Japan: Katherine Govier trails her ghost

I love Japan.  The food is only the beginning. I love the graphic design, the films, the fashion. I love the frenzied cities and tiny nostalgic bars and the sultry gleam of the modern architecture. I love how foreign the country remains, even to a persistent visitor. I also love Japan's past - or at least what we see in the woodcut prints of samurai, courtesans with umbrellas, and snow-capped Mount Fuji. The trick is to find that past in a country where bombs, earthquakes and foreign occupation have almost murdered it.

But I am lucky; I travel in the company of a ghost.

Five years ago, I met my ghost - an indigo-clad, dourly funny, sake-loving townswoman from the 19th century. She got a bad rap from history, but I have found her a charming guide. She captured my imagination, and then my life. So persistent was she that she arranged to be reborn in my novel The Ghost Brush. Her name is Oei (pronounced oh-EE) and she is the daughter of Japan's most famous artist, Katsushika Hokusai, creator of the iconic The Great Wave off Kanagawa.

Oei lived during a terrible time for women - under the Tokugawa shoguns. According to the shreds of her life story that exist, she was a plain, strong-jawed woman, divorced and fond of her tobacco pipe. She worked in her father's studio, attended the ancient master at his deathbed, was briefly fam- ous, and vanished. There is no record of her death.

But that's not quite all. There is her wonderful painting, her rich, almost surreal colours and her exceptionally fine technique. Only about half a dozen of her rare signed works remain. The ghost of Oei has guided me to art galleries in Cleveland, Boston, London and Leiden, the Netherlands, to see those paintings.

At the time Oei disappeared, her society was coming apart. She saw the end of the shogunate and the opening of Japan by the American "black ships" in 1853. Civil war, earthquakes and cholera followed - enough misery to make the Japanese believe the gods were punishing them. Many thousands died. She had looked over my shoulder as I researched and wrote her life. But then I lost her. Her last recorded words said that she was going to the sea near Yokohama.

Another great reason to visit Japan: to find Oei's trail.

Next page: On the trail to Tokeiji Temple