He handed me this little lifeline—I was not forgotten by those who had loved my father—as he tossed a crumb to a waiting bird. My heart hardened.
“Tell me,” he said, “does it trouble you that you receive no recognition for this work?” He gestured vaguely at my little row of brushes, always beside me, especially when, like now, the light was nearly gone from the sky.
It was a question with a hidden blade. Sympathetic in appearance and yet cutting.
“I am recognized by the people who matter to me,” I said. A blade in return.
“I know you’ve done the painting,” he said quietly. “
I
know it.”
I said nothing. What was there to say?
Dissemble, came Shino’s instructions. You will get your way in the end.
“You do me a great honor, Sakujiro, to acknowledge the work I continue, to assure that Hokusai’s fame lives on.”
“Of course, times are changing,” he said. “Japan will become modern. We will all be forgotten, and our small, old-fashioned ways.”
“Perhaps,” I said. A bitter thought escaped me. “And I shall be accused of forging my father’s work when what is taken for his work has been my work for a long time. That is funny, don’t you think?”
He did not laugh.
“I sometimes wonder . . . our father wanted immortality. Did he mean that he wished to live this life forever? Or did he mean that he wished to live on forever in his work, outside of our country?”
That question had occurred to me too. “Perhaps both.”
“The matter of recognition puzzles me. It seems natural that an artist wants it. And why shouldn’t you? I have wondered how you stand it. How did you tolerate all those years with the Old Man?”
I threw him a hostile look.
He paused and then went on. “Of course, you are a woman. I suppose that makes it different. But, Oei, I have learned this much in my life”—he puffed himself a little—“women are not so very different from the rest of us.” How proud he was to make this observation. “I say to myself that perhaps you learned to distrust the desire for recognition. After all, your father spent his lifetime behaving badly in order to get it.”
His statements were simple and accurate.
“You mean
our
father.”
“He turned himself into a clown. Remember the giant Buddha and the blood-red chicken feet in front of the shogun? Remember his perverse pride, pulling fleas out of his kimono while the purchaser rested on his heels? All so he would be known as an eccentric. All to get attention. And you were dragged along with it. This act, this way of behaving . . .”
Sakujiro’s wife slid out the screen and stood listening. He went on.
“Perhaps you made a pact with yourself? To say, ‘I don’t care if people see me as a fool. If my work is ignored’? Or perhaps you thought, This is for him, because he cares so much?”
I didn’t know the answer to his question. Would I have told him if I did? He was good to me, but I sensed that he would do his best to ensure that whatever I wanted, I would not get. “Yes,” I said. “It is as you say.”
Sakujiro stepped closer to me.
“Yes or no? You don’t care? I don’t believe it. You want to survive as one brush. You want it known that you were the great Iitsu. Now you seek immortality too. You want it, Ei. You want it as badly as he wanted it.”
I inclined my head. I was perfectly in control. I spoke mildly.
“You misunderstand me, Brother. I care nothing for great fame. But you are right. All people wish to be admired. To be given credit. As I will never be admired for my beauty or my grace, I would like to be acknowledged for my work: Oei made this.”
I knew he’d buy it. As long as I was humble.
But my humility was an act. I lived as my father did, by caustic humor. This was beyond Sakujiro’s understanding. The Old Man’s behavior—imperious, rude, self-centerd—amused me. It injured Sakujiro. And Hokusai was extraordinary. I knew that. So much better than the others. To be in the shadow of one so large was close to being in the sunshine.
“But there is one thing, Brother. One thing you perhaps do not appreciate. One person knew: our father did. Knew that I was great, and sometimes greater than he.”
The smile was wiped off Sakujiro’s face as if with a wet rag.
“There were days when he allowed it. ‘She paints beauties better than I do,’ he told his friends. Eisen knew. The disciples knew: Fukawa, the smooth one; Isai. They knew. That was the trouble. That
is
the trouble.”
“Is that what goes on now?” he said, as cold as cold.
“There is turmoil. Who is to be Hokusai’s heir? Who will inherit the seal?” I bent my head again over my painting. A fleeting look of fear crossed Sakujiro’s face. Could it be that I had power now? It was a strange notion but one that grew in me. He too wished to be our father’s heir. But I knew the art; he did not. This practice he had despised became daily more valuable through the surprise agency of strangers to our shores.
It might have been this notion that made me speak again after a few quiet minutes. “I am not happy here,” I said.
“Why?”
“Your wife believes I should do housework.” She was still there, stuck against the screen, hoping to be invisible.
“But you have nowhere else to go,” he said.
“On the contrary; I have many places. I can go back to our tenement at Asakusa. Or to Yokohama. Or I can travel and live with students.”
This made him angry. I was not to travel! He spouted all his reasons. It was a dangerous time. Politics! Highwaymen were slashing foreigners on the Tokaido! Only the other day a foreigner was cut down by rebel samurai while riding through a village near Yokohama. There were thugs and barbarians everywhere.
I made no answer, and he went into the house.
I
T WAS NOT
too many days later when Sakujiro’s wife imposed more rules for me. She laid them, in her indirect way, on my brother first. “She can’t walk by the sea. She’s an old woman. The neighbors criticize. If she insists on drinking and smoking, it must be out of sight!”
I heard every word while I was sitting under the stars with my pipe.
Sakujiro came out to see me. His hands rose a little from his sides and fell. Poor man—he was tortured. I could see that although he agreed with her, he understood me too.
“She didn’t like our father either!” he whispered. “You’re too much alike.”
We giggled. I had a good feeling. Perhaps after our frank words, brother and sister had come to an understanding. He knew that I could not wash dishes and prepare meals for the rest of my life.
The next morning, over our tea, his wife called me a masculine woman.
“You are unnatural. You are not a woman!”
She was a sexless creature herself—shapeless, her face pasty, her body constantly wrapped. How such a woman could have given birth to the bright button that was Tachi I could not imagine. She stood in her little kitchen hissing.
“Is that so?” I said.
I really think I frightened her. I had half a mind to tell her there was more woman in my left buttock than there was in her entire female line. But instead I did the unpardonable: I laughed.
“How do you know what a woman is? You think she’s a household drudge? It appears that you do.”
She began putting coal in the stove.
“A woman has a mind. A spirit. A woman also has a body and knows how to have pleasure in it,” I said.
“What a thing to say! At your age!”
I had made up my mind to leave, but I had not told her yet. I was not anxious to give her the pleasure.
T
HAT NIGHT AFTER
dinner I lit my pipe.
“Perhaps you would clear up the dinner food and dishes,” Sakujiro said.
“I’m sure I am so incompetent you would not wish me in your kitchen,” I said.
His wife huffed and banged her pots.
“Why must you be so difficult?” he said sadly.
“I can make a living as one brush,” I told him. “Why would I bother with these old household chores?”
Tachi and I retreated to the garden, from which remove we could hear Sakujiro and his wife fighting. They tore into each other just as my mother and father had done. Unlike our father, Sakujiro did not win.
The next day I tucked my brushes in my sleeve and set out.
I felt pain to say good-bye to Tachi. But we had agreed on a secret code. Whenever I needed to get away and didn’t want to explain, I would say I was going to paint the inn at Totsuka. It meant I was on the road, but she was not to worry. I would see her again soon.
That is what I told them, careful that Tachi heard: a man named Bunzo had invited me to paint the inn at Totsuka.
I went back to Edo.
T
HE RUMOR RAN
up and down the market. You could see it traveling, like a small wind-borne demon: people bent and heard it, then it whirled and ran to the next ready ear. In its wake the vendors began to pull down their awnings. Women scooped vegetables off the grills and piled them in barrels. Those who hadn’t heard shouted to know. When they heard, they clutched their babies. Older brothers yanked little girls by the hands.
“Why do we have to go home?”
“The foreigners have broken through from the sea all the way to Edo.”
“Invasion!” people cried.
The word was repeated and echoed all down through the arcade.
Beside me, Yasayuke the storyteller was concluding a rousing tale of how the hairy barbarians fornicated with foxes, and how the half-fox offspring—men with long, furry tails and sharp teeth—came to kidnap innocent maidens from their beds. The audience was caught between the desire to flee and the delicious terror of remaining to hear.
In Edo the gossip was all of danger, of newcomers, of politics, of events from far away that were casting shadows on our little alley. I had wanted the doors open. But I had not anticipated what the coming of the barbarians would unleash. I felt danger even in the temple grounds, rustling in the branches of old pine trees above our heads. The crows talked of nothing else.
“Look at them run!” Yasayuke’s crowd was gone. Mothers collared their children and dragged them like dogs. They doused their cooking fires, which hissed and smoked. Rolled-up mats were disappearing into barrows.
“This panic is the fault of people like you,” I told him. “Spreading rumors. You should be ashamed.”
The temple bells began to toll. Carts were pulling out of the market, and there was a din as the drivers tried to maneuver into line to get over the bridge. The barricade was shut in any case.
“Oei-san, you too should be afraid. It is always the one who is not afraid who is murdered. Did you hear about the five Russian sailors who were hacked to death in Yokohama? They didn’t believe the warnings either.”
The panic was infectious. The market was emptying. Firemen set their ladders against the top floor of the temple. With their barbed poles, they crawled over the curved tiles, shouting orders to sleeping guards below. I picked up my blanket and began to wrap the clay dolls. “No point in staying here. I won’t sell anything.”
I picked up
Kawara-ban,
now a printed broadsheet. It said this was not an invasion. One American and his Dutch translator had entered Edo. That was all. I joined those brave enough to have a look: we stood ten deep at the sides of the streets. The foreigners were on horseback. They were guarded before and behind by soldiers. They seemed very high above us. The horses’ hoofs made the only sound. The people were silent.
On the way home I passed a barracks. It was full of soldiers. It had a terrible smell. I knew that smell.
Cholera.
It often started when a great number of soldiers filled the barracks of a poor area. Some people got a watery diarrhea and soon got better. Others got the diarrhea very badly and all the water came out of them. They got cramping in the legs, and they died in a very short time.
I reached my alley. I went to the well. The walnut-faced
unagi
seller was there ahead of me.
“That smell.” I scrubbed my hands as if the smell would come off. But it was here too.
“It is the sickness caused by the barbarians,” she whispered. “The barbarians kill men and allow foxes to possess the corpses. That is what spreads it.”
“That is nonsense,” I said. “Cholera has been around for a very long time. The barbarians have not.”
The woman stared at me with hostility.
“It has nothing to do with foxes,” I said. “Although I do admit—and it has been observed—that the foreigners at Yokohama are very strange about what they do with foxes.”
There was no point making a joke. “You see?” challenged the
unagi
seller, returning to her grill to light it.