The Painting Read online

  And now she can’t erase the image of his thin limbs poking out of his sleeves, his face gaunt, and those dark, deep-set eyes, always remote, always tinged with anger and sadness. She lingers longer, watching the leaves.

  She picks one up and tosses it in the air, trying to postpone when she must go and attend to him. Lately, her dreams have been about flying. She flies far from this place west of the new capital, now called Tokyo, above the rice paddies, the fields of barley and wheat, an ocean of grass racing to the horizon, above the rows of small houses, the new buildings sprouting and slanting up the hillsides, and hunts for her lover. She is no longer sure he is in Ezo, or what the new government now calls Hokkaido.

  These dreams, she thinks, smiling timorously, perhaps they are a good sign. Perhaps it means he is coming, or he is here. And then she lets herself think a fanciful thought: Maybe her lover set the fire.

  HE LEAVES THE KITCHEN table, tired of waiting for his wife, shuffles away from her disturbing actions, down the long hallway of the house. Along white stones, he walks to the temple, only a short distance from the house, and opens the side door to the main room. All sound is swallowed here, a pool of stillness with the focal point in the center of the room against the far wall, the contemplative Buddha, fat, golden, glimmering, and smiling, as if he has a secret. The Buddha is surrounded by the villagers’ offerings, huge white bags of rice, green bottles of sake, sticks of incense, shiny coins, jars of pickled pink ginger, and dried barley. The goat that someone once brought is in the back pasture, along with a horse that needs new shoes.

  He takes a soft cloth and polishes the Buddha, beginning at the base, up the legs, his rounded belly, and there—what’s this—at his neck, a hairline crack. When did this happen? He studies the fragile split. Since the eleventh century, the Buddha has sat, and now, why now, this fissure? He traces his fingernail along the line and feels his eyes water.

  Nothing lasts, he murmurs. And it is true, so he says it again.

  He peers out the small window and a few villagers have arrived, waiting for the front doors to open. Big puffs of steam flare from their nostrils; they are slapping their hands together to stay warm and perhaps to let him know they are waiting outside.

  He opens the heavy, wooden door. Please, he says. Come in.

  They file in, set down their offerings, take a cushion, and sit, facing the Buddha. Today, there are only eight. A few weeks ago, more than two dozen, and the numbers will dwindle further now that the Meiji leaders have declared Shintoism, not Buddhism, the national religion. Still, the few ardent villagers come and he lets them in; still, on New Year’s Eve, he will ring the bronze bell 108 times, 8 in the old year and 100 in the new year, chasing away the 108 worldly desires by the ringing sound. So smart, these new officials believe they are, thinks Hayashi. They proclaim with such arrogance they can rip asunder beliefs with a silly piece of paper.

  WHEN HE RETURNS To the kitchen, she still has not come inside.

  Shall I begin, Hayashi-san? asks the maid.

  Soon he will have to leave for town to report the fire. No, he says, shoving his feet into the bucket of ice. The hem of his kimono falls into the bucket and he jerks it from the freezing water and rings it out. The maid steps into the kitchen. He sits still and listens to the wind and thinks, Sorrow is a boat that only drifts backward.

  Finally, Ayoshi comes inside.

  I’m sorry, he says, but I must ask you—

  Of course, she says and kneels before him, plunging her hands into the ice. She presses her thumbs into his arches. His hands are trembling, his jaw flares in and out as he grinds his molars. He is shaky this morning, she thinks. Perhaps she’s made it worse by lingering outside. Her hands already ache from the cold. She presses and massages and for a long time, neither one of them says anything. Finally, she asks what he’s going to do about the fire.

  He tells her he’s meeting with the government officials in town. He’s going to have to walk; the horse is not yet shoed. You’re welcome to join me.

  I’m sorry. I have a lot of work to do, she says, averting her eyes to his feet. She pushes harder. Who could have done such a thing? she asks.

  What work? he thinks. She has no work; she prefers to paint. He stares at his wife and imagines the winds of youth blowing through her. There are some mornings he is certain she’ll be gone. The other side of the bed is often empty, she rises so early and rushes to the studio. For some time now, he has thought the matchmaker chose the wrong one; perhaps the matchmaker didn’t know certain facts or chose not to disclose them. Of course, his wife is very skilled in the healing ways. She has hands full of energy and she moves in the spirited way. Perhaps the monks who made the arrangements with the go-between thought this was enough. Or maybe they chose not to tell him the whole story. The matchmaker guaranteed she came from a good family and that she was still pure. He knows the new leaders made her father an official representative, responsible for carving up the Hokkaido area into small plots of land for rice farmers. Before that, he was a feudal lord under the Tokugawa and adamantly against opening Japan to the West. But like so many others, he had to change his ways. Hayashi fretted about meeting her father. He assured the stiff old man with high cramped shoulders and an air of stony vigilance that he could provide for his daughter. He was certain her father would ask about Hayashi’s connection to the West, whether he planned to travel there, take his daughter there, but her father stood straight as a knife and barely said anything.

  He leans away from her, from the pain in his feet shooting up the back of his calves and his right shin bone. Her hands, he thinks. He often forgets how powerful they are. When she first arrived as his wife, she massaged his feet every morning without waiting for him to ask. Now he feels as if he must beg.

  Her hands burn from the cold. She pries her mind from her freezing fingertips. Outside, the naked branches of the maple, each leafless line, an experiment in design. Maybe she will put them in her painting today, she thinks, but no, it has never worked that way. She hears the wind rattle the window. Last night, it whipped the flames high into the black sky, the wood crackled, the smoke billowed, and she stood at the window, enthralled. She’d never tell Hayashi this, but it looked like a festival she once attended in Hokkaido. A large bonfire, with bundles of mugwort and bamboo grass being burned for purification. The men and women dressed in costumes, dancing, singing, and feasting. A spirit-sending ceremony. A dead bear had been found and they were sending its spirit back to the god world. She watched the flames of the bear’s spirit shoot up to the sky, her lover standing beside her.

  Her thumb joint creaks. She begins to lose her final pocket of precious warmth. Is this working? she asks.

  He nods, tasting metallic bitterness. He knows this taste comes from a lingering panic. When he was a boy, and the fire held him, swallowed up the air and the coolness, his mouth was full of the same acrid saliva. Then vomit when he smelled burning flesh. He calls out to the maid for a glass of water. She hands him a cup; he gulps it down and asks for another. As the taste subsides, he looks onto the memory of his burning house with horror, his family gone, but before that, before the flames, his proud father, his kind mother, his sister, the shameless beauty of his life; and somehow he cannot separate the two, the horror from the beauty, so closely linked, so intrinsically bound.

  This is working, he says to his wife, hoping to reassure her. His grip on the edge of the chair eases.

  Good. She clenches her jaw.

  And it is happening, the lovely moment is unfolding. He can’t feel anything in his right big toe. His left heel is disappearing to the cold and he loves this feeling, this erasure of his feet. He imagines he was once made of water. A long time ago, his limbs were plump with soft water; his skin, smooth like his wife’s.

  She hates his feet. The arch of each foot collapsed and blackened with streaks of dark purple, the outer edges pink with a line of bright red, the bottoms of his toes a swirl of black and dark blue, and his heels a sepa
rate color altogether, a shiny brown and black, like the streak left by a banana slug. She knows these colors too well. Several months ago, the colors seeped into her dreams. When she woke in the morning, she felt a churning in her stomach, certain they would tunnel their way into her paintings. That’s when she asked the maid to take over.

  She digs her fingers into his toes. Her thumb on top, her second finger below. The dent in the big toe on the left foot, he told her about it. Not from the fire. He must have been four. His family went to the seashore to escape the summer heat. He was so excited—did she have that reaction to water, he asked—he ran barefoot in the white sand and stepped on a piece of green glass. Strange, he said, how the body carries its marks.

  He is sweating now, a starchy, yeasty smell. She leans away and breathes through her mouth to deny herself the odor. She knows he’s almost at the point where he will no longer feel his feet. Her hands and wrists are now bright red. She presses on the crease along the center of the right foot, the puffy scar of his heels. He is most tender on the left side, the place connected to the heart.

  The toes on his right foot are now numb. His left foot, along the side. He feels his breathing open. He stares out the window watching the willow tree brush the wind.

  Her hands. She can barely move them now. Long, sharp spines poke into them, a punishment, but for what? What has she done? She wants to plead with someone, anyone. She closes her eyes, searching frantically for an image to take her away from the pain snaking through her body. Where is he? She has a terrible hunch that her father sent him far away. That her lover is no longer in Japan.

  She pushes her thumb into the tender spot.

  He sighs. He no longer feels pain.

  The cold wrestles into the long bones of her arms. Her teeth chatter, her lips a pale blue, her muscles pin to her bones, and soon, very soon, she will faint if she doesn’t stop. She hates the cold. She yanks her hands out, presses them into her armpits, and rocks herself.

  Enough, he says. No more. You’ve done enough.

  She shuts her eyes and wills the heat back into her hands.

  Thank you, he says.

  She barely hears him. The maid lifts her from the floor into a chair.

  Ayoshi-san, says the maid. Let me get you hot tea.

  He sits across from her, his head bowed, feeling terrible that he makes her suffer so and also deeply relieved. They sit like this in the kitchen of their home, in a room made of paper walls.

  She closes her eyes again and clamps shut her jaw. When she opens them again, he is staring wide-eyed at the teahouse, his lower lip drooping haphazardly. Who did it? she asks, feeling herself despise him. He is now calm, the pain pulled from his body, only the worried expression on his face from the teahouse. And she? She is filled with cold.

  He pauses. I don’t know.

  When he pulls his feet out of the bucket, the ice has melted, and his feet are deep red with streaks of blue. He wraps them each in a white towel.

  He asks the maid to shut the window screen. The hinge on the screen squeaks, and he grits his teeth and curls his fingers into tight fists, preparing to snap at the maid, Too loud, you are too loud, but he restrains himself. He’s irritable today, he thinks. He finishes his sweet rice cake and green tea.

  You’re not eating?

  Ayoshi shakes her head. I don’t feel well.

  He tells the maid to wrap the cakes.

  Do you think your feet will ever heal? Ayoshi asks, as though the question on her lips makes her nauseous.

  No, he says, tearing away the napkin tucked in his collar, seeing the disgust on her face. No, they won’t.

  She looks down. The towel has fallen away from his left foot. It lies there, limp and lifeless. She feels the one sip of tea rise from her stomach and clutch at her throat.

  Excuse me, she says, rushing from the table to the studio. There is a difference, she knows, between love and duty.

  AT LEAST HE CAN make this trip to town worthwhile; he’ll hire a builder to tear down the teahouse and a man to haul the boxes of pottery to the docks. Another large order, this time to England, and by now, he has lost track of how many boxes of vases, bowls, and teapots he has sent across the seas. These new officials are quite proud of him, in their own way, using him as a symbol of what could happen to any poor artisan or merchant or farmer. They want to like him—always the strained smiles and overly polite words—because of his busy trade with the West, but there are some things they can’t ignore.

  He walks with a stick, his back bent slightly forward, along the long dirt road to the town below. He knows some of these new officials, met them before the emperor’s restoration to power. Young, some of them exceedingly brash, an air of jaunty indifference, many of them educated in the West. They love all things Western, indiscriminately, full-heartedly. And he doesn’t disagree that the West can give Japan things it needs, but moderation, as the Buddha taught, everything with moderation.

  They made him an official of the new government; he will help promote Japanese arts and meet with the Western visitors who come to the town, they said. They gave him money to renovate the house and told him to make it feel expansive so the Westerners view Japan as wealthy and powerful, a force not to be ignored. After two centuries and more of isolation, it was time, long past time, to present Japan to the world. Hayashi added three lavish Western-style rooms filled with treasures and splendor. A wife, they said, find a wife who will make the Westerners feel welcome. They sent him a matchmaker. But when the new leaders demanded he tear down the temple, he refused. After many long discussions, they finally relented, saying he could let it stand.

  There, on the cliff, a bald patch in the wild wood—the remnant of the feudal lord’s house. Only five years ago, this town was ruled by a brutal feudal lord. The house, a monstrous structure, once loomed above the town like a vulture waiting to ravish the dead. Now the house has been torn down, demolished by the villagers, who, at first chance, refused to live in the shadow of his home, even if the ruler was no longer alive.

  The road is deeply grooved from the farmers’ carts. It leads down the gentle sloping hill blanketed with cedar and willow, down to the town, which he now sees. The feudal lord, who’d been appointed by the Tokugawa shogun, used to ride this very road on a big, black horse, accompanied by a handful of samurai. He wore shiny armor with medals and ribbons and a ceremonial cap, brandishing a sword in each hand. Amid the clatter of hooves, the booming voice of the man demanded the villagers get down on their knees as he passed. As a boy, Hayashi knelt beside his father on the shop’s wooden porch, his father cursing a steady rain of swear words, which would have appalled his mother, his father’s face bright red, the clickety-clack of the horse passing by. Each morning, the shopkeepers and farmers had to place a bag of their best goods for the lord’s men to take, without remuneration, without a thank-you, as if they wanted to be ruled with a swift whip and unrelenting sword. He recalls now the nights at home when there was nothing to eat, thinking of the lord’s storage rooms, filled with the best rice, daikon, cucumbers, sake, and dried seaweed and fish. As a boy, he played samurai in the backyard, running around with a stick as a sword, slaying the lord’s fighters as he entered the lord’s house and took back the food.

  He reaches the edge of town and sits on a bench to rest. Even though the air is cool, he is sweating, his kimono sticking to his back. The sun is out now, and he despises the sun’s splendor. Why didn’t he bring his hat?

  It has been at least a month since he’s been to town. Buildings are being torn down, and everywhere, the sound of hammers pounding and saws tearing through wood, the shouts of workers for another nail, another board, to move out of the way. This town was one of the earliest supporters of the new government, and for its commitment, received funding from the Meiji leaders to adorn itself in the Western style. Across the way, a sign says that a new Western restaurant is soon to arrive. Two doors down, an old grocery store is being stripped down and trotted out as a Western
clothing store.

  Good morning, says a storekeeper, sweeping the porch.

  Hello, says Hayashi. And they exchange the pleasantries of midmorning, the weather, the beauty of fresh daikon, and the storekeeper, who sells vegetables, looks at him curiously, as many of the townspeople do, as if trying to figure out some puzzling question—Who is this man who is allowed to keep the Buddhist temple open?

  Behind him is the spot where his father’s green tea shop once stood. Now, only an empty lot. He used to go to the shop at the twilight hour, at his mother’s request, to fetch his father. Inside the store, the shelves overflowed with bags of green tea, the scent spilling into the street.

  Father? he called out tentatively. His father was often in the back, huddled in a circle with other farmers and merchants, who spoke in grave and urgent tones. He crouched in the corner and listened to the men argue over the best way to overthrow the feudal lord. One night a merchant talked about a ship. The men in Satsuma were collecting money to buy a Western military ship. The merchant held up a picture of the ship. He’d never seen such a massive thing. His father convinced the town’s merchants to send them money.

  Several nights later, the shop and their home were set on fire.

  When the new leaders took power, Hayashi asked for the house with the stretch of gardens and the large temple.

  Before he rises from the bench, he looks to the dirt road that leads to the temple. He can’t see the sprawling wooden structure, or the large bronze peace bell, only the tip of the black tiled roof. He supposes it makes one curious.

  He walks to the minister’s building, the pain in his feet only a whisper, and as he reaches the porch, a raindrop falls on his eyebrow.

  Bless the rain, he says to no one. He stands there a moment, waiting for the showers. Rain pours onto his hair. The shopkeeper is still watching him. Hayashi feels his eyes bore into him. He guesses what the man is thinking: Did you hear how his whole family died? He’s the only survivor. He’s heard the talk. They say he is a quiet man. A potter. When they look at him, they always glance at his feet, which they’ve heard are remarkable swirls of blue and black.