Life of a Counterfeiter Read online

  In the course of our five-day trip together, Takuhiko and I encountered something quite intriguing that neither of us had expected. Every house we visited had, it turned out, a painting—and usually only one—that purported to be Keigaku’s, but was in fact a forgery. We came across these works with such regularity it almost seemed the families must have gotten together and planned it.

  The first was at the house of the wealthy M. family in Kakogawa, whose head had already died.

  They showed us several of Keigaku’s paintings in an inner room that looked out onto a carefully tended enclosed garden. Among them was one small scroll whose box bore the title “Autumn Scene, North of the Capital,” evidently meant for use in the tea ceremony. I spotted it as a forgery as soon as it was unrolled, and Takuhiko, who had been peering down at it from the side, immediately glanced up at me, so that our gazes unexpectedly collided, and clung together for a moment.

  “What do you think?” his eyes were saying.

  I had seen exactly the same painting at the house of a collector in Kyoto, but Takuhiko could tell right away, even without referencing such external circumstances, as he later explained, simply because there was a certain lack of grace in the execution. At any rate, the work had obviously been copied from a photograph in a catalog or some such thing. Just in case, we checked the manual of Keigaku’s seals, and sure enough the one on this scroll was unmistakably a copy, evidently carved from wood, of the original stone “Tekishintei” seal. At first glance it appeared to be quite skillfully done, but when we lined the two marks up side by side the discrepancies were clear. The vermilion ink was a different shade, as well, and while the box had a title on it, as it should, the calligraphy was fake.

  When we asked about the painting, the widow of the house told us her late husband had bought it from a painter named Hara Hōsen, a friend of Keigaku’s who had temporarily taken up residence in Kakogawa and had gone around with a number of old pieces; she herself had been acquainted with the man, though she had no idea what had become of him.

  “Ah, Hara Hōsen!” Takuhiko said when he heard this. “I know him, too, actually. I’m not entirely sure when it might have been, but I remember meeting him two or three times as a boy. It’s true he was a friend of my father’s, and he used to come over fairly often, but from what I’ve heard he made forgeries of my dad’s paintings at some point, and after that my dad refused to see him. Seems the story was true.”

  This experience with the M. family in Kakogawa turned out to be only the beginning; at one house after the next, day after day, we were shown Keigakus painted by Hara Hōsen.

  “Another Hōsen, huh?”

  “This one’s quite good, actually—almost better than the real thing.”

  Each time, after exchanging a few remarks of this sort, we would inform the unfortunate owners that the piece was a counterfeit. In some cases we could tell at a glance that the painting was fake, but some of the imitations were surprisingly skillful. Still, they could be clearly distinguished from originals by their lack of a certain innate quality, or by their less commanding aura—they were fakes, after all—and upon careful examination there was always some blatant mistake.

  From his middle period on, Keigaku abandoned the use of short, pale-green lines in depicting the surfaces of boulders, grass or moss, and so sometimes one could instantly point to an error of this sort; in other cases, Keigaku’s unusual technique of applying azure blue near the bottom of the snow in paintings of Mt. Fuji in the summer—a favorite theme of his—had been so sloppily mimicked that it could be cited as evidence of a fake. In every instance, without exception, the counterfeits revealed themselves.

  That Hōsen was responsible for all these forgeries was evident from the routes by which they had been acquired. He must have been an exceptionally adroit man, because in the large majority of cases he seemed not only to have painted the work, but also to have prepared the different seals and even done the calligraphy on the box; indeed, of the dozen or so forgeries we saw during our trip, only two appeared to have been sold in partnership with sketchy country art dealers.

  There was a reason for this: in his interactions with buyers, Hōsen had usually invoked his friendship with Keigaku as his trump card, using this to gain their trust before telling them he had received a certain painting as a gift from Keigaku, or bought it for very little, and then pushing the forgery onto them. On other occasions, Hōsen would offer to ask Keigaku to do a painting for the buyer, and then, after waiting for a plausible amount time, he would bring the painting along.

  As I noted, only two works had come to their buyers through an unscrupulous, unidentified dealer. Still, this indicated that at some point Hōsen had indeed partnered with such a person to sell his forgeries, and that made the whole business even more serious.

  During our trip, Takuhiko and I took to calling the counterfeiter by different names: “Hara Keigaku,” “old man Hara,” and so on. We had the opportunity to inspect a dozen or so of his counterfeits, and gleaned scraps of knowledge about the man from talking with their owners, but the stories we heard all dated from when he was in his forties and fifties, from the period when he had lived in the area, roving from place to place as an unknown local painter; the most we could do to satisfy our curiosity about the extent of his friendship with the young Keigaku was to speculate on the basis of Takuhiko’s hazy memories.

  Piecing together what we learned from the victims onto whom Hōsen had unloaded his forgeries, we determined that he had lived for some time in each of the small coastal cities we had visited—three years in Aioi, two in Shikama, four in Wake, and so on—but that he had never settled in any one place for as much as five years. Given that he was the sort of man to go about selling counterfeits, I suspect that after two or three years some incident would make it impossible for him to remain in each town, leaving him no choice but to move. Presumably he went on hopping from one small city to the next one in the vicinity, rather than picking up and leaving for someplace farther away, because he would have been unable to earn a living outside this region so rich in collectors of Keigaku’s work.

  S., the president of a sake distillery in Wake, was the only person to whom Hōsen had introduced his wife. For whatever reason, Hōsen had brought the petite but beautiful woman to this man’s house not once but on many occasions; according to what we were told, Hōsen had gained the confidence of the previous head of the household to quite an extraordinary degree.

  “I have the impression Hōsen was less a painter himself than a sort of dealer. I was still a child at the time, so my memory isn’t very clear, but I believe my father often relied on Hōsen when he wanted to commission a work from a painter in Tokyo, for example. Most of the paintings in this house came to us through him, I’d say.”

  The present head of the household, who told us this, was in his forties—he had been a celebrated rugby player in college, and didn’t look as though he had much interest in paintings.

  He continued: “I had the sense he was good at everything. He even carved his own seals, you know. I think we have one he did around here somewhere.”

  The man looked for the seal, but couldn’t recall where they kept it.

  We asked him to show us a few of the paintings by famous Tokyo artists his father had acquired through Hōsen, but they were all absolutely authentic; one was such a remarkably accomplished piece, though it was small, that it was surprising the artist had been willing to send it off to a place like this, way out in the country. Whatever Hōsen’s failings may have been, Tokyo’s painters seemed to have placed a good deal of trust in him.

  “So Hōsen specialized in Keigaku,” Takuhiko said. “And he navigated very cautiously, never selling two counterfeits to the same family.”

  It was true. Hōsen had been very clever, and very careful.

  According to our researches, Kakogawa was the only place Hōsen had lived in twice—though we couldn’t say why. He would have been in his late fifties the second time, wh
ich lasted from 1927 to 1928; after that he had left the region behind. Or rather, he didn’t necessarily leave; he simply stopped turning up, around that time, at the houses of the local art lovers.

  On the fifth and final day of our travels, on the way back from Saidaiji, we took a room in a small, well-known inn in Himeji, near the shore. We intended to relax a little, eat some fresh fish, and divest ourselves of the weariness of five days of travel. By some amazing coincidence, however, we discovered a landscape by Hōsen hanging in the alcove of our room. The first seal, in a style close to block script, was easily legible as “Hōsen”; the second and third read “Kankotei” and, once again, “Hōsen.”

  Owing in part, perhaps, to our weariness after so much traveling, this odd encounter with Hōsen’s work seemed inordinately funny.

  “Some strange karma seems to bind us to the great painter,” Takuhiko said. “And look here, he’s taken off the mask on this one. Surely it’s not a counterfeit of his own work!”

  We remained there, still standing, cracking jokes and gazing at the scroll in the alcove. We had seen several of Hōsen’s counterfeit Keigakus, of course, but this was the first time we had encountered a work of his own, signed with his own name.

  “Not half bad, is it?” Takuhiko said, looking a bit taken aback. “He could have made non-vetted status at the Ministry of Education Exhibit, I’d say.”

  At the very least, it wasn’t the sort of anonymous garbage one often finds hanging in the alcove of your average inn. The subject matter was trite—part of a mountain shrouded in mist, painted in the Nanga style—but it was executed with such exquisite attention to detail that one could see why Hōsen had signed it with his own name. In some strange fashion, I felt the scene burrowing its way into my heart as I stood gazing at it.

  “Odd spirit in there,” Takuhiko said.

  And it was true: something in the painting called for such a description. No one who had just seen a sampling of Keigaku’s masterpieces could regard it as a genuinely superior work, but its peculiarly solitary, impoverished spirit gave it a certain attractive harshness.

  “Kankotei. ‘Pavilion of Cold Antiquity.’ A perfect name for an artist,” Takuhiko said, evidently profoundly moved; then, having inspected the painting once more, he went out to the veranda and sat down on one of the rattan chairs. As he went, the sound of the name he had just uttered, Kankotei, was finding its chill way into the recesses of my own heart, and I had to agree that in some odd way it exactly matched the mood of the painting.

  We spent the evening—the last of our trip—sharing a few small bottles of sake. We tended to grow most enthusiastic when the conversation turned to Hara Hōsen, rather than during our discussions of the early masterpieces of Keigaku’s we had spent the past week investigating.

  The conclusion we reached was that Hōsen must have had some degree of talent, given that he was capable of paintings as good, despite their problems, as those we had seen.

  “What a fool. He should have painted his own works, rather than wasting his time making stupid knock-offs of my father’s!”

  Casting a sideways glance at the scroll in the alcove, Takuhiko pushed up the sleeves of the thin cotton yukata the inn had provided and raised his cup to his lips.

  “I’m sure the counterfeits sold better.”

  “That’s true. People would go for a Tekishintei over a Kankotei.”

  “What kind of a man was he, I wonder? You have no memory of him?”

  I felt a certain curiosity about this charlatan, the impression he had made.

  “None at all. I was just a boy, after all, and besides, the most I would have done is catch a glimpse of him in the entryway or something. I suppose there was one time, come to think of it, when my dad was about forty, I’d say, because I must have been seven or eight…”

  Takuhiko recounted his most deeply memorable encounter with Hōsen.

  He had no idea where it had happened, but presumably it was an exhibition. Hōsen was kneeling on the floor with his head bowed to the floor while Keigaku towered over him.

  “Lift your head and look me in the eye!”

  Takuhiko had, he said, a faint memory of his father shouting these words. Keigaku was livid, he kept shouting, repeating himself, but no matter what he said Hōsen never raised his head. Takuhiko had no impression of Hōsen’s appearance, what sort of air he possessed, but he remembered feeling deeply sorry for the man, even though he was too young to understand.

  “My dad must have found out about the forgeries, and… well, you know what he was like—he didn’t care, he’d fly off the handle even in front of other people. We weren’t at home, so it must have been one of my dad’s exhibitions, at some department store or museum, maybe a temple, and my dad must have caught him there. Something along those lines, I’m sure. My dad might have been helping him out financially then, too. Sounds like an old ballad the way I tell it.”

  Takuhiko treated it as a joke, but Keigaku seems to have given Hōsen money more than just once or twice. Takuhiko remembered hearing this from his father and mother, and the faint recollections that came when he cast his thoughts back to the two other times he had seen Hōsen, if that’s who it was, suggested that the man had either come to borrow money, or been summoned for a scolding by his father—something like that, in any event, must have been responsible for the way Hōsen hung his head when he left, judging from the mood of the scenes Takuhiko had peeked in on.

  “That time I saw him prostrating himself, unable to look up—I don’t think he ever appeared in my father’s presence again after that,” Takuhiko said. “Once I started middle school, I never heard my old man mention him visiting, and when he did talk about him it was always in a very retrospective sort of mode. ‘I had this friend once, a real bad character…’ That kind of thing.”

  We stayed up late that night, drinking before that painting of Hara Hōsen’s, and then spread our futons out on the floor in front of it and went to sleep.

  The second time I encountered Hara Hōsen’s name was near the end of the war, in the spring of 1945, which makes it about a year and a half after Ōnuki Takuhiko and I went on our trip around the towns along the Inland Sea. During that period there had been a dramatic shift in the direction of the war, and the country had become almost unrecognizably gritty and desolate: people’s day-to-day lives, their hearts, even nature itself had changed.

  I had evacuated my mother, my ailing wife, and our two small children to a village near the ridge of the Chūgoku mountains, relying on the good graces of an acquaintance there of one of my colleagues at the paper. The place was about as isolated as it could be, located near the area where Okayama, Hiroshima and Tottori prefectures abutted each other and falling just within the borders of the last. No matter how the war ended, it was the sort of spot where life would keep rolling placidly along, day after day, just as it had since ancient times.

  I went for a first visit to get a sense of the area, before shipping my family off in late March. The only person I had any connection with there—the acquaintance of my colleague upon whom I would be relying for help—was a man named Ogami Senzō.

  The eight-kilometer road that led to the village from the station at the summit, on the Hakubi line, was incredibly steep, just barely wide enough for one person, and I had to cross two small peaks on the way; once I entered the village, though, the land was so level it was difficult to believe it was on a mountainside, and the view was wide open in every direction. The sunlight and the scent of the wind were totally different from down below. Fifty or so houses dotted the spacious plateau, and the whole settlement brimmed with a light so free from any shadows that it actually left me feeling a bit empty. For the first time, up there, I experienced the sensation of light raining down from the sky. A shallow river perhaps nine meters across ran down the center of the plateau; it was hard to tell at first glance which was upriver and which was downriver, though in fact it was flowing north.

  Still in his farming clothes,
Ogami took me to see the village Youth Center—a building hardly any different from the farmhouses, despite its name—which we had been told we could rent, and I decided immediately to take it. That night I stayed with the Ogamis. Every household in the village had done so well with its fields that you would have been hard pressed to find such wealthy farmers elsewhere: each family owned two or three cows, and their houses were built in an old, unfussy style. Evidently the Ogami family could trace its roots back further than any other in the village, and their house was a size bigger than the rest. The room where they let me sleep was separated from the storage area by a sliding door fashioned from a solid board of Japanese cypress.

  And in this room, in the incongruously small half-mat alcove, I discovered a picture of Keigaku’s: a fox beneath a peony, turning to look this way. I was startled to see it there. As wealthy as they were, this was hardly a picture one would expect to find in a farmhouse up in the mountains.

  “That’s quite a piece you have there,” I said to Ogami. He was in his fifties, and looked like the last man you would expect to have anything to do with painting.

  “Yes, I hear it isn’t the kind of thing people like us can often get hold of…” For some reason, Ogami’s deeply suntanned face, with its simple, rugged air, had taken on a bashful coloring. “Happens there was a fellow in the village who used to be his best friend,” he said. “The painter’s, I mean. It’s a man named Keigaku who did it.”

  “What was this friend’s name?” I asked.

  “Hara Hōsen he was called. He was a painter, too. Died back in 1940, though, if memory serves. From these parts originally, and came back home at the end of his life.”

  I required no further explanation—everything was clear. I was surprised to learn that Hara Hōsen had come from this area, I must say. And even though he was a perfect stranger, hearing that he had died touched a certain chord in me, if only very faintly. Just one year after Keigaku had passed away, his counterfeiter, Hara Hōsen, had followed.