Life of a Counterfeiter

by Yasushi Inoue

  I walked out the gate, wondering if I would bump into anyone I knew, then decided to take a rest and headed for the village’s only restaurant, opposite the station. All of a sudden someone called out behind me in the accent peculiar to the region.

  “Hey, aren’t you the guy from the Youth Center?”

  Looking back, I realized it was a young man who had chopped firewood for us and was known by the nickname “Uranbe,” the second son at the farm next to the school.

  I chatted with the young man for a while. He told me, in a somewhat Reddish tone typical of the time, that before long the exploitation of the farmers would start up again. He never once asked after my family, never mentioned any of the other villagers; I sensed the baffled fury at the age that burned in his breast, and in the breasts of the other young men in these mountains.

  “Going up to the village?” he asked.

  When I replied that I didn’t have enough time today and asked him to say hello to people, he told me five villages had organized the first fireworks display since the war that evening, and if I could wait two hours lots of folks from the village would be coming to watch—it wasn’t long, why not stick around? So I decided to delay my departure by two trains instead of one. If it meant I’d see the villagers, I wanted to stay and thank them for all the help they had given us when we lived here.

  I passed the two hours from three to five in the station’s waiting room and in the restaurant across the square. The utility poles in the square were plastered with posters announcing the fireworks, the writing done, I was sure, by young men from the area—the red calligraphy, bleeding into the paper, was truly terrible. At five, though it was still a little early, I headed for the spot where the young man said the fireworks would be launched, which was part of an enormous field about five or six hundred meters northeast of the station. There was a small river, perhaps four meters across, the embankment of which was the only location in the area suitable for launching fireworks. It was indeed a good place for fireworks; no one would be in any danger here.

  A dozen or so fireworks shells, each slightly under a meter high, had been lined up like so many earthenware pipes in the clearing, which was awash with summer grasses. The sight of them poking up above the weeds gave me the strange illusion that I was looking not at fireworks, but at stupas, each one the marker for a grave. Five or six young men were sitting nearby, a boisterous gaggle of children around them. And then I ran into a man I knew from the village. He told me that maybe a hundred meters away, up on the embankment, they had a single set piece ready to go—this was the big draw tonight—and the spectators were supposed to gather beneath the railway bridge a hundred meters up from there. The villagers were sure to be along soon, too.

  It must have been too early, though, because no one was around. The sun was still fairly high in the sky, up above the iron bridge.

  “Five villages collaborated on the display, it’s true, but ours is the only one involved in the launch,” the man told me. “Used to be an old guy named Hara who made fireworks, and the youngsters learned it from him.”

  I hadn’t realized until then that all the young men were from our village.

  “Hara Hōsen, you mean,” I said.

  “You sure know at lot,” the man said, taken aback.

  “Do you think anyone here might have been close to him?”

  “Well, I knew him myself, of course… There’s a fellow we call Tassan, though, I guess you might say he was Old Hara’s apprentice, learning to make fireworks.”

  The man led me over to this fellow, Tassan, who was in his forties. I didn’t remember seeing him before. I asked why, and it turned out I wouldn’t have because he had been in the military throughout the war and had only been repatriated from the Soviet Union late last year. He had an extremely gruff, even angry tone, but I didn’t get the impression, as we talked, that he was such an unpleasant fellow, and while words didn’t come easily to him he was talkative enough. Evidently he was supervising the display that evening, and as the need arose he kept issuing orders to the young men around him.

  “Old Hara’s fireworks… Well, he was just an amateur, of course, since he got into it as a hobby, but if you ask me he had a real talent for rapid fire. Naturally, I don’t know how people do it in the cities,” Tassan said. Then, pausing to chase off the children who had clustered around, he called out to the young men, “All right, let’s send up two or three, get ’em energized.”

  This was the first time I had ever seen fireworks being launched. One of the young men tossed a small paper packet of gunpowder into one of the tubes, then put in the shell. He held a slow-burning fuse to the tip of a hardened chunk of gunpowder that he then tore off and chucked down into the tube. Immediately a burst of white smoke shot up into the still-sunlit sky, and there was a thunderous boom. I was stunned at how primitive the process was.

  “I heard Mr. Hara was eager to make fireworks of a deep-violet color. Do you know anything about that?” I asked Tassan after the third firework, all sound and no fire, had gone up into the air.

  “No, don’t know about that. Actually, now that you mention it maybe I did hear something along those lines, but my memory isn’t real clear,” he said. Then, after a moment, “The one thing I’ll never forget is the old man’s last display.”

  When Tassan went back home the night Hara Hōsen sent up his last fireworks, he found a notice waiting for him saying he had been called up; from the time he enlisted until his return toward the end of the previous year, he had spent more than six years overseas. Presumably the special circumstances had imbued his memory of Hōsen’s fireworks that night with equally special emotions.

  Tassan had been in north China less than a month when he got a letter from a friend informing him of Hara Hōsen’s death, mixed in among his first packet of letters from home, which reached him at his garrison in Fengtai.

  “It’s funny, when I heard Old Hara had died, I felt this weird sense of pity for the man. I’d never seen him that way before, but it struck me that all along he had been dying. Looking back, I got the feeling things hadn’t been right with him when he did those fireworks.”

  “Things hadn’t been right?”

  “Sounds strange to put it like that, I know,” Tassan said. “It was just something about the way he looked that night—I can’t forget it, even now.”

  Hōsen’s last fireworks display was part of a celebration of the two thousand six hundredth year of the imperial calendar or some such thing, and it was sponsored by a few neighboring villages, like the one that evening; it was held on the grounds of an elementary school in a village two stations down the line toward Yonago. Since no one else in the area knew anything about fireworks back then, Hōsen had agreed to handle the display; for two months prior to the event he worked to prepare the shells with young men from the village, and then he went to the site and launched them himself.

  “We were just amateurs, of course, so there wasn’t much to the fireworks, but the rapid firing sure was remarkable.” I could tell Tassan was still proud of that display, so many years ago.

  They had prepared sixty-four twelve-centimeter chrysanthemum shells for the event; Tassan was responsible for passing them to Hōsen, who tossed them into the tubes at a rate of about twenty a minute.

  “When you’re doing rapid fire, you try to have the next one go up just as the first one is bursting overhead—space ’em out any more and it gets dull. Thing is, it’s pretty darn hard to go on chucking the shells in those tubes like that, keeping up the pace.”

  And that, Tassan said, was just what Hōsen had done so splendidly, even with three fingers missing. The venue wasn’t a wide-open field like the one tonight: thousands of spectators were crammed into a plot next to the school, sandwiched between the town hall and the road, creating an atmosphere so lively you almost never saw anything like it in this region.

  Hōsen, Tassan and three or four other young men were the only ones by the launching pad, which they set u
p in the playground, next to the horizontal bars. In a rapid-fire display you keep tossing in one shell after the next, so almost immediately the tubes burst into bright red flames, and you have to keep changing them all the time, but Hōsen managed that, too, moving so fast you could hardly believe he was as old as he was. But after repeating the same gesture so many times, and in the same hunched posture, it was impossible for him to straighten up immediately. And so, having launched the last of the sixty chrysanthemums just as smoothly as could be, still bent over, he asked Tassan—

  “How was it? Was it beautiful?”

  He had been too busy launching the fireworks to look up.

  When Tassan told him they had been magnificent, he plopped down on the ground, his back still curved, and sat with his head down, saying nothing, panting loudly from an exertion that seemed to have sapped the sixty-seven-year-old man’s strength.

  At last, without turning to face Tassan, he spoke. “I heard a lot of ooing and aahing.”

  Tassan had been in such a dream-like state until a moment ago, as he was passing the shells along to Hōsen, that he hadn’t even noticed the cheers rising from the crowd; the sound came to him only now that Hōsen had mentioned it. Hōsen, too, must have been in that same hazy state, and heard the cheering for the first time as an echo, coming faintly to life inside him, once the display was over.

  Tassan had told me how deeply Hōsen had impressed him that night; hearing the story, I found myself picturing the old man then, and the vision touched a chord in me, too. I took out my cigarettes and held them out to Tassan. He thanked me, took one, and slipped it in its shirt pocket.

  “No smoking here,” he said.

  Stupid of me, I thought, and hurriedly put them away.

  “Seven years now, isn’t it, since Hōsen died?” I asked.

  “That’s right. I was thirty-four when I got called up, now I’m forty.” Tassan smiled in an offhand manner. “The old man, he—” he began, then stopped. Soon he remarked that the villagers should be turning up any time now. Turning toward the bridge, I saw that it was true: little by little, a crowd was gathering as people ambled in groups of three or five along the raised paths that cut across the fields, or made their way along the train tracks. Looking closer, I realized that they were moving very slowly, weighed down by mats of straw or rushes that they had brought to spread on the ground, and bundles of food and drink wrapped in furoshiki; only the children were darting on ahead.

  The old man, he… Tassan left the thought unfinished, and I said goodbye to him and made my way along the embankment that jutted up over the narrow river toward the bridge, to see for the first time in ages whoever had come from the village where my family had taken shelter. At some point the sun had begun dropping behind the squat hills that ended in red cliffs at the western edge of the plateau; arrows of red evening light flew across the even field ahead of me, almost perfectly level.

  I had the feeling I knew what Tassan had been about to say, even without hearing it. Just as Hōsen’s widow and my wife had interpreted something inside him in the same way, and felt the same revulsion, Tassan and I—we two, at least—felt the same attraction when we thought of Hōsen on the night he launched his last fireworks, even if we couldn’t explain what it was that made us feel that way.

  I mulled this over as I walked.

  *

  And with that, I have set down what I know of the counterfeiter Hara Hōsen. Nothing but fragmentary stories heard from others. And yet, somewhere along the way, as I strung these pieces together, I had come to hold in my mind an image of this counterfeiter’s sixty-seven-year life as a sort of flow—a dark and frigid stream. There was no rhyme or rhythm to that painful surging, the dark and turbid motion of some essence the man known as Hara Hōsen carried within him from the moment of his birth that rendered it impossible for him to live otherwise than he did. Painful, yes, but the pain was matched by the peculiar sadness of our karma, so that whenever I found myself reflecting upon the sorrows of human life I would remember that thin, swarthy man with his weak and gloomy air—this was how I imagined Hara Hōsen now—softly drawing his counterfeiter’s brush across a sheet of paper, hiding what he was doing from his wife, or slipping out so she wouldn’t find him twisting gunpowder up in pieces of paper and setting them on fire.

  When I discovered Hōsen in the only surviving piece of writing in Keigaku’s own hand, however, I felt an entirely different emotion. To think that Keigaku, the greatest painter of his age, and Hōsen, who never saw the fireworks he himself had launched and always had his back to the cheering crowds, had begun their lives at precisely the same place—the irony of it! When this fact was brought home to me, I saw Hōsen’s life for the first time not as a dark, turbid stream that issued from something he had carried with him into the world, but as the tragedy of an ordinary, unremarkable man who ground himself down when the burden of his encounter with a genius proved too heavy to bear. The gloomy, fatalistic impression the counterfeiter’s life had left faded away, and Hara Hōsen rose up before me in a new light, colored by a more human tragedy.

  If Hara Hōsen had never been friends with Ōnuki Keigaku, if the two men had not been so close, perhaps Hōsen’s life would have turned out very differently. Maybe eventually he would have entered the painting world and made enough of a name for himself that we would have remembered him, or half remembered him, as a peripheral figure awarded non-vetted status at the government exhibitions. For some reason, I can’t help feeling that Keigaku played an outsize role in the misfortunes of Hōsen’s life, though I may simply be reading too much into things. I wonder.

  If we might envision Keigaku at the turn of the century, around the thirtieth year of the Meiji era—around the time, in other words, that he wrote his diary—as a dragon blessed with a sky full of clouds, forming a path to the heavens, Hōsen was a helpless grub who could only fall over when the mighty blast of that dragon’s glory fell upon him.

  When Keigaku came with his silver medal to drink with Hōsen, then a young man in his twenties, how did Hōsen sit with him? In what attitude? What was the expression on his face when he returned home and saw Keigaku’s magnificently free-wheeling calligraphy on the door to his room?

  Already, between 1897 and summer 1899, this man, with his small eyes, timid and yet betraying a fiercely competitive streak; his sunken cheeks and thin lips, which had a nervous, jealous air; the skin that grew progressively more spotty with age; and the forehead destined to lose its hair—for this was how I had revised my vision of Hōsen’s appearance—already, slowly but irrevocably, the groundwork was being laid for the tragedy of his long, dark life.

  I have decided to put a stop to my investigations of Hara Hōsen, at least for now. Because I must get on with Ōnuki Keigaku’s biography, turning to the energetic rush of his middle period, beginning with his masterpiece Mt. Fuji, which established his position within the painting world.

  These past two days, during which I added nothing to the biography of Keigaku, and sat staring out at the slopes of Mt. Amagi, the red crape myrtle in the corner of the garden suddenly lost most of its blossoms, colored so that they recall an earlier age, and at the same time, just like that, the white crape myrtle burst into bloom; the summer clouds that welled up constantly over the ridge of the mountain seemed—though I may have been imagining it—to have changed into autumn clouds, gliding along so slowly you could barely tell they were moving at all. Looking at the calendar, I realized that it was indeed the first day of autumn.

  It occurred to me that those two Hōsen–Keigaku counterfeits, Birds and Flowers and The Fox, were probably hanging even now in the alcoves of those two farmhouses in the village by the ridge of the Chūgoku mountains, where autumn would already be filling the air, and suddenly the sense I once had that I was in the presence of something eternal seized me again. The feeling was connected to Keigaku and Hōsen, but there was more to it than that—it was also life itself, which held within it a kernel of truth that had nothin
g to do with either of them. Here, it seemed to me, there was no sense in speaking of originals and counterfeits. I sat for a while, steeped in the coolly glittering light of that awareness, thinking that when autumn set in I might go up to Kyoto and drink with Ōnuki Takuhiko, and tell him of a side of Hōsen he didn’t know.

  REEDS

  ABOUT A MONTH AGO, A. Newspaper ran as the lead item in its society section a lengthy article about a father who had been searching all over for his six-year-old son, who had been kidnapped, leaving no stone unturned, until he happened to hear of a child who sounded like his son living at a temple in Shiga prefecture, out in the country, and made a trip down to see him.

  When I read the article, though, it turned out that the meeting had not in fact established that the father, Mr. Y., and the boy, whose name was N., were parent and child, each one looking for the other. N., who was at the center of it all, had no recollection of his childhood, so while it was ninety percent certain that he and Mr. Y. were simply a father and his son who had been subjected to the whims of destiny, there was no way to prove conclusively that this was the case. This uncertainty, I suspected, was what made the incident seem like good material for a lead story.

  All anyone knew about N.’s past was that he was Japanese; that in Shōwa 25—1950—he had been sold to a bread manufacturer in Jiamusi, China; and that eventually a kindly Japanese had brought him back to Japan, where he was raised at the temple in Shiga, where the boy’s benefactor had been born.