Counterfeiter and Other Stories by Yasushi Inoue

Author:Yasushi Inoue
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4629-0077-0
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

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

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