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Life of a Counterfeiter

and Other Stories

Pushkin Press

LIFE OF A COUNTERFEITER

Nearly a decade has passed since the Onuki family first asked me to compile a biography of the painter Onuki Keigaku, and I have yet to complete it. This spring, I received a printed announcement from the house in Kyoto saying they would be marking the thirteenth anniversary of Keigaku's death with a memorial service at a Zen temple; a postcard was enclosed, self-addressed and stamped, by which I was to inform them whether or not I would be able to attend. I must admit I was somewhat diffident about presenting myself to the family. For better or worse, work would make it impossible for me to participate in the ceremony anyway, but in all honesty it came as a relief that this was the case—I felt as if I had been saved.

It was in 1942, as I recall, that Takuhiko, the new head of the family, first contacted me to discuss the terms under which I might undertake to assemble Keigaku's biography; he indicated that, while the family was in no great hurry, they intended to present the book to the deceased on the seventh anniversary of his death, and to distribute copies at the ceremony, so they would be glad if I could finish the manuscript in time for it to be published by then. In the event, the seventh anniversary fell in March 1945, when the war was in its final stages, and both the Onuki family and I were in such frantic straits that the biography was nowhere in our thoughts; I had no choice but to put a temporary hold on my work while I was still gathering materials, and our agreement dissolved of its own accord. After the fighting ceased, however, the family approached me once again. Now that we were living in a more settled age, they said, the project could no longer be allowed to languish, and they desired that I might see it to completion in due haste. Ever since, perhaps once a year, I receive a postcard from Takuhiko inquiring, with a subtlety and delicacy so typical of him, how the biography is coming along; and each time I have replied with some tortuous excuse, buying a temporary reprieve.

I was chosen for the rather irksome task of preparing Keigaku's biography, it seems, because I had interviewed the deceased on a few occasions in my capacity as an arts reporter for an Osaka newspaper, which is what I was in those days, and he had liked me better than reporters from the other papers: this familiarity would make it relatively easy for me to collect materials. My position in the newspaper and the passing acquaintance with the painting community it had given me appears to have impressed both the Onuki family and Keigaku's disciples favorably as well, leading them to settle upon me as the person best suited to the job.

My decision to accept the commission—which I did with alacrity—was prompted in the first place by my admiration both for Onuki Keigaku the man and for his works; but also, and more importantly, by the realization that, in order to compile such a biography, I would essentially have to write a history of the entire Kyoto painting establishment, or indeed of painting at the national level. This would not be such a bad way, I thought, for a reporter who was supposedly a specialist in the arts to learn a bit about how painting had changed and evolved in this country since the Meiji period.

Having taken on the job in this rather cavalier manner, I discovered that the work itself was by no means as straightforward as I had expected. I began by trying to piece together a timeline of Keigaku's life, only to find that until he built the magnificent estate in Kyoto where he lived out his final years he had been constantly on the move, bumping about from place to place as the spirit moved him—he had lived in more than ten houses just within Kyoto and its suburbs—and as if that weren't enough, he had spent almost half of each year traveling. It was all but impossible, then, to determine with any accuracy when and in which atelier he had painted even his greatest, most acclaimed works. In order to trace the sixty-odd years of his career, I had to piece together what I could learn from a number of disciples and fellow painters, as well as art dealers, framers, collectors, and so on—and each of their accounts conflicted with the others. Making a timeline was not as neat a task as it might appear from the outside.

Keigaku had lost his wife of many years, Mitsu, when he was fifty, and lived out the remainder of his life in a household of three, accompanied by an elderly maid who passed away two years after him and a series of students who did chores around the house in exchange for lodging. Keigaku was such a prickly man that none of the students stayed for long; one was always leaving, and another coming to take his place. Takuhiko, whom as heir one would have expected to be most knowledgeable about the deceased's doings, had spent many years in France, and although he had returned five years prior to Keigaku's death, he had his own house in Tokyo and had been so characteristically self-centered in his dealings with his father that he had essentially no experience of Keigaku's day-to-day life. The end result was that there was almost no one I could go to for detailed knowledge about Keigaku's private existence. And there was one more factor that placed hurdle after hurdle in my way as I attempted to gather materials for my biography, causing me no end of trouble: owing to his untamed personality, his wild disregard for matters that concerned more ordinary people, he had always been utterly indifferent to the painting establishment, and thus from start to finish remained isolated, a member of no school but his own.

In short, for all these reasons, I made hardly any progress at all, even on the timeline that should have been the foundation of my biography, managing to fill at best two or three notebooks by visiting towns near his birthplace, up and down the coast of the Inland Sea, where I saw his very first efforts, and by making trips to view the major later-period "decorative works," painted for selling, in the small weaving towns in the Hokuriku region where, oddly enough, many of his admirers were concentrated. And then, as the war escalated, my work on the biography came to an abrupt end, the basic research still only half done.

After the war, my feelings came to be dominated by an odd reluctance to embark again on a once-failed project, and while I knew I had no choice, insofar as I had taken the job, my acute awareness of the particular annoyances I would face made it hard to pick myself up and do what had to be done. What's more, when the war ended, I had—quite out of the blue, even from my own vantage—quit my post at the newspaper, moved to Tokyo, and plowed headfirst into the world of literature, so that all my time was occupied by writing of that nature; thus, what with this and that, I allowed my work on the biography to languish, putting it off until tomorrow, then the next day, with the result that even now, after all these years, I have yet to produce anything beyond that incomplete timeline, littered with blanks, and two or three notebooks of fragmentary jottings.

So the situation stood. The realization that I had now failed to produce the biography in time for even the thirteenth anniversary of Keigaku's death made me feel so ashamed of myself and my endless procrastinating, with respect both to the Onuki family and to the deceased himself, that I really could not have faced them; and so, ever since I received the announcement, I began to think that this year, at last, I absolutely had to cobble together at least the semblance of a biography, so that I would at least have half carried out my responsibility, and be free of that burden.

Since I knew from past experience that I never made much progress on my own work in July and August anyway, when the heat is at its worst, I arranged to devote these two months to the Keigaku biography, renting a small studio in a village at the foot of Mt. Amagi, in Izu, where I was born and raised. I threw myself somewhat aggressively into the project, deciding to spend only mornings on it, and that I would simply leave anything I was uncertain of until the autumn, when I would make a trip to Kyoto to fill in the gaps; thus I would at least be able to finish the manuscript.

Work progressed smoothly enough inJuly: I went through nearly ten collections of Keigaku's occasional essays and travel writings and listed as many of his trips as I could identify, then added in his major works by year of composition—and with that I was able to complete a timeline of sorts, however slapdash. In August, relying on my old notes and trying as much as possible to set out only trustworthy facts, avoiding any speculation, I finished the section of the biography covering from his childhood through his teenage years, then wrote of his apprenticeships with a series of Kyoto painters, including Katakura Isso and Yoshimizu Gaho; the submission of his first important work, Pleasures Lost, to the 1897 Exhibition for the Promotion of Painting, and the really quite extraordinary splash with which his career began when the painting received an award, marking him as a genius from the beginning; and then, finally, his unveiling, in quick succession, of the works now regarded as his early masterpieces, among them White Nights, The Old Fox, and A Thin Layer of Snow. After that, however, I suddenly found myself unable to write another word.

Here and there, in the course of describing Keigaku's glorious beginnings as a young artist, I had been transcribing sections from what was essentially the only holographic document to have survived, an unpublished diary from that period in his life that Onuki Takuhiko had handed me the first time I visited him in Kyoto after the war.

"I came across something unusual," he had said. "I wonder if you might find it useful?"

The diary contained scattered notes about day-to-day events from the end of 1897 to the summer of 1899, all written out in spidery characters on handmade Japanese paper; it was a precious, absolutely unique record of Keigaku's life during that period. Evidently the family had found it in a Chinese chest in the storehouse, mixed in with all sorts of other old papers, while they were preparing to evacuate.

The thing in this diary that most piqued my curiosity was the revelation that this brilliant, arrogant and haughty painter, who seemed never in his life to have possessed a true friend, had in fact been close to someone in those years—a man named Shinozaki. His name appeared three times. What was more, his was the only name in the diary's pages that did not belong to a family member. One entry read, "Went to see Shinozaki in Kitano with my silver medal; we spent the night drinking and talking." Judging from the context, this almost certainly occurred after Keigaku received the Special Award for Picture of a Peacock at the exhibition of the Kyoto Painting Association. Presumably he went to share his delight with his close friend, taking the medal with him, and the two had stayed up all night pouring each other cup after cup of sake; one can easily imagine that this must have been the happiest night in Keigaku's young life. That he was able to share his joy with Shinozaki so completely, without holding back, suggests that they must have been very close indeed.

The next entry reads: "Shinozaki sent a sea bream to congratulate me. Went right away to see him in Shimotachiuri, but he was out. Left a note, enormous, on the door to his room." Presumably Shinozaki had sent the sea bream because Keigaku had taken another prize at an exhibition or something like that; Keigaku, touched by this warm gesture, had immediately dashed off to Shinozaki's house, or perhaps to the room he rented. We have no way of knowing what the "enormous" note Keigaku left "on the door to his room" might have said, but in all likelihood it was either a note explaining the reason for his visit or a poem in Chinese of the sort he often composed later in his life, spontaneously tossed off, expressing his gratitude for the gift. This was an extraordinarily reckless thing for Keigaku to do, but I found it fascinating—it seemed so perfectly to capture the proud confidence of a young, brilliant painter whose talents were only just being recognized. No date is given for this entry.

Shinozaki's name appears for the last time in this sentence: "Shinozaki left Mt. Sho this morning, came to Kyoto." This comes toward the end of the diary, in an entry dated August 3, 1899. The line has been written in on its own; it has no connection to what precedes or follows, and does not seem to have any particular meaning. And yet, the second I saw the two characters for Mt. Sho, an image rose up before me, perfectly clear, of that intimate friend of Keigaku's, the man he called Shinozaki: all of a sudden, I realized that he was the counterfeiter Hara Hosen.

I had some slight knowledge of Hosen as a man who had produced counterfeits of Keigaku's work and lived a dark, unhappy life, though until then I had half forgotten his existence. And yet, when it struck me that he must have been essentially the only close friend Keigaku ever had in his youth, I was struck by an emotion unlike anything I had ever felt, and that I don't know how to describe.

Casting my thoughts back, I realized I had once heard that Hosen had been adopted, and, although I had never been told his original surname, the name Shinozaki was, it occurred to me, very common in the small settlement along the Hino river, in the Chugoku mountains, where Hosen had grown up. There could be no doubt, as far as I was concerned, that the Shinozaki who appeared in the diary and Hara Hosen were one and the same.

For the next two days, I left my work on the biography and did nothing but sit in the rattan chair on my south-facing veranda, staring at Mt. Amagi and the late-summer sun, suddenly so much weaker than before, glowing on its slopes. My thoughts were occupied, not by the figure of that brilliant painter Keigaku in the full glory of his youth, but by Hosen's checkered career—though obviously the little bits and pieces of knowledge I had concerning him were only then, for the first time, drawing together to form a single coherent thread, an image of a life. As I sat facing the mountain, a powerful urge came over me: I had to keep thinking about Hosen. There was something in his life, it seemed, that I could not avoid thinking about—that I had, for his sake, to reflect upon.

* * *

I first encountered Hara Hosen's name in the autumn of 1943 when Onuki Takuhiko and I took a trip together, thinking we should go look at a number of Keigaku's representative early works that remained scattered about in various towns on the Inland Sea, along the southern edges of Hyogo and Okayama prefectures, owing to their proximity to Keigaku's hometown.

We gave ourselves about five days and visited the houses of owners of Keigaku's works in Akashi, Kakogawa, Takasago, Himeji, Shikama, Aioi, Wake and Saidaiji. Takuhiko had contacted someone at each house in advance to explain our motivation for coming; in most cases they welcomed us warmly, and we were able to see a number of paintings Keigaku had done in his twenties of which previously we had only heard.

We were kept quite busy getting on and off trains, stepping out onto the platforms of small stations in Harima and Bizen, where one could somehow intuit the nearness of the ocean and where the autumn sunlight splashed across the whitish, sandy soil characteristic of the region, and then making the rounds of the addresses I had copied out in my notebook, going from the house of one venerable or at least inordinately wealthy family to the next, each one of which had been a patron of Keigaku's, so to speak, while he was alive. Sometimes our schedule allowed us to stay no more than an hour or two, and even had that not been the case Takuhiko was innately given to rushing about, so I found myself hurrying, indeed almost sprinting, down long roads enclosed by pines or streets bordered by endless mud walls, but it was late autumn and I didn't sweat much at all—the weather was neither too hot nor too cold, ideal for a trip of this nature.

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Excerpted from Life of a Counterfeiter by Yasushi Inoue, Michael Emmerich. Copyright © 1956 The Heirs of Yasushi Inoue. Excerpted by permission of Pushkin Press.
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