Goodbye to the Ghost by Katherine Govier

When is a novel finished? My gut tells me, followed later by my mind. Does everyone else get sick, sleep deeply, dream weirdly, feel abandoned? I rewrite, edit, copyedit, of course. The tasks drag on. Get blurbs, approve cover. Read page proofs. Fiddle. See them again, sitting on hands. No more changes! I complain but really this is pleasure. It is the long goodbye.

It’s tough with every novel but with The Printmaker’s Daughter—published in Canada as The Ghost Brush--, it has been especially tough.

I worked on the book for five years. I recreated Edo, the largest city in the world- 200 years ago. I’ve made many real friends. And I have become very close to a certain rough-voiced, insistent, ghost.

I met her in Washington at a symposium on the late works of Hokusai. She was angry and I didn’t blame her. She had been pushed out of history in her own time, and still met snubs and derision by art historians—despite the overwhelming evidence that she acted as her father’s “brush”.

Her father was Hokusai, creator of “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”, most famous image ever to come out of Japan. She took the painting name Oei, a pun on how her father called her- “Hey You!” She “painted but did not sew”- a fact so extraordinary in her time that became, effectively, her obituary. She didn’t cook either; she and her father, who were constant companions, ate take-out. Yes, they had take-out in Edo in 1820. She was divorced, gloomy and plain.

Or so they said. But I didn’t see how she could have been. Her brushwork was meticulous, her colours intense, jewel-like. Her imagination—like the erotica she created- was surreal.

Chasing Oei I went to France and England, to the Netherlands, to Japan. Her fans don’t accept the rap history gave her. She and her fate jump-started a hundred conversations.

Curators led me to other curators. Critics pointed me to obscure articles. In the mountains of Nagano, Japan, I walked by a little stream with a researcher who knew that she mixed her astonishing pigments right there. I squatted as she would have, to rinse her bowls, and looked up at the sawtooth mountains that closed her in.

It was fun playing detective. Something like collective memory, “kolekutibu memori” exists in Japan, though the country appears relentlessly modern. “Some people say,” a curator in Kawasaki told me, “that she was killed...it was a dangerous time.” In the back rooms of a miso factory a man pulled out a cup with brushes and dried pigment, used by one of her students. I listened while a translator read one of her letters out loud. She was charming. She said: “We have never met but I trust you are well…”

THE PRINTMAKER’S DAUGHTER has been the best traveling companion ever. I made sure her sense of humour, her lovers, and her frustrations got equal play.

Now I have to move on. Oei has changed the way I see the world, not only her world, but my world too. I miss her. It is like a death. Except that she was already dead. How do you bury a ghost? I think you don’t. You just hope that she rests a little easier.