‘It is not boring, I can assure you,’ he said. ‘Repetition is good. This is how it is done. It is a privilege for me to work on such a blade and teaches me a great deal.’
The people left, all together. One by one the little vessels leaped off the shore, forming a row first, and then
flaring out in a V formation, like silent ducks, sails flapping as they took to the wind. Hanako was in one of them, Vera in another with Keiko and the old aunt and the old uncle. Keiko’s nephew manned the tiller-oar, not looking in Vera’s face but blushing when he was forced to steer it across her. He stared outward to the invisible mainland, and the wind took his hair back from his forehead.
On the shore, Ikkanshi-san stood, his hands crossed at the wrist beneath his belly. He looked immoveable, like a standard, not a real man at all.
Vera looked back. She said goodbye to each part of the island in her mind: the rocks and the stretch of beach where she practised diving. The bushes, reeds and the bamboo grass they called
sasa.
Farther up toward the High Place, the prickly briar. The Dragon Lake where she sat when she was lonely, and the Lost Lake with all the marsh grasses. The swallows, the gulls, the snakes, even the snails with which she and Hana had played.
The island itself vanished first, so flat that as the waves rose it began to disappear. Then the rooftops went. Then he. The lighthouse was still visible. Her eyes clung to it.
‘The island has been the same for many years,’ said the aunt. ‘And now it begins to be a little different.’
‘What kind of person would build a winter house on the summer island,’ the uncle asked. ‘Such a person must be stupid.’
‘A person staying all winter there,’ said the aunt. ‘Perhaps one who has reason to hide.’
They directed their remarks to Keiko, but did not look at her. Vera watched Keiko’s face. A faint pressure built under her skin.
‘You are right,’ said the aunt evenly. ‘One might think to hide on the summer island. But not in a big house. A big house, people will see.’
‘Forgive me, aunt, but I disagree. Building a big house
is proof that the person has no reason to hide,’ said Keiko.
‘That is proof that the person is stupid,’ said the aunt contentedly.
‘Will the ferry come, in the winter?’ Vera asked, thinking of the basket maker. Keiko did not look back.
‘For a little while, and then, not.’
‘Who will bring him food?’
‘He will have enough.’
Vera thought about the potatoes the old women had grown, the seaweed and the dried octopus. There must be rice. And the cats would keep the mice from it. ‘Won’t he be lonely?’
‘No,’ said Keiko. ‘I do not believe so. I believe he will be glad.’ She showed her
shiran kao
face: she who knows nothing.
The next time she looked back, the summer island was gone, swallowed by the waves. The boats flew onward. Keiko’s face was blank in the wind.
In the old Japanese prints, love is the driving force. When rain pelts, it is the rain of rejection; the moon behind Fuji’s cone is the moon of longing. And that love is echoed not in any heaven but in the body. Daily I watch those ordinary Edo people thronging their gates and their shrines, waiting patiently for boats to take them across the river, climbing mountain paths under burdens of logs, and poling barges against the current. Every warrior, priest and common labourer is sinew-carved, and every woman, whether she is writing a letter or hazarding her way along a snowy path, has limbs softened and a face swollen by passion.
When as a child I pored over my grandfather’s prints, I wondered about this thing called love. Such power to invest a landscape, a population! But perhaps it was merely ‘wind’, as the old sword masters say, a style, an affectation that was currently in fashion. This love for the body nevertheless had found itself a perfect expression in the
ukiyo-e.
The art was born, and it died, on the surface. It is a servant, not a master. It is beautiful, not because it was truthful, but because it was faithful.
I buy and sell the
ukiyo-e,
art that was, in its time, of the commoner and for the commoner. Those ordinary people who were rising out of feudal servitude to become free men and women, in thought if not in deed, could now enjoy the fruits of their labour. They left us a record of their time. I know how they wrapped their sumptuous fabrics around their bodies, and how the women did their hair. How they kneeled in
seiza;
on which side the weapons lay; what bird or animal adorned their over garments. I’ve come to understand that this elaboration was coding, a fantasy. These compelling images of life were dreams, even in their own time. In truth, the people of Edo were caked in mud, shivering, and more concerned about the next meal than about a
message from a lover. But they picked up the latest
ukiyo-e,
looked at the print, and saw themselves as resplendent.
There are messages buried in this code. I mentioned hair. Hair was an Edo obsession. Tied up above the neck, it signified a coy purity that may be for sale. ‘A woman’s neck is her soul and her life,’ was true for the courtesans: her living was made on it. In the
nijinga
– the portraits of beautiful women; my grandfather called them his ‘Beauties’ – loose hair at the nape of a woman’s neck indicated that she had fallen in love. Long, loose hair meant wantonness – as in Utamaro’s triptych of the abalone divers. This too was a fantasy. In fact the divers were sturdy, hard-working fisherwomen. But their legend lived in the pictures. Diving women have fascinated the Japanese for centuries, and when the Westerners saw them, they too were fascinated.
My grandfather’s
Three Views of Crystal Water:
I still have it in my possession. Sometimes I take out the triptych and stare at it. I had originally put the seashore first, then the bridge, and finally the fire in the pagoda.
This story satisfied me for a while. But one afternoon, in that strange period where I lived with my grandfather, at the tail end of my short childhood, I flung open the folder and saw the three prints. I was suddenly convinced that they were in the wrong order. I had set them in order in my mind: first, the women on the beach; second, the letter passed at night; third, the flight from fire. But now I saw a different story. First, should be the fire at the pagoda. This was an unexplained calamity. The samurai stood at the gate, a guard or a scourge. He watched the two women escape, older and younger, or mistress and servant, one armed and on horseback, the other on foot. He could do nothing.
But the second picture showed an encounter at night. The women were out in the dark land and unprotected when, secretly, a stranger passed the maid a message. The message was an offer of shelter, the messenger, perhaps, in disguise, the samurai. He was an honourable man, and although he loved the highborn woman, he would not harm her.
Then the third picture would be the women by the seashore,
a happy ending. The refuge was to be amongst this group of women, hidden, and cloistered. Still, the tall woman, the one in the front whose curved back nearly hides her bare breasts, casts a longing look over her shoulder to where, in the dunes, the man who had saved her watches from afar.
Now this version of the story seemed true to me.
I gazed at the last picture. The women were seen from the top of a slight rise. They were
ama;
they’d clearly been diving. The observer – we – looked over a circle of women, standing and sitting near the edge of the water. They were wet; their hair was dripping down their bare backs. The small fire drew them together as they warmed themselves. Around their feet were baskets. These baskets held their catch of abalone, or turban shell perhaps. It would have been a good day. The water was flat and turquoise and, where rocks stand up from the surface, it was transparent: you could see the other halves of the rocks beneath.
The sea was large and reached from one side of the paper to the other. Its blue stretched high in the picture to a flat horizon, at the far reach of which were rocky islands and a few boats. Childishly drawn waves marched out from the land. Even so, it was strange to name this a view of waters because the women were the most interesting part of the picture, with their gently curved arms and breasts and their modesty, which could be felt despite their nakedness. The water was their habitat, I suppose, their salvation.
But the feeling of the picture was of privacy violated by an unseen watcher. I feel – I always felt when I looked at this print – my grandfather’s fascination with the beautiful, aloof diving women. Their sensuality is perhaps idealised and yet not entirely, I know, because I was amongst them.
As I said this morning to a client, in the
ukiyo-e
we have not just a window but a grandstand on a time as distant and as vital as Shakespeare’s. The ‘window’ has been dressed by a genius. It is full of everything we desire, characters in a dozen activities beguiled by material goods that make us want to reach in and take them. The people mingle with their idols; ‘big faces’, as we
call the portraits, show actors distorted by rage or remorse; demure courtesans reveal a bit of red underslip.
But it is art by subjects, for subjects. The celebrated geisha is a captive in her pleasure quarters, an object of commerce. Edo’s charm under lantern light is illusory. The labourer staggers under his load; the foot soldier faces the lethal sword; the blind and the lepers, the open road. It is not a beautiful world, but something infinitely more moving: a cruel world seen as beautiful. The pictures are of longing and of hope. This is Edo as it wanted to be. Only love could make it that way.
It is not my way. I am a realist. Love has little place in my world. Oh, when I was young I experimented with it, the way children play with matches, or venture into deep water.
But if it is not my way, why do I adore the
ukiyo-e
?
I think it is the particulars of the dream. The detail, the application, the elaboration! I feel the exchange of energy for grief. That parade ripples by the grandstand, luminous, gaudy, deadly as the underwater world.
The word that many use to describe Edo and its night denizens, is of course, ‘the floating world’: life lived in the moment, sweetened by an awareness of death. I favour ‘buoyant world’, with its sense of a bubble. Think of a rising, of the dawning of power to an underclass. Of joy, bought and sold. And after, the flooding that will carry it all away. Fatalistic, this pleasure. Did an uprising ever sweep away the powerful and fulfil its promise of earthly reward for the underclass? My time on the summer island coincided with the tragic crushing in war, war waged and war lost, of all that Edo raised up. And the knowledge of that end was present from the beginning. It is as if these artists furiously carving daily impressions into their blocks of wood knew that it was not to last. You can feel that in the pictures: they are full of reportage, but also suffused with fantasy, exactly the combination that I love.
Buddha says that sorrow results from trying to hold on to that which must disappear. The water in which we are immersed moves constantly on its tides and storms, and we must move with it. A tragedy, if we hang on; an entertainment, if we let go. The
flux tosses such exquisite creatures our way! The artists’ adherence then to ‘real’ things, material things, the faithful replication of fleshly pleasures is a futile kind of faith, clutching an anchor, a foothold as the stream carries us away.
Do you know, I said to my customer this morning as she left with her woodcut print, that Hokusai, one of the great artists of the
ukiyo-e,
lived in ninety-three houses, never cleaning up, and leaving when the rent became due? He said that he had come into the world without much and he would leave that way. How delicious, and ironic then, to be a collector of his works.
In the absence of any better guide, I took my world view from the
ukiyo-e.
As I saw it, lovers were tossed and bent by life, rather than the opposite. Love is what might have been, if not prevented by duty, or by what schoolteachers used to call a ‘current event’.
Current events: that was a subject when I went to school in Vancouver. I liked the phrase: it meant electricity. Something sparked, in an instant, in a place you’d never heard of, for a reason you couldn’t have guessed, and the shock went out all over the world. We tried to keep up: we memorised the names and leaders of a dozen countries, and dutifully wrote down the dates of the assassinations that led to wars: Archduke Ferdinand, for instance, I never forgot him. But current events shocked little people too, not famous, not rulers. Certain lives were struck by the lightning of history as it happened, pierced, lifted out of the ordinary.
Mine was, in its small way. Recently I saw a photograph in a book. It showed a long column of Japanese Imperial Army soldiers marching on a broad, empty street, soldiers with bayonets over their right shoulders, headed by a man in front with the flag, that sun with its spokes. I had seen such a parade, such a column, when I first arrived in Japan, so many years ago. But in this book, now, in our anti-military times, beside the phalanx, on the deserted pavement, a lone man crouched with a microphone, from which a black wire ran out of the picture. He was recording the sound of their footsteps. And that sound went around the world. That was all: empty street, marching soldiers, man with microphone.
How simple, how minimal, the soundtrack to mobilise a country! And how huge it became.
I came into this world amongst people who love objects. Pearls were the star and the beacons of my young life. I learned enough to know that pearls were the making and unmaking of my father and grandfather, my mother and stepmother. Is it any wonder that I do not deal in pearls?
What thou lovest well is thy true heritage; the rest is dross.
The pictures came to me. The pearls did not. More of that to come.