The Izu Dancer and Other Stories: The Counterfeiter, Obasute, The Full Moon (9 page)

"1916, Arareya Fireworks Store, Tokyo

1918, Suzuki Fireworks Store, Yokosuka

1921, In Charge of the Oriental Pyrotechnical Factory

1922, Sakai Fireworks Display Store, Osaka

1924, In Charge of the Marudama Pyrotechnics Factory, Osaka"

At the end, there was an ostentatious subscript: "
The foregoing is certified as factual."

It is not clear where, when, or to whom he intended to submit this. This much, however, is clear: the period from 1912 to 1926 was precisely the time he was dispensing Keigaku forgeries as he moved around in the small cities and towns of Hyogo and Okayama Prefectures. It is therefore also clear that this was a wholly fabricated statement of his personal history. The possibility exists that when Hosen reached an impasse trying to earn a living as a counterfeiter or as a village artist, he might have been a technician in charge of a fireworks factory at one or another country town—on the side. If you want to stretch your imagination even further, you could even say that when he was ordered to appear at the police station, he was possibly able to settle the matter very quickly by just producing this false document and wrapping the police up in smoke. In any case, there is no doubt that this document clearly reveals a characteristic part of the nature of the person that was Hosen Hara.

IV

"I DON'T know whether you know it or not, but making fireworks in the winter can be very unpleasant. Chilean nitrate can be awfully cold when it's cold." As she said this, Hosen Hara's widow looked at the palm of her right hand as if she were recalling the chapped hands she had in those days. Then she dropped her gaze.

My talk with her took place at the end of November, the year the war ended.

Although the war had ended, life in the city was still shrouded in great post-war confusion and anxiety, and almost every day newspaper articles were reporting on the gangs of robbers, so I kept my family at their evacuation site where they were. I had intended in any case to have them spend the rest of the year there. The seasons changed in that mountain village as much as a month earlier than in other places, and toward the end of September, piercing blasts from the bleak and dismal autumn winds came whistling incessantly up the slopes of the mountain range, producing terrific drafts which blew all the way from Mimasaku to Hoki. At the beginning of October, the continual late-autumnal rains that are characteristic of the highlands arrived as the first harbingers of winter.

As that time approached, my wife seemed to develop a feeling of panic over spending the winter snowbound in an unfamiliar place. When I went to visit her there at the beginning of October, she suddenly broke the news to me that she wanted to move out of this place of refuge, and the sooner the better. After I returned to Osaka, my wife urged me persistently in letter after letter to move them out of their evacuation place. She lacked the self-confidence, she wrote, to spend the winter here . . . surrounded by an old woman and two infants . . . and without heating equipment . . . and if the children caught pneumonia, there wasn't a doctor, and . . .!

About the middle of November, I took a fairly long leave of absence from my company and left for that hamlet in the highlands of Tottori Prefecture in order to move my family. There I encountered a whole series of various and sundry impediments to getting things like transportation and shipment of effects taken care of. By the time I had taken the last step and managed to arrange some means for shipping our effects and transporting the family, November was almost over.

On the last afternoon, in order to arrange for the shipment of our baggage via the San-in Line, I set out for the station at Shoyama, a place whose name I had so often heard but which I had never visited. If I could have sent our things from the neighboring mountain-top station, which I always used and where I knew the station master, I would have had no problem. But those two steep ridges on the mountain road leading to our house were a formidable obstacle.

Negotiations over the baggage at Shoyama station were settled much more simply than I had expected. According to the conversation I had with the station personnel, if I waited until evening, a truck could be sent from there to the hamlet where I lived. So, since I thought that I might just as well save myself the trouble of walking that five-mile mountain road again, I decided to go back with the truck when they sent it.

As I was wondering how I might best kill the two hours until the truck left, I suddenly remembered hearing that Hosen Hara's widow was living here supported by her elder brother. I tried to think of some particular reason why I had to visit Hosen Hara's widow, but I couldn't come up with one. I did eventually come up with an idea. Rather than approach her to talk about Hosen or anything connected with him, I would ask her instead about anecdotes or anything else I might not yet have heard concerning Keigaku Onuki, whose biography I had to write. With this excuse in mind, I got up the courage to go and visit her.

I asked about Hosen Hara's wife at the general store in front of the station and got an immediate answer. I was told that until two or three years ago Asa had run a little store selling cheap sweets in front of the station, but as the intensity of the war increased and the things she sold became so scarce, she had to close the store. They didn't know what she was doing now, but she was being supported by her elder brother who had a lumber yard or something. I met Asa at the porch of this house, which, while it could not be considered luxurious, was a well-built and excellent house.

I was unable to tell, of course, whether she was happy or unhappy living with her elder brother. She had a trim figure, and as the late afternoon sun fell on her there on the narrow porch, she was peeling persimmons with a kitchen knife getting them ready to dry. The young proprietor of the saké distillery in Wake had told us that she was of small stature and beautiful. And indeed she must have been beautiful when she was young. Even as a woman of sixty, there was still left in her that chicness in both appearance and expression that is usually met in entertainment people. But when she showed her profile, her earlobes were shallow, and here and there, there were traces of tragedy and an air of extreme poverty. I had thought that she would have an aversion to talking about Hosen because he had spent his life dishonestly as a painter, but she showed no such tendency whatsoever.

"It might
look
as if he had some close association with Keigaku-
sensei
when he was young, and after I married him he may have gone up to Kyoto on occasion and visited the
sensei's
home at Hyakumamben. But he did not have any connection that could really be called a
close
association. Anyhow, the fact is that he counterfeited the
sensei's
works inordinately, and so he couldn't show himself in front of Keigaku-
sensei
."

It was surprising, the degree to which this woman had disassociated herself from Hosen. She gave me the impression that as far as she was concerned all the bad acts of this man to whom she had been married for so long were already past, gone, and forgotten, and she had no connection with them.

"I separated from that man in 1935. From then until the time he died, he only came to visit me once. That was on the day the newspapers announced Keigaku-
sensei's
death."

Asa told me that on that day when Hosen came to visit her he had said something like, "Why won't you substitute for me and go and burn some incense at Keigaku's altar instead of me, because I can't hold my head up even at his funeral." Asa told me that she had wondered at the time why, instead of feeling the need to go and apologize for the great trouble he had caused Keigaku, he had acted as though a sadness over the death of an old friend was gripping him.

"No matter what anyone else says, I believe that his spirit was broken after coming to these mountains. Even though he had no reason for it, he held a grudge against Keigaku until then. When he used to drink, he would say that if
he
wanted to paint,
he
could paint pictures as well as the other fellow; when he was young,
he
was the more skillful of the two;
he
also had talent. But, after coming to these mountains, when mentioning Keigaku, he would sometimes say, 'It's such a great thing that he's so famous.' "

That was Asa's story. And the image that then drifted into my mind of Hosen who after reading the news of Keigaku's death had come up to this hamlet to visit the wife who had deserted him, the image of him moving along the winding, hilly road which I myself had just that very day walked, that image curiously crystallized as one of a little person together with the late autumn winds crossing the marvelous bamboo thickets that filled the slopes of the mountain range. However, thinking about it later, I recalled that the anniversary date of Keigaku's death was March third. So, it would have been a time when one side of these mountains was still covered with snow, and Hosen might have been wearing straw snowshoes and trudging stolidly across the snow packed mountain road to get to Shoyama. And
even then
, apparently, Asa had not gone to Keigaku's funeral in Kyoto, and that's the way the matter stood.

In any event, the fact that there was a day such as that in Hosen's declining years suddenly struck me like a ray of sunlight amidst the generally dark and dismal colorless monotone of this person called Hosen who was inexplicably commanding my attention.

Asa's talk about Keigaku ended, I asked her obliquely, though I myself thought it was rude, why she had decided to separate from Hosen. Soon after Hosen came to the mountains and started to manufacture fireworks, she began to want to leave him for doing that kind of work. She herself sometimes had to assist him—"Oh, well, it was making a living, if you can call it a living, so what could I do?"—but apparently she hated Hosen for engaging in that work even more she hated the job itself.

"Even when that man began to counterfeit Keigaku-
sensei's
work, he sneakingly kept it a secret from me. It finally came out in the open, but at first, as you might expect, just my knowing it seemed an embarrassment to him. He carried on these activities as secretly as he could so that I wouldn't know about them. And when he started making fireworks, it was just the same. This time it was not that he was doing anything particularly bad, although there are laws about amateurs handling explosives. It was just that he hid things from me, no matter what he did. If he had only been open about it, everything might have been all right. But when I wasn't there or after I'd gone to bed, he used to sneak over to the edge of the porch and stealthily grind things in his mortar. It was because he did that sort of thing that I got to dislike fireworks."

What apparently first motivated Hosen to tinker with explosives was that there was someone he liked, the owner of a curio store, who made fireworks, and during the time he was associated with that person, he himself developed an interest in making fireworks. When Asa first became aware of it, Hosen was furtively wrapping all sorts of chemicals in paper in roughly equal quantities of about an ounce-and-a-half each and igniting them to see what color their flames would be.

"Why in the world did he find fireworks so interesting?"

"Well," replied Asa a bit pensively, "he was a funny man. I don't know where he ever got the idea, but once he was trying to produce a certain deep blue-violet color and he acted as though he was obsessed. He generally could get that color by mixing Paris green with chlorate of potash and pine resin, but he seemed to be trying to find some means for producing a chrysanthemum of this deep bluish violet—it was supposed to be the color of bell-flowers—but it always ended up a little pale and different from the original bell-flower color."

Hosen lost three of his fingers when he was making shooting stars. He had incorrectly inserted a fuse in the side of an explosive he had been devising, and it accidentally ignited, the explosives nearby catching fire in the process. It was quite a serious thing. Although Asa was quite upset by the incident itself, it additionally provided her with an excuse for leaving him—and she made up her mind to do so. Ever since he had begun working secretly with explosives, she said, she had developed a strong dislike for Hosen, and her dislike had continued. When the explosion accident occurred, it was the last straw, and she really wanted to leave him for good.

"Did he ever achieve that blue-violet?" I asked.

"Mm-m, I wonder. He apparently was not very satisfied with it while I was still with him," she replied but acted as though she really had little interest in that subject. While she was relating stories about Hosen, some of the earlier love and affection she had felt toward him, even though he was such a strange person, had more or less been revived, and even though she now displayed an attitude of cold indifference and detachment, she certainly did not say anything bad about him intentionally.