The Izu Dancer and Other Stories: The Counterfeiter, Obasute, The Full Moon (6 page)

"What do you think?" his eyes were saying.

For my part, I knew the original of this same work, which was held by a collector in Kyoto. Although Takuhiko had never seen it before, he knew instinctively from its lack of dignity and grace that this was not Keigaku's. He explained this to me later. At any rate, by checking with photographs in exhibition catalogues and other reference works, we could tell definitely that this painting had been drawn in imitation of Keigaku's work. As an extra precaution, right then and there, we opened a book of impressions of Keigaku's seals and checked. It seemed quite clear that in place of the stone seal always used with Keigaku's professional name,
Tekishintei,
a counterfeit wooden seal had been substituted. At first glance, the seal impression was a perfect facsimile, but on comparison with the two together, there were distinct discrepancies. Besides, the vermillion inking-pad that was used was different from the pads used in originals. Also, while the painting was furnished with an autographed case, this too was, of course, a counterfeit. When asked, the widow of the deceased owner said that she was acquainted with the man from whom her husband had acquired it; that he was a Japanese painter who carried old curios around with him; that she didn't know what he was doing now, but at that time he had briefly been living in Kakogawa; that he was a friend of Keigaku's called Hosen Hara.

When Takuhiko heard this, he exclaimed, "Did you say Hosen Hara! I know him too. Let's see. . . when was that? At any rate, I vaguely remember meeting him two or three times when I was small. He certainly was a friend of my father's, and he used to come around to our house, but I once heard that he later became a counterfeiter of my father's works and my father forbade him to come again. So, that really was true!"

From then on, following upon the case of Mr. M-of Kakogawa, wherever we went, day after day, we found "Keigakus"—painted by Hosen Hara.

"This is another Hara-Keigaku, isn't it?"

"Beautifully done. Better than the original."

We continually engaged in exchanges of conversation like this, and though it was rather painful to the collectors, whenever we found forgeries, we exposed them as such. Some of them revealed themselves as forgeries at just a cursory glance, but at times there were works that were counterfeited in astoundingly exquisite and accurate detail. There were ways of identifying the forgeries because Keigaku originals had an air of artistic splendor and worth, but even beyond that, when we subjected some of the forgeries to close scrutiny, we found that they contained really gross errors here and there.

For example:

From his middle period on, Keigaku never used any whitish green in daubing his portrayals of moss and grass or rocks and crags, so forgeries which overlooked this fact or contained errors like this could be spotted at a glance. Further, a clumsiness was detectable in the forgeries when it came to the special way of using ultramarine at the bottom part of the white snow on Mount Fuji in summer, which Keigaku loved to portray. In all cases, evidence like this was available, and so the forgeries exposed themselves as forgeries.

All of the forgeries we saw had been acquired by the very same means and were by the brush of Hosen Hara. Apparently this Hara was a very ingenious man. There were instances in which the art work, the artist's signature, the seal, and everything up to the autographed case could, as a matter of course, be ascribed to Hosen himself. Among the ten or so forgeries which we saw during this trip, only two could be considered to have been done in association with a bogus country art dealer.

Hosen had been able to gain people's confidence by claiming a close personal relationship with Keigaku— and this was a trump card he always used with buyers. On top of that, there were many cases in which he would tell the buyer whether he had gotten a particular item from Keigaku or had bought it cheaply, and then proceeded to palm off a forgery. There were also cases of his saying, among other things, that he would request Keigaku to do a picture on order, and after settling on an appropriate time for delivery, he would deliver.

The fact that he used as a middleman a dishonest art dealer whose character no one knew—and there were two definite cases of this—shows that Hosen associated with crafty art dealers, and this seemed worse than his just engaging in this kind of illicit work.

On this trip we half-jokingly began to bestow upon Hosen Hara names like "Keigaku-Hara" and "Uncle Hosen." We had uncovered some ten forgeries that he had produced, and from the collectors' stories we had obtained some fragmentary bits of knowledge about Hosen, but all of these stories concerned Hosen at the age of forty or fifty. That was a period when he changed his residence from place to place, wandering about as an obscure local painter. But, beyond what could be conjectured from Takuhiko's faint recollections, there was no way of knowing to what extent he had really had a close friendship with Keigaku. When we tried to synthesize the stories of all the victims on whom Hosen had foisted forgeries, we gathered that he had lived for varying periods of time in the small cities that we had visited along the Inland Sea, but he had not settled down in any one place for as long as five years. Since he was the kind of fellow who went around selling forgeries at will, inevitably, after two or three years had passed, there would be some sort of incident so that he could not earn a living or remain in any one town and had to move on to another place. However, he always moved to other small cities that were very close by, because he would have had a hard time earning a living if he had left the places where the Keigaku enthusiasts were concentrated.

Hosen did not introduce his wife to anyone except one person, a Mr. S-, the proprietor of a sake-manufacturing company in Wake. The story goes that several times Hosen took his small but beautiful wife for visits at this person's house and that he had, to a surprising degree, commanded the trust of Mr. S-'s father.

"I think Hosen was much more an art dealer than a man who painted pictures himself. I don't remember him very well because I was just a child, but it seems to me that when my father ordered paintings from Tokyo, he ordered them through Hosen. I'd guess that most of the things in this house were acquired with his help." These were the words of the current master of the house, a forty-year-old former university rugby star who didn't have much interest in the paintings. "I think that whatever he did he did well. That's because he was an engraver. Undoubtedly we must have something in the house that Hosen engraved."

Then he searched for it, but it was nowhere to be found.

We were shown some of the works by famous Tokyo artists that the former owner had acquired with Hosen's help. They were all genuine originals, and among them there were some small but rather interesting masterpieces that are very rarely found in country places like that. Considered in this light, there apparently was another side to Hosen that brought him respectability and trust among the Tokyo artists.

"In the final analysis," Takuhiko said, "Hosen is a Keigaku specialist. But even more, he manoeuvers with discretion and doesn't palm off more than one forgery per house." Actually, he was just like that. He could be regarded as a very clever and careful man.

It would appear from our investigations that for some reason Hosen lived in Kakogawa twice. The second time was when he was past his mid-fifties. At the end of that second period of residence in Kakogawa, in 1927 or 1928, he seems to have vanished from this area.

On the fifth and final day of this trip, returning from Saidaiji, we stopped near the Himeji coast and took up lodging at a small inn whose name I don't remember. It was our intention to settle down to recover from the fatigue of the five-day journey and eat some fresh fish. As we entered the room to which we were assigned, to our surprise we discovered in the
tokonoma
*
a landscape painting done by Hosen. It was a weird discovery. The artist's name, "Hosen," was written calligraphically in nearly square, easily legible characters, and the scroll was autographed with two seal impressions,
"Kankotei"
and "Hosen." Perhaps it was because we were so tired from our trip that this strange, fortuitous encounter with a work by Hosen made us feel so odd.

Takuhiko said, "We seem to be having rather close relations with Master Painter Hosen."

"This time he's revealed
himself.
I'd be surprised if this weren't a forgery of Hosen's work."

Both of us just stood engaging in that sort of idle chatter and staring at the scroll in the
tokonoma.
Actually, we had seen some ten Keigaku forgeries counterfeited by Hosen, but this was the first time for us to see his own work properly ascribed to him in his own name.

"It's not bad at all, huh?"

With an expression on his face that revealed his surprise Takuhiko said, "It could get Academy recognition."

To tell the truth, it
was
different, not in the least the sort of absurd art of dubious authorship that one usually finds in the
tokonoma
of these lodging houses. The subject, the corner of a high mountain enveloped in mist, drawn in the style of the southern painters, was quite commonplace, but it was drawn with minute precision and bore Hosen's own signature; and as we looked at it, it strangely permeated our minds.

"It has a peculiar spirit," Takuhiko said then. There certainly was something in the picture that had a peculiar spirit. For eyes that had just witnessed so many Keigaku masterpieces, this painting of course could not compete, but yet there was a spirit of destitution and solitude which had disciplined the work.

"Kankotei,
indeed!" Takuhiko burst out a little later, as though he had been deeply impressed by something. He stared at the scene again and then walked over to the rattan chair on the porch. The sight of the Chinese character for "cold"—
Kan
—in that name and even the sound of that expression in my mind as I heard it sent chills through me, matching the eerie sensation that was inherent in the work.

That evening, we spent the last night of our trip opening saké bottles. And under these circumstances, stories about Hosen were apt to prevail over the stories about the masterpieces of Keigaku's early period which we had been investigating all week long.

By some manner or means, the conclusion that we reached between us was that having painted such a picture as we saw there, Hosen could not be called completely devoid of talent.

"How foolish! Instead of the monotonous drudgery of forging my father's works, wouldn't he have done better painting pictures of his own?" Takuhiko, glancing wide-eyed at the scroll in the
tokonoma
, rolled up the sleeves of
hisyukata,
and lifted his saké cup to his mouth.

"The forgeries probably sold better."

"I suppose so. The name
Tekishintei
would certainly sell better than the name
Kankotei."

"On the whole, what kind of man was he? Do you remember him?" As I was beginning to feel more or less curious about this counterfeiter, I also wanted to know about his personal appearance.

"I really don't remember anything about that. It was when I was very little. Besides, you see, I only caught glimpses of him in the hallway or places like that. One time though, oh yes, it happened about the time my father was around forty and I guess I was seven or eight . . ." and from out of the recesses of his memory Takuhiko related what was left of his deepest impressions of that time.

He did not clearly or wholly recollect where the place was, but apparently it was at some exhibition. Hosen was on his knees on the floor, with his head lowered, and Keigaku was standing in front of him, saying: "Lift your head up and look at me."

As Takuhiko vaguely recalled, there had been some shouting about something. Keigaku had gotten violently excited and kept on shouting, repeating the same thing over and over, while Hosen at that time merely kept his eyes lowered without saying a word. Takuhiko was left with absolutely no impression about the personal appearance of Hosen at that time, but, he said, in his childish heart he had had a tremendous feeling of compassion for the man.

"It was because my father had that kind of temperament, I think. On discovering that there were forgeries, he shouted abuses in front of people without compunction, you know what I mean? We weren't at home, so I guess that he was caught by my father at one of my father's exhibitions, at a department store, museum, temple, or someplace like that. Even so, I think my father may have given him some money after that. So, this has gotten to be a kind of apocryphal story."