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

by Inoue Yasushi

  Then he escorted me to the forty-year-old man who was called Tassan, no one I remembered ever seeing before. When I inquired, he told me that he had been drafted early in the war and had only late last year returned from the Soviet Union. When he spoke, he used language that seemed resentful and unsociable, but he didn't seem a particularly bad man. He spoke awkwardly but liked to speak. Apparently he had a position of over-all responsibility for shooting off today's fireworks, and the young men there snapped to at his every command.

  "If you're talking about Uncle Hosen's fireworks, I'd say he got started because he liked them. He was an amateur of course, but he got to be a pro at the rapid-fire. I don't know much about the work done by fireworks makers in town, but . . Tassan broke off his sentence in the middle and routed a gang of children who were hanging around. "Well, let's get started," he said to the young men. "Fire two or three more shots to liven things up!"

  This was the first time I had ever seen fireworks being shot off. First, one youth dumped into the tube a small amount of gunpowder that had been wrapped in paper. Next, the balls of fireworks were inserted. Then, with a fuse he ignited some solidified gunpowder he held in his hand and tossed it into the tube. Instantly, a white smoke went rushing and swirling up into the heavens, followed by a piercingly loud explosion. I was astonished at this primitive operation.

  "I've heard that Uncle Hosen was struggling to produce the color of the bell-flower. Did you know that?" I inquired of Tassan when the noise of the third blast of fireworks had subsided.

  "No, I don't know anything about that. To tell you the truth, I have a feeling that I once heard something of that sort, but I don't even have a clear recollection of what I heard either," he replied. "There's one thing I won't forget about that old man though. It was the last time that he ever shot any off. . ."

  It was the evening of the last time that Hosen Hara shot any fireworks. Tassan said that on his return home that night he had found that his draft call had come, and for the full six years or more from the time he was drafted until he returned at the end of last year, he had been overseas. Since that was a special occasion, Hosen's fireworks demonstration that night left a marked impression on him, one that he could still remember. In less than one month after that, he was sent to northern China to his first post in Feng-t'ai where his first letters from home had been held for him. Among these letters there was one which came from a friend informing him of Hosen Hara's death.

  "When I learned that Uncle Hosen was dead, I had a weird feeling. 'Poor old Hara!' I thought. I had never felt that way about the old man until then, but yet I suddenly realized then that I had known the old man was going to die. And when I thought of the old man shooting off the fireworks, there was something extraordinary about it."

  "What do you mean by 'extraordinary'?"

  "I guess it's a funny thing to say, but anyhow, even now I can't forget the way the old man looked that night," said Tassan.

  The last time he shot off fireworks was at a fireworks festival in 1940, commemorating the 2600th anniversary of the Accession of the Emperor Jimmu, as Tassan remembered it. Something was being inaugurated at that time under the joint sponsorship of several villages, just like today, in the schoolyard to the elementary school of a hamlet two train stops toward Yonago from here. At that time, there was no one else at that place who manufactured fireworks, so Hosen had undertaken the job himself at their request. For two months he had the youths of our hamlet helping him to turn out the fireworks, and he had himself gone to the schoolyard to shoot them off.

  "Anyhow, they were amateurish fireworks, so they weren't very interesting. But his rapid-fire was superb," Tassan said, proud of their rapid-fire technique of those days.

  On that occasion he had gone ahead and prepared sixty four-inch chrysanthemum balls. Tassan was in charge of passing the balls of fireworks, with Hosen receiving and thrusting them into the tubes at the rate of about twenty shots a minute.

  "Generally, in rapid-fire there is hardly any interval between the time the first one going up bursts open and the time you can see the one below going up. Nevertheless, you have to get the next ball into the tube in a steady rhythm without stretching that interval. That's a very tough job."

  He said that Hosen was able to do this brilliantly and get away in time, even though he had a hand with three fingers missing. The arena they had used on that occasion was not so extensive as the one we now had. In front of the City Hall right next to the school, traffic was heavy and the roads were filled with thousands of spectators. The whole area was unusually crowded. A place for setting off the fireworks had been erected beside the high-bar in the schoolyard, and Hosen, Tassan, and an additional three or four young men were there. Since these fireworks were the rapid-fire type and they had to thrust the balls into the tubes in rapid succession, the tubes became red-hot and burned out almost instantly and had to be changed. Hosen was so active and agile that you wouldn't have thought he was an old man. When Hosen had finished shooting off the sixty chrysanthemums without any apparent difficulty, he suddenly seemed unable to straighten his back because he had repeated the same action over and over again with his back bent.

  With his back still cramped, he had asked Tassan, "How was it? Was it pretty?"

  This was because during the time he was shooting off the fireworks himself he had not had time to look up and see them. And when Tassan had answered that they were brilliant, Hosen had lowered himself to the ground, still bent over, panting and short of breath, his head drooped motionlessly, unable to say anything. Apparently this work was too strenuous for a man of his sixty-eight years.

  Then a little later, "The spectators . . . they seemed . . . very noisy . . . shouting, weren't they?" he said to Tassan without looking up in his direction.

  At these words from Hosen, Tassan at first could hardly recall the din of the crowds, even though he had been there passing the balls to Hosen. Everything that had happened just an instant earlier had seemed to Tassan like the events in a dream. Probably Hosen also had placed himself out of this world—between dream and reality—and after he had finished shooting the fireworks, the noise had vaguely come to life in his mind.

  Tassan had told me that he had been left with a strong impression of Hosen that night, and listening to his story I also developed an image of Hosen on that occasion which has somehow persisted in my mind. Taking out a cigarette, I offered one to Tassan. He thanked me and took one, but put it in his shirt pocket.

  "We can't smoke here," he said. I had mechanically taken one myself, so I quickly put my cigarette back in the pack.

  Then I said that it was seven years since Hosen passed away.

  "Yes, that's right. I was thirty-four when I was drafted, and I'm now forty," said Tassan, and then, for no reason at all, he laughed.

  "Even the old man ..." he started to say, but he suddenly shut his mouth and then, instead, said that it looked like the village association was assembling. I looked toward the steel bridge. Sure enough, headed toward the bridge, several small groups in threes and fives were crossing the elevated ridges of the rice fields or walking along the railroad track and assembling. I looked attentively. The people were approaching slowly, carrying small plain or figured mats or scarves. Only the children were running.

  "Even the old man . . ." he had started to say and then had turned silent. That was the way I left Tassan. I walked across the embankment toward the steel bridge so that I could spend as much time as possible with anyone at all I might meet from the hamlet to which we had evacuated. At the western edge of the plain, the sun was now sinking, accentuating the red-soil in the buttes on the sides of the low hills. Already at water level, the red evening sun was shooting arrows of light over the cultivated land in the direction of my destination.

  I had the feeling later that even without asking I knew what Tassan had intended to say. Hosen's widow and my wife had a common way of reasoning; both had felt a repugnance toward something about Hosen. So also, Tassan
and I both shared in common the opposite view. Even while we did not fully understand the true character of Hosen or find him particularly captivating, we were both attracted to him the way he was on the night he shot off fireworks for the last time.

  Thinking these things, I walked off.

  VI

  THE foregoing is what I know of the counterfeiter Hosen Hara. All of it is only fragmentary hearsay that I picked up from people. Somewhere along the line, when all these fragments were pieced together, however, my image of the sixty-eight-year life and career of this counterfeiter emerged as a single cold and dismal stream. And that single stream had a dark and muddled evolution, completely without rhythm and entirely without essence. It was unbearable to think that this person called Hosen Hara was fated by birth to assume that way of life. Unbearable, but also because it was unbearable, it had inherent in it the eerie melancholy of predestination in the fullest sense of karma. Whenever I thought about human pathos, I was perforce reminded of a human being—(and at times I thought of Hosen in this light)—a human being who unbeknownst to his wife stealthily wielded the counterfeiter's brush ; a human being who furtively, so that his wife wouldn't discover it, twisted gunpowder in paper and ignited it; a human being with a wizened, grayish, shadowy, and lethargic appearance.

  However, when I learned of the entry of this person in the unique, hand-written Keigaku diary, I was struck with an entirely different sort of emotion. How strange that the Keigaku who conquered the world and the Hosen who had continued to turn his back to that crowd of spectators without even looking at the fireworks display which he himself had set off—how strange that both of these men had started life from the same position and the same point of departure! Knowing this, I felt for the first time that what I had witnessed in Hosen was not the evolution of a life that was fated to be dismal and muddled, but rather the tragedy of a mediocre man who on contact with a genius had been battered about and crushed by the weight of his best friend. The dismal fatalistic feeling which I had sensed until now in this one counterfeiter's career was extinguished, and the person that was Hosen Hara loomed before me tinged rather with the hue of human tragedy.

  If Hosen Hara had not been a friend of Keigaku Onuki, if he had not had an intimate association with him, Hosen's career might have been entirely different, I thought. At some stage Hosen Hara might have gone out into the world of art and might have made his name memorable, perhaps to the point of recognition by the Academy. For some reason I could not help feeling that Keigaku Onuki had played a very decisive role in the hapless career of Hosen Hara; nor do I think that this is just my own arbitrary way of looking at this life. If you consider the Keigaku of the period around 1897, when he wrote that diary, a hidden genius, a dragon lying dormant waiting for the opportunity to soar to ethereal heights, then wasn't Hosen Hara a helpless and hopeless grub-beetle with no other course than to cower before the impact of Keigaku's glorious brilliance? What possible stance could this Hosen in his twenties take in front of the Keigaku who had come to drink with him bearing the silver trophy? And what kind of expression could there have been on the young Hosen's face when, on returning home, he saw the elbaorate characters of the poem Keigaku had written on the door?

  The tragedy of this person—discouraged, but with his small eyes still manifesting the vigor of his competitive spirit, his slender jaw and mouth alive with nervousness and jealousy, his skin speckled with the black spots that followed him to his old age, his hairline destined to recede (I had now revised my concept of Hosen's appearance in this way, but anyhow . . .) —the tragedy in that long and dismal career was gradually but in a deep-rooted íorm already getting underway during the period from 1897 to the summer of 1899.

  With this, I conclude my investigation of Hosen Hara for the present. This is because I must proceed with Keigaku's biography to the time when his masterpiece "The Happy Mountain Peak,"* his first work of that period, appeared and to an account of the vigorous activities of his middle period which fixed his position in the art world.

  During those two days that I gazed fixedly at the summit of Mount Amagi without touching my pen to Keigaku's biography, the red buds of the crape myrtle at the edge of the garden had suddenly diminished and its white blossoms were in bloom. Perhaps I only imagined it, but the rising cumulus summer clouds constantly rolling upward had changed to wispy autumn clouds drifting unnoticeably away. I looked at the calendar; it was the First Day of Autumn.

  Even then I remembered the Hosen Hara forgeries of Keigaku's "Flowers and Birds" and "The Fox" which had hung in the tokonoma of the two farmhouses in the mountain-ridge hamlet in the Chugoku range where the atmosphere of autumn had similarly begun to fill the air. And at that moment those same thoughts of the Eternal seized me once again. Eternity was something related to Keigaku and Hosen, and yet, ironically, Life held one small reality which was irrelevant to both Keigaku and Hosen: in that mountain hamlet originals and forgeries had no meaning. When fall came I would go to Kyoto and drink saké with Takuhiko Onuki and tell him about the aspects of Hosen which he didn't know, I thought. And at that moment, I became submerged in my thoughts which sparkled with a cold light.

  Footnotes

  * Two excellent English translations of this work have been published, one by George Saito entitled Shotgun in the collection Modern Japanese Stories: An Anthology and the other under the title Hunting Gun, by Sadamichi Yokòo and Sanford Goldstein.

  ** Edward G. Seidensticker's translation of Lou-Lan appeared in the Japan Quarterly, vol. VI, no. 4 (October-December, 1959).

  *** This has been translated by John Bes ter and was published in the Japan P.E.N. News, No. 4, December, 1959.

  * 1868-1912: the period of the reign of Emperor Meiji.

  * A section of Kyoto.

  * The tokonoma has no Western counterpart. It is a long, narrow alcove or recess in a room (usually the main room of a house, but sometimes also the tea-room or master bedroom) used decora-tively for displaying a prized hanging scroll. Generally, it is very simply and tastefully arranged with just the scroll and a flower arrangement or statuette. Every guest room at a Japanese inn has a tokonoma.

  * In pre-modern Japanese architecture, the doma was an unfloored multi-purpose area, set lower than the rest of the house and used as a storage area, as a pantry, and as the kitchen. Separate kitchens have only recently begun to replace the doma in urban areas; in rural areas, the doma persists.

  * I am informed by makers of Japanese fireworks that "chrysanthemum powder" is a technical term for a mixture of charcoal, sulphur, and potassium nitrate in proportions that will produce a chrysanthemum-shaped flare when exploded in the air.

  ** Seeds and chaff were used as retarding catalysts until sawdust replaced them due to regulations in some countries against the import of agricultural products.

  * A euphemism for Mount Fuji.

  OBASUTE

  I

  WHEN onearth was it that I first heard the legends about abandoning the old people on Mount Obasute?

  I come from a mountain village in the central part of the Izu Peninsula. There I was educated during my childhood days. In the Toi region on the west coast of the peninsula, tales about discarding old folks in the mountains in ancient times have been handed down from generation to generation. In all likelihood, it was along with these tales that I heard the Legend of Mount Obasute, a mountain whose very name means to discard old people, and it caused my small heart to swell with sorrow.

  Wasn't I about five or six at that time? On hearing that story I went out onto a porch and screamed and sobbed. I have no recollection of where that place was exactly, but what I do recall in my faint memory is that my grandmother—or was it my mother?—anyhow, a member of my family immediately came flying out to the porch and said something to me—just a few words. Of course, I could not comprehend the story itself, but the sadness of the whole idea of carrying my mother on my back and taking her up a mountain and abandoning her there became an abstraction which oo
zed into my heart like waterdrops dripping between rocks. I shrieked and cried, unable to endure the sorrow of being separated from my mother.

  It was only after I became ten or eleven that I was able to grasp the full meaning of the story of Mount Obasute in its entirety. Occasionally I used to get picture books from an aunt of mine who lived in a small town about twenty miles away. In one of those volumes there was a tale called Obasute-Yama. Apparently all sorts of variations of the legend about abandoning old folks on Mount Obasute are in circulation with slightly altered details. But the one that I know is based entirely on that book, and it continues to hold to this day without modification. It can easily be discerned how strong an impression that picture book Obasute-Yama imprinted on my mind when I was a child. Of all the tales that I heard in my childhood, the two that I can't forget even now are the story of Ishidomaru, who went to visit his father on Mount Koya, and the Legend of Mount Obasute. Both have as their themes the anguish of separation of a parent and child.

  Years later, during my university days, when I was back home on summer vacation, I fortuitously rediscovered this Obasute-Yama picture book in the cupboard of our godown, and I looked it over again. Only the frontispiece was in color; the illustrations on several other pages were in black-and-white relief; and the Legend of Obasute was written in a literary style that might be considered a little too difficult for children.

  In ancient times in the Province of Shinano there was a feudal lord who hated old people. So he decreed throughout the land that when old people became seventy years of age, they were, without exception, to be taken to the mountains and left there. One bright moonlit night a young farmer climbed up a mountain carrying his mother on his back. Since his mother had reached the age of seventy, he had to discard her there. However, the young man could not bear the thought of leaving her there—no matter what! He brought her back home again, dug a hole under the floor so no one would see her, and hid her there. About this time, an envoy from a neighboring province appeared before the feudal lord and laid down a very difficult proposal. He posed three problems, and if these were not solved, the Province of Shinano would be attacked and destroyed. The three problems were: to make a rope out of ashes; to pass a thread through a nine-sided jewel; and to make a drum beat by itself. The feudal lord was perplexed, and he issued a proclamation throughout the land calling upon the wise men to solve these difficult problems. When the young farmer told this to his mother, who was hidden under the floor, the mother instantly explained to him how the problems could be solved. The young farmer immediately went to the home of the feudal lord and told him. Because of this the province was able to be saved from its difficulties. On learning from the young man that all this was due to the wisdom of an old woman, the feudal lord became enlightened and understood that old people should be respected, and without any further hesitation he proceeded to abolish the decree.