Yasushi Inoue - Counterfeiter and Other Stories

What apparently first motivated Hosen to tinker with explosives was that there was someone he liked, the owner of a curio store, who made fireworks, and during the time he was associated with that person, he himself developed an interest in making fireworks. When Asa first became aware of it, Hosen was furtively wrapping all sorts of chemicals in paper in roughly equal quantities of about an ounce-and-a-half each and igniting them to see what color their flames would be.

"Why in the world did he find fireworks so interesting?"

"Well," replied Asa a bit pensively, "he was a funny man. I don't know where he ever got the idea, but once he was trying to produce a certain deep blue-violet color and he acted as though he was obsessed. He generally could get that color by mixing Paris green with chlorate of potash and pine resin, but he seemed to be trying to find some means for producing a chrysanthemum of this deep bluish violet — it was supposed to be the color of bell-flowers — but it always ended up a little pale and different from the original bell-flower color."

Hosen lost three of his fingers when he was making shooting stars. He had incorrectly inserted a fuse in the side of an explosive he had been devising, and it accidentally ignited, the explosives nearby catching fire in the process. It was quite a serious thing. Although Asa was quite upset by the incident itself, it additionally provided her with an excuse for leaving him — and she made up her mind to do so. Ever since he had begun working secretly with explosives, she said, she had developed a strong dislike for Hosen, and her dislike had continued. When the explosion accident occurred, it was the last straw, and she really wanted to leave him for good.

"Did he ever achieve that blue-violet?" I asked.

"Mm-m, I wonder. He apparently was not very satisfied with it while I was still with him," she replied but acted as though she really had little interest in that subject. While she was relating stories about Hosen, some of the earlier love and affection she had felt toward him, even though he was such a strange person, had more or less been revived, and even though she now displayed an attitude of cold indifference and detachment, she certainly did not say anything bad about him intentionally.

"In the final analysis, he was an unfortunate man, that man, don't you think? I really think so. It may look as though I wasted my whole life on account of him, but I sometimes wonder if he wasn't even more unhappy than I was. It was his curse to care more about painting pictures than about his three meals a day; in the long run, he got started on the wrong track and ended up without painting a single worthwhile picture; when he made fireworks, he lost three fingers; he was almost driven to distraction over 'deep purple, deep purple'—but he couldn't even produce that! He wasn't a particularly bad man, but I guess he was just born unlucky."

For over an hour I listened to Asa's tales. While listening to her stories, I was captivated by the way she talked about this person Hosen as she stared fixedly into the distance and by the way she was in certain respects still bound up with him.

It was my observation that during the course of almost thirty years that she had lived with him during their marriage, she had been an individual unto herself and had developed a special kind of mentality not generally found in women.

"Do you know the proprietor of the big saké distillery in Wake?" I asked, recalling the owner's statement that Hosen and she had frequently visited his home.

"No, I don't," she answered promptly, as if the distillery was something completely unknown to her. Perhaps my reference to something in her younger days had displeased her. The thought also suddenly occurred to me that the person who used to frequent that house with him might have been some other woman, so I dropped the subject.

At that point, without even having a cup of tea, I cut short my curious visit with this stranger from whom I had heard things that really infringed on her privacy, and I left so as not to be late for my five-o'clock truck.

Of all the things I had heard from Hosen's widow that day, the story about Hosen trying to shoot off the blue-violet chrysanthemum interested me most. At the time that I heard it, it didn't even seem particularly important, but it curiously remained in my mind, cropping up unexpectedly from time to time.

After we moved out of our evacuation site and were living in an Osaka suburb, I casually disclosed to my wife the desire — or, to overstate the case, the dream — that Hosen had cherished in his declining years. As soon as she heard it, she winced and spontaneously exclaimed, "Awful!"

"Why 'awful!'?"

"Because. I can't really explain it, but for some reason it gave me an unpleasant feeling — ghastly! A deep-violet flare opening against the black sky! That was probably what made me feel so queasy."

Then, I too was struck by the thought that I was dabbling in something I should not touch. With that, I hurriedly dropped the story of Hosen I had intended to tell. That is all there was to it and it had no particular significance, but my wife's attitude of that moment has remained fixedly in my mind as a totally unexpected and revealing discovery. I believe I generally understand my wife's feelings, but even when I probed this thing in depth, there was something incomprehensible, or at least I couldn't understand it. I could believe that there was something discernible in Hosen that could have caused my wife to feel something intolerably unpleasant just as it caused his wife to leave him. Although she had managed to go tagging along after him through a life of several decades of counterfeiting, there must have been something — something incomprehensible to people like me — something deep-rooted in the physical revulsion she felt, so that she as a woman could not trail after the Hosen who produced explosives.

Hosen's production of fireworks, the gunpowder, and the chemicals he used, these cold and dismal things somehow engendered the same feelings even in me. I could not, however, feel this in the same way my wife and Hosen's widow might have felt it. I could catch at least a fleeting glimpse of the piteous beauty which a multi-petaled bell-flower color bursting open for an instant in the night sky might have meant to this one counterfeiter whose life had been wrecked and who possessed nothing. However, I still wondered if this dream of Hosen Hara had really ever opened up in the sky at night. There was no way of asking the deceased man and confirming that it had. But certainly, had it on the other hand not been the color of petals opening, wouldn't the two women have winced anyhow and wouldn't they have reacted just as tempestuously?

That was the line of my thought.

V

AFTER that, the case of Hosen Hara gradually disappeared from my mind without my realizing it. As time went by, the not-too-cheerful story of this dead counterfeiter whom I had learned about accidentally and through hearsay from people at our evacuation site would, in the course of events, rather naturally become dim in my memory. Two years after the war, however, Hosen was once again brought before my mind's eye as though it were a finale to the stories I had heard about him.

It was summer. At that time, I was all involved and wrapped up in problems of provincial culture. For the first time in a year and several months, I took a train on the Harima-Bizen Line which crosses over to Yonago from Okayama Prefecture. I was on my way to cover a general art exhibition at one of the San-In Prefectures around the Japan Sea in order to do an article for the Sunday supplements.

As the train pulled up to the platforms at the small mountain-top stations where I had gotten on and off so often loaded down with supplies on my back, I gazed out at the stalks of the tall growing weeds swaying in the highland winds and at the red-soil banks on the west side of the station; and always there was the sound of pebbles rolling down the banks to the road below. Suddenly it occurred to me that it would be no great loss if I arrived at my destination one train later. I vacillated for a while over whether to get off or not, but just as the train was on the verge of departing, I grabbed my valise from the string-net shelf and hopped off the train.