Life of a Counterfeiter by Yasushi Inoue

Author:Yasushi Inoue [Yasushi Inoue]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781782270904
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2014-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

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

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