Chapter

           Ten

Reeds by the river

Moving in a summer breeze

Ink flows on paper

A few days after the fireworks festival, Lord Shimizu announced at breakfast that he would be leaving Edo on business.

‘I’ll be away at least two weeks.’

‘Please travel safely, Minoru.’ I was sure that, like me, Misaki must be wondering if his sudden departure had anything to do with his investigation of the attack on the government officials, but he had not referred to the incident again.

Whether out of a desire to distract us or improve us, he informed Misaki and me that we would be having a visitor in his absence; in addition to our weekly ikebana lessons we were to have painting lessons. The painting master had been recommended by Isamu’s own master; Daiki was a local man with a good reputation who occasionally took on a few private students.

‘I met him once at a friend’s exhibition,’ Isamu told us a few days later. ‘I think you’ll like him.’

As he had the last time Shimizu went away, Isamu made a point of dropping by regularly. On this afternoon, he had come to us carrying a scroll of paper, and some tools for painting that his uncle had asked him to purchase for us.

‘Daiki-san was kind enough to lend me this to copy.’ Isamu had mentioned before how he and his fellow students were encouraged to copy the works of other artists as a way of learning. ‘It’s called Bamboo by Moonlight.’ He unrolled the scroll and laid the first sheet of paper before us.

‘How beautiful!’ exclaimed Misaki, but I was struck speechless.

It was a simple scene — a small grove of bamboo rendered in black ink and stretching towards a silvery moon — yet it was so much more. The way the light fell on some leaves, illuminating them, while others were faint and shadowy, the sense it gave of a slight movement of breeze rippling the foliage, aroused in me a feeling I hadn’t had in a while; not since I’d last stood in the forest near my home and felt the kami of the trees, of the wind: a feeling of deep connection to the natural world.

‘And this is a painting by the friend I was talking about.’

Called The Poetry Gathering, it showed a pavilion by a stream with a group of scholars drinking and writing poems.

‘Is that it?’ Misaki asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Why haven’t you brought one of your own paintings to show us?’ she demanded.

‘Oh, those are not good enough yet for such critical eyes.’ His teasing tone matched Misaki’s, but it was me he was looking at. He thought I was critical? It seemed Isamu was another who considered me too outspoken.

‘I’m sure that’s not the case,’ I said stiffly, trying to conceal my hurt.

After the ikebana teacher, I expected someone similarly small and fussy, but the painting master was a big barrel-chested man with a deep voice. I couldn’t imagine how those big hands had produced a work of such delicacy as Bamboo by Moonlight.

He was modestly dressed in a blue kimono and came unaccompanied, carrying a wooden box.

We sat together in the reception room, Misaki and I with the tools Isamu had brought arranged on two low tables in front of us. Between us stood a bowl of water.

Daiki withdrew his own tools from his box. ‘You see here? This is all you need to paint, just four things: the ink stick, the ink stone, some paper, a brush. Well, as you improve you’ll need several brushes, but for now we’ll just use an all-purpose one. And this paper — again, it’s just for practising. I’ll let you know when your work is worthy of better. If it is.’ His words were delivered in such a jovial tone it was impossible to feel insulted.

‘To begin, you need to make your ink.’

He showed us how to grind the ink stick on the rectangular stone, which had a smooth surface and a small depression for water.

‘We put a little water here — not too much — then hold the stick straight and grind evenly. Now you try.’

I ladled a small amount of water into the depression until it was half full, then tentatively began to rub the stick on the stone.

‘Round and round,’ Daiki encouraged me, ‘so that the water and ink mix well.’

Misaki was doing it as easily as if it were second nature, the movement of her stick on the stone smooth and confident.

‘You’ve had painting lessons before,’ I said accusingly.

‘No, I haven’t.’

When we each had blue-black ink on our stone, Daiki directed us to pick up the long thick brushes with firm bristles, holding them in the middle. From his box he withdrew a single green reed.

‘Think of the brush as an extension of your hand, your hand as an extension of your mind. If you paint a reed, use the hand and the brush to express how the reed makes you feel.’

Uh-oh. Expressing my feelings through ikebana hadn’t exactly been a success.

‘Watch.’

I had found his size intimidating, yet once he held the brush in his hand a great stillness settled over him. He reminded me of the hill behind my home, its great bulk a safe haven, somehow reassuring rather than threatening.

‘A single reed, a single stroke,’ he murmured, his deep voice hypnotic. His hand glided over the paper, neither quick nor slow but sure and steady.

He turned the sheet of paper around to show us.

I studied the reed. It was not an exact copy of the reed in front of us, but somehow it captured the particular character of the reed. I was seeing the reed through his eyes, I understood, and the reed expressed some part of him; they were connected, and they had come from the same hand, the same mind, the same eyes — the same spirit — as the picture of the bamboo grove beneath the moonlight.

‘How did you do that, sensei?’ I asked, looking from the painted reed to the master’s face.

His eyes looked into mine with a deep knowing, as if reading there the feeling his painting had given me. ‘It’s simple,’ he said. He raised his left hand to touch first his forehead then the fingers that still held the brush. ‘The mind, the hand — that’s all you need.’ He smiled. ‘And a good teacher, of course.’

Before he would let us attempt to paint the reed ourselves, he insisted that first we practise making brushstrokes on the paper.

‘Vary the speed, the movement of the wrist, get a feel for the sensation of brush on paper. Make thick lines, thin lines, straight, curved.’ We filled many sheets of paper in this way before at last we painted the reed. I tried to empty my mind of everything but the slender stalk of green. I studied the slight crease in the centre, the broad base and the tapered tip, and I tried to express all that I had learned about the reed through my brush.

When we were done I felt tired but pleasantly so. I was surprised to find that nearly the whole afternoon had passed.

‘That was . . .’ I shook my head.

‘Even better than ikebana?’ A smile played on Misaki’s lips.

‘So much better than ikebana,’ I said emphatically.

Misaki said nothing, and I noticed she looked not so much tired as strained.

I could hardly wait for the next painting lesson. In the week after the first lesson, I practised grinding ink so often that Misaki joked we would need to send Isamu out for more supplies before we’d even had our second lesson. I also suffered through an ikebana lesson in which we had to create an arrangement using waxy-leaved lilies and cascading spirea branches. While Misaki’s looked both artful and spontaneous, mine looked like it had been flung together in a typhoon and happened to accidentally be blown into a vase.

When at last the time for our painting lesson came, I almost groaned aloud when I saw Daiki was carrying a bunch of irises. Ever since my first ikebana lesson I had considered the iris my enemy.

‘You’re glaring at these flowers like they mean you harm, Kasumi-san,’ the painting master observed.

‘Kasumi has had a disagreement with irises. But perhaps painting them will help her to forgive them.’

It really was stupid to hate a flower, I had to admit. As I watched the painting master demonstrate how to splay the bristles of the brush for the curve of the bloom, twisting his wrist in a fluid motion, I began to see the flower through his eyes. Grinding the ink stick on the stone, watching the water turn black, I found myself eager to paint it.

With the brush in my hand, I gazed at the flower for a long time, until I felt that I had absorbed the soft texture of the petals through my skin, felt their shape fill my mind. Then I took a deep breath and let the flower out through my brush; instead of fighting the iris I was moving in harmony with it.

Peace settled over me like a blanket and I allowed my mind to drift with the movement of the brush; there was no need for words here, and I could be . . . the flutter of a petal in a building breeze, the sharp line of a leaf.

‘I see you are grateful to hold the brush in your hand.’

I woke as if from a dream at the sound of the master’s voice. He and Misaki were both looking at the page in front of me. I had filled the paper with irises.

‘These are good,’ said Daiki.

Misaki nodded. ‘They are, Kasumi.’ She looked at her own page and wrinkled her nose. ‘They make mine look lifeless.’

‘Yours are technically very proficient, Misaki-san,’ the teacher assured her. ‘But these . . .’ He tapped the corner of my page with his forefinger. ‘These speak of the spirit of the iris.’ He gave me a considering look. ‘Why is that I wonder?’

I couldn’t explain it exactly. I only knew that while I had been painting I had ceased to be conscious of my mind; for once, the voices in my head that told me how to be, who to be, were muffled. For once I had been only myself.