Life of a Counterfeiter

by Yasushi Inoue

  Extremely unclear directions of this nature had been written out over three pages, followed by entries giving the recipes for “safflower powder” and “chrysanthemum powder,” with the required quantities of gunpowder for each marked in red ink. The remainder of the book contained entries on preparing “Crossette Comets,” “Straight Bursts,” “Double Leaves,” and so on. Hōsen had intended these notes as memos to himself, of course, and since I knew nothing about fireworks it was all quite beyond me. A piece of hanshi paper that had been tucked between the pages, however, turned out, when I opened it up, to be Hōsen’s résumé. This interested me greatly, though for reasons unrelated to the contents. I say this because, while the presence of Hōsen’s birthday at the beginning—“Hara Senjirō (Hōsen), b. October 3, 1874”—unmistakably identified the résumé as Hōsen’s own, the entries, transcribed in tiny characters, were obviously all fake. “1916–Arareya Fireworks Store, Tokyo; 1918–Suzuki Fireworks Emporium, Yokosuka; 1921– Overseer Tōyō Fireworks Factory; 1922–Sakai Fireworks Emporium, Osaka; 1924–Overseer Marudamaya Fireworks Factory, Osaka”—so they went. At the end of the list, Hōsen had added, in a rather ostentatious fashion: “With reference to the above, all this is confirmed as being free from error.”

  There was no way of knowing when and to whom Hōsen had intended to submit this résumé, but the years he had listed, all during the Taishō era, corresponded to the period when he had been roving around Hyōgo and Okayama prefectures, from one small city to the next, peddling his Keigaku counterfeits. Clearly, then, this résumé was a complete fabrication. Perhaps at some point, finding himself unable to make a living either from his forgeries or as a local painter, he had tried to find employment as the chief technician at some fireworks factory. One might go further and imagine that, when he was called in by the police that one time, he used this same fraudulent résumé to pull the wool over his questioners’ eyes, and had managed as a result to escape unscathed.

  At any rate, this piece of paper revealed in the plainest possible manner the essence of Hara Hōsen. Of this there could be no doubt.

  “This isn’t the sort of thing you would have any experience with, I’m sure, but the truth is it’s extremely unpleasant working with gunpowder in winter… the niter gives you such a chill, so icy cold you can’t even describe it.”

  Hara Hōsen’s widow held her right hand out as she spoke, glancing at her palm as if it were a mirror, as if recalling how chapped her skin had been. This was the year the war ended, in late November.

  Even now that the fighting was over, life in the city remained shrouded in tremendous uncertainty and confusion, and lately each day’s newspaper carried another article about an armed raid, so until recently I had been planning to have my family stay in our house in the village until New Year’s; the seasons turned a full month earlier there than elsewhere, though, and, by the end of September, dreary, desolate winds had begun barreling up the mountain slopes several times a day, forming a ferocious corridor of wind that blew straight through from Mimasaka to Hōki, and then in October the showers that are such a unique feature of winter in the mountains began sweeping past, one after another—the first indication that the coldest season was approaching.

  Around this time, my wife seemed suddenly to have grown afraid of spending winter snowbound in an unfamiliar region, and when I went to visit in early October she informed me, out of the blue, that she wanted to leave as soon as possible. She wasn’t sure she could see my elderly mother and our two children through winter here, without even a heater, and if the children were to catch pneumonia there would be no doctor to take them to… After I returned to Osaka, my wife kept harping on about the same points in every one of her letters, trying to persuade me that they should come back.

  In the middle of November, I took a somewhat long vacation to go help my family move out of our mountain village in Tottori prefecture; by the time I had disposed of the assorted difficulties that arose in connection with having our things transported and shipped off and so on and had finally got all the arrangements made, bringing me at last to the point where I was ready to lead my family away, only a few days remained before the end of the month.

  On the appointed date, I set out in the afternoon for the train station in Shōyama—a town whose name I had heard but which I had yet to visit—to ship our belongings home on the San’in line. I knew the station master at the next stop, the one at the summit where I always got on and off, and things would undoubtedly have gone much more smoothly if I could have sent everything off from there, but the route was made too difficult for a move by the peaks between the house and the station.

  The various negotiations relating to our luggage at Shōyama Station ended up being less involved than I had expected: the man I spoke with told me that if I could wait until evening a truck would be going out to the village where we lived. Walking nearly eight kilometers of mountainous road for the second time in a day seemed like more trouble than I wanted to take, so I decided to hitch a ride on the truck instead.

  As I was wondering how to kill the two hours left until then, I suddenly remembered hearing that Hōsen’s widow lived here with her brother. I had no reason to visit the woman, I realized, but then it was always possible she might have some small anecdote to share that related, not so much to Hōsen himself, but to Ōnuki Keigaku, about whom I would eventually have to write my biography, and so I decided to go and see her after all, in part as a way to pass the time.

  I managed to track down Hōsen’s wife right away by asking at the general store outside the station. Until two or three years ago the woman, Asa, had run a small candy shop across the way, but as the war escalated she ran out of sweets to sell and decided to close it; she wasn’t working now, and relied for her food and lodging on the generosity of her elder brother, who had a lumber yard or some such thing. So I was told. And so it came about that I went and met Asa on the veranda of a house with quite an imposing demeanor, though I doubted the family had much money.

  Naturally I had no way of discerning whether it was a blessing or a misfortune for her to be living with her brother’s family, but she was neatly dressed; she sat on the narrow veranda, basking in the late afternoon sun, peeling persimmons with a kitchen knife, presumably to hang from the eaves to dry. The owner of the sake distillery in Wake had described her, long ago, as petite but beautiful, and it was true: you could tell she had been gorgeous when she was young, and even now there was a cool, sophisticated sort of briskness in both her speech and her bearing that reminded me of the women you find at clubs or restaurants, and seemed unexpected in a women now in her sixties. And yet when she turned her head to the side, I was struck by the thinness of her earlobes, which gave an impression of poverty, and suggested, somehow, that her life had not in fact been happy. I had expected that she might decline to talk about Hōsen, since he had lived and died as a fraud, a painter of counterfeits, but she gave no indication that this was the case.

  “I believe when he was young he was friends with Master Keigaku, but after I married him—well, I suppose he may have gone to see the Master at his house in Hyakumanben when he visited Kyoto, but their relationship wasn’t what you would call a friendship. After all, there was that unbelievable period in his life when he made those forgeries, so he couldn’t face the man.”

  I was startled to see how clinically she spoke of him. On the face of it, she no longer let herself be troubled by her long-time husband’s deplorable actions; all that belonged to the past.

  “I separated from him in 1935. Between then and the time he died, he came to see me only once. That was the day the papers reported Master Keigaku’s death.”

  Hōsen had come to ask her to attend Keigaku’s funeral and light a stick of incense in his place, since he himself couldn’t possibly show his face before the dead man’s spirit. At the time, Asa said, she had the impression Hōsen was asking her to go, not because he wanted to apologize to Keigaku for all the trouble he had caused, but b
ecause of the loneliness he felt now that his old friend had died.

  “I think he really lost confidence after we moved up here into the mountains. Until then, he had resented Master Keigaku, though he had no reason to do so. He used to talk all kinds of rubbish when he drank, about how he could paint just as well if he set his mind to it, he had been the better painter when they were younger, he’d had more talent, but at some point after we moved up here he started talking differently. ‘It’s true,’ he’d say, ‘Keigaku is a master, he’s got amazing talent.’”

  So said Asa. It seems she didn’t attend Keigaku’s funeral in Kyoto, but that was neither here nor there; what mattered to me was the image of Hōsen making his way to this village on the day he read of Keigaku’s death in the newspaper, treading the same narrow, twisty path I had taken earlier, just below the ridge, on his way to visit the wife who had abandoned him. His figure rose before my eyes with a peculiar clarity, very small, set against the magnificent fields of short bamboo that covered the mountain slope, the late autumn wind gusting over the leaves. Later, it struck me that since Keigaku had died on the day of the Doll’s Festival, on March 3, the path would still have been buried in snow; Hōsen, wearing straw sandals, perhaps, must have struggled through the drifts, and taken a very long time to get here.

  At any rate, realizing that Hōsen had experienced such a day late in his life made me feel as if a single ray of white light, however faint, had pierced the dark, monochromatic vision I had created of the man, without even realizing that I was doing it.

  When Asa had nothing more to say about Keigaku, I found a roundabout way, impolite as it was, to ask what had made her leave Hōsen.

  And so she began: “This isn’t the sort of thing you would have any experience with, I’m sure, but the truth is it’s extremely unpleasant working with gunpowder in winter.”

  The desire to leave Hōsen had come over her quite suddenly, it seems, after they moved up into the mountains and he started playing around with gunpowder. Occasionally he would ask her to help, but that wasn’t what she minded—it was how they earned their living, after all. What she detested was the way Hōsen got when he was doing that kind of work.

  “When he produced his first forgeries of Keigaku’s works, he did it in secret, without telling me,” she went on. “Eventually he took to doing it out in the open, but I suppose early on even he was too ashamed to let me know, so he tried hard to keep it from me, to do it so I wouldn’t notice. When he started making fireworks it was exactly the same. This time he wasn’t doing anything wrong, though of course amateur fireworks are illegal… but still, he had no need to worry about what I would think, he could have done it openly, but instead he would wait for me to go out, or until after I went to sleep, and then set himself up at the edge of the veranda or someplace and start grinding his mortar and pestle and so on, as quietly as he could. I guess that’s why I came to hate gunpowder so much.”

  Hōsen had first begun experimenting with gunpowder because the proprietor of a certain antique shop in Aioi was into making fireworks, and in the course of their dealings Hōsen had developed an interest in the art himself; by the time Asa learned about it, he was already wrapping various chemicals in paper packets of about forty grams each and igniting them to see what color flames they produced.

  “Why was he so interested in fireworks, do you think?”

  “You know…” Asa thought for a moment. “There was something odd about his fireworks. He was obsessed with producing a deep, rich violet color, like a Chinese bellflower—I have no idea what gave him the idea. You get a color like that when you mix Paris green, potassium chloride and powdered amber, but it’s always a little too light, not like an actual bellflower. Hōsen seems to have decided that one way or another he had to produce that exact color, just as deep, and then launch it in a chrysanthemum or something.”

  The time Hōsen lost three of his fingers, he was working on a falling star and he had accidentally thrust his pick into the section where he had set the blasting powder, causing a spark that blew up the gunpowder next to him. The incident itself hadn’t necessarily stirred up any unpleasant feelings in Asa, but it inspired in her a sudden desire to leave Hōsen. She had been feeling somewhat irritated with him all along, ever since he began using gunpowder, but the explosion finally made her feel that desperate yearning to get away from him.

  “Did he ever achieve that violet?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Asa replied, sounding as if she didn’t much care one way or the other. “He never seemed happy with the color, at least while I was there.” I had the sense that talking about Hōsen had rekindled some of the love she had felt for him; her tone remained flat, her attitude cool and distant, but she never once spoke with real malice. “In the end, I think he was an unhappy man. I often think about that. I ruined my life on account of him, more or less, but I think his life was even unhappier than mine. He loved painting more than three square meals, but he strayed down the wrong path and ended his life without ever creating a single painting worth anything, and then when he started doing fireworks he lost three fingers, and that violet he was always going on about, trying so hard to make—well, he probably didn’t succeed there, either. It’s not that he was a bad man, he was just born to live an unhappy life.”

  I listened to Asa’s talk for more than an hour. There was something nice about the way she spoke, as if she were watching Hōsen, never taking her eyes off him, but from a great distance—or as if she had somehow contained him, the man he had been, within her. I got the feeling that in the course of nearly three decades living with Hara Hōsen, she had matured, emotionally, in a very particular way that made her unlike other women.

  “Do you know a large distillery in Wake?” I asked, remembering the story about her and Hōsen going to see the company president together.

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t,” she replied right away, as though she meant it. Maybe she didn’t like talking about those days, when they were young. Or maybe, it occurred to me, the woman who had gone to the president’s house had been someone else, not her… I let the topic drop.

  Leaving enough time so that I wouldn’t be late for my five o’clock appointment with the truck, I brought an end to this peculiar visit, in the course of which I had heard all kinds of details about a stranger’s life without even being offered a cup of tea, and left the house behind.

  Among the various stories Hōsen’s widow had shared, I had been most intrigued by the one about his desire to launch a deep-violet chrysanthemum. At the time it hadn’t struck me all that forcefully, but it lingered with an odd insistence in my heart, and I found myself recalling it at odd moments.

  Once, after we had left that mountain village behind and moved to a place in the suburbs of Osaka, I happened to mention Hōsen’s ambition—or, if that’s too grand a word, his dream—to my wife. No sooner had I had finished than she grimaced and remarked, “How awful.” The expression on her face suggested she could hardly bear the idea of such a firework.

  “Why? What’s so awful about it?”

  “I mean… I don’t know how to put it, I just don’t like the thought. A big burst of violet opening against a dark sky.”

  Something told me I had touched an emotion better left alone, so I decided not to talk any more about Hōsen and hurriedly shifted the conversation. It was a trivial thing, it meant nothing; and yet my wife’s attitude struck me with all the force of a discovery, utterly unexpected, and the impression lingered. I half understood how she felt, but when I considered it more closely I realized that in fact it really didn’t make sense to me. Perhaps, I thought, whatever it was my wife found so awful was the same thing Hōsen’s widow had noticed inside him that prompted her to leave. Perhaps something in all this surpassed my comprehension, something in the almost physiological revulsion that prevented women from feeling for Hōsen once he become involved with gunpowder, even one who had stood by his side for decades as he earned his livelihood by painting
counterfeits.

  I myself sensed, in Hōsen’s experiments with gunpowder, something of the dark, cold nature of gunpowder itself. But it did not evoke in me feelings like those my wife and Hōsen’s widow seem to have had. The image of a few violet flowers suddenly blossoming in a dark nighttime sky, which the counterfeiter needed more than anything else at a time when his life lay in shambles around him, struck me, indeed, as possessing a certain mournful beauty.

  I doubted Hōsen’s dream had ever bloomed like that against the darkness. Now that he had died, there was no way to ask. I couldn’t help thinking, though, that it was precisely the impossibility of the color of those blossoms that had inspired such intense disgust in the two women.

  After that, without my even noticing, Hōsen left my thoughts. It was only natural, I suppose: as time passed, the less-than-cheerful stories of a certain counterfeiter I had chanced to hear in the mountains where my family had fled the war gradually faded from my memory. But in the end, Hōsen was simply biding his time, waiting for the moment, two years after the war ended, when he could rise up before me one last time, as if to bring closure to the tale of his life as I had heard it.

  It was summer. For the first time in a year and a few months I was riding the Hakubi line from Okayama to Yonago, over the Chūgoku mountains, to research an article for the Sunday edition about a comprehensive exhibition being held in one of the prefectures in the San’in region, linking it to the issue of provincial cultures. The train pulled up to the platform of the small station at the summit where, shouldering as much luggage as I could bear, I had embarked and disembarked so many times, and I saw the tall weeds that bordered it stirring in the winds sweeping the plateau, and then to the west the red cliffs, from which sand constantly spilled onto the road below, hissing faintly, and it suddenly struck me that it would cause no major difficulties if I were to arrive at my destination one train later. I hesitated for a while, debating whether or not to get off; then, just as the train was preparing to leave, I grabbed my bag from the rack and leapt down onto the platform. The period when my family had lived here being what it was, the area brimmed with all manner of painful memories of a sort I could never experience anywhere else, and, even if I couldn’t make it to the village where we had stayed, I thought it might be nice to spend two hours or so here, drinking in the familiar scenery of the square in front of the station, the houses in the village. If I didn’t jump down now, I would probably never have another chance to get off at this station.