The Printmaker's Daughter (62 page)

In the 1970s and 1980s he tried to sell them. People from various museums looked at them but said, “They’re not Hokusai.” Then a young dealer from Japan came to the house. He said he could get him ten times what he was asking if he sold them in Japan. Zeller sent them to Kyoto to be remounted, and they were subsequently sold to the Hokusai Museum in Obuse. There, they were “denounced.”

“Because of the shortened scroll and the misplaced signature?” I asked.

No. He was vehement that the misplacement of the signature meant nothing. Sometimes scrolls were just signed in that place, he said. The seal was right. But the signature was Hokusai’s, and it was plain that they were not Hokusai.

Did this mean that Oei signed “Hokusai” even when she was commissioned to create paintings herself after her father’s death? I asked why he thought she would do that.

“Frustration,” said Zeller. “Because she knew her work would disappear and his would carry on.”

Was she really painting for history?

“She was nobody,” he said. She wanted her work to last, and that was the only way. He used an evocative phrase. He said that after her father’s death, Oei was “clinging to the wreckage.”

But Zeller was not without hope. On identifying works by Oei, he said, “Painters are creatures of habit. They do the same things over and over again.” He noted the fingers, fleshy at the joint of the palm, then tapered to being thin at the end. Hokusai’s were not the same, he said flatly. “That is how you can tell. That and her colors.”

There are no absolutes in this business, said Zeller. The proof is in the eye, and people’s eyes got indoctrinated. He talked about pigment analysis, which could be useful for dating works when the authorship was in question and for locating where works were being done.

He thought
Tiger in Snow
was by Oei, as well as all those other tigers that were painted near the end of Hokusai’s life. He thought
Promenading Courtesan
was by Oei, and certainly the rest of the “Dutch” paintings were hers. And more. What about the short screen of the phoenix—the Ho-o bird—which was in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and attributed to Hokusai? Hers, he said. And the Ho-o bird in Ganshoin Temple in Obuse, spoken of as one of his last works? Hers too.

“Once you ‘get it’ about Oei and look at the Hokusai works, you can see it everywhere you look. You can’t miss it if you have eyes in your head,” he said. “The study of Hokusai has to be thrown out and started all over again. It’s all rot.”

Zeller believed in the possibility of discovering caches of paintings. “Keep looking and searching,” he said. He gave me names of people to write to: translators, researchers, transcriptions of conferences. “Eventually, more paintings will turn up. It’s time,” he said, “for the story to come out.”

New Developments

In Leiden, the Netherlands, at the Volkenkunde Museum, is a set of “Dutch” pictures collected in Japan by von Siebold and supposedly by Hokusai. They are not signed. Scholars have looked at them from time to time and gone away scratching their heads.

I went to see them, the watercolors, and two painted scrolls. Several have many of the hallmarks of Oei’s work:
Promenading Courtesan
depicts a young prostitute enfolded in a giant, puffy brown and blue kimono and a red frilled underskirt, her hair a two-tiered beehive speared with heavy ornate pins, her platform clogs twisting as she steps. It bears the hallmarks of Oei’s work: the composition is centered; the central figure is alone, suspended in emptiness; the colors are deep and intense; the chunky-figured woman is stiff and unmoving; her fingers are long and tapered.

In certain watercolors there are straight-edged structures drafted in Dutch pencil under the paint. The trademark is fine; fine threads in the tartans of their kimono and furnishings are there. There is a certain stiffness: the bodies don’t move, not in the way Hokusai’s do. There are no humorous little dogs in the corner biting people’s ankles. There is a lot of attention to fabrics and draping, and the subjects are sometimes ones that might be of particular interest to a woman: for instance, a nursing mother.

And the hands and fingers are all the same, the familiar fingers we have come to see as Oei’s signature, her trademark. The palm is fleshy and the first joint of the thumb round, as is the ball of the foot under the big toe. Then the digits themselves taper immediately, becoming long and slender.

And—a breakthrough for Oei—she is now getting at least partial billing. In the catalog of the exhibit Hokusai and the Dutch, which ran at the Edo-Tokyo Museum in December 2007, the attribution has changed from Hokusai to Hokusai “possibly with the assistance of his daughter Oei.”
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Another important marker in the emerging story was the television documentary aired in Japan by NHK called
Onna Hokusai
—the female Hokusai. In it details of Oei’s life and work are set forth in much the way Kubota Kazuhiro has outlined them.

Certain questions remain, on which I’ve taken a stand in the novel. One concerns the
shunga
with “the hidden signature,” and the theory that Oei and the artist Keisai Eisen created
shunga
together. On this I got an emphatic confirmation from Gankow Sakai of the Japan Ukiyo-e Museum. “Yes. I’ve seen the secret signature.” Sakai also weighed in on the Dutch paintings, bought in 1826 by von Siebold: “The 1820s was a bad decade for Hokusai. They are not signed. Not signed means not Hokusai. Hokusai always signed his work. This is important.”
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He spoke generally then about how mistakes get made in attribution and are repeated until they are accepted as truth. “Someone makes a mistake and it gets repeated over and over.” His caution seems worth repeating. “Always ask why. Everybody says something is by Hokusai. Why? Looking at the picture of the chrysanthemums, ask, ‘Why Hokusai? Is that Hokusai? He never painted a chrysanthemum before. There is nothing else like it in his work.’ The answer seems to be obvious: there is no reason to imagine this work is by Hokusai except for the signature, which is not quite right.”

The other is forgery, which is too complex to go into here. Suffice it to say that several scholars have written about forgery tools and imitative seals being found in Obuse. They don’t bear on Oei’s work directly but complicate the entire study of Hokusai.

Turning the Tables

The only picture ever made of Oei in her life is on the receipt Kubota discovered in the Obuse archives. On it were the two cartoon faces of Hokusai and Oei. He is in profile. She is looking straight out. It is a cartoon, drawn with affection. She looks straight on; she has wavy hair drawn back from her square hairline and a dot in the middle of her forehead, between her eyes. This must be a Buddhist decoration. And a prominent, lantern-shaped jaw, justifying her nickname, “Strong-Jawed Woman.”

The receipt is remarkable. Such a bill for services, with two little portraits on it, was a clear message that father and daughter had done the work together. It is quite literally equal billing.

It made me reflect on these two artists who had a partnership in life that has been left to interpretation by history. For more than one hundred twenty-five years, a black-and-white view has made the father one thing and the daughter his opposite. It is as if she had to be the photographic negative of his positive.

We assume that Hokusai’s signature raised the value of a work and Oei’s signature lowered it, even when the only evidence—the receipt for
Chrysanthemums
—shows that she was paid more than he ever was. Could we change our conclusion, then? We know commissions came to her. Perhaps by a certain time, Oei’s signature
raised
the value of a piece of work.

We assume that because she mixed the pigments, she was the assistant. But the gemlike colors were strong, unique, and much envied. So why not argue that making the colors was a primary task? That only she could do it so well in all of Japan, giving her father a great advantage over other painters?

The last book Hokusai wrote was
A Treatise on Color
. It was published in 1848, less than a year before his death. The scholar Carolina Retta has suggested, tactfully (such suggestions are always made very carefully), that Oei had the main role in writing it. Her reasons: first, the date of the book was so late in Hokusai’s life; second, the drawings in the book are like the ones in letters in Obuse known to be written by Oei; third, the thick colors it describes were Oei’s trademark.

“We can find a close correlation here between the techniques described in the manual and several used in paintings attributed to Hokusai’s final years,” wrote Retta. “There is also a good possibility that Oei assisted him at this time in compiling the notes used for the manual. In any case, surviving letters prove that she was conversant in the coloring techniques used by her father.”
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There are other assumptions we could turn upside down. What if the negatives attributed to Oei—her fondness for drink, for instance—were his? I’ve seen a recipe for his dragon liquor: two cups of
shochu
morning and night.
Shochu
is strong. It’s made of potatoes; it’s like vodka. Two cups morning and night. At that Freer symposium, there was the Japanese curator who said, with what had to be sarcasm, “Some of these paintings from his old age look as if he was drunk. No, I forgot. He didn’t drink.”

In fact, many of Oei’s traits were also noticed in her father, in whom they are forgiven, and in fact seen as evidence that he was a great artist. You could say the story went like this: Hokusai was a drinker. His wives did not die but ran away. He was gloomy, untidy, and unkempt. He spent all the money he had. He became eccentric and impossible to deal with, almost crazy, in fact. Oei selflessly devoted herself to his care, taking commissions and earning enough to keep her father and herself going.

Or we could see them as a pair, which is how I prefer to, a team in which each partner equally contributed his or her vast talent and energy and, yes, frailty. When Hokusai died, the team was no more. Oei struggled, but for at least five years she made a life as “one brush.”

But then what? She disappeared.

The political situation changed drastically: the West had arrived. There was an earthquake and a cholera outbreak in Edo. The shogun was defeated. The country fell into civil war. The old ways were changing. The
ukiyo-e
market sank. So just when Oei thought her time had come, in fact, her time had run out.

Oei’s Disappearance and Death

Along with negative assumptions, neglect, forgery, and tampering, there is an additional component to Oei’s story: untimely and unexplained death. Kubota’s discovered record of her sending the
Chrystanthemum
miniatures to Kozan in Obuse in 1853 is the last indication of her whereabouts. For decades the unsolved mystery of Oei’s disappearance has stymied researchers. What happened to her? Why does no one know?

I asked Koike Makiko at the gallery in Kawaki. She and Shinwa Ichikawa, curator of the Hiroshige Museum in Nakagawa-machi, had heard conjecture in the area where she was presumed to have been at the time of her disappearance. She is said to have traveled there to help create work for the export market that had opened with the arrival of Westerners. Experts, including Kubota Kazuhiro, believe that it is likely because Katsushika Isai, one of Hokusai’s students, had opened a shop in Yokohama, where she might have worked.

Koike hesitated before she spoke: “Some people say . . . that she was killed.” She was not murdered by someone she knew, but she did not die in an accident, the curators maintained. They said that the area was not safe in those days. They said that she could have been killed by robbers unaware of her identity. But they did not know for sure: it is a mystery, they confirmed.
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Professor Carpenter advised me that from here on in, it would be speculation. “Something very dark happened to end Oei’s life. She may have done something. It may have been the drinking. Or something . . . more destructive.”
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It is hard for me to believe that Oei destroyed herself. Don’t we always believe that women artists extinguish themselves for want of fame or self-love, or because they were somehow abnormal to begin with?

For the moment, the place and time of Oei’s death remains a mystery.

Late in the process of writing the novel, I received a new Japanese edition of Iijima Kyoshin’s
Katsushika Hokusai Den,
with footnotes by Professor Suzuki Juzo. There was interesting new material in the footnotes, I was told. I had them translated. They became part of the character of Oei as I imagined her.

They contain a long discussion of whether Hokusai drank. Conclusion: inconclusive.

There is additional testimony from Tsuyuki Kosho, who had painted the sketch that has defined Oei to this day. He said: “Hokusai was lazy in his nature and hated to clean up the room. However, Oei was not as lazy as Hokusai. The reason why she did not clean up the room seemed to be that she obeyed the Old Man. She kept her hair neat. She was decent in her behavior. I never heard any bad rumors about her. She always stayed with him and did not fail to be dutiful to him. I highly appreciated her.”
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