The Ghost Brush by Katherine Govier

way that stories came from real life. But could they come this close to us? Was that my yakko? My Shino? Could it be? I sat in a corner and rocked myself and pulled at my chin.
    “Look at her! She’s doing it again! She’s going to make her chin even longer.”
    T HE NEXT TIME we were in the Yoshiwara I ran off, looking for her.
    “Ei! Come back.” Hokusai put down his brush with a clatter of annoyance and ran over to scoop me up: I screamed with delight.
    “Worthless child!” he said, loudly enough for anyone to hear. “Why am I saddled with this wild thing?” He ran bowlegged back to his travelling mat on the ground and scolded: “You stay still or your father cannot work, and when your father cannot work, you cannot eat!” That was his favourite line.
    And then Shino appeared.
    “May I take her to the caterers? I have to pick up some cakes for tonight and take them back to my house,” she said.
    “Take her!” he said. He didn’t look up from his page. “By all means, take her.”
    That’s how I got to see inside her high-class brothel.

6
    The Corner Tamaya
    THE CORNER TAMAYA was on the corner of the boulevard and Edocho 2, the second big street of the Yoshiwara. It was built of wood, with three steps going up from the walk. The entrance hall was filled with red cabinets and silk floor cushions. There was an ebony Go board and vessels for incense. “These are from China,” whispered Shino.
    “How do you know?”
    “They’re like the ones we had at home.”
    To one side was an alcove with a low desk in it. There a woman sat on her heels, looking harassed. She was not young, but her clothes were heavy and ornate, layer on layer of velvet and patterned silk. She was doing three things at once: writing, giving orders to a small girl, and throwing her voice behind her up the stairs to order someone else. Her name was Kana, Shino whispered, and she was the housekeeper, a former prostitute who had married the boss.
    “Here you are, Shino,” she said bitterly. “Back at last. Hurry with those to the kitchen.” She didn’t look down far enough to notice me. I was very short.
    We went back to the kitchen, which was warm and splashed with water from a well in the centre. Light came down through a vent in the roof. Shino caught the eye of a cook and passed him her parcel. On the way back we saw the bookkeeper, occupied with his abacus. She whispered to me, “He sold me my bedding. I had no money. I don’t like it either—it’s a rough cotton futon and all dull grey, nothing soft or smooth against my skin.”
    I didn’t have a futon of my own; my sisters and I pulled one tattered thing back and forth between us.
    “He said, ‘You’re an apprentice. What does it matter what you sleep on? When you are accepting clients you will buy beautiful bedding.’ He wrote down the cost in a column beside my name. ‘This is your account.’ But there were so many charges against it already! ‘I just got here. What are those?’ I asked him. He ticked them off. ‘A month of food. The bedding. Tips for the bearers who brought you here.’ Do you get that, Ei? I paid for my own trip to jail.”
    She laughed at her story, and I watched her face to see if it still split up the way it did when I first saw her. It did.
    “When I came here I didn’t understand money. In my home the women didn’t handle coins. Except, maybe, when we sneaked out to buy pictures.”
    I handled the coins my father paid no attention to: mon, momme. I pointed to the ones in her palm. “I know some,” I said. There was a squared one. The large brown ones had a hole; those were the ones the moneylenders kept tied in long laces, where they sat at the foot of the Ryogoku Bridge.
    “You can help me, then. You worldly thing.”
    I was delighted.
    T he upstairs was one large space around the staircase. In cubicles between thin screens, the courtesans slept; their doors were curtained. I could hear their voices. When one screen opened I saw a