Yasushi Inoue - Life of a Counterfeiter

The building was so dilapidated that I was hesitant even to go inside. The house hadn’t originally been Hōsen’s, but when he came back to the village the year of the Manchurian Incident he bought it for next to nothing. According to the old woman, Hōsen wasn’t from this part of the village, but from another small settlement about four kilometers away; he didn’t get along with his older brother, who had inherited his parents’ house, so instead of returning to the area where he had grown up he took this house and settled down here.

“Where’s his family?” I asked, puzzled that the house had been left empty after Hōsen’s death.

“His wife, you mean? Oh, she ran away,” the woman said nonchalantly.

“Ran away!?”

“Imagine she got fed up with him. She stayed with Old Hara some three years, and then she went back to her parents’ house in Shōyama for the festival and didn’t come back.”

Hōsen had gone to fetch her, concerned neighbors had interceded, but in the end she refused to return. For some reason Hōsen had been adopted into his wife’s family when they married, so in order for the couple to be formally divorced he would have had to remove himself from their family register; evidently that had never happened, but the long and the short of it was that from then on they were separated.

“Let me think if she came when he died… I believe she may have been here for the funeral, but she never came back once until then.”

“How old is she?”

“Hara was sixty-seven or sixty-eight when he died, so she must be past sixty now, even if she was ten years younger than him,” the old woman said. “I hear she lives with relatives in Shōyama.”

It turned out, then, that Hōsen had come back to his hometown in his old age, and passed away in the village of his birth — and yet, as the old woman told it, it seemed just the sort of down-and-out ending one might expect of a counterfeiter, his last years deeply tinged with sorrow.

I stepped up into the wasted house without removing my straw sandals, and aimlessly opened the door of a cabinet that stood next to the sunken hearth. It was filled with junk, everything covered in dust and cobwebs. The old woman, who had poked her head in at the same time I did, plucked out a few dishes, commenting that they could still be used.

“Old Hara used them when he made fireworks,” she explained. She wiped the dust away, then set them down just inside the door, on the step up from the dirt entryway into the house proper, evidently intending to take them when we left.

“Fireworks?” I asked.

“He made fireworks here.”

She scraped around in the junk with a stick, knocking things out onto the torn tatami, telling me to look, all those things were tools for making fireworks. Mixed in among the dust as it rose were fine black particles like soot.

“They say there’s gunpowder, that’s why no one wants to clean it out.”

So the old woman said, even as she went on blithely stirring the rubbish on the tatami with her stick. Three or four half-spheres, like halved rubber balls, jumped out of the pile, and it was true — traces of yellow powder adhered to each, down at the bottom, suggesting they may once have held gunpowder. All sorts of things lay scattered about: what seemed to be papier-mâché shells; torn paper bags leaking black powder; suspicious objects about the size and shape of medicine balls; hardened clumps of what must have been that same black powder; as well as paint dishes; calligraphy and painting brushes; spatulas; bundles of Japanese paper; a mortar.

I was somewhat taken aback to learn that Hōsen had been making fireworks. Stepping down into the earthen-floored room I found that it, too, was so littered with trash of the sort inside the cabinet, flecks of rice chaff mixed in among it, that there was hardly a place to stand. The chaff, the old woman explained, was something Hōsen had put in his fireworks.

“He used to sit over here to make them.”

The old woman was in an area beyond the earthen-floored room that in most farmhouses would have served as a cowshed; even from the outside, I could sense how dark and gloomy a space it was. A wooden table and a stump that must have been his seat were the only indications amidst the mess that this had once been a workroom. A half-broken scale stood beside a few bottles on the sill of the small window that was the only light source; protective amulets had been pasted here and there on the decorative wooden panels above the sliding doors, guards against fire.

I had decided the second I set foot in the house that my friend couldn’t evacuate his family here — cleaning the place up enough to make it habitable would be too much of an undertaking.

I stood for a time in the center of the impossibly cluttered earthen-floored room, my eyes fixed on the dark corner in the storeroom where Hōsen had made his fireworks. I had never met the man, the deceased, and I had no way of imagining his appearance, the impression he had made, but now, for the first time, a sort of image rose up in my mind’s eye: I saw Hara Hōsen as something like a dull, apathetic beast, huddled there in the darkness.

He must have sat on his stump at the table, fiddling with the scale and the various powders — black, red, yellow. Bars of light stream in diagonally from outside, from behind. The surrounding air is dim, cold and still. My sense of Hōsen here, in this house, was darker and more miserable than my image of him as a counterfeiter.

There’s something unpleasant here, I thought. And no sooner had I felt this than I recalled the strange spirit that brimmed in the ink painting Ōnuki Takuhiko and I had seen at the inn in Himeji. Whatever it was we had sensed in that work filled this eerie, vacant house as well, floor to ceiling — only here it took a dirtier, uglier form.

As we were leaving, we went around back and the old woman pointed out “Old Hara’s grave” to me. Beyond a narrow patch of unused land was a drop of about four meters; the unremarkable rock she had indicated squatted, half buried in weeds, near the ledge. A vast, panoramic view spread out behind it. Mountain ridges undulated gently in the distance; dropping my gaze, I saw the village houses dotting the plateau, tiny as toys, each one shouldering a mass of foliage. It was July, but it didn’t look like summer. The whole landscape felt as cold and settled as if it were underwater.

That evening, the extremely inarticulate Ogami Senzō recounted in some detail Hōsen’s final years in the village.

As he told it, Hōsen and his wife Asa had returned the year of the Manchurian Incident, in winter, bringing with them essentially nothing but the clothes on their backs. While they had no real luggage to speak of, they did have a small sum of money, and they used this to purchase — for very little, it was true — what the villagers called “the house on the hill,” which was standing empty, its former residents having died one after the other of tuberculosis. They paid the asking price, handing over the money and taking up residence right away.

Hōsen encouraged the village headman, the Ogamis, and one or two other families in the village to buy the paintings he claimed were Keigaku’s shortly after he moved back. He had only visited once or twice in the years since he had declared he was going to be a painter and left the village in his late teens, so hardly anyone here was well acquainted with his character. Once, a long time ago, a rumor had reached the village that Hōsen had become a great artist in Kyoto and Osaka, and when he came up in conversation the villagers always treated him as a man who had gone off and made it in the world. They had been a bit surprised, accordingly, at his wretched appearance when he returned later in life. It seems Hōsen told the villagers he had contracted rheumatism in recent years: his right arm hurt too much for him to do anything as delicate as paint with a brush, and so once his savings ran dry he had come back to the village.