind in the middle of the channel, out of range of either side. One, two, three. There were rocks in that narrow passage, visible when the air was clear but hidden in the fog on a night like this. These ships did not come up on the rocks. They continued, right into the heart of the bay.
They were demon ships.
I was truly, thoroughly, frightened. They had entered. I remembered my father telling me the world was round; it was a fishbowl. He had walked all over its outside, looking across the surface. I felt that night that I was on the inside, swirling in the water, knocking against the glass. Drowning in it. I went home to my brother’s house. I stood over Tachi with tender fears for her. I lay in bed and stared at the night. These foreigners had such powers. What would they do to us?
At first, nothing.
By dawn the guns had been moved nearer. The
bakufu
had commandeered a hundred of the small fishing boats and put a cannon in the front of each, to be sent out to fire on the ships. But this was futile.
We gathered on the cliffs to watch. After the guns, the first things out were artists in little boats, sketching. But I returned to my vantage point under a tree on top of the hill. Here is what I drew: A great, heavy-bodied black ship with its three masts and many strips of netting. Its sails furled horizontally along poles. The flags tearing out the back as the mysterious power moved the ships against the wind. An unfurling banner of black smoke above, the breath of the dragon. A box in the center of the ship sitting low in the water, with wheels that turned like waterwheels. A man, a tiny figure dwarfed by the striped flag above his head.
T
ACHI AND I
sat in the garden. The family of my brother lived in comfort. There was a small pond with carp; there were trees that fringed the edges, and black rocks that shone when it rained. From a certain corner you could just catch a glimpse of the sea. I told her the ghost story of the Tokaido. I had seen it on the Kabuki stage.
“The beautiful young woman Oiwa lived by the water’s edge, where the marshes run alongside the Tokaido Road. She had an evil suitor. Her father refused to give her in marriage to the man, who was called Iemon. So Iemon murdered him. But it seemed the refusal was too late in any case. Oiwa and Iemon were already living together, and she was already pregnant by him. She bore the child, but then the villain Iemon turned against her, saying she was ugly.”
“
Why would he call her ugly? She was beautiful,” protested Tachi.
“The reason for Iemon’s treachery was that he had visited a nearby lord and caught sight of his granddaughter. The lord allowed the two to meet, and then he allowed Iemon to marry his granddaughter. Oiwa, who had borne his child, was only a poor woman, and she was not truly married. The lord was evil as well, and he thought that she and her child were of no account. To erase all trace of the lovely Oiwa, the lord sent her poison disguised as a healing potion for after childbirth. She drank it and became a hideous ogress.”
I pulled faces, stretching my mouth and ears and puckering my chin. We laughed until we could not speak, but Tachi was caught up by the injustice of it all, so I had to catch my breath and continue.
“Iemon then killed both Oiwa, the mother of his child, and her servant, and he tied their bodies on either side of a plank and pushed it into the river. The plank floated sometimes with one body up and sometimes with the other. Old women gathered at the river’s edge and saw this.”
I remembered this as one of the most terrifying scenes. Tachi was twitching with horror and delight as I told it. I created the scene: bodies merging and submerging in the water, dead hair and dead limbs floating, turning blue.
“The two murdered people became ghosts and haunted the lord and Iemon. In his sleep Iemon saw the hideous ogress who was once his beautiful young lover, and, attempting to slay her, he murdered his new wife by accident. Oiwa, who was born in the Year of the Rat, then made her ghostly presence known in the form of rats. As the play ends, Iemon is swarmed and eaten by rats.”
I gave a large, satisfied sigh at the end of this: the evildoer had been punished, and in such a fitting way.
“That’s good,” said Tachi in a high but firm voice. I could see her imagining the hideous death and deciding that it was right. “But—the new wife—why did she have to die? Was she evil too?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It seems she was punished for the evil of her father. Let’s ask . . .”
Then we both looked into the night sky. It was where my father and I had looked for answers when I was her age, and I told Tachi that. She looked solemn, and we quested in silence. She was an excellent partner in such activities. Tachi and I would go into the pine woods after rain to find the special pine mushrooms. When we brought them home, Tachi cooked them for me. I ate them because they granted immortality.
“If I am to live to be very, very old,” I told her, “I want you here too. You must eat these too.”
Sakujiro’s wife interrupted: Katsushika Isai had come to visit.
“This is suspicious,” said the other women of the household. “Why would he want to see this old woman? What is his game?”
Their narrowed eyes followed Isai and me as we found the low stone table in the garden. Tachi followed us and sat quietly nearby. Her back was turned, but I knew her ears were alert.
Isai was a tall, hawk-featured man who stepped as if he were walking on lily pads and whose narrow mouth worked nervously in pouchy cheeks. He glanced in amusement at my sister-in-law and her mother, whose shadows were clearly visible moving behind the screens.
“How is it for you here?” he said.
“I am asked to clean the kitchen,” I said. “To cook the rice.” I made a loud guffaw for the benefit of the women, whose shadows scattered, and he smiled thinly.
“Not your field of expertise. Now if they wanted you to go to the market, that might be better.”
“They save that task for themselves. They don’t like to let me out.”
Isai had opened a printshop in Yokohama. It was where the foreigners were contained by the shogun. I had been in that town. There were two streets of ramshackle buildings, a few storehouses called by the foreign name of “go-downs,” and some lodging houses on swampland. The whole town smelled like the sewage that collected nearby.
The muddy streets jostled with sailors and Chinamen and whalers and ladies with great big balls of fabric sitting on top of their bottoms. There were brothels, of course, where dull-eyed girls languished on porches. There was a butcher, always surrounded by a crowd of Japanese curious about beef, which was suddenly the fashion for eating. There was also a shed with a printing press in it. The foreigners used lead instead of wood for printing.
Isai had learned a little English to communicate with the foreigners.
“There is a market for our work,” he told me. He was to be known as one of the last
ukiyo-e
artists. Inside Japan, we were dying. But outside the country, we had been discovered.
“More than a few of those foreigners are looking for Hokusais,” he said.
“I am not surprised,” I said. The Old Man was famous. It was what he had wanted. I said I hoped my father received this news in his new home in Hades. “The Old Man wanted life after one hundred years, and it seems he may even have it,” I said.
“But it is not a joke,” said my visitor. Isai had a problem. His customers did not like to hear that Hokusai had been dead for six years, and that there were no new works by him.
“There must be prints around,” I said.
And then, in the garden, where Tachi’s little ears were pinned back to hear us, Isai wondered aloud if I could design beauty prints like my father’s.
“You mean like the ones I have been designing for years?”
A smile played on his lips. “We know you had a hand. That is why I am asking you. But of course, they were his work. They bore the seal of Hokusai.”
“My father stopped making beauty prints thirty years ago,” I said curtly.
He said nothing. He would profess not to know that now?
“I wonder if you would come to work with us.”
I allowed my head to droop. He had asked me the wrong way. In any case, refusal is the first step in a negotiation.
“I cannot move to Yokohama. I have moved too many times.”
“Live here if you prefer. No need for you to travel to Yokohama to see the designs carved and printed. I can come here.”
Isai was not a bad man. I even liked him. He told me he had old Egawa, my father’s favorite woodcarver, working with him.