Both moon and sun at once! We knew it was a sign, although we assured each other that we did not believe in signs.
I went to sleep peacefully.
When I woke up, there was a crowd in front of my little house. They wore the names and faces of my father; they were his disciples of old and of late—Isai, Tsuyuki Kosho, even Iwajiro was there. Iwajiro, the boy who had been my shadow. My enemies and even my friends were there, a rolling thunder of round heads.
“Give us the seal, Katsushika Oei,” one of them said. I couldn’t see in the dark. “We are the true heirs of Hokusai. We will carry on the name. No woman inherits the seal.”
“You are deluded,” I said. “The seal alone does not make one his heir.”
“If you don’t give us the seal, we will make sure that you never work again,” they said.
“I cannot give it to you. It would be wrong. My father left it to me.”
I would have told them that my father was a fiction, that they had named themselves for and followed and set their lives upon a fabrication, and that they too were fabrications as a result.
“We will take it from you, then,” they said regretfully.
I was about to tell them that I did not have it. But I was cut down—a short sword in my ribs to immobilize me and a
katana
strike to the neck. It was not well done. My head was half lopped, right at the place my neck always bent, like a flower head snapped on its stem.
Blood beat out of me. I lay on the ground. I heard shouting and the guards’ feet pounding. The white gown of the abbess appearing, and her thin, weak body spinning this way and that, performing her ridiculous
kata.
The men disappeared. I wish I could say it was her prowess with her
naginata.
But alas, I think she just frightened them off. She looked like a vengeful spirit.
How did they know I was there? Who had followed me? Who had dared to enter the compound of the Temple of Refuge? Maybe they hadn’t intended to kill me, but my defiance, my usual defiance, inflamed them. Too late I recalled Shino’s advice to dissemble.
Shino leaned over me. Her sorrow was contained. This was her gift, the gift of containment. A feeling of ease came.
“Remember,” I said, “no fading. No putrefaction.”
I was heavy, heavy.
The blood that was in me ran and ran; it ran all over the stone in front of the door to the Treasure House and around to the back, where the guards were shouting and mounting their horses for the chase. This river of blood should have left my body empty, but it did not. I was as heavy as ten people when they tried to drag me off the doorstep.
“You cannot move her,” said Shino. “There is only one way for this corpse to be moved, and that is for her killer to return. If the killer returns and takes one hand, I will take the other, and she will be light as a leaf and we will bear her away.”
The guards brought back the killer. I could not see his face. He was one of the forgers. It didn’t matter which. They were all the same—all manifestations of the father I had helped to create.
He took my left hand and Shino took my right. I stood and together we walked. That disciple’s face was not clear, but I could hear him. The guards took him away.
Shino and I retreated farther into the temple precinct.
T
HEY HAD THEIR
potions, their pastes, and their medicaments. The chanting nuns laid my body out and washed me.
And they prepared me for paint with the heavy white coating we always used. Every bit of skin—my legs and my arms and the round ends of my fingers, the cracks between my toes, and the pale blue hollow behind my ears. They painted those private places that painters had seen before, and in the hollows between my thigh muscles. They painted the ridge of my spine and the bristling hair and slack skin under my armpits; the worn soles of my feet, with their many horizontal lines; my wrinkled, dry heels; my lips and the lids of my eyes. I felt the soft bristles of their brushes run over the stretched and plump stomach skin and the sensitive white place under my jutting chin.
They had a basin of my red pigment, which was intended to preserve the body. They took me up by my feet and my head, with two others at my hips, and laid me in the liquid. If a part of me floated above the surface, they gently pushed it under. When I was done, I was red as a berry all over and sealed to fight off decay. They dressed me in my white death clothes and stretched me in my coffin.
They made no record of this body. The nuns from the Temple of Refuge were powerful. I was gone from my country and my time. From my family and my friends. From art and from history, almost.
I
AM LEFT TO
my own devices. I hear the drip of water from the roof in winter and see fireflies on summer nights. There are cats too, their bony spines rubbing against my coffin. For a time some of my paintings surrounded me, but after Shino’s death the doors were cracked open and the works carried off. I wanted to see them again, see where they’d got to. They are spread around that fractious world—in vaults or down in forgotten chests—that I will not see again. And here I lie.
I am the unbeautiful, the untended, the unintended, the unofficial painter.
I am the brush. I am the line. I am the color.
There are facts I would like to talk over with my father. The world is round. What does that mean for the waves? Do they shoot off the edge? Or curl around and come back, licking the surface, like your tongue would a rice ball or an ice ball?
He was a scattered man, always pulling a geographical escape, always adopting a new name. He flashed his talent and then grew bored with it, flashed it again so it burst out of the rock like some gusher—and then drought. He squandered. He wasted. His pride was immense. He tossed gold coins on the floor for us to count. He exploited us all, but mainly me.
He was my father.
“Go with him,” my mother said. “I have no more patience for it. You be the one. You love him.”
A life sentence, that one.
On this subject of love. Shino says it is the greatest of mysteries. I said once and I say it again: it is nothing but a rat’s fart in a windstorm.
You can quote me. I am Oei. Katsushika Oei. Katsushika I take from the place where Hokusai was born. Oei is what he called me. Some people say my father was difficult. I can’t agree. He was not difficult. He was impossible.
I am she, Hokusai’s daughter. Painter of deep pools of color and perfect, fine lines. A woman who loved food and drink and tobacco. Soothsayer. Consumer of the mushroom that has, as promised, given me immortality. My body dyed red and wrapped in a winding sheet, I lie preserved, a great painter in my own right. A fine woman loved by more than one man. And who loved several in return. But none, I promise you, more than the Old Man.
It could be my epitaph. Perhaps it is. But you would have to find my grave to know.
And that you cannot do.
Afterword: Who Was the Printmaker's Daughter?
I
N MAY 2006
I went to an exhibition of Hokusai’s late works at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. When Japan was “opened” to the West in the 1860s, Hokusai’s prints and paintings were bought and sent around the globe—to the Netherlands, England, France. Thirty years later, Charles Freer, the American railway entrepreneur, purchased many of these pieces and placed them in the museum. By the terms of his will, the holdings could never be loaned. The collection had been in storage for a hundred years.
The public was invited to a symposium on the final weekend of the exhibition. Experts from around the world were speaking.
The exhibition was magnificent. The pictures lit up the space. I doubt the artist had ever imagined them like this, filling huge connected rooms. He had painted just to stay alive. Here was Edo: its theater placards, children’s toys, festival dances, shopfronts, crowded bridges, and ferryboats. Every person was a character, every little figure engaged in some buffoonery or strenuous task. It was as if Hokusai had deliberately catalogued his world for our pleasure.
There was the looming
Great Wave off Kanagawa
, with the tiny boatmen in its frothy claws, said by some to be “an image of fear.” Then came the courtesans of the floating world, electric in their massive gear—fear in a more visceral form. A she-ghost rose out of a wooden well, smoking a long, thin pipe. A dragon’s tail of white smoke rose into the blue night sky.
At the very end hung
Tiger in Snow
. The huge cat bounded weightless, his giant, curling claws extended in sympathy with the pine needles protruding from snow clumps. It is painted very finely and is unlike anything that precedes it. “Thought to be a self-portrait,” I read. “Painted in his final year, at age eighty-nine.”
It seemed incredible that an old man could paint such a thing.
Among the careers of great artists, Hokusai’s was noteworthy for being long—he started work in his teens and kept on until he was ninety—and puzzling—he has been credited with up to ten thousand works, but there have always been difficulties in attribution. He used dozens of pseudonymous art names, a series of seals, and half a dozen distinct styles that—now that I’d seen them together—make the artist seem not just versatile but possessed of multiple personalities.
Hokusai has been called “the Dickens of Japan”; his portrayal of working people is compared to that of the American muralists of the WPA during the Depression. Born in a suburb of Edo in 1760, he was apprenticed to a mirror polisher for the shogun. As a teenager, he was a bookseller’s delivery boy and a wood carver. He prospered in an atelier but fell out with his master. At thirty-seven he was selling condiments on the street. At forty-seven he was the best-paid artist in the city. At fifty-seven he was broke, and so it continued, feast and famine, mostly famine, until he died, having reached precisely twice the age of the average man in his time.
Ukiyo-e
artists rarely had patrons or indulgent collectors; they painted what townspeople wanted. They wanted scenes of their burgeoning culture. The pictures were subject to censorship and the artists to punishment. Hokusai survived because he was versatile. He painted private poetry cards for the
kyoka
poets. He illustrated novels. He took students by correspondence and published instruction books full of sketches called
manga
. He produced quantities of
shunga
—erotica, or “laughing pictures,” as they were called.
He was in danger of being a jack of many styles and master of none. In 1826, Hokusai was sixty-six and at a career low. His second wife had died. He suffered from a palsy that left him unable to walk. He is said to have cured himself with Chinese herbs, prayer, and exorcism. At this point his daughter Ei came home to look after him.
He experienced a miraculous rebirth. With a long wooden staff called a
bo
to steady him, he took to the roads. His travels (and a newly available blue paint called
beru
) inspired the series
Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji,
which includes the most famous “view,”
The Great Wave off Kanagawa
, a work that lives on as an image of tsunami and as allegory—tiny people under huge powers.
Thirty-six Views
sold well but changed little. Hokusai and daughter lived together in untidy poverty until he died.
The Great Wave
rolled on, finding its way out of the closed world of Japan to Europe. Debussy was inspired by it to write
La Mer
. Van Gogh collected Hokusai prints. Picasso, Matisse, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cassatt—all were influenced by it. Hokusai’s fame grew long after his death until he became the most famous Japanese print designer in the world.
Why—when he had periods of great success—was he always poor? Why did he seek refuge first in the little seaside town of Uraga and later in the mountains of Nagano? Why so many changes of name? What to make of the unevenness and extreme variations in style of his work, especially at the end of his life? He added messages to his pictures, but they are cryptic, and few people today can read the premodern Japanese calligraphy.
He left nothing. The artists of the floating world were so lowly they barely existed in the official record. Much of that record was destroyed anyway, as wood-shanty Edo was subject to countless fires and earthquakes and, finally, the firebombing of World War II.
At the symposium, Professor John Carpenter from the Sainsbury Institute in London was the only scholar to mention Hokusai’s daughter. I was listening intently. I had read about Oei in an out-of-print art gallery catalog,
Japanese Women Artists, 1600–1900
, written by Dr. Patricia Fister.
[1]
I knew that Oei was an artist too, who worked in her father’s studio all her life. I waited to speak to Professor Carpenter as he politely dispatched a collector who was sure that the print he inherited was worth a fortune.