Life of a Counterfeiter

by Yasushi Inoue

  That evening, I wrote a letter to mail to Kyoto, where Ōnuki Takuhiko was no doubt fraying his nerves day and night, rushing to move the enormous collection of artworks his father had left behind out of the city. I told him that Hōsen was dead, and that by some strange trick of karma it looked as though my family would be evacuating to his hometown.

  About a month later, I moved my family to the village. Deep-purple flowers were blooming on the akebia vines in the thicket behind the Youth Center, where the four all-but-helpless members of my family were to live. April was almost over, but the air was still chilly, and when I dipped my hand into the stream that ran past the house the water was as cold as in winter.

  I spent about five days helping my family get settled in before returning to Osaka, and on one of those days I went to pay my respects at the house of the village head, whose family traced its roots in the area back almost as far as the Ogamis. In the reception room, I came across another of Hōsen’s counterfeit Keigaku’s—the second I had seen in the village. This one was a 240-centimeter picture of birds and flowers, and although it was a fake it was quite forceful.

  Needless to say, I kept quiet about the pictures, revealing their secret neither to the Ogamis nor to the village head. I had absolutely no desire to push unwanted information upon people who believed they owned a painting by Keigaku at a time when the very survival of the nation was in doubt. In all likelihood, their Hōsen–Keigaku forgeries would never leave this mountaintop village; for hundreds or perhaps even thousands of years, they would pass from hand to hand, from one person who had never even heard of Ōnuki Keigaku to the next. This wouldn’t change, no matter what became of the country, I thought. And all of a sudden, I felt—though the feeling lasted only as long as the thought—that I was in the presence of something eternal. My distress as I prepared to entrust my family to this unfamiliar place, in these times, plunging them into a world of unknown feelings, unknown customs, had left me feeling altogether different about those counterfeits than I had a year and a half ago.

  I visited the village three times to check on my family between then and the conclusion of the war in August. On the third of those trips, I think it was, I went to inspect another empty farmhouse in the village for that same colleague at the paper, guided by the old, bent-over woman who was looking after it. The house stood on a low rise at the village’s south end, where the land began sloping gently up and down; apparently it was higher than any of the others, and it was set apart from the settlement, all on its own. I was surprised to learn from the woman that this was where Hōsen had lived. Almost five years had passed since he died, but it had been left undisturbed, uninhabited.

  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.

  He didn’t really do any work after he settled down. Every so often he would head off to Yonago, Okayama, Tottori, and so on, with scrolls and antiques, then return with new ones, so he must have gone on being a sort of dealer, if only on a small scale, even after he retired to the countryside.

  Hōsen hadn’t made a particularly bad impression on the villagers, and he never caused others any trouble, so early on they called him “Mr. Hōsen, Mr. Hōsen,” imbuing the name with a certain degree of respect; over time, as his trips became less frequent, and then as it came to be known that he was fooling around with gunpowder, even taking sparklers he had made to sell to toy stores in Yonago, people started referring to him as “Old Hara” instead.

  Needless to say, Hōsen wasn’t a genuine fireworks maker; he made them illicitly. He seems to have been working with explosives from the time he moved to the village—once, late at night, the villagers had raised a ruckus when a ball of fire shot up into the sky over Hōsen’s house, only to be stunned when they learned afterward that he had launched what was known as a “falling star.”

  In his third year in the village, Hōsen lost three of the fingers on his right hand when some of his gunpowder exploded. After this incident—in part because people were disgusted that he was handling such a nasty substance—his popularity plummeted. Hōsen himself grew oddly arrogant in the wake of the accident, as if he had been wronged somehow, and from then on he no longer tried to conceal what he was doing, and began making his fireworks almost openly.

  For the most part the villagers kept their distance from Hōsen’s house, but whenever they chanced to look in on him they would find him sitting in the former cowshed, now remade into a workspace, preparing various types of toy fireworks—evidently orders from Yonago or some such place.

  Half a year or so after Hōsen lost his fingers, he and Asa separated. Even Ogami felt he couldn’t just stand by and watch when that happened, so he played the middleman, going to meet with Asa at her parents’ house in Shōyama to ask her to come back to Hōsen, but try as he might she never said anything but I won’t do it. Two or three other neighbors took their turns going to Shōyama as well, but to no avail. In the end, Hōsen gave up on their relationship, seeing how deeply Asa wanted to be rid of him. The villagers didn’t really hold it against Asa that she had abandoned her husband of so many years. His right hand, with its three missing fingers, was dreadful to look at, and when you stopped to think about it there was something so dismal in the image of him toying with his gunpowder in the dim workroom that you could see even his wife might get fed up.

  Hōsen’s finances improved somewhat once he started making fireworks, though since he was doing it illegally he couldn’t be too open about it, and it seems he was quite liberal—even a bit too liberal—when the time came to make donations to village road projects, and in the customary monetary gifts neighbors made at weddings and funerals. Once the police came after him, and he was dragged off to the station in a nearby town, but he must have smooth-talked his way out somehow because he seemed not to have paid a fine, and he kept working on his fireworks in the dark workroom just as before.

  In the end, Hōsen continued his solitary existence in the village for almost a decade, until his death in 1940. He must have gotten his hands on a smallish sum of money at some point, because while on extremely rare occasions someone would see him working on what appeared to be fireworks, for the most part he spent his last three years sitting on the veranda, or lying there, doing nothing but gaze off into space. Still, when summer came he would make the boys in the area as many fireworks as they wanted, accepting small payments in recompense. When pressed he would occasionally carry a load of his fireworks to a nearby village, where he would launch them for their summer festival or some similar event, so that people elsewhere came to regard him—“Old Hara,” as they said—with greater affection than his own neighbors.

  Hōsen’s death came completely unexpectedly. One morning, when the rains that had been falling for ages finally let up, someone from a neighboring house, perhaps a hundred meters away, realized he hadn’t seen Old Hara for two or three days, and when he went to check in on him he found him sprawled out face down in the earthen-floored room. Hōsen’s body was cold enough that some hours must have passed since he died, and rigor mortis was setting in. He had died of a stroke.

  The intriguing thing about Hōsen’s death is that he was about to do a painting when it happened. He had spread two folded blankets on the floor of the storeroom, and neatly lined up a few dishes holding paints and, beside these, the box holding his inkstone with five painting brushes on its lid—their tips, too, precisely aligned. A single sheet of fresh white paper had been centered on the blankets, spread out so that there wasn’t a wrinkle. He had not yet begun to paint.

  Presumably Hōsen had gotten everything ready, then recalled something he needed to do and gone into the earthen-floored room, where he collapsed.

  “Did Hōsen do any painting toward the end of his life?” I asked Ogami.

  “No, I don’t think he did,” he said. “But he was a painter at heart, of course—I suppose he must have sensed death coming, and wanted to paint one last time. Anyway, I doubt he could have painted anything worth looking at with three fingers gone.”

  There was something touching in the story of Hōsen’s death, even if he had been a counterfeiter. For some reason, I found myself thinking he hadn’t really intended to paint a picture; that this wasn’t what the sheet of paper lying there, unmarked by a single stroke of his brush, meant. It struck me that perhaps he had simply wanted to be surrounded by those painterly implements.

  After Ogami had tol
d me what he knew of Hōsen, as I was preparing to leave he suddenly had a thought. “Come to think of it,” he said, “I believe there are some notes Old Hara wrote in one of the cabinets in your storeroom. About fireworks, I think. We came across them at the time of the funeral, and some of the young men put them away for safekeeping in the Youth Center, thinking they might come in handy sometime.”

  There was one cabinet in the storeroom of the house we were renting that we had agreed to leave untouched, just as it had been when the building was still a Youth Center. It held various items that the young men of the village held in common.

  I opened the cabinet as soon as I got back. It was packed with all kinds of useless papers: records of festival donations, minutes of youth group meetings, manuscripts for speeches, that sort of thing. Among these scraps, however, was a hand-bound notebook made of hanshi-sized paper, on the cover of which was written, in skillful calligraphy, “The Essentials of Firework Preparation.” The imposing title belied what appeared to be simply a collection of Hōsen’s notes on the fireworks he had made. Turning to the first page, I found the title: “Misty Blossom—Red Mist—Snowfall.”

  To make the star, first prepare a safflower core. When it has dried, mix clay with chrysanthemum powder, kneading thoroughly with water until soft, then cut and blend in approximately 1.5% of a magnesium stick, put the mixture in a bowl, and thoroughly coat the core. Once it is evenly covered, prepare a powder from 100 monme chrysanthemum and 10 monme seeds and sprinkle it all over, then roll into a ball. Repeat as necessary until the star is a good size, perhaps four or five sun across, then finish with a layer of bursting powder. Note, however, that it is necessary to sun-dry it completely after each application. Use a 4.55 or 6.3 sun core.