The Printmaker's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 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.
    Among 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 tipped back on the top of his neck. The oval of his chin jutted forward and the larger oval of his crown slid backward. His eyebrows were 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 only person among the townsmen who could buy a license. Handling money was a despised activity, officially, and the bakufu assumed that this shameful occupation would keep the blind in their place.
    But who cared about the official position? Money was running wild. Merchants were not ashamed to exchange it. They were, every year, louder and prouder. They dressed in fine coats and sported like lords. The real lords, we heard, were threadbare in their homes as well as in their hearts. Surviving on loyalty, duty, and the labor of others was harder and harder for the high and mighty. And so the blind moneylenders were busy. There was demand for their services. And they too became rich. Rich enough to eat and drink and spend a night at the Yoshiwara, to buy a courtesan.
    But this particular blind man was not wealthy. There were a few other ways of life open to the blind of our city. These were hairdressing or otherwise working with the body. One way was to be a masseur. I decided that the blind man worked soothing the muscles of sumo wrestlers. That explained why the beefy hands—draping off his wrists in front of his chest—flexed and pulsed while the rest of him was still. He was watching the parade intently. The expression on his face was assessing, appreciative, like the faces of the sighted men beside him. He was thinking of skin, of flesh: I knew it.
    The slit of visible eye was white; he had no pupils. Maybe those were rolled up to the inside of his head. His lips were apart, and top and bottom together made almost a circle; they too were fat and short. His nose was broad and stopped above his lip, leaving a wide, blank space there. It was a blank space that was the same as the blank space that was his entire face.
    He could have been praying, but I doubted it: he didn’t look religious. He was sucking in the courtesans’ presence; he smelled them, he heard their breath, he felt their tension. He was taking them into his body.
    It gave me a cold feeling. The women could not hide, even from the sightless.
    A NOTHER TRIP NORTHWARD. I was older now. I ran alongside my father as he strode to the dock. I jumped from the shore onto the ferryboat he was boarding, taking my chances over the span of cold, dirty water. He put out his hand to steady me without really looking. I sank down into the bottom of the boat between his knees to keep warm. It was nearly winter.
    Once we stepped back onto land,