The Artist of Total Absorption

by Mike Rogers

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

While soysauce may be applied over-generously, flattery can never be spread too thick, and it did not fail to produce the required effect. Fingers removing the desired one’s garments never trembled in such swelling anticipation of delights to come as did the connoisseur’s while he fumbled in his saddlebags to reveal the beautifully rounded objects of his own passion.

“When only the lad greeted me,” he said, “I was concerned that the potter himself, instead of being content to sell individual items to individuals, thereby sharing the pleasure more widely, might have gone away to offer the entire production of his latest firing to someone much richer than myself, one who would give him a premium for its exclusivity. The potter never let the lad get involved in any of the business — he’d whip him and kick him and drive him away if he ever showed the least interest. I must say, I found that behaviour somewhat at odds with the sensitivity displayed in the creation of a marvellous exhibit such as this.”

He whipped off the wrapping cloth and held what it had concealed up on his finger-tips, which nonetheless gripped it firmly.

It was, all in all, a pot, a slightly dumpy, round-bellied one, satisfied with itself, snug and smug. The proportions, though, were right, and the glaze had dribbled in all the right places, but it didn’t strive beyond itself, it didn’t try to explain why it hadn’t grown any bigger, but was happy to be just the size it was. I could see why he liked it, but it wasn’t my taste.

“The lad explained to me — funny, you know, but I was surprised to hear him speak — I’d never heard him speak before, I’d always assumed he might be dumb — he explained to me, in really elegant and eloquent language, that the potter was undertaking a journey to the far West, the duration of which could not be estimated, but that it would result in a new ingredient which would improve the quality of the pottery.

“I told him I was sad if this was the only piece left available for sale, but he assured me that, as the apprentice, he had full knowledge of all his master’s techniques and had conducted a firing with a sample of the new ingredient and had some examples ready to show me.”

While he was telling me all this, the connoisseur was wrapping up his first prize in the cloth it had come out of, stowing it safely in his left-hand saddle-bag and producing from the right-hand one another cloth-wrapped bundle, which he held in hesitation while he got his breath back under control. I was puzzled for a moment, because there had been no physical exertion involved in the procedure. Then, of course, I realised that it was suppressed emotion that lay behind his respiratory problems, and then I, too, felt compelled to hold my breath and become rapt with attention, not daring even to blink before the revelation came.

And it was a revelation. The cloth slid from the shoulders of the pot as a robe slides from the shoulders of a naked lover to make, as it were in echo, a tantalizing shape on the ground beneath. The pot itself was smaller, but only in the kind of size you can measure with your fingers. In every other way it was greater. Its base tucked in under itself, so that it almost seemed to float rather than sit on a surface.

Above that, it spread out in perfect proportion with the curved lip that finally crowned it, emphasizing that summit as a culmination that would not have been so beautiful without the matching support below. How rarely do you find a head and a body that go together so well that neither diminishes the other?

I had stood there so still for so long that I found myself at last gasping for breath, and the pot’s lucky owner was in exactly the same state, his eyes moist with delight.

“Do you know,” he said, “I don’t think I care if the old potter never comes back from his long journey to the West, if his apprentice can make stuff like this! If I dared to put it down for a moment, I’d show you how it rings... ”

But he didn’t dare; instead, he wrapped it up, put it safely back in the right-hand saddlebag, climbed onto his horse and trotted off.

I packed my sketching-things away in my satchel and stood thinking about what to do next. I was, of course, delighted that the maltreated and abused apprentice had managed to emancipate himself from his master; what a terrifyingly misused word and position that can be! So much so, that I didn’t really care how that emancipation had been achieved, though I had my ideas.

A potter’s resources of colourings for glaze contain many substances whose powers extend well beyond their primary uses in the craft, to say nothing of heavy and blunt objects. Fire, too, kept like a wild animal in a cage, needs to be fed and can eat up many things that might otherwise prove embarrassing. There was no need to upset Takai, my kind host, by reminding him of the whole business, when I could sort it all out for myself.

I slipped into the compound, went up to the house, and called out, “Master Potter!”

The lad appeared. I know about bodies; you have to, if you want to draw them. I saw the distortions that came from broken bones badly healed, the limp, the twist in the spine from malnutrition... and the fire in the eyes. Some mornings, even now, I can see that in my own. Do I have a mirror? Of course! Do you not remember what trade my father followed? The artist’s nearest model is himself or herself. I’ll hear no nonsense about women not being artists, when my own daughter is one!

“The potter is away,” he said, “on a long journey into the West. I am only his apprentice.”

“Nonsense,” I said, “let us both agree to speak the truth. You are the Master Potter. The man who bought you from your parents and did unspeakable things to you until at last you were able to stop him was merely a potter, competent, but not great and certainly not a master.

“I congratulate you, though, on your ingenuity in speaking the truth, while not revealing all of it. The potter has gone on a long journey into the West, from which he will not be returning, and you are the one who sent him on it. I do not know exactly how you did it, but I am sure of it.”

When I said that, he smiled at me. “Will you not come in and share a glass with me, noble sir?” he said, making a gesture to invite me in.

“How stupid do you think I am?” I replied. “You have a whole apothecary’s rack of poisons in there, and I am standing here, accusing you of murder! Not, of course, that I would think for one moment of putting you in the hands of justice for taking justice into your own hands. I congratulate you on it, just as I congratulate you on your skill as a potter.

“It is not an art I practise, but it is one that I can appreciate and, were I an unscrupulous collector, with what I know I could blackmail you to make me masterpiece after masterpiece for nothing. Obviously, that is not my intention, so you can stop looking to see how near at hand that iron-shod pole is, with which your former owner threatened my kind host at the farm over there.”

I watched the tension go out of his body. He took three paces forward and slumped down onto the top step of the three that went up to the veranda. “It is such a relief not to have the secret any more,” he said.

“The details, I’m afraid, will have to remain yours,” I said, “since I do not wish to be burdened with them, but I do have a third congratulation to offer you.”

He raised his head and looked at me in puzzlement.

“The ingredient,” I said, “the special ingredient that you mentioned, always telling the truth, because I think I know what it is.”

“How can you?” he said. “Nobody knows.”

“Nobody,” I said, “is supposed to deal with traders outside our realm, but they do. I have... contacts, who get me works of art, prints, drawings, from Europe, to improve my art, teach me new tricks, new ways to imitate nature.

“One of them wanted to show me a cup he had been given by a trader from Europe, one of the ones that come to the island by Nagasaki. The traders used to bring examples of the kind of pottery the Europeans wanted, so that the Korean potters in Japan could make the sort of thing that would sell more readily.

“He showed me how the cup rang like a bell when you tapped it with your fingernail. The pot you sold today did just that, though its purchaser was too shy to show me. He was like a man who has a girl and boasts about her to his friend but doesn’t want to show her off to him in case he steals her! I know how they make that stuff. And I know why there will never be any sign of your former owner’s skeleton.”

I watched him shake his head and wasn’t sure if he was admiring my cleverness or despairing at his situation.

“Finally,” I said, “I have some advice to give you. Your former master has, shall we say, entered completely into your work. Now is the time to break that connection. Sell all you have made, and move away from here the moment that is done or sooner, if you can. There will be a list of all the customers somewhere. Go to them. Take their money. Set up somewhere else. Make yourself free from the whole of your past. Cattle bones will work just as well. Go and live by a slaughterhouse.”

I could see he was beginning to resist. I was glad to see it. He had spirit.

“Why should I do this, if, as you say, I can trust you?”

“Because I have some experience of these things. Who do you think drew the One Hundred Ghost Stories?”

His eyes filled with horror and amazement, and he fell forward in front of me on his knees. “You are the great master Hokusai?”

“No,” I replied, “I’m just Hokusai, an old man mad about art. But I do know what I’m talking about.”

“Those prints!” he said, shaking his head. “They haunted me! I couldn’t sleep for thinking about them!”

“Exactly,” I said. “I only ever did five. Five! Having said I’d do a hundred.”

“Why did you stop?” he asked, looking up at me.

“Because they haunted me, too! The ones I’d done and the ones I’d promised to do.”

“Plate Mansion!” he breathed in horror. “Okiku, who breaks one of the set of Korean plates, and jumps into the well in shame... And you drew her as a ghost coming out of the well, whose spine consists of those very plates, instead of vertebrae...”

I could see the lad needed some comforting, so I told him the version of the story that I had from a Buddhist monk... “All the time, her ghost keeps on counting up to nine, and lamenting that there’s one missing... Then the monk that the people send for says, “Ten!” And she’s happy and vanishes and never comes back again. And that’s what you should do.”

And he did. Do you still want names? I don’t see why I should ruin the reputation of a dead potter, however awful he was as a human being, or spoil the career of a living one, whatever he had to do to win his freedom. Names? You’re not getting any! And that’s that.