Katherine Govier’s Long Goodbye

Katherine Govier has been talking to ghosts. Well, a ghost: Oei, daughter of the Japanese print-maker Hokusai, the protagonist of her latest novel. Now, after five years of writing, research, and travel, the novel is out in bookstores—and so the author finds she has to say goodbye. Here, to my great delight, she talks about what this is like:

When is a novel finished? Maybe some of you writers know, but I don’t. Does everyone else get sick, sleep deeply, dream weirdly, feel abandoned? After I write the end I rewrite, edit, copyedit, of course. The tasks drag on. Get blurbs, approve cover. Read page proofs. Fiddle. Read them again. I complain but really this is pleasure. It is the long goodbye. Eventually I have to let it go. Don’t I?

It has been tough with every novel but this time, with The Ghost Brush, it has been especially tough.

I’ve been working on the book for five years. I have invented/recreated—with lots of travel and research—a detailed past world. I’ve made many real friends. And some imaginary ones. 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 grumbling away and I didn’t blame her, the great print designer’s daughter. She had been pushed out of history and was still being snubbed and diminished by the art historians. She came to me begging for recognition, to be given a place in history.

I took up her cause. Here was a woman who took the painting name Oei because it was a pun on the way her father called her— “Hey You!” She did not sew, a situation so grave for a woman in her time that it alone was remarked upon for the next 150 years. She didn’t cook either; she and her father, who were constant companions, ate take-out from the markets. 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 were stunningly intense, jewel-like. Her imagination—and the erotica she is thought to have created–was wild.

Oei was a terrific traveling companion. I went to Europe, to the United States, to Japan asking about her. She opened many doors. She has her fans, who don’t accept the rap history has given her—and some detractors. She and her fate jump-started a hundred conversations.

Though she must have been dead 150 years she left certain objects, certain traces. Curators led me to other curators. Critics pointed me to obscure articles. In Obuse, 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 in the water and loved the sawtooth mountain range that closed her in.

I discovered something like a collective memory, “kolekutibu memori” in Japan, a country that appears, to the casual observer, relentlessly modern. “Some people say,” a curator in Kawasaki told me, “that she lived with her father in Yokosoka.” As if this had been going on in living memory, not nearly two centuries ago! This particular curator, a young woman, called her Oei-san. It is a familiar suffix, one that you use for a colleague. In the back rooms of a miso factory I gasped as 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. There, she was on her best behavior: “We have never met but I trust you are well…”

She has been a real friend to me. Her beautiful pictures of have heartened me. She has been the best traveling companion ever. We laughed. We shopped in the open food markets and oogled the food. We wandered in temples. We stared at prints trying to figure out if they were from her brush or that of her famous father. And I wrote her story, trying to free her from clichés and naysayers, making sure that her sense of humour, her lovers, and her frustrations got equal play.

Now the story is over. She is fading. I have to move on. Katsushika Oei has changed the way I see the world, not only her world, but my world too. I am going to 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.

Katherine Govier is an award-winning author of 9 novels and 3 collections of short stories. The Ghost Brush is now in stores; you can also read her essay about travelling to Japan to research the Edo period for this novel, “Showing My Hand”, in Issue 108 of TNQ.