Ascendancies (30 page)

“I don't like their attitudes,” growled Encho's companion. His name was Onogawa, and until the Emperor's Restoration, he had been a samurai. But Imperial decree had abolished the wearing of swords, and Onogawa now had a post in a trading company. He frowned, and dabbed at his nose, which had recently been bloodied and was now clotting. “It's all too free-and-easy with these modern rickshaws. Did you see those two runners? They looked into our faces, just as bold as tomcats.”

“Relax, will you?” said Encho. “They were just a couple of street runners. Who cares what they think? The way you act, you'd think they were Shogun's Overseers.” Encho laughed freely and dusted off his hands with a quick, theatrical gesture. Those grim, spying Overseers, with their merciless canons of Confucian law, were just a bad dream now. Like the Shogun, they were out of business.

“But your face is known all over town,” Onogawa complained.

“But what if they gossip about us? Everyone will know what happened back there.”

“It's the least I could do for a devoted fan,” Encho said airily.

Onogawa had sobered up a bit since his street fight in Asakusa. A scuffle had broken out in the crowd after Encho's performance—a scuffle centered on Onogawa, who had old acquaintances he would have preferred not to meet. But Encho, appearing suddenly in the crowd, had distracted Onogawa's persecutors and gotten Onogawa away.

It was not a happy situation for Onogawa, who put much stock in his own dignity, and tended to brood. He had been born in Satsuma, a province of radical samurai with stern unbending standards. But ten years in the capital had changed Onogawa, and given him an Edokko's notorious love for spectacle. Somewhat shamefully, Onogawa had become completely addicted to Encho's sidesplitting skits and impersonations.

In fact, Onogawa had been slumming in Asakusa vaudeville joints at least twice each week, for months. He had a wife and small son in a modest place in Nihombashi, a rather straitlaced High City district full of earnest young bankers and civil servants on their way up in life. Thanks to old friends from his radical days, Onogawa was an officer in a prosperous trading company. He would have preferred to be in the army, of course, but the army was quite small these days, and appointments were hard to get.

This was a major disappointment in Onogawa's life, and it had driven him to behave strangely. Onogawa's long-suffering in-laws had always warned him that his slumming would come to no good. But tonight's event wasn't even a geisha scandal, the kind men winked at or even admired. Instead, he had been in a squalid punch-up with low-class commoners.

And he had been rescued by a famous commoner, which was worse. Onogawa couldn't bring himself to compound his loss of face with gratitude. He glared at Encho from under the brim of his bowler hat. “So where's this fellow with the foreign booze you promised?”

“Patience,” Encho said absently. “My friend's got a little place here in Bricktown. It's private, away from the street.” They wandered down the Ginza, Encho pulling his silk top-hat low over his eyes, so he wouldn't be recognized.

He slowed as they passed a group of four young women, who were gathered before the modern glass window of a Ginza fabric shop. The store was closed, but the women were admiring the tailor's dummies. Like the dummies, the women were dressed with daring modernity, sporting small Western parasols, cutaway riding-coats in brilliant purple, and sweeping foreign skirts over large, jutting bustles. “How about that, eh?” said Encho as they drew nearer. “Those foreigners sure like a rump on a woman, don't they?”

“Women will wear anything,” Onogawa said, struggling to loosen one pinched foot inside its squeaking shoe. “Plain kimono and obi are far superior.”

“Easier to get into, anyway,” Encho mused. He stopped suddenly by the prettiest of the women, a girl who had let her natural eyebrows grow out, and whose teeth, unstained with old-fashioned tooth-blacking, gleamed like ivory in the gaslight.

“Madame, forgive my boldness,” Encho said. “But I think I saw a small kitten run under your skirt.”

“I beg your pardon?” the girl said in a flat Low City accent.

Encho pursed his lips. Plaintive mewing came from the pavement. The girl looked down, startled, and raised her skirt quickly almost to the knee. “Let me help,” said Encho, bending down for a better look. “I see the kitten! It's climbing up inside the skirt!” He turned. “You'd better help me, older brother! Have a look up in there.”

Onogawa, abashed, hesitated. More mewing came. Encho stuck his entire head under the woman's skirt. “There it goes! It wants to hide in her false rump!” The kitten squealed wildly. “I've got it!” the comedian cried. He pulled out his doubled hands, holding them before him. “There's the rascal now, on the wall!” In the harsh gaslight, Encho's knotted hands cast the shadowed figure of a kitten's head against the brick.

Onogawa burst into convulsive laughter. He doubled over against the wall, struggling for breath. The women stood shocked for a moment. Then they all ran away, giggling hysterically. Except for the victim of Encho's joke, who burst into tears as she ran.

“Wah,” Encho said alertly. “Her husband.” He ducked his head, then jammed the side of his hand against his lips and blew. The street rang with a sudden trumpet blast. It sounded so exactly like the trumpet of a Tokyo omnibus that Onogawa himself was taken in for a moment. He glanced wildly up and down the Ginza prospect, expecting to see the omnibus driver, horn to his lips, reining up his team of horses.

Encho grabbed Onogawa's coat-sleeve and hauled him up the street before the rest of the puzzled crowd could recover. “This way!” They pounded drunkenly up an ill-lit street into the depths of Bricktown. Onogawa was breathless with laughter. They covered a block, then Onogawa pulled up, gasping. “No more,” he wheezed, wiping tears of hilarity. “Can't take another…ha ha ha…step!”

“All right,” Encho said reasonably, “but not here.” He pointed up. “Don't you know better than to stand under those things?” Black telegraph wires swayed gently overhead.

Onogawa, who had not noticed the wires, moved hastily out from under them. “Kuwabara, kuwabara,” he muttered—a quick spell to avert lightning. The sinister magic wires were all over the Bricktown, looping past and around the thick, smelly buildings.

Everyone knew why the foreigners put their telegraph wires high up on poles. It was so the demon messengers inside could not escape to wreak havoc amongst decent folk. These ghostly, invisible spirits flew along the wires as fast as swallows, it was said, carrying their secret spells of Christian black magic. Merely standing under such a baleful influence was inviting disaster.

Encho grinned at Onogawa. “There's no danger as long as we keep moving,” he said confidently. “A little exposure is harmless. Don't worry about it.”

Onogawa drew himself up. “Worried? Not a bit of it.” He followed Encho down the street.

The stonelike buildings seemed brutal and featureless. There were no homey reed blinds or awnings in those outsized windows, whose sheets of foreign glass gleamed like an animal's eyeballs. No cozy porches, no bamboo wind chimes or cricket cages. Not even a climbing tendril of Edo morning glory, which adorned even the worst and cheapest city hovels. The buildings just sat there, as mute and threatening as cannonballs. Most were deserted. Despite their fireproof qualities and the great cost of their construction, they were proving hard to rent out. Word on the street said those red bricks would suck the life out of a man—give him beriberi, maybe even consumption.

Bricks paved the street beneath their shoes. Bricks on the right of them, bricks on their left, bricks in front of them, bricks in back. Hundreds of them, thousands of them. Onogawa muttered to the smaller man. “Say. What are bricks, exactly? I mean, what are they made of?”

“Foreigners make 'em,” Encho said, shrugging. “I think they're a kind of pottery.”

“Aren't they unhealthy?”

“People say that,” Encho said, “but foreigners live in them and I haven't noticed any shortage of foreigners lately.” He drew up short. “Oh, here's my friend's place. We'll go around the front. He lives upstairs.”

They circled the two-story building and looked up. Honest old-fashioned light, from an oil lamp, glowed against the curtains of an upstairs window. “Looks like your friend's still awake,” Onogawa said, his voice more cheery now.

Encho nodded. “Taiso Yoshitoshi doesn't sleep much. He's a little high-strung. I mean, peculiar.” Encho walked up to the heavy, ornate front door, hung foreign-style on large brass hinges. He yanked a bellpull.

“Peculiar,” Onogawa said. “No wonder, if he lives in a place like this.” They waited.

The door opened inward with a loud squeal of hinges. A man's disheveled head peered around it. Their host raised a candle in a cheap tin holder. “Who is it?”

“Come on, Taiso,” Encho said impatiently. He pursed his lips again. Ducks quacked around their feet.

“Oh! it's Encho-san, Encho Sanyutei. My old friend. Come in, do.”

They stepped inside into a dark landing. The two visitors stopped and unlaced their leather shoes. In the first-floor workshop, beyond the landing, the guests could dimly see bound bales of paper, a litter of tool chests and shallow trays. An apprentice was snoring behind a shrouded wood-block press. The damp air smelled of ink and cherry-wood shavings.

“This is Mr. Onogawa Azusa,” Encho said. “He's a fan of mine, down from High City. Mr. Onogawa, this is Taiso Yoshitoshi. The popular artist, one of Edo's finest.”

“Oh, Yoshitoshi the artist!” said Onogawa, recognizing the name for the first time. “Of course! The wood-block print peddler. Why, I bought a whole series of yours, once.
Twenty-eight Infamous Murders with Accompanying Verses
.”

“Oh,” said Yoshitoshi. “How kind of you to remember my squalid early efforts.” The ukiyo-e print artist was a slight, somewhat pudgy man, with stooped, rounded shoulders. The flesh around his eyes looked puffy and discolored. He had close-cropped hair parted in the middle and wide, fleshy lips. He wore a printed cotton house robe, with faded bluish sunbursts, or maybe daisies, against a white background. “Shall we go upstairs, gentlemen? My apprentice needs his sleep.”

They creaked up the wooden stairs to a studio lit by cheap pottery oil lamps. The walls were covered with hanging prints, while dozens more lay rolled, or stacked in corners, or piled on battered bookshelves. The windows were heavily draped and tightly shut. The naked brick walls seemed to sweat, and a vague reek of mildew and stale tobacco hung in the damp, close air.

The window against the far wall had a secondhand set of exterior shutters nailed to its inner sill. The shutters were bolted. “Telegraph wires outside,” Yoshitoshi explained, noticing the glances of his guests. The artist gestured vaguely at a couple of bedraggled floor cushions. “Please.”

The two visitors sat, struggling politely to squeeze some comfort from the mashed and threadbare cushions. Yoshitoshi knelt on a thicker cushion beside his worktable, a low bench of plain pine with ink stick, grinder, and water cup. A bamboo tool jar on the table's corner bristled with assorted brushes, as well as compass and ruler. Yoshitoshi had been working; a sheet of translucent rice paper was pinned to the table, lightly and precisely streaked with ink.

“So,” Encho said, smiling and waving one hand at the artist's penurious den. “I heard you'd been doing pretty well lately. This place has certainly improved since I last saw it. You've got real bookshelves again. I bet you'll have your books back in no time.”

Yoshitoshi smiled sweetly. “Oh—I have so many debts…the books come last. But yes, things are much better for me now. I have my health again. And a studio. And one apprentice, Toshimitsu, came back to me. He's not the best of the ones I lost, but he's honest at least.”

Encho pulled a short foreign briar-pipe from his coat. He opened the ornate tobacco-bag on his belt, an embroidered pouch that was the pride of every Edo man-about-town. He glanced up casually, stuffing his pipe. “Did that Kabuki gig ever come to anything?”

“Oh, yes,” said Yoshitoshi, sitting up straighten “I painted bloodstains on the armor of Onoe Kikugoro the Fifth. For his role in
Kawanakajima Island
. I'm very grateful to you for arranging that.”

“Wait, I saw that play,” said Onogawa, surprised and pleased. “Say, those were wonderful bloodstains. Even better than the ones in that murder print,
Kasamori Osen Carved Alive by Her Stepfather
. You did that print too, am I right?” Onogawa had been studying the prints on the wall, and the familiar style had jogged his memory. “A young girl yanked backwards by a maniac with a knife, big bloody hand-prints all over her neck and legs…”

Yoshitoshi smiled. “You liked that one, Mr. Onogawa?”

“Well,” Onogawa said, “it was certainly a fine effort for what it was.” It wasn't easy for a man in Onogawa's position to confess a liking for mere commoner art from Low City. He dropped his voice a little. “Actually, I had quite a few of your pictures, in my younger days. Ten years ago, just before the Restoration.” He smiled, remembering. “I had the
Twenty-eight Murders
, of course. And some of the
One Hundred Ghost Stories
. And a few of the special editions, now that I think of it. Like Tamigoro blowing his head off with a rifle. Especially good sprays of blood in that one.”

“Oh, I remember that one,” Encho volunteered. “That was back in the old days, when they used to sprinkle the bloody scarlet ink with powdered mica. For that deluxe bloody gleaming effect!”

“Too expensive now,” Yoshitoshi said sadly.

Encho shrugged. “Remember
Naosuke Gombei Murders His Master?
With the maniac servant standing on his employer's chest, ripping the man's face off with his hands alone?” The comedian cleverly mimed the murderer's pinching and wrenching, along with loud sucking and shredding sounds.