Free The Ghost Brush by Katherine Govier Page A

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.”
    “I ask you, 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!”
    Laughter, and they all 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 up 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 right down on us. The samurai milled around. There was some holdup with his horse. His foot must have been caught. Clumsily, he dismounted and began to walk in our direction.
    “Speak of the devil!”
    “Look at the has-been slumming it down here in the quarter!”
    I agreed with those who said Utamaro was wrong. Sadanobu might no longer be senior councillor, but he would never lose power: his grandfather had been Shogun. They called him a hypocrite because he loved the brothels and the drinking life, even though he preached against them.
    We stared as he loomed up. The tobacconist murmured, “I wonder if he’s still reading my books.”
    Laughter broke out, and it carried in the air.
    “No, he isn’t,” said Sanba. “He’s going to bed early because he has to get up early to practise jujitsu with his sensei. That’s before he delivers lectures on Confucian fealty. No time for reading.”
    “No more writing either, I guess.”
    “I really do wish I’d published that miserable little novel he wrote when I had the chance,” murmured Tsutaya while they all watched the large, clumsy man. “You know he offered it to me? But he was just a sappy young lord who was going to inherit some faraway domain—who cared? I passed on it. Now