Making Red

obuse — From my hotel window on Tokyo Bay, I watched a neon-trimmed Ferris wheel spin slowly in the dark. I wished its little buckets could dig down and raise the dead of old Edo, buried with their picturesque wood-and-paper world under this concrete metropolis. But the buckets raised no one.

Can I?

I have come here on the trail of a fictional character. That is, she will be fictional when I’m finished with her. At the moment, she is historical, but barely. She is a great, lost woman artist. A painter who lived in the shadow of her famous father. Her birth name was Ei. But he called her to his side with a “Hey, you!” (O-oi in Japanese) so often that she adopted a homonym of this as her painting name, “Oi.” Her time, the last half-century of the Tokugawa shogunate, was hugely oppressive to women. Around her father’s death in 1849, she was briefly famous. Then she disappeared. There is no record of her death. She rarely signed her work. But when she did, she called herself Flourishing Woman. Or perhaps it was Drunken Woman; the characters could mean either. It depends how you read them.

I’ve been looking for her in another language, another script, another century. Now I’m in another country — hers. Do I think I will encounter her, walking on the street? No. The past is all but invisible here. But how funny. On my rail pass, embossed and in foil, is The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, the most famous image from Japan ever to wash over the rest of the world. Her father, Hokusai, Japan’s premier printmaker, created it. And Oi was there, under its snarling lip.

After so long, all this happens in one day.

6:30 a.m.: Train from Ueno Station to Nagano.

8:30: Change for Obuse, on a slow commuter.

9:15: My spirit guide is waiting for me under the station roof in this little mountain town where Hokusai took refuge in his ninth decade. I’ve never met Kazuhiro Kubota. But he knows more about Oi than anyone alive. Through the aegis of a generous scholar, a translator, and email, we have corresponded. According to collective memory, kolekutibu memori in Japanese, Hokusai “just showed up, when he was about eighty.” He had walked from Edo through the mountain pass. He found a generous patron here. Later Oi came to assist him. They enjoyed times of comparative comfort and ease, and produced work that can still be seen in the town.

10:15: We are leaning over a case in the Hokusai Museum, with Hart Larrabee, an American translator. Under glass are two letters in Oi’s hand. There is also a copy of a receipt with little sketches of both the master and Oi drawn on it. It can be seen as a clear statement that father and daughter worked as partners. Kubota-san was employed at the museum. But now he has been let go. He wonders if his research on Oi is not appreciated, if it is seen to detract from her father’s reputation.

He reads the letter, written in pre-modern Japanese, and says the words aloud in contemporary Japanese. Hart repeats it in English. “Thank you for your letter. Although we have never met,” she begins, “I am most pleased to hear that you are well . . .”