The Printmaker's Daughter by Katherine Govier

could no longer stand all his friends’ bullying. He was yearning toward the dark, toward the place where it was silent, where no voice baited him. I started toward him and then stopped. That man Sanba was in my path.
    “What do you suppose Hokusai is doing?”
    “He’s worshipping,” I said.
    “The moon?”
    “No, the North Star. Myoken. The writers’ star. The star of the brush. It is one of the seven stars that make the Great Dipper. There.” I whispered, pointed; then I saw that he knew; he was teasing me.
    “I didn’t know your father was a worshipping man.”
    “Of course he is. We go often to his temple at Yanagishima in Honjo, where he was born,” I said, amused that Sanba would not know so obvious a thing.
    Away from the row of lanterns the stars became brighter. There was smoke in the air; they did not hold still. They were intense, but they flickered. They were covered. Then, in a moment of clear air, they emerged overhead in waves and currents, like graceful brushstrokes of light through the dark sky.
    He caught my hand. “Let’s not disturb him,” said Sanba. “It’s a good hiding place.”
    But I wanted to.
    “Father!” I said. “Old Man!”
    “Hey, you. Oooo-eei,” he replied, without surprise, or regret that he had left me, and without turning his head. “Come and look.”
    I loosened Sanba’s hand. “Thank you,” I said. “You can go now.”
    I climbed the tree and tucked myself in at the Old Man’s side. We stared at the dark sky as the night went on.
    I was a ghoulish child. It was the company I kept. But I was not gloomy; it was a glittery, feverish fascination with ghosts I had. I watched everyone flirt with death. I was always excited. I was difficult to tame; my spirits were high.
    But that night of the new year I was wary.
    I searched for one beautiful thing on which to focus my mind. And I could find nothing. Not the cherry blossoms on the boulevard—they were planted only for their blooming season, and then they were ripped out. I bled for those trees, that they could not put down roots. The yellow flowers too were hastened into bloom. Soon after, their thin stalks collapsed and they died.
    Not Shino’s long, inquisitive face and fluting voice: no, now when I saw her face I thought of her in the Hour of the Ox, when she rose from her mattress, dark circles under her eyes, a washboard of bones visible on her chest where the kimono fell open, holding a lighted taper.
    “Tie up your kimono,” I would whisper. “You look so cold.”
    Her chin drooped and her hair overwhelmed its spiky pins and pulled to the side of her head. Her red undergarments showed around her ankles. If I showed pity, it made her angry.
    “Don’t you pity me! ” she chided.
    My father said I was not to feel fear, and she said I should not feel pity. What could I feel, then? Anger. I felt it, but I could not hold on to it. If I felt nothing, what did that make me? A ghost?
    This thought was agitating, and I twisted away from it, nearly falling from the crook of our tree. Then I found it interesting and tried to get it back.
    Perhaps I really was a ghost. How long had I been one? Who else was a ghost? Was my father? He was angry, yes, as he’d shown tonight, but his anger died. Then he was sad. Was it because he made things beautiful that were not, in truth, beautiful? And he did it so well! Beauty that pulled at the cords of the heart, the cords that ran down the back of the throat, beneath words, beyond words, straight to tears. That beauty owned him. It replaced flesh and blood. He would deny all of us and himself to serve that beauty.
    I had always known it. I had learned in his arms. This art and the need to make it was stronger than love. But each time I saw the god of art win, I had to learn again. And painfully.
    Myoken was his master. His master said he need not eat when others ate. He need not sleep when they slept. He need not paint what other people wanted. He must paint what he was