Again I demurred.
“There are two reasons I will not leave this house,” I told him. “One is the girl, Tachi. The other is that the stars here in Uraga are brilliant. When I am allowed out at night”—here I gave him a wry smile—“I search for Myoken.”
He knew what I meant—I was speaking to my father.
“The Seven Stars are very bright in Yokohama,” he said.
The truth was, I did not want to live anywhere. I wanted the road. I now wished to adopt the ways of the Old Man, which I had hated when it was his time to ramble. I hoped it was not too late. These were among the things I said to his star on my nightly walks. I still got commissions, though no more from Obuse. But Mune and others found their way to me for the odd scroll painting. Life was tolerable. I liked the old ways, where I could go for a time to live with a student and teach. Sometimes, too, I could go back to the tenement at Asakusa in Edo. I did not wish to stay still, that was the fact. Now that movement was permitted, I could not stop indulging.
“Yokohama is very dangerous, with all the strangers in the port,” I said, though I was not frightened at all. I knew from my own soothsaying that I would not die at the hands of a foreigner.
“I would assure your safety,” he said.
They needed me badly. No matter how they tried, all the disciples with all their Hoku-names could not do the master’s work as well as I could. But they would not admit it.
I told him I was not ready to make a decision, and he left.
T
HE STARS WERE
not just an excuse I offered to Isai. My attachment to Uraga’s night sky was real. If I managed to escape the house, when the family feared I was drinking sake with men, I climbed my hill, looking out to sea and up into the sky. Stars shivered. They beckoned. They were flirtatious.
“The
rangaku
-
sha
tell us that stars are burning balls of gas.”
“Oh! How sad!” said Tachi.
My father had not questioned the stars. But so much new knowledge had flooded into Japan that it was hard to hold to the old beliefs. It was painful to admit that he was following a ball of stone and smoke moving without purpose in a vast emptiness.
The country was under siege. It wasn’t just the barbarians. It was the struggle within. Assassins roamed the roads; a foreign diplomat was struck down by a swordsman, and the politician who had led us to the Treaty of Friendship with the United States of America was murdered as a traitor. The emperor was being called on to expel the foreigners, but he had no money. The
bakufu
made sure the emperor was poor. Samurai who wanted the emperor to seize control were flooding to Kyoto, the imperial city. The
bakufu
arrested those they could find, but others went into hiding. And brigands took advantage of the confusion.
I was neither a believer in the old nor a follower of the new. I was like the fortune-tellers who sat at the feet of the great bridges in Edo. Knowledge leaped into my head from an unknown place, an inner garden I had developed in our lean years that had remained alive. Little seeds were planted there, and in my solitude I cared for them, examined and fed them, and from these notions came larger visions.
Tachi, my little niece, was not little anymore. She was fifteen years old. They would be trying to make an advantageous marriage for her, but it would not be easy. She was a different girl, stolid and sensible. She asked many questions, which was why I liked her.
“Do you want to hear a ghost story?” I said.
“Yes, please!”
“Once there was a serving maid who was employed by a man and a woman, his wife. They were both very, very mean. When the serving maid did not clean the dishes properly, they beat her. Then, because her eyes had been blackened in the beating, she could not see. She was drying a dish when she dropped it and it broke. The man and woman were so angry that they beat her again. And she died.”
“Ooooh,” said Tachi. She was listening in total delight. Perhaps her life was dull. Certainly it was circumscribed: she had to help at home, and although she had been to school only briefly, she was considered to have enough education.
“After she died, she came back as a ghost.”
“What does a ghost look like?”
“What does it look like? Have you never seen a ghost?”
“I see strange things at night,” said the young woman in her forthright way. “But how do I know if they are ghosts if I don’t know what ghosts look like?” She had stocky legs and her stomach protruded. Her eyes did not blink and she was not shy.
“Good point!” I said. “But your question is hard to answer. Every ghost is different. I saw one that looked like a cabbage floating in a pond. You know, the leaves were all wavy around its head, and there were no eyes, only a round—”
“Ugh,” said Tachi.
“Or . . .” I reached for brush and paper. “What a gap in your education, my dear! Let me show you the ghost of the servant girl.”
“Did you see her?”
“Do you think that we can see everything there is? The world is full of things we can’t see at all.”
“That’s funny for you to say because you’re a painter,” said Tachi.
“It’s true,” I told her. “But painters don’t paint only what we can see. We paint invisible things too. I did not see this particular ghost, but I think my father saw her. He drew her picture in a book.”
I got out my ink stone and poured myself a little water from the bucket that sat on the floor. I sketched the gaunt face and the long neck and the long, wet hair of the serving maid. “She fell in the wash water when she died,” I explained. “Her neck was two feet long. Inside it were saucers, spaced apart, giving it the look of a paper lantern or a paper dragon.”
Tachi was suitably horrified.
A
N OFFICIAL CAME,
a messenger from the local government. At the door, the messenger had knocked, his head on the ground with elaborate courtesy. Inside, he bowed continually and wished to present me with an invitation to a formal dinner in honor of the visiting foreign ambassadors.
The invitation was addressed to the Great Master Katsushika Hokusai’s Daughter, the painter Katsushika Oei. It read: “The Governor of Yokohama District would be most pleased to enjoy your presence at a dinner to meet his Excellency, the British Ambassador.”
It was fantastical, like something out of a Kabuki story. I thought at first it might be a trap. But I knew how to respond. I had learned in the long ago past, when the shogun’s messengers came to the studio and Hokusai went on picking fleas out of his cloak.
“But it is not possible,” I murmured, turning my head away. The more I demurred, the more exquisite the messenger thought my manners. But I meant it. Unfortunately, under the code of etiquette that required every assent to be framed as dissent, there was no way of truly saying no.
“I have no means of transportation,” I said.
“The governor has already assured us that you will be picked up and delivered,” he said.
“I have no one to accompany me,” I said.
“If it pleases you, Katsushika Oei, you will invite a member of your family to accompany you.”
I asked my brother Sakujiro. He could not quite accept that the invitation was for me: in his mind it was for his father, and therefore should be for him. I almost felt sorry for him. The poor man was torn between pride and disdain: pride in his father, disdain for the “commoner” art.
His wife viewed my invitation as part of the seditious influence of the barbarians. “Hokusai represented by his daughter!” she murmured. “Our traditions are truly being tested.”
Sakujiro said that times were changing.
“Changing so much that we should have women at formal dinners?”
“Yes,” said my brother. “Carpenters have learned to make chairs and tables. Temples are partitioned to accommodate the emissaries. Ladies go to dinners.”
In the garden, his wife complained to her mother. “From the time of their first arrival onshore, the American officers have raised toasts to ‘the absent ladies’—and not only to their own, but to the absent Japanese ladies.”
“A gross impertinence!” The mother had phlegm in her throat and constantly cleared it into a dish. Spit, spit, spit.
I wore my one good kimono, lavender with the redheaded cranes, Shino’s gift to me for Hokusai’s funeral, long ago now. My sister-in-law was at pains to explain that it was no longer in fashion. She offered me others, more muted, more suitable, she said, for an old person.
But I was not deterred. I even painted some red on my lips the way I had learned at the Sign of the Nighthawk.
T
HEY SAID I
would not like champagne, but I did. Two foreign ladies looked at me askance as I downed glass after glass. I didn’t get red-faced or sloppy the way their husbands did, either. Sakujiro stayed at my side.
After the meal a juggler made an iron top climb straight up a stiffened rope and spin on a knot at its high end. Then a conjuror came out on a raised platform, like a geisha’s stage. His hands were beautiful, thin and veined: I twitched to draw those hands. He folded a piece of white paper, opened the folds, inverted them, and refolded, until he had a pretty white butterfly.
Then he put his hand in his opposite sleeve, pulling out a fan and opening it in the same instant with a flick of his narrow wrist. The paper butterfly sat in the palm of his left hand. He fanned, creating a breath and then a breeze; the butterfly began to gently flutter its wings. The movement was so sensual; I felt the tickle on my own palm. The butterfly rose slowly, and then suddenly, as if it was startled, it leaped up several feet.
The foreigners nodded to one another with widening smiles. How clever these little Japanese fellows were.
But it was magic. They forgot—we all forgot—that the butterfly was only paper. It zigzagged across the tables. A foreign officer tried to catch it. It darted up and escaped. Two other men in uniforms jumped up to chase it, but the butterfly sank and spun—never too far away from its creator’s fluttering fan—still out of reach. People shouted and pointed. After a few minutes they became convinced the conjuror had a live butterfly up his sleeve, which he had substituted for the paper one.
I heard a translator ask how he trained the butterfly.
The butterfly bobbed, as if thinking to land again, but there was nowhere—the magician had hidden his left hand—and so it rose, flew high, and then dropped down again on the edge of the fan.
But in a few seconds it was off again, investigating nearby dishes as if it might find nectar there, even—making us gasp—coming close to the burning tapers on the tables. It sped, it whirled, it rose, and it plunged; it never faltered, never fell, always found the air that was pushed its way by the fan.
I was moved: the craft of it, the sham, the painstaking practice the conjuror must have endured, the dedication to his illusion of fan and paper and air and wrist. The unearthly intelligence of the conjuror’s beautiful hand, with the veins running up and down in it. Fragility danced to the tune of impossibility—buoyant and dauntless.
The barbarians were silenced, awed. But I could see their regret: this was not an item that could be bought, shipped, replicated. This is why they are barbarians, I thought. Paper butterflies—and everything like them—will be lost when we dance to their tune.
People pushed back their chairs, making a sound like a room full of irate hens. At that point a translator behind me stepped forward. “You are Madame Hokusai?”
“I am,” I said. My brother bowed. I did not. I had taken on Hokusai’s habits.
“The evening has run away with us,” he said. “I had intended to present you. . . . There was someone who wished to pay his respects to you. But it is impossible. Everyone is leaving.” He gave me a helpless look. “Did you enjoy yourself?”
“I did,” I said, and I meant it. The bubbles of the champagne kept rising in me, and the butterflies flew in my head as we jolted in the dark by palanquin to an inn. Then, later, the champagne let me down badly, and the world seemed suddenly empty and without purpose. Who could possibly have wished to be presented to me?
T
WO NIGHTS LATER,
my brother joined me in the garden. Behind us the pine tree tossed at the top of the hill. The sound of waves reached us on windy nights like these. I took the horn-shaped pastry he offered. I pulled a tiny bit off one end and put it gently inside my lips.
“You eat like a woman tonight,” said Sakujiro kindly. “But it is rare that you behave like one.”
Perhaps in his mind it was a simple observation, without injury intended. I decided to take no offense.
“I am trying to make concessions to your household,” I said. “It is not necessary to smack my lips. But it is necessary to paint.”
He nodded.
I reached for another sweet. “Are these from Tosaki?”
“Yes, he sent them. For you, actually.”