The Ghost Brush Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’d drop you.”
    My father dimpled in a way calculated to charm. “But you won’t because I’m good, correct?”
    “Let’s see what you’ve got. Then I’ll tell you if you’re any good.”
    My father bristled, but he opened his satchel. He put the designs on the table out of my reach. I could feel the tension. The bald man came and stood over us. The pictures were of courtesans under the moon, courtesans with flowers, courtesans walking by the canal. “Hmmm,” he mumbled reluctantly. And “Hmmph” and “Hmmmph.”
    More pictures, then: of foreign men riding on horseback—Koreans, they must have been. Of teahouse girls.
    “Give me lovers’ suicides,” said Tsutaya.
    Hokusai lifted some papers. Boys gathering leaves. Children at the seashore. Tsutaya cleared his throat with impatience.
    This man was an adopted son of the great publisher Tsutaya Juzaburo, whom the artists still lamented. He had died ten years before. The artists said he was a genius. I had heard the men talk about him. Myself, I thought he was a fake. He was the son of a brothel owner. They were mean, greedy men, I knew that. His father had had a bright idea, that was all. He bought the rights to publish the saiken guidebooks, with their tiny writing and columns full of symbols giving a prostitute’s rank, how much it cost to buy her for a night, and what she would do.
    The saiken were popular. Here is why: because when a tsu—that is, a sophisticate—comes in the gate, he wants to know about the courtesans for sale. He buys one of these little books. You can see him walking along, his head bent over the pages, his ears red with excitement, his breath coming shallow and fast. He could collide with a lamppost, or even with the famous courtesan Hana-ogi on her way to a teahouse, and not know it.
    We watched them often enough, my father and I. My father would yell out, “Fool! Reading the map when you should be enjoying the view.”
    The guidebooks sold not only to newcomers but to regular customers as well, because they wanted to know how their sweethearts stood up in the ratings.
    And naturally the saiken were of interest to the prostitutes themselves. They had to look themselves up to discover if their value was rising or—more likely—falling. They were always getting older, and as they got older this was noted in the saiken, even though the ages were off by a few years. The guidebooks didn’t exactly speak the truth because they were made for advertisement. They didn’t exactly have the best interests of the customer at heart. They represented the best interests of the Yoshiwara merchant.
    So the little book would say something like this: “Misty Moon is eighteen years old and has rounded breasts but a slim figure and teeth with a space between the first two. Her look is demure, but her temperament is fiery . . . Easy to please and passionate in her response . . .”
    This was a load of night soil, but never mind. You had to buy the book to read it, and everyone wanted to read it. And if you’d already bought one you probably bought another and another, because you had to have the latest. The saiken had to be edited twice a year. New girls debut, and old ones die or—rarely—retire.
    Of course if you knew anything you knew that the saiken’s truthfulness was limited, to put it nicely, because Tsutaya had a lot of people to please: the brothel owners, the teahouse owners, the clients themselves. But the tsu didn’t think of this. He read and his mouth gaped and his mouth watered and he believed.
    It takes no genius to make money publishing that stuff. In fact it takes a certain stupidity. And this wasn’t even the first Tsutaya, but a pale son. Why should a man like that have power over my father?
    I glared at the publisher’s head as if I could put holes in it. I fidgeted. He didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no. What was so difficult? Hokusai was as good as and better than any other artist Tsutaya published. But