Yasushi Inoue - Counterfeiter and Other Stories

This place was filled with a thousand and one bittersweet memories of things not experienced elsewhere due to the times. Even though I did not go to the hamlet which had been my family's refuge, I still thought it would not be a bad idea to spend up to two hours in the station square looking up at the familiar landscape and the rows of houses in the hamlet. If I did not seize this opportunity to get off and wander around this station, I might not get a second chance. Possibly I might meet some of the villagers I knew, even if I only knew them by sight. Thinking these thoughts, I went through the gate and headed for the only restaurant there was in the square, intending to relax there. As I proceeded to walk toward the restaurant, I was brought to a halt on hearing from somewhere behind me in the characteristic local dialect: "Aren't you the fellow from the Assembly Hall?"

I turned around. It was the second son of the farmer who lived next door to the elementary school, a family affectionately and jokingly called the "People-Out-Back." He was the young man who always helped us with the firewood.

I stood there and chatted with him. The boy talked about the difficult times the farmers were having, in terms that indicated a rather pinkish political attitude. He didn't ask for news about my family, nor did he even mention any of the residents of the hamlet. Anger over our difficult times, for reasons he didn't understand, was building a fire in the head of this young highlander.

"You going into the village?" he asked.

I explained that I did not have the time so I couldn't go today, but I asked him to take my best wishes and greetings to everyone. The youth then informed me that starting at sundown, for the first time since the war, there was to be a fireworks display in which five towns were jointly participating; that in just two hours crowds of people would be assembling for this spectacle; that among them would be people from our hamlet; that it would not take long — so why didn't I wait around for it? I had intended to be one train late anyhow, so I decided to make it two. I reasoned that if I met some of the villagers here, I could fulfill some of my obligations by thanking all these people for their many courtesies during the time of our evacuation.

It was now three o'clock. I spent the next two hours in the station waiting room and at the restaurant. On the telephone poles in the station square exceedingly crude and clumsy handbills had been posted. They were written with smudged red ink, probably by the young people of this area, and announced a "Gala Fireworks Display." Although it was still a little early, at about five o'clock I set out toward one edge of the unnecessarily extensive area a half mile or so northeast of the station where the young man had told me the fireworks would be shot off. A small river about twelve feet wide flowed there, and it had been decided that the embankment of this river would be the most suitable area for setting off the fireworks. Indeed, it was considered the place where there would be no danger at all.

The area was covered with summer grass. Some fifteen or twenty tubes, which looked like three-foot clay pipes, had been arranged for the fireworks. The nature of the place and the effect created by the heads of those many tubes jutting up in the grass aroused in me hallucinations of standing in a graveyard. Five or six youths were seated nearby, surrounding the boisterous children. There I encountered a man from the hamlet of our refuge whom I only knew by sight. He told me that a pyrotechnic device which was to be the main attraction tonight was being set up about one hundred yards from where we were standing but still on the embankment; that in order to see this the spectators would be assembling under a steel bridge still another one hundred yards away; and that the people from our hamlet would soon be arriving there.

But possibly because it was still too early, not a single person had yet appeared in the area under the steel bridge which was scheduled as the place for the spectators to assemble. And the sun was still poised over the steel bridge.

"We call this a five-village cooperative project, but only my hamlet shoots the fireworks. That's because we had an old man named Hara who made fireworks, and so our young people learned how to do it," the man said. That was the first I knew of it, but all the young people who were here were from our hamlet.

"You mean Hosen Hara, don't you?" I asked.

"I'm surprised that you know him!" The fellow had a look of amazement as he said this.

"Do you suppose there's anyone who knows him well?"

"Well, I don't know. I guess I knew him, but over there's a man called Tassan who seems to have been Uncle Hosen's disciple in fireworks."

Then he escorted me to the forty-year-old man who was called Tassan, no one I remembered ever seeing before. When I inquired, he told me that he had been drafted early in the war and had only late last year returned from the Soviet Union. When he spoke, he used language that seemed resentful and unsociable, but he didn't seem a particularly bad man. He spoke awkwardly but liked to speak. Apparently he had a position of over-all responsibility for shooting off today's fireworks, and the young men there snapped to at his every command.

"If you're talking about Uncle Hosen's fireworks, I'd say he got started because he liked them. He was an amateur of course, but he got to be a pro at the rapid-fire. I don't know much about the work done by fireworks makers in town, but. ." Tassan broke off his sentence in the middle and routed a gang of children who were hanging around. "Well, let's get started," he said to the young men. "Fire two or three more shots to liven things up!"

This was the first time I had ever seen fireworks being shot off. First, one youth dumped into the tube a small amount of gunpowder that had been wrapped in paper. Next, the balls of fireworks were inserted. Then, with a fuse he ignited some solidified gunpowder he held in his hand and tossed it into the tube. Instantly, a white smoke went rushing and swirling up into the heavens, followed by a piercingly loud explosion. I was astonished at this primitive operation.

"I've heard that Uncle Hosen was struggling to produce the color of the bell-flower. Did you know that?" I inquired of Tassan when the noise of the third blast of fireworks had subsided.

"No, I don't know anything about that. To tell you the truth, I have a feeling that I once heard something of that sort, but I don't even have a clear recollection of what I heard either," he replied. "There's one thing I won't forget about that old man though. It was the last time that he ever shot any off. ."

It was the evening of the last time that Hosen Hara shot any fireworks. Tassan said that on his return home that night he had found that his draft call had come, and for the full six years or more from the time he was drafted until he returned at the end of last year, he had been overseas. Since that was a special occasion, Hosen's fireworks demonstration that night left a marked impression on him, one that he could still remember. In less than one month after that, he was sent to northern China to his first post in Feng-t'ai where his first letters from home had been held for him. Among these letters there was one which came from a friend informing him of Hosen Hara's death.

"When I learned that Uncle Hosen was dead, I had a weird feeling. 'Poor old Hara!' I thought. I had never felt that way about the old man until then, but yet I suddenly realized then that I had known the old man was going to die. And when I thought of the old man shooting off the fireworks, there was something extraordinary about it."

"What do you mean by 'extraordinary'?"

"I guess it's a funny thing to say, but anyhow, even now I can't forget the way the old man looked that night," said Tassan.