“I’m interested in Oei,” I said. “Can you direct me to some information on her? I’m a novelist,” I added.
His eyes lit up. “It’s a great story,” he said.
“I know why I think it’s a great story, but why do you?”
He said Oei lived in a terrible time for women and was a better painter than her father—had I heard that?
“People talk about the painting being uneven. About the two very different styles of work. About ‘the studio.’ The disciples. About how mysterious it is. But it’s so obvious! I think she was the painter. You can tell. Her line is different, and her colors—”
“Her palette was completely different,” he said. He stopped. Did I have his latest book, in which there was an essay on Oei? He also said he could put me in touch with a fellow in Japan who knew a lot about her.
And then he stopped again. I could see that something was preventing him from saying more.
At the end of the day, a curator from the Tokyo National Museum explained that this was the first and likely last chance to see the full range of Hokusai’s work in one place. And the truth was, people were scratching their heads. Things didn’t add up.
“We should look at how the studio functioned, and how involved the students were in production,” suggested someone.
“We need to ask why so many of Hokusai’s works are dated ‘age 88.’ ”
“Some of these paintings from his old age look as if he was drunk,” said one of the Japanese curators, speaking through a translator. “No, I forgot, he didn’t drink. Maybe he didn’t get much sleep or wasn’t feeling well when he created them.”
“It’s time to work on authentication,” said another person.
“If authentication takes place, it shouldn’t be seen as a threat. It doesn’t matter if the pictures are authentic or not,” said someone else, a little lamely.
That seemed naive. Would you say the same about Van Gogh? If they were “inauthentic,” would they still be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? No. Surely it did, in fact, matter. Shocked voices rose: each picture could be defended; each was signed and sealed as Hokusai’s.
Carpenter spoke last. He said that because he had studied the calligraphy, he could say this: it is possible to make a perfect copy of a calligraphy signature. And a seal can be used by people other than its owner. It was important to think of others who might be involved. He agreed with what had been said before: the forgeries—he used this word deliberately—were best in his eighty-eighth year.
Forgery
is a big word to use in a national art gallery, a big word to use in connection with the most famous Japanese artist outside the shores of Japan. I found it remarkable, too, that not one single expert suggested Hokusai’s daughter as the alternate brush.
I knew then that no matter how difficult it would be for an amateur and a nonspeaker of Japanese to crack this world, I would write the story. I loved the art and I loved the mystery. And I saw it almost as a case study in the way an inconvenient actor is subtracted from history. How is it that a woman known by her peers to be “an excellent painter,” as good as or better than her very famous “old man,” even, for one year at least, “the most famous artist in Edo,” can disappear from the record? Or almost. Some tantalizing comments, some wonderful pictures, remain.
Oei in Rumors: The Myth of the Homely Daughter
A drawing exists of Oei and Hokusai when he was eighty-four. Hokusai is on his knees, his bottom up in the air, bent over his paper, which is on the floor. His head is bald with a little fuzz; his face is pressed close to his paper. He looks adorable and extremely nearsighted.
His daughter next to him leans on the stem of her pipe, her neck improbably crooked to the side. Her face is sharp, downcast. The room is bare. On the wall a notice states that the artist cannot accept orders for fans or pictures.
The sketch is the work of Tsuyuki Kosho, one of Hokusai’s many pupils. Although Tsuyuki created the work from memory, forty years after Hokusai’s death, he was said to have been able to call up the scene “in exact detail.” He refers to the “solitary” Hokusai carrying on his work. Solitary? His daughter is two feet away. Apparently she is invisible.
There is no formal biography of Hokusai. This sketch and its genesis is described in the collection of reminiscences,
Katsushika Hokusai Den
, by Iijima Kyoshin,
[2]
published in Japan in 1893. Iijima spoke to associates of the master who were still alive, forty-four years after his death. I read it in a chatty French translation by Edmond de Goncourt,
[3]
one of the Old Man’s nineteenth-century French fans.
Survivors remember Hokusai as eccentric. “Like many great artists,” he sometimes had “an unpleasant humor and was disagreeable to men who did not show him the deference that he felt he was due, or whom he didn’t like the look of.”
A letter has Hokusai asking for one gold ryo to be paid in the smallest change possible “so I can pay my little debts to the tradesmen in my neighborhood.” In another, he complains of having only one robe to protect “this old body of seventy-six years against a cold winter.” Goncourt concludes that Hokusai lived in a “black misery,” because of his independent spirit and because of the low prices paid to artists.
Reference is made to the “homely daughter Ei,” who helped in his studio. “Hokusai himself admitted her superb talent in painting. He stated: “My hand skill in painting women would not be able to compete with that of Ei. She draws elaborately in her own style.”
Iijima wrote: “The third of these later daughters [the first of his second wife], Oei . . . proved of a rather masculine, domineering nature—‘she could paint but could not sew.’ She married a student and a decade later was divorced. On the death of her mother she returned home to live with her father. Oei was a distinguished artist herself, assisting Hokusai in his work as well as ministering to him in his old age.”
Iijima states, as Goncourt quotes, without qualification: “Oei did many of the paintings in Hokusai’s middle period that are signed with the art name Iitsu.”
Iitsu means “one again.”
Iijima’s statement that Oei was Iitsu has given certain scholars difficulty. Although reluctant to tackle her oeuvre, creators of the art historical record have not shied from creating a personality for the shadowy daughter. Not enough to be untidy, she had to be a drunk too. “When she does sign, she includes the notation ‘Miss Tipsy,’ which may reveal one facet of Oei’s personality—a general fondness for drink,” wrote Richard Lane, an early Hokusai collector and author of
Hokusai: Life and Work
.
[4]
The reigning expert on Hokusai in Japan, Professor Kobayashi Tadashi, quotes the Edo chronicler and diarist Saito Gesshin as saying: “Hokusai’s youngest daughter, Ei (better known by the name Oei), resembles her father—instead of washing the dishes after a meal, she just leaves them lying around without thinking twice about it.”
[5]
Saito adds almost as an afterthought that Oei “has done many designs for woodblock prints published under the name of Iitsu.”
By any account she poked fun at her husband’s work, and this is widely quoted as a reason for her divorce. She was a bad housewife. And, finally, she was “homely,” “masculine,” with a strong chin. Her final failing, then, was to be “not beautiful.”
Why the personal slurs? Were they intended to deflect attention from the idea that Oei authored many works that, in the century since Iijima made his claim, have been attributed to Hokusai.
Dr. Patricia Fister does say that Oei made a small mark with paintings—not prints—that she signed herself. Five or six of these remain in museums around the world. There is also a book called the
Illustrated Manual for Women
. “With the publication of this book and a dictionary of tea with her designs Oei achieved a certain degree of fame in Edo two years before her father’s death.”
[6]
One year later, in “The Labyrinth or the Hornet’s Nest,” Richard Lane was saying: “Certain Japanese scholars have hypothesized that some Hokusai forgeries might be the work of his daughter O-Ei. . . . Without solid evidence such views encroach rather on the bounds of fantasy: more the province of novelists and playwrights.”
[7]
But the rumors are too persistent to ignore. Speaking of the unsigned Dutch paintings (more of them later), Lane himself wonders: “As one other intriguing possibility [of the artist] we might cite Hokusai’s own daughter O-Ei. . . .
It is not my duty here to prove who actually did them
but only to record my view that it was probably not Hokusai.” (Emphasis mine.) Concluding that Oei deserves a study of her own, Lane declines to take it on.
Elsewhere, Professor Kobayashi similarly dodges the issue: “The statement that Hokusai’s daughter Oei was responsible for many of the works done under the name of Iitsu is important evidence of her role in the production of Hokusai designs, but it also raises an issue beyond the scope of this essay.”
[8]
But he also has pointed out that among the few surviving letters from Hokusai, there is indication of how work was shifted between himself and his daughter. Hokusai wrote to his publishers: “As for
100 Poems by 100 Poets, Explained by the Nurse
, at the outset I ordered the preparatory drawings from my daughter, but for various reasons I have decided to draw them myself. She is to do the next work,
Pictures for Warriors
. As for the fee, we have decided on a fixed sum.”
[9]
Small wonder then that Segi Shinichi asserts: “Not only did Oei act as a muse to her father in his later years but there is a good deal of evidence suggesting that she sometimes painted works in his stead.” His examples include
Tiger in Snow
, which he describes as being impossible to credit as the work of a ninety-year-old. He says it was “unsigned” and only “later received Hokusai’s signature and seal, as
Tiger in a Snowstorm
signed Gakyu-rojin Manji rojin hitsu (in 90th year). Some consider it the work of Oei.”
[10]
As I began to research her life, I kept seeing this ambivalence. That Oei was the ghost painter is an open secret: John Carpenter stated it clearly; others just hinted. To some, it is a kind of joke. “I’ve often wondered,” drawled one distinguished professor at a Madison, Wisconsin, conference on Edo prints, “just how much of Hokusai’s work Oei did in his last decade.”
At the Isago no Sato Museum in Kawasaki, a small museum devoted to
ukiyo-e
scenes of the area, serious thoughts were expressed. Curator Koike Makiko said that Oei is “very famous” today among painting students because her technique is so exceptional: “She left very few paintings. However, most scholars see all that work by Hokusai and know he did not do it himself. The reason why the number of works painted by Oei is limited is that she was painting under Hokusai’s name. It is said that Hokusai painted over eighty pictures in several months during his last year. It was impossible to finish this many works. So she might have painted these, and Hokusai only put his signature on the works.
“She and Hokusai together . . .” Koike put her hands in front of her, fingers spread, and then pushed them together so her fingers were crisscrossed, all eight of them waving. “They cooperated,” she said.
I did the same and mimed pulling my two hands apart. “Could their work be disentangled?”
She shook her head. Oei’s work was combined almost inextricably with Hokusai’s.
But does it have to be? Couldn’t people tell the difference if they really wanted to? Was it truly a labyrinth, as art historians say, composed of works the master supervised in the studio, works that are hers or his alone, and works that are out-and-out forgeries? Or is it a question of will?
Asking the Right Questions
Scholars are knowledgeable, sensitive, aware—but when they run up against canonical thinking, most have been willing to let Oei and her reputation go out with the wash. Art history demands proof for any claim. It does not at present leave room for speculation. A scholar wishing to establish Oei’s record must comb the archives and come up with names, dates, quotations. There is one such dedicated researcher on Oei’s case, with access and expertise.
Kubota Kazuhiro, who worked at the Takai Kozan Museum in Obuse, Japan, has pored over source material in premodern Japanese to reconstruct Oei. Posing questions about chronology, about Hokusai’s health, and about color, style, composition, and technique, he has begun the process of extricating Oei’s works from her father’s. His findings are published in Japanese, in art history periodicals. Of many articles and numerous details, I quote just a few.
In “Oi Eijo: The Whereabouts of Katsushika Hokusai’s Daughter,” Kubota cites evidence of Oei’s extremely fine hand for details.