Free The Printmaker's Daughter by Katherine Govier

read it himself, they said. Then his men had come back and arrested Kyoden. Kyoden was the leader of the literary world. Sad-and-Noble decided to make an example of him. He was sent up to the White Sands for questioning, and his old father too.
    He was charged with making ukiyo-e and depraved books.
    Kyoden suffered his punishment of fines and manacles and became even more famous. His book disappeared for a while. Then it came back into print, even though the blocks had been burned. But he didn’t write satirical books anymore. At least not very often.
    “Obedient? Is that what you call it? Gutless is what it is. You make moral tracts,” said Sanba, “and once in a blue moon pop out a racy little novelette. You can’t have it both ways.”
    “Why not?” Kyoden was grinning. “Sad-and-Noble has it both ways.”
    “He’s not so bad. He started a savings bank for the poor. And during the rice riots he released rice from the merchants’ hoarding places. He was even lenient to those who’d been caught doing violence to their betters,” Waki said.
    “He hates us, though.”
    “That’s because he’s jealous.”
    Yuko brought down her telescope. She pushed out her tiny red lips and breathed a mournful “who-who-who.” Her lover’s horse had not won the race. “My hopes are dashed.”
    The men sighed in mock dismay.
    She brightened. “But maybe it’s better this way. I will write a beautiful poem about it.”
    “How do you live with yourself, writing that rot?” Utamaro demanded of Kyoden. “And then you marry those shinzo ? Those little girls are not even legal in brothels!”
    They all laughed and lay back on the hillside. They called themselves old men—Kyoden; Hokusai, who was fifty years now—but they didn’t really mean they were old men. Only Utamaro truly was an old man. He had no wife.
    “I marry them to save them from lives as courtesans,” said Kyoden.
    The two of them doubled over together.
    “I mean it!”
    “An act of charity it is not. You marry shinzo for two reasons. You lust after little girls,” said Utamaro. “Then you pump them for information to use in your books.”
    Kyoden only laughed. “And you? Who do you lust for? Little boys?”
    Utamaro just waved his hand. He did not deign to answer.
    “I may be false to principles,” said Kyoden, “and to most of my friends. But there is one thing I’m true to. I’m true to type. I’m an Edoite—just let me live one more day. I’ll write to the bakufu tune. I’ll write to sell. It’s called the Way of Survival. When I have enough money, then I will write what I want to say.”
    “And when will that day come?”
    “Maybe never. When do Edoites have enough money to buy back their virtue?”
    “Good question; a purchase of that nature would be very expensive.”
    The Mad Poets chortled away, and wet their brushes, and wrote their verses. They knew everything. They had seen it or done it, or they knew someone who had done it, and it was all funny. They had high-flying opinions of themselves, and they never stopped trying to slice one another’s kite strings in order to keep their own sailing highest.
    “I feel for all men who cannot afford virtue,” my father said.
    They sniffed, suspicious that he was putting himself above them. He was painting a dead duck with an abalone shell. He never wanted to make the kind of pictures the others made.
    “I suppose you can be sympathetic; you don’t have much to lose,” said Kyoden.
    My father grinned amiably. “Not much to lose. That’s the secret.”
    He wasn’t the most popular artist in Edo, it was true. But he did sell his prints to the Dutch, and that made people jealous. It was impossible to insult my old man. He believed he would one day prove himself to be greater than all the others. So did I.
    At the foot of the bridge, the ranks broke around Sad-and-Noble and he stopped. He seemed to be looking down on us. The samurai milled around. There was some holdup with his