Counterfeiter and Other Stories (3 page)

For two days I laid aside my pen and postponed the task of chronicling Keigaku Onuki's biography. I passed the time idly, sitting in a wicker chair on the veranda, facing south and gazing at the late-summer Amagi mountainside as the sunbeams were rapidly fading. My thoughts turned away from the image of the brilliant early days of the artistic genius Keigaku, and Hosen Hara's hapless career captured my thoughts. Then, for the first time, all my fragmentary bits of knowledge of him fell into place, and it was a composite picture of his life that now flashed into my mind. Filled with a strong impulse to think further about Hosen Hara, I turned my face toward the mountain. There was something compelling in Hosen Hara's life that forced me to think about him.

II

I
N THE
fall of 1943, I had set out with Takuhiko Onuki to take a look at some of Keigaku's representative early works which had been produced and still remained scattered in various villages near the artist's birthplace around the Inland Sea in Hyogo and Okayama Prefectures. This was the first time that I encountered the name of Hosen Hara.

We had set a period of five days to visit the homes of the collectors of Keigaku's works and had scheduled our trip in this order: Akashi, Kakogawa, Takasago, Himeji, Shikama, Aioi, Wake, and Saidaiji. Since Takuhiko had generally announced in advance that we were going to make these visits, we were hospitably received at most of the houses, and we were able to inspect many works of Keigaku's second decade, hitherto known to us only by name.

While we were quite busily getting on and off trains, the autumn sunbeams were scattered like fallen petals over the whitish sand characteristic of these places. As we got off at the small stations in the Harima-Bizen area, we had the feeling of being somewhere near the sea. We wandered about from house to house visiting the old homes and rich mansions of those who had been, in a sense, patrons of the late Keigaku, men who were written up in my notes. Because of our tight schedule, we had just one or two hours at some places. But even when we could have been more relaxed, I had to go half-galloping after the impetuous Takuhiko along the long pine-wooded roads and through the mud-walled residential areas. The late fall temperature was ideal, neither too hot nor too cold, but traveling at such a pace, our bodies were covered with a light perspiration. It had been my main purpose on this trip to see these works, and it was Takuhiko's intention to pay his respects at the homes of his late father's powerful supporters. But at each of those homes, we had to listen to one or two anecdotes about Keigaku's early days, and occasionally, if there were scrolls in unauthenticated boxes, Takuhiko was asked to autograph them.

Takuhiko, whose resemblance to his father was manifest in the high-strung temperament that showed in his face, thick eyebrows, and crewcut hair, would say, "Fine, let's do it!"

And he would roll up his sleeves to his big-boned shoulders, not at all like "a fellow who did as he pleased in Paris and whose charm and polish were renowned throughout the world," as he often boasted, and he would show that he could write characters surprisingly like his father's.

From the time of our first encounter, I had taken a curiously great interest in this contemporary of mine, this Keigaku the Second, and in a short time we had built up a frank, candid, and friendly relationship. Although he had been something of a profligate abroad, playing around did not interest him after he returned to Japan. As if his personality had suddenly changed, he did not care about either his reputation or his appearance. He gave the impression of staring wide-eyed at war-ravaged Japan, like a foreigner. Coupled with his defiant nature as a second-generation genius, he had the good-natured attitude generally attributed to young men from good homes. Rumors that had reached my ears before I actually met him were incredibly far from the truth. It seemed as though he was being stereotyped through misunderstandings of the nature of a son of a well-known painter.

He had inherited a prodigious artistic talent from his father, but gossip had it that he was lazy, shiftless, and incompetent, that he was slovenly and undignified, and he was rumored to be an offensive, despicable playboy. While it could be said that he had a profession—he was an engraver—he actually didn't do much of anything. There was nothing compelling him to do anything, because he had inherited an enormous fortune, a magnificent town house, and a villa, all bequeathed by his father. Before the war ended in defeat, producing his father's biography and collecting his father's most magnificent works had been the most compelling jobs for him.

In the course of my five-day journey with this Takuhiko Onuki, we stumbled upon one fact of completely unanticipated interest. As if by prearrangement, one forgery of Keigaku's work had been collected at almost every house.

The first forgery of Keigaku's work that we encountered was in Kakogawa, at the home of a Mr. M——, one of the artist's patrons, where the head of the household had passed away some time ago. In the inner drawing room, which looked out over a well-kept garden, we were shown any number of Keigaku's works, among which there was one miniature, a scroll in the
Chagake
style which usually adorns tea-ceremony rooms. The scroll was labelled "North Kyoto Autumn Scenery." The instant that this one was displayed, I could tell beyond question what it was. Even Takuhiko, who had been peering at it from a vantage point off on the side, immediately turned his eyes toward me. Our glances instinctively met and intertwined.

"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 saké-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.