8

A FTER THE BATTLE at Ueno Park, Kato took Harry into his confidence more and more, allowing him into his studio and paying him to deliver finished work. Harry liked the studio for its sophisticated jumble of Greek statues, samurai armor, urns stuffed with props like umbrellas, swords and peacock feathers. Artfully out-of-focus photographs of French haystacks and cathedrals covered the walls, plaster casts of feet and hands weighted the cloths that covered works in progress. Whether his models posed in kimonos or without, Kato always wore a studio coat and beret because, as he said, “Professional decorum is never so essential as with a naked woman.”

Western art was for himself. For money, Kato produced purely Japanese woodblock prints. It was a transformation to Harry. Kato was no longer an imitation Frenchman fussing over a palette, he was a master who could capture the contours of a model with a seemingly continuous line of ink. The model herself was no longer a sallow, short-limbed version of a Parisian prostitute but a delicate courtesan wrapped in a silk kimono. Better yet for a boy like Harry, the process was a puzzle to be disassembled and put back together. Kato’s sketch went to a carver who sent back a close-grained cherry-wood keyblock and as many as ten other blocks carved for separate colors. Sometimes Kato sent the blocks to a printer, sometimes he did the printing himself. He printed one color a day, from light to dark-clamshell for white, red lead for tan, turmeric for yellow, redbud for pink, safflower for red, cochineal for crimson, dayflower for blue, lampblack for ebony-on soft mulberry paper. Kimonos were always a challenge, with their patterns of peacock eyes, russet leaves, cherry blossoms, peonies. The subtlest color of all, however, was skin, painted with the lightest pink to flatten the fibers of the paper. Layer by layer the colors coalesced into an image, the slattern into an innocent beauty, a swirl of lampblack for a teapot’s steam, a dusting of mica to suggest the night. Harry enjoyed the misdirection. Great artists like Hokusai or Kuniyoshi could each print a series called Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which were not pictures of Fuji but of life in Tokyo, of courtesans or fishermen or peddlers stumbling up a hill with a small, hazy Fuji floating serenely in the background.

Harry arrived once when Kato had gone for medicine and left the door unlocked. Harry was inside alone, stealing a smoke, when an ember fell from the cigarette and burned a drop cloth. He had to move a plaster cast to refold the cloth and hide the incriminating hole and, in doing so, uncovered a work in progress that he had not seen before: a courtesan in an elegant black-and-blue-striped kimono, her hair knotted and embellished with a tall white comb. What was different about this print was that she was in the pleated leather back of a large car, leaning to one side with a cigarette to accept a light from a male hand holding a lit match. The more Harry looked, the more he saw the artistry in the two sources of light, the match’s small ball of fire and the moon through the rear window of the car. How her twisted position revealed the line of her neck. How loose strands of hair and the kimono’s rumpled surface indicated a recent intimacy. What surprised him most was that the woman was Oharu.

Oharu was Harry’s best friend at the theater, his older sister and secret love. Harry had seen her only in chic skirts and French hats. He moved another cast to pull more of the drop cloth off. A second, almost finished print was of Oharu at a cherry-blossom party, wrapped in a maiden’s pink kimono and seated on a quilt covered with fallen pink and white blossoms. It would have been a portrait of innocence itself, except for the fact that the quilt was planted with bottles of sake and beer. Oharu slumped to the side, her eyes slitted with drink, a ukulele forgotten in her hands. Golden bees crawled over the blossoms, bottles, Oharu’s hair. A third print was so dark it took Harry a moment to understand it was a ballroom flecked by the reflections from a mirror ball on dancing couples, black figures on a blue floor, the only one identifiable, Oharu, in a red kimono waiting by the slanted light of a half-open door.

By now Harry couldn’t stop. He uncovered a stack of prints, a catalog of copulation, on every page a samurai or monk inserting his monstrously swollen erection into a woman experiencing such transport that her eyelids were closed and her teeth bit into cloth as if to stifle any outcry, while, under a kimono’s disarray, her legs splayed, the gaping bush lay exposed and her toes curled in ecstasy. The main thing so far as Harry was concerned was that the prints were antiques, not of Oharu.

“Interested?” Kato asked.

Harry hadn’t heard the artist return. There was no point in trying to hide the prints. “What are they?”

“Treasures. Instruction for a bride, entertainment for an old man, a charm a samurai would be proud to carry in his helmet. Now items of shame, victims of Western morality. You know, Harry, Westerners know so little about and seem to take so little pleasure in sex, it’s a wonder they propagate at all. Your father, of course, is the worst.”

“Why him?”

“Because he is a missionary and a missionary is a murderer, only he murders the soul. And he is smug about it. If it were up to your father, Japan would have no Shinto, no Buddha, no Son of Heaven and no sex. What would be left?”

“What about the pictures of Oharu? I like those.”

“You do? One moment you’re a snoop, the next you’re a connoisseur.”

“Could I buy one?”

“Buy?” Kato put the medicine down to cough, slowly open his cigarette case and regauge the conversation. “That’s different. I should treat you with more respect. These portraits of Oharu are not for any ordinary print run. They are one-of-a-kind, special collector’s editions.”

“I’ll pay over time.”

“It might take your lifetime. I don’t know of any missionary boy, even you, Harry, who can afford that. Which one were you thinking of?”

Harry scanned Oharu in the car, the cherry blossoms, the ballroom.

“The ballroom.”

“Ah, very telling, because she seems to be waiting, doesn’t she, hoping to dance. The room is so dark you might even be in it. You’d wait for the right dance, of course. She’s a little tall for you now, but in the fantasy she’s perfect, her ear to your cheek. That’s the charm, you know, of the ballroom dancer or café waitress. Not sex but conversation. Japanese men don’t talk to their wives. The most normal relationship they have is with their favorite waitress. How would you get that kind of money, Harry?”

Harry was truculent, devoid of ideas. “Some way.”

“That covers a lot of ground, all of it dishonest. I’ll have to think about that before you start robbing people in the streets. But, as an artist, I’ve never been more flattered.”

Harry was good with a knife and glue, and Kato found work for him after school at the Museum of Curiosities, helping the proprietor patch its half-human monsters. Harry especially liked the mermaids with their long horsehair and lacquered skin of papier-mâché, hideous fangs and sunken eyes, like the remains of a nightmare washed up on a beach. Harry earned more money when Kato entrusted him with the carving of censors’ seals for certain reproductions, fakes. Kato taught him how to trace old seals on translucent paper, transfer the paper to balsa and carve an exact copy that would add the stamp of authenticity.

“Who knows?” Kato said. “You may be an artist yet.”

“I can’t draw.”

“But you have a steady hand. Do you suppose that comes from picking pockets?”

“I’m not doing that so much anymore.”

“Go ahead. Artists steal all the time, that’s why taste is so important.”