Yasushi Inoue - Life of a Counterfeiter

In my childish way, I liked hearing Grandma Kano praise Matsumoto Jun. She had devoted her life to my great-grandfather, and Matsumoto Jun was my great-grandfather’s mentor, the man he most respected, so as far as she was concerned it was only natural that she, too, should put her faith in him, unconditionally, without reflection. Grandma Kano taught me what a beautiful thing it is to show a person respect. Whenever she talked about Matsumoto Jun, I sensed her love for my great-grandfather seeping out from within her words; it was as though she were bowing down in reverence toward the ever so distant figure of Matsumoto Jun who stood, somewhere beyond the vast ocean of her love, as an embodiment of the absolute.

This was not the only cause of her veneration of Matsumoto Jun, however.

“He was such a splendid man, you see, people found themselves bowing their heads right down in his presence, natural as could be. Men as great as him, they aren’t like other people… Since your grandfather was his pupil, he always just called him by his first name, ‘Kiyoshi this’ and ‘Kiyoshi that,’ but when he spoke to me he was always very polite, calling me ‘Mrs.’”

I couldn’t say how many times I heard that story. When she told me about accompanying him to see the figures built from chrysanthemums or the fireworks at Ryōgoku Bridge, she always touched on Matsumoto Jun’s usage of that form of address, pronouncing the word herself as if to summon the emotions she had felt at the time. In her eyes, it seemed, Matsumoto Jun was the one person who had treated her as Kiyoshi’s lifelong partner, in the truest sense, and that had moved her profoundly, cutting into her heart so deeply that she would never in all her life forget it.

“He had a fine physique, such a sense of solidity as you couldn’t hope to describe, and while a man of his rank never had to worry over money, he would spend whatever came in right away. And once he had used it all up, he would turn to your great-grandpa for assistance. Your great-grandpa just loved that, and he would rush off no matter what with money to give him.”

Grandma Kano would tell me any number of such stories, and then in the end she would always turn to the same topic.

“Great men outshine the rest of us in every way. Not only was he a truly outstanding doctor, but he was such a master at everything else, as a poet, a calligrapher, anything you like, that there wasn’t another person in all Japan who could rival him. Your great-grandpa used to say so all the time. Take a look at those characters there — such energy!”

With that, Grandma Kano would point up at the two horizontal pieces that hung in their frames from the transom on the second floor of the storehouse, making me look even though I was still just a boy and didn’t understand a thing. Each work comprised four characters: one read “Tender as the spring,” and the other “Cherish a spirit of reverence and act lightly.” The first was dated “Early spring, year of the metal sheep,” which is to say Meiji 16, or 1883.

Grandma Kano told me she and my great-grandfather had received one of these two works when they went up to Tokyo and visited Matsumoto Jun at his estate, so she must have been a familiar face in the household around that time. Meiji 16 was two years after my great-grandfather moved back to Izu. Matsumoto Jun would have been fifty-two, my great-grandfather forty-two, and Grandma Kano twenty-eight.

Needless to say, it was owing to Matsumoto Jun’s good offices that my great-grandfather became the private doctor of the Egawa clan, whose head served as the local magistrate in Nirayama, and that he became the first director of the Prefectural Hospital; thus, even after he retired to his hometown, he would go up to Tokyo a few times a year to pay his respects to his mentor, and a few times in the course of my great-grandfather’s life Matsumoto Jun came down to see him in Izu. I learned later on that when Matsumoto Jun paid a visit, it was always because he needed money. We still have a dozen or so samples of his calligraphy at home, and it turns out he took up his brush to write each of these as security for a debt. Whenever my great-grandfather heard Matsumoto was coming, he would sell some of his land so that he would be ready when his mentor arrived.

Such was their relationship. Of course, after my great-grandfather’s death in Meiji 30, Grandma Kano no longer had any reason to meet Matsumoto Jun, so she looked on from our small storehouse in the mountains of Izu as he became a baron and abruptly rose to prominence; then, after he passed away, she continued to feed the flames of her veneration by giving the young boy in her charge slight glimpses of his personality.

As a child, I had my own image of Matsumoto Jun. He was bold and magnanimous, but at the same time he possessed a certain seriousness that could not be violated. His skin was fair, his hair jet black; he was chubby and of average height. When I grew older, I was startled to discover how closely my image of Matsumoto Jun resembled Okakura Tenshin in his days as head of the School of Fine Arts, photographed on horseback in a kimono.

At any rate, throughout the years I lived with Grandma Kano, I had to stand before the Buddhist altar in our rooms and place my hands together in prayer twice each month. The first time was on the day of each month when my great-grandfather had died; the second, on the day Matsumoto Jun had died.

My great-grandfather’s official wife died when I was seven, so I have hardly any memories of her. Judging from the stories that have been passed down — that as the daughter of a principal advisor to a daimyo she had brought a red-lacquered bath pail as part of her trousseau; that all her life, she was hopeless in the kitchen — she must have been raised in an extremely sheltered fashion and grown into a woman notable only for her retiring nature; my great-grandfather, with his intense disposition, could hardly have been expected to feel pleased with someone like that, and as a result that woman ended up walking into the picture as his true lifelong partner.

Suga, his principal wife, seems to have been fairly well regarded in the country, in part because people sympathized with her plight and in part out of respect for her family; meanwhile, Grandma Kano was never well liked by the villagers, even in her old age. Behind her back they called her by her given name, “Okano,” adding only the familiar “O,” and the mere fact that she had taken charge of me seems to have been reason enough to criticize her.

The villagers often made comments about her to me. “Oh, you poor thing! You tell that woman to stop drinking all the time and fix you something good to eat!”

The truth was that I never suffered any sort of abuse at Grandma Kano’s hands. She did make it her practice to have a bit of sake every night, but she would take her time drinking just a single small bottle-full, all the while telling me stories about Tokyo, or perhaps teaching me some new character, or talking about Matsumoto Jun. Each night, I would fall asleep in her arms.

Whenever someone sent Grandma Kano a box of confections, she would set some on the altar as offerings to my great-grandfather and Matsumoto Jun, and then she would give the rest to me, since she had no taste for sweets. Every night when I went to bed, she would wrap up some snack in paper and place it next to me on the futon so that I would have it to eat in the morning, the moment I woke up. She always made sure to leave a little out for the mice, too, twisting it up in paper and putting it on the floor, a little distance away. There were a lot of mice in the storehouse, but as long as she put food out for them they would never invade our futons.

Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night, and when I did mice would always be scampering around near my pillow. But it was just as Grandma Kano said: however wildly they might dash about, they never came in under the covers. I was never frightened; I slept with my face buried in Grandma Kano’s chest. Hearing her talk about Matsumoto Jun had convinced me that he deserved our respect more than anyone in the world, and by the same token her assurances made me believe that the mice would never, ever get inside our futon.