Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

1800.  I am born.

Into the red squall of dawn, the teem of city. Into the vast numbers of townsmen with only one name. The earth is flat. The Shogun rules. It is a Virtuous Regime, a Benevolent Regime, and there is no unexpected event. Edo is splendid and everyone is for sale.

   I scream. I am O-Ei. Third daughter of the penniless artist who will one day be known as Hokusai. My older sisters are O-Miyo and O-Tetsu. Their mother, who also produced one son, is dead. My mother is the second wife.

   She squinted at me, the first of her children, the fourth of his.

   “She has large ears,” said my father in a tone of delight.

   “Large ears are lucky, in men. Not in women.”

   “She looks like a little dog, a Pekinese,” he said. “I will call her Ago-Ago.”

   It means Chin-Chin. I did have a peculiar one; wide at the jaw and then pointed, thrusting and determined.

   “There is self-will in that face,” my mother said. “It must be broken.”

   This kind of judgment made over a baby girl might convey any mixture of love, regret, or fear. It would not express gladness. But let us believe there was at least regret in my mother’s voice.

   My father, who smiled unceasingly with joy, took me. He danced and dandled me, astonished. It was as if he’d never seen a baby before. He feed me rice water with the tip of his finger. He tied me in a sling and wore me under his ribs, or on his back, if he was working. And my black eyes did not close. From that day there were two of us, both stubborn as cats. We were stealthy about getting our way but we knew each other’s tricks. And he did not break my self-will; he made it grow. I was his good luck charm.

   In years to come he called me Chin-Chin, when he remembered, but most often, he just called me ‘Hey!’ That was how I got my name, which was Ei. Later, it was O-Ei. But then so many things had changed.

   I was born in a hard time. And I grew a hard and spiny shell, like a chestnut. I heard what they said about me and smiled. Strong-jawed woman. She paints but does not sew. Chin-chin. My father’s words defined my world, even before his pictures did. This is the same for all children. Everything past became legend, immediately, and could
not be questioned. To describe the real world, my father’s stories were the only thing. We had no history, it was not allowed to us, the common people, the townsmen, chonin. We had no news, or right to it. Only what passed before our eyes: the grand Shogun’s procession, the march of the doomed man to the Punishment Grounds, the details of his crime written on the banner he carried. Our rulers had no faces, and our actors wore masks. But we knew their features from the actor prints. We gorged on whispers of love suicides. We drank up ghost stories. My father’s were the best.

   He could dream monsters! The murdered housemaid with the long neck, each disc of it a plate she’d broken; the drowned woman with hair spread like snakes; the giant spider, the floating skulls with pointed fingers. Do you see? — The creatures of our imagined world made us real. I was unlucky and lucky. Unlucky to be under the weight, the corpse, of the rotting feudal ways. And a daughter. A
woman. Even a strong-jawed one. But — Lucky to be born of him, in the centre of this magic. Lucky, and unlucky. I will explain. That is O-ei’s story.

   We townspeople were the low ones, the canny ones, wise in our gossip that traveled through whispers, jokes, pictures, and yellow-back novels. Give me your matinee idols and your supermodels, your secret codes and sex toys. We had it all. We also had our Lantern Festivals, our New Year’s bonfires, our fireworks, our kites. Strange: my father and the other artists gave us faces; and this made a power of us. When they caught on, the Bakufu forbade our stories and destroyed our pictures. They sometimes succeeded. But not for long.

   First memory: I lay on my mat in the damp dark and the cold of whatever small room we shared, and my father worked by the light of a candle. He stood and blew it out. He opened the door to the night. A fine white snow was falling.

   It was one o’clock in the morning. The snow erased the rooftops with its soft white brush, leaving only the thin dark outline of tiles When we looked out it was thick as feathers. Then he lifted me in his arms and we went out to stand under the sky. We looked up. It fell straight down without fluttering, freighted, through the barren trees.
There were no leaves to catch it. It melted on the lanterns: too warm. It fell around his feet and more snow followed. It blottered the ground, sopping up its colour, and then melted, darkening the packed earth until it gleamed in an unnatural way.

   There I lay, in his arms, warm, with the cold airy flakes landing on my eyes, my cheeks and my lips. How safe I felt! How loved! We were like one being.

   The snow was beautiful. I licked my lips where it tasted sweet. My father stared and sighed. I thought it was for happiness, for holding me. Now I know differently. He was puzzling how to catch it on the page.

   What time is it? My mother called.

   It is the Hour of the Rat, he said. The hour of romance. Or the hour of avoiding romance.

   What did he mean? She wanted to know.

   Here my father laughed softly. I know his laugh better than my own. It was a laugh not heartless, but mirthless, a laugh that had seen much and presumed nothing, a laugh unsurprised and yet delighted, a free laugh, at how life was — in this case, under a curtain of snow. My father was no romantic. He was a servant of circumstances, always.

   Even a courtesan might delay a while, he said, before necessity compels her to the company of one who waits. Examine herself in the mirror, or tidy the empty glasses. But not for long: this is the hour. The hour of tyranny, and love.

   Then we went back inside.

   My father lived in the world of his pictures. When he spoke of himself he did so with distance. He observed himself, as if he were spying on a figure he was going to create with brush and ink. He was, laughing or crying or eating or lying, “the artist”. He was “the old man”, long before he was old.

   At that time father made his living painting calendars. He delineated the long months and the short months; they changed every year. But soon after this memory of snow, it became illegal for the common people to own or sell such a calendar. Calendars could be issued only by license of the Shogun: the Shogun alone was responsible for counting days and months, for celestial movement and changing seasons.

   My mother cried. The powers had taken away our livelihood. You cannot afford one of these official calendars unless you are a lord or a lady, she complained.

   Think a moment, said my father. There is a way. This was a thing he often said. A calendar is a handy thing. People will still want one. And so my father became more elaborate. He made calendars that were disguised as pictures. For some months he sketched roosters, for others, chrysanthemum. Hidden inside the sworl of the flower petals or in the roosters’ feet would be the characters giving the numbers of days. The townspeople would spot these and understand very well that this picture was telling them the days, and even enjoy the little game. The officials failed to notice, and my mother was quiet, for a time.

   Another memory:

   He was working on the black outline of a Shoki, a demon-queller that he would paint on a silk scroll. The scroll was a private  commission, for a man who wanted the painting as a talisman to protect his son from smallpox, which often killed children. Using his black brush, my father drew the one-who-must-be-quelled, a gnarled and hideous little demon, down in the left hand corner of the page, at the god’s knees. He gave his demon-quelling god long flowing hair and a wispy beard. Shoki was pushing the demon’s chest backward with one hand, and thrusting his sword down its throat with the other. It should have been a frightening picture. But it wasn’t.

   The demon that he had painted was good; in other words, it looked evil. But his Shoki was without shape. He was not happy with it. Neither was I, the baby.

   My mother was in the next room with the three older children. She had put them to bed and had gone to sleep herself, on the simple mattress. She would wake very early while they were still sleeping and pluck at him to come to her for sex. This was not wise: how they would feed we four children who had already made our appearance was not at all clear. But she was an impetuous soul. She must have been to marry him. I heard him say this, from early days. He showed no consideration for what might be thought of as the delicate feelings of a child. Nor for the woman.

   I was listening. Listening for my father’s grunts of frustration as he worked.

   Outside the door, there came footsteps. Bearers, with a palanquin on some urgent errand in the dark? Or the crier, running through the wet snow toward the Ryogoku Bridge, his footsteps slapping the wet stone? The crier sometimes appeared on dark nights like this. He carried no written script.

   It was the crier. His voice went up from the stones to the rooftiles.

   Utamaro has been arrested!

   The warehouse of the printing firm Tsutaya Juzaburo has been stormed by the bakufu! They have seized the blocks! They have seized the copies of his latest print! They are going to burn the blocks! They are going to jail Utamaro!

   Hokusai leapt up. I screamed to go with him. He swore and wound me in his sling. The chosen burning place was the open space in front of the Ryokgoku Bridge over the Sumida River. This was a good choice, because people could stand on the bridge, and see.

   The Ryogoku bridge was high and arched and long, and made of rounded wood timbers. Below it floated all the little boats that plied the Sumida — the ferry boats, the barges, the restaurants, the fishing boats. Once a year we had glorious fireworks there. I would stand in the centre at the highest point over the water, the fireboat nearly straight below me. I could see the prow loaded with the round brown balls that contained the powder, each one with its black lettering telling just exactly which kind of fire-picture it would make.

   I could see the boatman light the wick and drop the ball down a tube that stood straight upward in the center of his boat. I was incoherent with excitement. Then the smoke and fizzle, and then the burst of coloured light, arcs of it, silver and red and green, stars in it, and twisters, snakes in it, and more bangs giving birth to more stars. I would gasp and hold my father’s hand and the lights would do their work in writing on the sky for a moment, and then shush themselves, making sounds like mothers with fingers to their lips, blowing through their teeth. Down each went and the dark reclaimed the sky.

   But this night the bakufu had made a pyramid of the woodcut blocks, and crumpled the prints into tight balls and thrown them under the wood to act as tinder. Some held Utamaro by the elbows. He did not struggle but stood proudly. He bowed to us. He was a tallish man with an arched nose. It was as if he had invited the audience.

   “Where are the wooden clappers, to start the show?” He referred to kabuki; even I knew that. And he stood proudly watching.

   The sparks flew high and awestruck silence fell on the people who were gathered. The sparks were aimless but light, and drifted up in the breeze that came in from the bay, and then dimmed and slowly fell into the water, and became harmless. The fire’s glow fell into the water, like a sun going down, like the upside down world that it was
part of. The cherry wood was hard and it crackled. The cutters had run away. This was hours and days and weeks of their time. The blocks were the firm’s worth. The publisher stood with his head in his hands. The picture, and its means of production, gone forever.

   When the burning was over, the fire died and sizzled as the soldiers threw water over it. Smoke cut into my eyes. Though the soldiers waved the crowds away, Hokusai and I kept our eyes on Utamaro as long as we could. Then we went home and my father painted his Shoki fiery red and it was good.