The Izu Dancer and Other Stories: The Counterfeiter, Obasute, The Full Moon

by Inoue Yasushi

  Then he searched for it, but it was nowhere to be found.

  We were shown some of the works by famous Tokyo artists that the former owner had acquired with Hosen's help. They were all genuine originals, and among them there were some small but rather interesting masterpieces that are very rarely found in country places like that. Considered in this light, there apparently was another side to Hosen that brought him respectability and trust among the Tokyo artists.

  "In the final analysis," Takuhiko said, "Hosen is a Keigaku specialist. But even more, he manoeuvers with discretion and doesn't palm off more than one forgery per house." Actually, he was just like that. He could be regarded as a very clever and careful man.

  It would appear from our investigations that for some reason Hosen lived in Kakogawa twice. The second time was when he was past his mid-fifties. At the end of that second period of residence in Kakogawa, in 1927 or 1928, he seems to have vanished from this area.

  On the fifth and final day of this trip, returning from Saidaiji, we stopped near the Himeji coast and took up lodging at a small inn whose name I don't remember. It was our intention to settle down to recover from the fatigue of the five-day journey and eat some fresh fish. As we entered the room to which we were assigned, to our surprise we discovered in the tokonoma* a landscape painting done by Hosen. It was a weird discovery. The artist's name, "Hosen," was written calligraphically in nearly square, easily legible characters, and the scroll was autographed with two seal impressions, "Kankotei" and "Hosen." Perhaps it was because we were so tired from our trip that this strange, fortuitous encounter with a work by Hosen made us feel so odd.

  Takuhiko said, "We seem to be having rather close relations with Master Painter Hosen."

  "This time he's revealed himself. I'd be surprised if this weren't a forgery of Hosen's work."

  Both of us just stood engaging in that sort of idle chatter and staring at the scroll in the tokonoma. Actually, we had seen some ten Keigaku forgeries counterfeited by Hosen, but this was the first time for us to see his own work properly ascribed to him in his own name.

  "It's not bad at all, huh?"

  With an expression on his face that revealed his surprise Takuhiko said, "It could get Academy recognition."

  To tell the truth, it was different, not in the least the sort of absurd art of dubious authorship that one usually finds in the tokonoma of these lodging houses. The subject, the corner of a high mountain enveloped in mist, drawn in the style of the southern painters, was quite commonplace, but it was drawn with minute precision and bore Hosen's own signature; and as we looked at it, it strangely permeated our minds.

  "It has a peculiar spirit," Takuhiko said then. There certainly was something in the picture that had a peculiar spirit. For eyes that had just witnessed so many Keigaku masterpieces, this painting of course could not compete, but yet there was a spirit of destitution and solitude which had disciplined the work.

  "Kankotei, indeed!" Takuhiko burst out a little later, as though he had been deeply impressed by something. He stared at the scene again and then walked over to the rattan chair on the porch. The sight of the Chinese character for "cold"—Kan—in that name and even the sound of that expression in my mind as I heard it sent chills through me, matching the eerie sensation that was inherent in the work.

  That evening, we spent the last night of our trip opening saké bottles. And under these circumstances, stories about Hosen were apt to prevail over the stories about the masterpieces of Keigaku's early period which we had been investigating all week long.

  By some manner or means, the conclusion that we reached between us was that having painted such a picture as we saw there, Hosen could not be called completely devoid of talent.

  "How foolish! Instead of the monotonous drudgery of forging my father's works, wouldn't he have done better painting pictures of his own?" Takuhiko, glancing wide-eyed at the scroll in the tokonoma, rolled up the sleeves of hisyukata, and lifted his saké cup to his mouth.

  "The forgeries probably sold better."

  "I suppose so. The name Tekishintei would certainly sell better than the name Kankotei."

  "On the whole, what kind of man was he? Do you remember him?" As I was beginning to feel more or less curious about this counterfeiter, I also wanted to know about his personal appearance.

  "I really don't remember anything about that. It was when I was very little. Besides, you see, I only caught glimpses of him in the hallway or places like that. One time though, oh yes, it happened about the time my father was around forty and I guess I was seven or eight . . ." and from out of the recesses of his memory Takuhiko related what was left of his deepest impressions of that time.

  He did not clearly or wholly recollect where the place was, but apparently it was at some exhibition. Hosen was on his knees on the floor, with his head lowered, and Keigaku was standing in front of him, saying: "Lift your head up and look at me."

  As Takuhiko vaguely recalled, there had been some shouting about something. Keigaku had gotten violently excited and kept on shouting, repeating the same thing over and over, while Hosen at that time merely kept his eyes lowered without saying a word. Takuhiko was left with absolutely no impression about the personal appearance of Hosen at that time, but, he said, in his childish heart he had had a tremendous feeling of compassion for the man.

  "It was because my father had that kind of temperament, I think. On discovering that there were forgeries, he shouted abuses in front of people without compunction, you know what I mean? We weren't at home, so I guess that he was caught by my father at one of my father's exhibitions, at a department store, museum, temple, or someplace like that. Even so, I think my father may have given him some money after that. So, this has gotten to be a kind of apocryphal story."

  Takuhiko smiled. Actually, however, it appears that Keigaku was quite charitable toward Hosen and gave him money more than once or twice. Takuhiko also had recollections of hearing things like that from his mother or from Keigaku. He had vague memories of two other occasions when he had met a man who resembled Hosen. There was something about Hosen's being summoned and rebuked or coming to borrow money. In any case, he always got the same feeling he had had on that occasion when he had caught a flashing glimpse of the man who would not lift his head up.

  "In all likelihood, that time when he sat on the floor and couldn't lift his eyes may have been the last time that he appeared before my father. After getting to be of junior high school age, I never heard of Hosen's coming to visit my father. But my father used to say in retrospect that he had a good-for-nothing rascal for a friend."

  That night we sat in front of Hosen Hara's painting, drinking saké until very late and made up our beds in front of that picture.

  III

  THE SECOND time I ran into the name of Hosen Hara was a year and a half after I had traveled to the towns and villages of the Inland Sea coast with Takuhiko Onuki. I know that because it was the year the war ended, the spring of 1945. During that year and a half, the course of the war had taken a drastic turn for the worse. At home, the people's lives and spirits—and even Nature—were rough and ruined beyond recognition. With the help of an acquaintance of mine, a colleague at the newspaper where I worked, I was having my mother, my frail wife, and my two infant children evacuated to a mountain village, a place near the summit of the Chugoku mountain range. It was a spot near the juncture of three prefectures, Okayama, Tottori, and Hiroshima. It was a tiny place, literally a mountain nook near the border of Tottori Prefecture. It was a place where one had the feeling that here, and here alone, night and day would peacefully follow each other with no change from the old days, no matter what the result of the war.

  It was the end of March when I first set out to preview the place where my family would be evacuated. I knew of only one man to whom I could turn in that village. His name was Senzo Onoe, and he was an acquaintance of my colleague at the newspaper. The five-mile road leading from the mountain-top station on the Harim
a-Bizen line to this place is, as might be expected, a steep mountain path which one person can barely traverse. Along the way, it is necessary to go over two small but sharp ridges, but on entering the hamlet, one finds a remarkably fiat area, a tableland, and the prospect opens and extends easily from here in all four directions. The rays of the sun and the fragrance in the wind are different from what they are anywhere else in the world. There are some fifty houses scattered over that broad tableland, and the whole village is filled with a shadeless brilliance, even though this sometimes only imparts a feeling of emptiness. I first experienced the real sensation of "sunbeams descending" when I came to this highland. A shallow river only thirty feet wide, whose upstream and downstream are indistinguishable, turns and flows north at that place.

  Escorted by Senzo Onoe, who was wearing the kind of farmer's field smock that we Japanese call noragi, I was shown a place in the hamlet that might be leased—the Youth Assembly Hall. Although it was called that, it was a structure in a style that was hardly different from that of the ordinary village houses. I immediately decided to rent it for evacuating my family. Then, that night I stayed at Onoe's house. The villagers were the kind of relatively large-scale farmers that are not seen in other places. At every house, two or three oxen were kept, and even in the construction of their homes, the villagers retained a rough, old-fashioned atmosphere. Onoe's family was the oldest in the community, and compared with the other houses, his was a size larger. I was invited to sleep in the guest room, which was separated from the storeroom by a partition of one large panel of cypress.

  In the curiously small, half-sized tokonoma of this guest room, I saw something that excited me. It was Keigaku Onuki's picture of a fox under a peony bush with his head turned facing outward. I uttered an exclamation of surprise. It was not appropriate for a mountaineer farmer to have a masterpiece like this in his tokonoma, no matter how prosperous he might be.

  Gesturing toward the picture, I said to the fifty-year-old owner of the house, who could not possibly be interested in such art, "That's a superb thing, isn't it?"

  "It wasn't an easy thing to come by for people like us, I understand," said Onoe. For some unknown reason, he showed a shyness in his sun-blackened, rough, but honest-looking face. "Really," he went on, "a man who said he was a bosom friend of this Keigaku who painted it was in this village, and ..."

  "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 overriding 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.

&nb
sp; "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 his 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.