“They like to dress up in pink jackets, get on horses, and ride wildly through the marshes, chasing them.” I’d seen prints of this in the bookshop. “But they don’t do unnatural things with them!” I was considered something of an expert on foreigners because of my father’s business with them. “And if they did, why would the cholera strike us, in the backstreet tenements of Edo?”
Hokusai and I had never had cholera. We had attributed this to the prayers and charms we recited. There was a dance that people did to avoid infection: I saw children being coached by their mothers to skip and hop with one foot high and arms straight overhead, then turn and repeat it on the other leg.
I took precautions. I returned to the bookshop and bought a little book,
Cholera: Before the Doctor Comes.
It advised me to take Chinese herbs. I walked to the herb seller with the list in my hand and spent a significant amount of my precious earnings.
Coming home again, I saw a dead body in the lane. The stench was awful. Shame made it worse. Trying to hide their symptoms, people went secretly to wash their clothes by the river or hid behind the houses to relieve themselves. The traces were building up around us. I covered my mouth with the end of my sleeve.
I did not get cholera this time either.
But the old
unagi
seller got it: one day she was a little weak, and the next she was taken away to a hospital. The
bakufu
had tried to help the poor, giving us soup, and then this help had turned hostile. The woman’s son came to cook the
unagi
, but he was no good at it. He said he had tried to visit his mother but was told she was very sick and had died.
“But she was not so sick when she went in to that place,” he said bitterly. “They take old people there to get rid of them, because they think they will give other people the cholera.” This grown man was a good son but a bad cook, and his eel was made bitter by his rage.
“They blame the foreigners, but the military itself is trying to kill us,” he said. “The world is out of balance, and we are all going to have more misfortunes; this is only the beginning.”
The tenements were less crowded when the epidemic at last eased off. But still I stayed on, for the comfort the place recalled, for the past.
I chanted and chanted. I smoked my pipe. I drank sake. I fed the wild cats. It was an odd and backward way to mark the passing of our era. But that’s what I was doing. The masters were gone. Greatness was gone. Utamaro had died in my childhood. Hokusai had died. Eisen had died even before my father. Now Hiroshige.
But I was lucky. Remember what I said: lucky and unlucky. I was alive. I was here to make the journey from the old world to the new one. I was ready to play in the affairs of this new time. The wave had picked me up and carried me past. It was my father’s last gift.
I still had certain paintings in my possession. From time to time I finished one and signed it “Hokusai, age 88.” I put the seal on it. Taking care that no one knew, I went to see Sakai in front of the shogun’s castle. Sakai was always glad to see me and paid me what my painting was worth.
Then the catfish came.
I was inside and had slid the door shut. The cats were restless and crying as they paced the rim of the room. I had a handful of coal and was about to light the
kotatsu
when I felt the ground slip away under my feet. Perhaps I was sick. I had eaten only apricot-filled sweets for dinner, but I’d had many of them. I thought when the fire caught I’d put on the kettle for tea—though I usually sent out for it, I didn’t want to go outside again tonight.
When the ground dropped out, I found myself on my knees. I let go of the coals and grabbed the heating table, but it too slid away from my hand. The earth was shifting, breaking; it did not stop but continued to fall, and the walls of my house fell too and the wood partition between the next house and mine began to crack and fall.
Women screamed in the alley and men called other men to help. I said not one word but grimly held on to my
kotatsu,
which was at least a firm weight. It fell and rolled, taking me with it. I cracked my head on a beam; something splintered—the beam and not my skull, I presumed. I grimly gripped the iron coal burner. It was lucky I hadn’t lit the stove yet or I would have burned my hands. Then I wondered where the roll of oiled paper that I had planned to use to light it was.
It didn’t take long to discover it, in the corner where small flames were crackling happily among the wrappers from my takeout meal. Before I could stand—the ground still treacherous and, as far as I could tell, on a sharp angle—these flames had danced right onto the pile of drawings there.
“Hey!” I shouted, as if the flame were a cat and I could shoo it away. I let go of the stove, waving my hands, and fell on the papers, somehow finding the kettle and pouring the water out. Where were the cats? Fled, the cowards, with no thoughts of me. Now the papers were ashy black and wet, but they were not burning. My own fire was out, but I could hear and smell that others’ were not. Up and down the alley, even while the timbers were crashing and the houses sagged, women ran with wooden buckets to the well. The cry went up for the firefighters, but where were they?
I set the stove on its feet. I went out my door, which was not a door anymore but a hole under a dropped beam, and found a panicked crowd at the well. The women passed their buckets to one strong boy, who dipped and filled each one and passed it to other boys, who ran back to fires along the alley. By now I knew it was an earthquake.
“We knew this would happen,” the people were saying. “It is because of the barbarians. The catfish that supports all of Japan is moving under the earth.”
“It won’t be the houses falling that will kill us,” they said, “but the fire.”
The children were sent to kick and smother the small flames that tried to connect our little houses. Men were lifting the beams and looking for anyone lost, while boys ran back and forth with their buckets. The earth was still rumbling and shaking.
“The catfish!” they said to one another. “Oh, when will it stop?”
“Only when it has put right the balance,” said some. And still the earth shook, and now there was thunder too and lightning.
“Katsushika Oei! Oo-Oei! Yoo-hoo!”
Down the center of the alley and covered in ash waded Yasayuke, seemingly unperturbed, waving to me among the panicked residents who were pulling their blankets and their pots out of their little collapsing tenements.
“My friend,” I said lightly, “do you want a place to sleep?”
“No,” he said. “I am not at all concerned for me. But you are a woman and need protection.”
He said that knowing it would annoy me.
“Come to the temple. It’s the only safe place.” He took me by the hand and pulled.
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“The cats.”
“What nonsense! They sold you out at the first flash of lightning.”
“I can’t leave my things.”
“What things?”
“My paintings.”
The beam of the house next door was lying across the doorway. But the house was not burning, not yet. With their water buckets, the residents of the little alley would keep it from burning.
The orange crate with the statue of Saint Nichiren in it was still on the back wall. I took the statue out and removed the seal of Hokusai and put it into my sleeve. I collected my paints and brushes, rolling them in a cloth and tucking them inside my kimono. I sorted through the ash and charred remains of the drawings that had been in the corner. Then I pulled up the mattress. The precious pile of “Hokusai” works and silk paintings, letters and receipts was safe there. I rolled them and put them in a traveling bag.
I
N THE MORNING
the firefighters arrived, waving their banners and their long metal hooks, pole vaulting and singing at the top of their lungs, with minions running behind with bamboo ladders. Yasayuke and I were still alive. Everyone was at the temple under its heavy overhang, holding on to their children and their barrows. I did not like it there.
“What if the temple falls down? Under those heavy beams is the worst place to be,” I complained, my fingertips on the seals in my sleeve.
“How could the catfish bring the temple down? He is not that powerful.”
The shaking began again, and I threw myself to the ground. When the wind began to blow ash, I went with Yasayku to the big tree. I knew it had old deep roots that clawed into that earth, and it seemed to me safer than even the giant-beamed temple.
He joined me, and as we sat together; others followed—some who were injured and others who were shaking with cold and fear. Runners came by, shouting the news: the quake was worst in the central area, where the government offices were. It was bad too along the river lower down and closer to Edo Bay. There, many houses were in flames and the fire was spreading. People were buried under collapsed stones.
“Do you hear that? It is divine recompense for allowing the foreigners to come to our country. The catfish knows the
bakufu
is weak and must be replaced.”
“That is foolish superstition. Don’t you see?”
The ground shook again and again. Feet ran past in the dark and lanterns waved, and men called out in unison as they hoisted a water barrel or a wall that had come down.
The barricades were up on all the bridges. We could not get out of the district. “They’re containing us instead of fighting the fires. They’ll see us burned to death!”
I wondered, for the first time, if I would have as long a life as my father. I had not imagined that I might be cut short; I’d intended to be rewarded with thirty years of freedom, or forty, after his death. I was strong and as agile as he had been, and could renew myself when thwarted: I had done it forever.
But that was before. Although the years of my father’s life had been dangerous, their cycles of crackdowns and famines were predictable. Now I faced an unknown world. A telegraph in Yokohama sent messages along the Tokaido by wires. Also in that port city, sumo wrestlers moved in a constant belt, carrying huge sacks of rice and silk up the ramps of foreign ships. Peasant farmers sold silk to foreigners and became wealthy, if they survived their neighboring clans’ impulse to murder them as traitors.
And now the catfish, on top of it all.
Sheltering under the tree with us was a diviner, that figure from old pictures, with his long pole with paper fortunes tied on it. He reached out. “Oei,” he said, “you will not have the auspicious life your father had. You will have only a dozen years from the time of the arrival of the barbarians—and that is all.”
The next day dawn came without light. The smoke of thousands of fires curdled the sun. At noon there were more movements of the catfish under Edo, and the news of thousands of dead, all along the river as it ran down to Edo Bay.
I
WAS SITTING
on the step outside my crumpled dwelling, stroking the cats and watching the babies play in the rubble, when Sakujiro appeared.
“Ah, Sakujiro. How are you?”
I was genuinely happy to see him. I had heard nothing since I had left his home. The earthquake was two weeks ago. I was worried about Tachi. “Is everyone well?”
He told me his wife and family were well, but his house was badly damaged. His garden bench had broken in two pieces, just where I had sat on it. No doubt the wife saw meaning in that.
“First the cholera kills so many,” he said, “then the earthquake. There are seven thousand dead. All the carpenters are building coffins. It will be a long time before we can rebuild the house.”
“I am sorry,” I said. I truly was. But the satirical mood was too strong to resist. “But I am sure the deaths from sickness and disaster were not intended as a personal inconvenience to you.”
Sakujiro curled his lip.
“In the tenements we can rebuild by ourselves. But your magnificent structures cost a great deal more to replace, and you have to pay the poor to do the labor. Your accounts must tell you that.”
He shook his finger in my face. “You speak without caution. Your words are like acid!”
But their truthfulness shot me full of energy. My words gave me back just a little of that which had been denied me. I know I should have dissembled. Could he understand why I spoke as I did? I did not even try to explain. Perhaps I should have. Instead, I held out my arms to him. “Do you dislike your sister or only disapprove of her?” I said.
“I disapprove of artists who disrespect our regime!”
“It was your father’s way,” I snapped. “He would have disapproved of you for being too respectable!”
“That is a filthy lie! My father was not political. He knew how to stay alive, even if you don’t.”
“And who, then, should speak for the afflicted ones?”
“Why, no one, of course.” He stared at me. “The shogun is their father. He speaks for them. Or are you one of those who favor the return of the emperor?”