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off, as if the singer had fallen down a hole.
    It was nothing Mitsu said that helped him; it was walking here, being here. It was the fever of money flowing and the wanting. It was the people my father wanted to make pictures of—not the prostitutes, though he’d done that, or the actors, the famous people. It was the ordinary ones—people who worked with their hands and their bodies, the ugly and misshapen ones, the funny and beleaguered ones. That’s what he wanted. But who wanted to buy those pictures?

4
    The Yakko
    WE HAD COME TO THE YOSHIWARA in the late afternoon. We sat on the side of the boulevard waiting for the parade. It hadn’t started, but already people had gathered. It was the third month, and the day of the Lantern Festival parade. Every teahouse on the boulevard had hung a lantern with blue-and-black patterns under its eaves. The courtesans and their attendants would march in their giant costumes with royal pomp from the brothels to their places of assignation.
    My father had his sketchbook. He commanded me to stay right there! Then he forgot about me.
    The courtesans came out of the high-class brothels next to the boulevard. There was a man with a great iron spear in front to lead them and then a lantern bearer, although it wasn’t dark yet. They stood with their child attendants in their brilliant kimono of silk and velvet in colours so deep I thought the seas and the skies had been emptied to make them. There was a cart with more women, their faces painted white, playing samisen. Drummers began pounding their rhythms to speed the heartbeats. Acrobats flipped in a series of circles, like the wheels of an ox cart, from hands to feet, hands to feet, all around the cluster of exotic women.
    The first childish girls wore pounds of lustrous stuff, but they were small potatoes compared to the top rank, who towered on clogs as high as my forearm was long, with hair like wasps’ nests speared with many golden sticks. The top courtesan, the tayu, was stupendous. Everyone gasped to see her. She paced with infinite slowness, balancing on one foot most of the time, while a man walked behind her holding an umbrella over her head. Then more followers—the housekeeper, the teahouse workers, and then another courtesan in her enormous shoes and her enormous hairdo.
    I ran along beside them. I quickly caught up because of their special step, the figure eight, which meant they had to swing each foot in two circles and then out behind in a jaunty kick before planting it. It made them very slow. Some of the courtesans were very fresh and new. I tried my best to catch their eyes, but I could not. I was not certain they were human. The children in their entourage were, I knew, because they pushed each other and wailed. They were not allowed to look at anyone. I ran back to my father. It wasn’t the performers he was drawing, of course. It was the watchers.
    Amongst the watchers, and the subject of my father’s brush, was a blind man with his cane.
    He was bald; he had shaved himself as a sign of his blindness. This was the custom. And he was massive. His head was like a large egg sitting tipped back on the top of his neck. The oval of his chin jutted forwards and the larger oval of his crown slid backwards. His eyebrows were dark black, thick, and short, and they curled over his squinting eyes like sleeping dogs. His prominent ears were immensely complicated whirls of flesh. On one of them he had hung his rosary; I suppose it was a good place to keep it, if you were blind. You would always know where it was. He had big strong hands like paws, and these he kept aloft, as if he were afraid of misplacing them too. The wrists were high, and the backs of his hands and his long, fat fingers flopped softly.
    The instant I saw him I hated him. I hated him because he made me afraid, and my father had instructed me never to be afraid.
    There were two ways of living for blind men. One was to be a moneylender. A blind man was the