Yasushi Inoue - Counterfeiter and Other Stories

"What was the man called?" I asked.

"His name was Hosen Hara. He was a painter, too. Some years back — when was it? 1940, I think — he died. He originally came from these parts and came back here in his later years."

Even without asking for an explanation, I understood the rest. It was a surprise to me that Hosen Hara came from this place. But as soon as I heard that he had died, even though he was a complete stranger to me, I felt a certain deep emotion for a while. Two years after Keigaku had passed away, his counterfeiter, Hosen Hara, had followed him to the next world!

That night I informed Takuhiko Onuki in Kyoto that the counterfeiter Hosen Hara had died and that I was evacuating my family to Hara's birthplace. In my letter to Takuhiko, who probably was himself feverishly engaged in evacuating the massive art works that Keigaku had bequeathed, I wrote about the incredible thing that had happened.

Evacuating my family to this village took a month, and the purple akebia flowers were already blooming in the thicket behind the Youth Assembly Hall where the four helpless members of my family were to live from then on. It was the end of April, but the temperature was still low, and when you put your hand into the small river in front of the house, the water was as cold as in winter.

After the five days it took me to get my family fairly well settled, I went back to Osaka. Before that, I went to call at the home of the village headman, whose family Standing was second only to Onoe's. And there I was disturbed to find in his guest room a second Keigaku forgery painted by Hosen Hara. It was a counterfeit of the painting "Flowers and Birds," over a foot and three-quarters wide, an imposing thing to look at.

To Onoe and the village headman I of course said nothing about the secret of these works. At a time when, throughout Japan, life and death themselves were so uncertain, I didn't have the heart to impose any needless worries upon the people who thought that these were Keigaku's work. The counterfeited Keigakus painted by Hosen Hara undoubtedly would not in all eternity go out of this hamlet on the mountain summit. For hundreds and thousands of years, I reflected, they would be passed on to people who didn't even know the name of Keigaku Onuki. In all likelihood, no matter what happened to Japan, this fact would not change. As these thoughts flashed through my mind, I felt that I was witnessing Eternity. It also seems to me that during this period my anxiety about entrusting my family to the customs and manners of an unknown and unfamiliar place was over-riding the concern for forgeries I had had about a year and a half earlier.

From then until August when the war ended, I went to that village three times to see my family. I believe it was on that third occasion that I went on behalf of another colleague of mine to look at still another vacant house in this hamlet, escorted this time by an old bent-over farmer-woman who was acting as the agent. The house was on the slope of a short hill which rose lazily south of the hamlet, and it could be said to be the highest house in the village. There it stood removed from the center of the population. There, as I learned from the prattle of the old woman who was guiding me, was the house in which Hosen Hara had lived. Although it was almost five years since Hosen had died, that house was still vacant and just as he had left it.

The house was in complete disorder. It was not originally Hosen's house, but he had returned to this village the year that the Manchurian Incident broke out and had "bought it for a song." She went on to say things to the effect that Hosen had left his own small hamlet, which was actually about two miles away, because he did not get along with his older brother and that because of their relationship, when he returned to his native place, he had taken this house instead of going back to the hamlet where he had been raised.

"How about his family?" I asked the old woman, thinking it strange that the house had been left empty after his death.

"You mean his wife? She ran away." The old woman said this as though it were nothing at all.

"Ran away?"

"She probably got mad at him. She lived with Uncle Hosen in this house for three years. Then, at the time of a festival, she went home to her family in Shoyama and stayed there and never came back."

Hosen had even gone to beg her to come back. And also a man in the neighborhood, worried about them, had acted as a go-between, but in the end she had not come back. Hosen, for some reason unknown to the old woman, had been adopted into his wife's family and had taken their name, Hara, so unless he chose to withdraw that name from the registry, there could be no divorce. Her family was indifferent to all this, but in any case, the two had separated.

"When the old man died, I guess his wife did come. At least she may have come at the time of the funeral, but until then she didn't come back even once."

"About how old a person is she?"

"When he died, the old man was sixty-seven or eight. She was about ten years younger, so she must be past sixty now. I hear that she's being supported by her relatives in Shoyama," said the old woman.

So, in his declining years, Hosen had returned to his native village a wrecked counterfeiter and had died in the village where he was born, but even those last years, as related by the old woman, were punctuated with shadows of misfortune.

Still wearing my zori , I entered the dilapidated vacant house. For no particular reason, I opened a cupboard near the hearth and looked in. The interior was packed full of all kinds of trash covered with dust and cobwebs. Poking her head in beside mine and removing some plates from inside the cupboard, the old woman said something to the effect that they could still be used.

Then, she shook the dust off them and put them on the threshold, intending to take them back with her later.

"These are things Uncle Hosen used when he was making fireworks."

"Fireworks?"

"He used to make fireworks here."

Then, muttering that all of these things were paraphernalia for making fireworks, she raked the rubbish out of the cupboard with her cane, and it came tumbling down on the worn-out tatami . A black powdery substance, mixed with dust, whirled around over the floor, blown by the breeze.

"He said it was gunpowder, so everybody's been afraid to sweep it away." As she said this, the old woman without a speck of concern raked the stuff all over the tatami . Three or four round things, like halves of India rubber balls, came bouncing out. Since of course these things too had formerly contained gunpowder, a little bit of yellow-colored powder still adhered to the bottom of them. Things that looked like they might have been round papier-mâché cases for fireworks, paper sacks with their sides split and black powder oozing out of their insides, some pellet-shaped articles of unknown character, solidifiers that might be for refining the black powder, dishes for mixing paint, writing brushes, spatulas, painting brushes, a sheaf of Japanese paper, mortars — all sorts of things like that were scattered around in there.

I was somewhat surprised to hear that Hosen Hara had been making fireworks. We stepped down into the doma .* The doma had all kinds of trash and chaff scattered over it, just like the cupboard, but to such an extent that there was hardly room to set one's foot down. The chaff, the old woman explained, was something Hosen used inside of sky rockets.

"The old man used to sit over there and make the fireworks."

I looked at the place she was indicating. It was a shaded place just beyond the doma which might have been a little barn at any other farmhouse. She pointed out what was undoubtedly his former workshop. A wooden bench and a tree stump on which he used to sit amidst the disorderly trash confirmed this. Set on the sill of a small window, which was the only place through which the sunlight entered, were a half-broken measuring device and a number of chemical bottles. Slips of paper with prayers invoking protection from fire were pasted on the lintels between the doors and ceiling. Cleaning this house and putting it into the kind of shape that would enable a person to live in it was going to be far from easy. The moment I set foot in this house, I rejected it as a home to which my friend could evacuate.