The Ghost Brush Read Free Page A

Hopeless.” He acted out his feelings: artist flings down brush, covers eyes with fists.
    I looked at the design. It was a view of the banks of the Sumida River, which ran through our city. There were tiny people and ox carts, bridges and boats everywhere. Not bad, I thought. He smacked it.
    “Where is the life?” he cried, rhetorically. “You can’t smell the tannery downriver or the incense from the temple; you can’t hear ferrymen grunt as they’re poling on the river.”
    He was harsh with himself. There were hundreds like my father who lived in that world and painted it, making shop signs, theatre sets, and the woodcut prints that were cheap and for sale everywhere. Since he had displeased his master and was discarded, we were on our own. It was difficult; there were always others, more willing, to do any work.
    For a time he was a middleman of peppers. He bought red peppers from a peasant and sold them from his back. And sometimes he found a private commission for a laughing picture, one that told a little sexual story and was useful in its way. Artists were in fashion, out of fashion, only as good as the day’s work—that was their lot.
    Once in a while he was famous, then he couldn’t sell. This was the way; he could not keep a good name. He had taken a new one recently. He called himself Sori.
    I liked the picture. “It is good,” I told him. Still, he did have a point. It was maybe too pretty.
    “What about the cries of the men being flogged on the grounds of the jailhouse? Fifty times for the light sentence, one hundred for the heavy? No no no no no. How about that glimmer of lantern light in the black canal water? I want the people who look at my pictures to hear the angry sob of a nighthawk”—that was a riverbank prostitute; I knew them already—“taken by force!”
    He stomped around.
    “You can’t feel the rain.”
    He was wrong there. You could feel the rain. His rain was good.
    “How to capture it all? I want it, want it. I need to learn. But how can I? There’s no teacher for what I need.”
    I held out my arms to be lifted. I tried to melt into his body.
    He walked in small circles and patted my back. It calmed him. The proper teacher was his ears and eyes.
    “I know it’s in me. But how many years before I find it?”
    W ith a father like that my mission was clear: someone had to look out for him. Even now that he is long gone, if I close my eyes and breathe deeply I can bring him back. I can feel, in the muscles inside my thighs, his back and waist, where I clung to him as he jogged along. I feel the sweat of his neck on my arms. I lay my chest along his spine; his arms twine behind his back and turn so they prop up the sling, and I sit in the crossed palms of his hands. Oh, seduction. Oh, that safe nest of cupped fingers on my bottom. The warmth of them, the stir that only many years later I would know was sexual.
    In my ears there is still the cold slosh of water against a wooden wharf and the charcoal sellers’ shouts in the alley. And in my nose I hold the musty air of autumn, the bitter chrysanthemum, the wet, smeared leaves on the stones. All of it, all of it now gone, a paper world, a weightless world, a world of mad colours and things that died.
    He didn’t have to say I was the one. He knew it and I knew it. The others belonged to my mother. Together we made the rounds of the city, with me slung on his back. It was a wonderful world. The bang of clogs over the arched bridges was music. Beautiful objects were being made in every doorway: silk and velvet cut in patterns; hair combs and painted lanterns; baskets, bowls, and cards of celebration. Firemen ran by with long poles on their shoulders; bannermen shoved us into ditches so the daimyo could pass. The ghosts of dead servants lived under the bridges, and sword-bearing gods leaned out of the clouds.
    W E LIVED IN SHITAMACHI , downtown, in two rooms, each one six tatami mats in size, in a single-storey terraced house made