Read Online The Printmaker's Daughter by Katherine Govier - Free Book Online Page B

painted an inlet with a little sailboat crossing it. I wasn’t very happy with it. Something was wrong with the distance and the shapes. I couldn’t make it appear on paper the way it was in front of me. I took it across to my father. He sat up and paid attention then and showed me how to correct it.
    “Now make a poem that goes with it,” he said.
    I started writing something about the opening being narrow, and when the poets saw it they laughed even harder. Their minds were in the gutter, and I told them so. “That’s not what I meant,” I said. “I am ten years old.”
    “You are ten years old when it suits you,” my father said. “And when it suits you better, you are twenty.”
    I told him I had no idea what he meant, izn it, and he told me to stop talking like a courtesan. I replied, in the voice of a nighthawk, “Hey, hey, Old Man. How about it?”
    Everybody laughed. I felt pleased with myself.
    “Has she no innocence, your daughter?” one of them asked.
    Hokusai just looked at me as if I were a stranger.
    “Look at the beautiful hornets,” said Sanba, adeptly diverting him. “Yellow and black, with such long legs. Watch they don’t sting.”
    “Too bad we’ve already done a book about sex and insects.”
    “The book did well,” murmured the publisher.
    “Without me it would have been nothing.”
    “You are so arrogant, Utamaro, my friend.”
    “I am arrogant because I am the best.”
    “You’re not the best. You’re only the most expensive,” said Tsutaya.
    “Publishers who buy cheap get what they pay for: the books won’t sell, and they’ll go out of business.” It was true; Utamaro was on top. No painter in Edo could touch him. The common people loved his paintings. The bakufu did too. Even the shogun’s women loved his paintings, so Shino said. My father tried some in his style, but no matter how good those were, they were still nothing but imitations of Utamaro.
    “You won’t be the best forever; new artists are always coming up,” mused somebody.
    “You mean those idiots who peek out from behind every screen in every brothel? Who crawl the streets like ants?” the great man droned. “They try to make up for want of brush power by dressing up their models in gorgeous costumes with painted faces. Whereas if I do a simple ink sketch with the power of my brush, what I create will live forever.”
    Downriver from us, a humped bridge with many feet, like a caterpillar, rose over the sluggish water. On the high point, you could just make out a thick, heavily clad figure on horseback in the midst of the men with their swords. A daimyo’s retinue was crossing.
    “Look who’s coming.”
    Everyone looked. It was Sadanobu. Sad-and-Noble, they called him. Famous author of edicts. Hater of the Yoshiwara and our lifestyle. He who—in the storyteller’s tale—punished the famous yakko. Was it our yakko ? She wouldn’t say.
    “No matter. He’s not important,” said Utamaro breezily.
    Sadanobu had been councilor when the shogun was a child. Now the shogun was grown up and had taken over. As it happened, the shogun was more corrupt than we ever were. Things were back to normal.
    “He can’t be ignored. He’s still got power.”
    “I wonder what he does with his time?”
    “Keeps busy with his martial arts. It fills the hours when he can’t make rulings.”
    “If he makes more, so what? We’ll break them. Look at how many times they’ve ruled that there will be no publication of news. Notice how often Kawara-ban comes out?”
    The little broadsheet and the criers who ran ahead of it announcing news had somehow survived the crackdown.
    “The bakufu are cats—just choosing their moment to pounce.”
    “I’ve been pounced on once,” said Kyoden. “That’s enough. Thereafter I became a mouse: obedient to the Way.”
    Sad-and-Noble’s men had come to the tobacco store and bought a copy of Kyoden’s yellow-back novel about life in the pleasure district. The councilor had