Life of a Counterfeiter

by Yasushi Inoue

  One can see even from this résumé of his career that as a young man he had deep ties to Nagasaki, and given the evidence, his appearance at this restaurant was probably nothing to wonder at.

  *

  The person who planted in my childish heart, when I was still very small, an image of Matsumoto Jun as a man more worthy of respect than anyone else in the world was the woman my great-grandfather had taken as his mistress.

  From the age of six until the spring of my thirteenth year, when I was in fifth grade, I was raised by this woman, then in her mid-fifties, at our ancestral home on the Izu peninsula. I only went to live with my family, joining my parents in the city, after Grandma Kano—this was what we called her—passed away. The reason I was raised by Grandma Kano, startling as it might seem, was that after my great-grandfather and his wife Suga died, when Grandma Kano’s distinctive position as a mistress no longer really mattered, she had begun living as a member of our family on funds my parents sent her; even then, however, she could never entirely shed the wariness she felt on account of the odd status she had occupied all her life, ever since she was a young woman, and so, even though two generations had passed since my great-grandfather headed the family, she thought it would be best to strengthen her position by keeping me with her as the eldest son and heir.

  My parents were young then, and in the face of Grandma Kano’s persistent requests they appear to have decided, in a rather offhand way, that it would make things easier anyway if she was willing to take me, and left me in her charge. In short, I was Grandma Kano’s hostage.

  Even as a boy, I could tell that Grandma Kano was beautiful. There was a certain severity to her features, but it was clear her looks must have been remarkable when she was young. She came from a port town on the other side of Mt. Amagi, just across from my hometown, but at the age of eighteen or nineteen she had gone up to Tokyo as a geisha and become acquainted almost immediately with my great-grandfather, Kiyoshi, who soon redeemed her; from then on, he kept her with him wherever he was employed: during his stint as family doctor to the great Egawa clan, and as the first director of the Shizuoka Prefectural Hospital system, as he moved from one city to the next, including Kakegawa, Mishima and Shizuoka. When at the age of forty poor health obliged Kiyoshi to return home and set up a practice there, she showed herself for the first time in his hometown, half openly, taking her place as my great-grandfather’s second wife. She was twenty-six at the time.

  From then until her death at age sixty-three, for more than three decades, she struggled constantly against the chilly reception she was given in a rural area where every aspect of life was dominated by a feudalistic morality, even when no one’s mistress was involved. Clearly, then, she had a strong will. She tended conscientiously to the needs of my great-grandfather’s principal wife Suga, and served all our other relatives well. Still, she appears to have acquired a reputation as a forceful, clever woman who, precisely because she was so forceful and clever, had to be carefully watched, because one could never tell what she might be plotting.

  Of all the things Grandma Kano told me between my sixth and thirteenth year, during which time she and I lived on the second floor of our family’s small storehouse, the main building having been rented to an official in the Forestry Bureau, only two have remained with me to the present: that my grandfather, very generous with his money, ran through cash like water; and that Matsumoto Jun was the most magnificent person, and a truly worthy man. Grandma Kano called Matsumoto Jun “Sensei.” He was the only person she referred to in that way. She never once applied the term to the principal of my elementary school, not even when she addressed him. She seemed to feel that to use the same term in reference to anyone else would constitute an affront to Matsumoto Jun’s dignity.

  In my childish way, I liked hearing Grandma Kano praise Matsumoto Jun. She had devoted her life to my great-grandfather, and Matsumoto Jun was my great-grandfather’s mentor, the man he most respected, so as far as she was concerned it was only natural that she, too, should put her faith in him, unconditionally, without reflection. Grandma Kano taught me what a beautiful thing it is to show a person respect. Whenever she talked about Matsumoto Jun, I sensed her love for my great-grandfather seeping out from within her words; it was as though she were bowing down in reverence toward the ever so distant figure of Matsumoto Jun who stood, somewhere beyond the vast ocean of her love, as an embodiment of the absolute.

  This was not the only cause of her veneration of Matsumoto Jun, however.

  “He was such a splendid man, you see, people found themselves bowing their heads right down in his presence, natural as could be. Men as great as him, they aren’t like other people… Since your grandfather was his pupil, he always just called him by his first name, ‘Kiyoshi this’ and ‘Kiyoshi that,’ but when he spoke to me he was always very polite, calling me ‘Mrs.’”

  I couldn’t say how many times I heard that story. When she told me about accompanying him to see the figures built from chrysanthemums or the fireworks at Ryōgoku Bridge, she always touched on Matsumoto Jun’s usage of that form of address, pronouncing the word herself as if to summon the emotions she had felt at the time. In her eyes, it seemed, Matsumoto Jun was the one person who had treated her as Kiyoshi’s lifelong partner, in the truest sense, and that had moved her profoundly, cutting into her heart so deeply that she would never in all her life forget it.

  “He had a fine physique, such a sense of solidity as you couldn’t hope to describe, and while a man of his rank never had to worry over money, he would spend whatever came in right away. And once he had used it all up, he would turn to your great-grandpa for assistance. Your great-grandpa just loved that, and he would rush off no matter what with money to give him.”

  Grandma Kano would tell me any number of such stories, and then in the end she would always turn to the same topic.

  “Great men outshine the rest of us in every way. Not only was he a truly outstanding doctor, but he was such a master at everything else, as a poet, a calligrapher, anything you like, that there wasn’t another person in all Japan who could rival him. Your great-grandpa used to say so all the time. Take a look at those characters there—such energy!”

  With that, Grandma Kano would point up at the two horizontal pieces that hung in their frames from the transom on the second floor of the storehouse, making me look even though I was still just a boy and didn’t understand a thing. Each work comprised four characters: one read “Tender as the spring,” and the other “Cherish a spirit of reverence and act lightly.” The first was dated “Early spring, year of the metal sheep,” which is to say Meiji 16, or 1883.

  Grandma Kano told me she and my great-grandfather had received one of these two works when they went up to Tokyo and visited Matsumoto Jun at his estate, so she must have been a familiar face in the household around that time. Meiji 16 was two years after my great-grandfather moved back to Izu. Matsumoto Jun would have been fifty-two, my great-grandfather forty-two, and Grandma Kano twenty-eight.

  Needless to say, it was owing to Matsumoto Jun’s good offices that my great-grandfather became the private doctor of the Egawa clan, whose head served as the local magistrate in Nirayama, and that he became the first director of the Prefectural Hospital; thus, even after he retired to his hometown, he would go up to Tokyo a few times a year to pay his respects to his mentor, and a few times in the course of my great-grandfather’s life Matsumoto Jun came down to see him in Izu. I learned later on that when Matsumoto Jun paid a visit, it was always because he needed money. We still have a dozen or so samples of his calligraphy at home, and it turns out he took up his brush to write each of these as security for a debt. Whenever my great-grandfather heard Matsumoto was coming, he would sell some of his land so that he would be ready when his mentor arrived.

  Such was their relationship. Of course, after my great-grandfather’s death in Meiji 30, Grandma Kano no longer had any reason to meet Matsumoto Jun, so she looked on from our small storehouse i
n the mountains of Izu as he became a baron and abruptly rose to prominence; then, after he passed away, she continued to feed the flames of her veneration by giving the young boy in her charge slight glimpses of his personality.

  As a child, I had my own image of Matsumoto Jun. He was bold and magnanimous, but at the same time he possessed a certain seriousness that could not be violated. His skin was fair, his hair jet black; he was chubby and of average height. When I grew older, I was startled to discover how closely my image of Matsumoto Jun resembled Okakura Tenshin in his days as head of the School of Fine Arts, photographed on horseback in a kimono.

  At any rate, throughout the years I lived with Grandma Kano, I had to stand before the Buddhist altar in our rooms and place my hands together in prayer twice each month. The first time was on the day of each month when my great-grandfather had died; the second, on the day Matsumoto Jun had died.

  My great-grandfather’s official wife died when I was seven, so I have hardly any memories of her. Judging from the stories that have been passed down—that as the daughter of a principal advisor to a daimyo she had brought a red-lacquered bath pail as part of her trousseau; that all her life, she was hopeless in the kitchen—she must have been raised in an extremely sheltered fashion and grown into a woman notable only for her retiring nature; my great-grandfather, with his intense disposition, could hardly have been expected to feel pleased with someone like that, and as a result that woman ended up walking into the picture as his true lifelong partner.

  Suga, his principal wife, seems to have been fairly well regarded in the country, in part because people sympathized with her plight and in part out of respect for her family; meanwhile, Grandma Kano was never well liked by the villagers, even in her old age. Behind her back they called her by her given name, “Okano,” adding only the familiar “O,” and the mere fact that she had taken charge of me seems to have been reason enough to criticize her.

  The villagers often made comments about her to me. “Oh, you poor thing! You tell that woman to stop drinking all the time and fix you something good to eat!”

  The truth was that I never suffered any sort of abuse at Grandma Kano’s hands. She did make it her practice to have a bit of sake every night, but she would take her time drinking just a single small bottle-full, all the while telling me stories about Tokyo, or perhaps teaching me some new character, or talking about Matsumoto Jun. Each night, I would fall asleep in her arms.

  Whenever someone sent Grandma Kano a box of confections, she would set some on the altar as offerings to my great-grandfather and Matsumoto Jun, and then she would give the rest to me, since she had no taste for sweets. Every night when I went to bed, she would wrap up some snack in paper and place it next to me on the futon so that I would have it to eat in the morning, the moment I woke up. She always made sure to leave a little out for the mice, too, twisting it up in paper and putting it on the floor, a little distance away. There were a lot of mice in the storehouse, but as long as she put food out for them they would never invade our futons.

  Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night, and when I did mice would always be scampering around near my pillow. But it was just as Grandma Kano said: however wildly they might dash about, they never came in under the covers. I was never frightened; I slept with my face buried in Grandma Kano’s chest. Hearing her talk about Matsumoto Jun had convinced me that he deserved our respect more than anyone in the world, and by the same token her assurances made me believe that the mice would never, ever get inside our futon.

  Whenever I got bad grades at school, Grandma Kano would go to the teachers’ room to complain. Other than that, there was nothing about her that I didn’t like.

  The day after I saw Matsumoto Jun’s calligraphy at K., the restaurant, the same friend took me to see a succession of Nagasaki’s famous places and historical sites, including Suwa Shrine, Eyeglasses Bridge, Sūfuku Temple and Dejima; by the time we left Urakami Cathedral and stepped inside the foreign cemetery in Sakamoto-machi, the sunlight, which had taken on an autumnal tint all of a sudden, was less streaming than drifting down, and the day was giving way to a tranquil twilight.

  Apparently there were two other foreign cemeteries, one at the foot of Mt. Inasa and the other near Urakami Cathedral, but this one had the oldest graves. The foreign cemetery didn’t really feel like a cemetery; it was a cheerful place distinguished only by the particular stillness that hung in the air. And in this bright, quiet spot were rows of crosses and busts and gravestones, each set a good distance apart from the next. A few of these markers had suffered considerable damage, likely from the atomic blast—some had had chunks blown off, others had tilted over—but none of this resulted in a sense of messiness or disorder.

  Feeling the first time since my arrival that I had been liberated from the crowds of tourists, I took my time examining each word on the flat surfaces of the stones, so unlike the tall narrow markers at Japanese graves. Most memorialized men and women who had lived in Japan in the early years of the Meiji period. J.M. Standard, who was born in Edinburgh and died in Nagasaki in 1854, was among the oldest I saw; most of the people there had died two decades later, in the early years of the Meiji period. My friend, who was born in Chōfu, noted down in his notebook the name of a certain William Halbeck Evans, who had died in Chōfu in 1930, at the age of seventy-one.

  “I don’t know a thing about this man Evans, but he died in my hometown. Next time I go back, I might just see what I can find out.”

  My friend’s curiosity about this man struck me as a bit funny, somehow. Without exception, every gravestone bore some variation on the phrase “In sacred memory,” but by now even the memories of these people had faded away, and the feelings that moved in our hearts as we faced them seemed closer to excitement than anything else.

  As we strode across the grass, I peered down at the successive graves, the perimeter of each one marked by a low stone wall.

  Then, in one corner of a grave somewhat narrower than the others, overwhelmed by some plant whose thick growth of small leaves was dotted with small white flowers, I stopped and lit a cigarette. The grave belonged to E. Goodall. He had died in 1889, and beneath the English letters of his name was a transcription into kanji. This use of characters to write the man’s name was the only thing that distinguished his grave from the others.

  I began repeating the name to myself after that: Goodall, Goodall, Goodall. Because I had the feeling it wasn’t the first time I had encountered those sounds. And as I kept at it, I suddenly realized that it was the “Goodall” from “Mr. Goodall’s gloves.”

  I had seen the big leather gloves we referred to as “Mr. Goodall’s gloves” on several occasions—this, too, during the period when I lived with Grandma Kano. This was that “Goodall.” Needless to say, I had no way of knowing whether the Mr. Goodall whose name was associated with the gloves was the man resting in the earth before me, but I couldn’t help marveling that in these past two days, yesterday and today, I had twice encountered things that made me think of Grandma Kano.

  What kind of man was Mr. Goodall? No doubt it would be possible to research the events of his life, if one were so inclined. Even having that information, though, I doubted I could confirm one way or the other whether he was the Mr. Goodall of the gloves. Grandma Kano—who may well have had some knowledge of the person whose name went with the gloves—had long since passed away; there was no one left in the world anymore, there were no clues, that might reveal whether or not the two people were one and the same.

  And yet, in part because I had stumbled upon that sample of Matsumoto Jun’s calligraphy just the day before, I couldn’t help feeling that the Mr. Goodall resting under the gravestone was indeed the very man with whom Grandma Kano had forged a connection one day, in the course of her long life—even if it was a connection so tenuous that it hardly seemed to deserve that name.

  The third and fourth characters in Mr. Goodall’s name were covered over with many layers of moss, white and gr
een, until it was barely possible to make out the writing.

  “1889. What year would that be in the Meiji period?” I asked my friend, who was staring at a stone a little ways off. He stood up right away and began crooking his fingers, counting.

  “Meiji 22,” he said. “Funny how many people died around Meiji 20.”

  I think I must have seen Mr. Goodall’s gloves for the first time during a major house cleaning in the year I started elementary school. Two or three young men from another branch of the family had come to help, and when they lugged our household items and furniture down from our second-floor rooms and spread it all out across the garden, someone discovered a pair of white leather gloves, wrapped in newspaper, in one of the piles. They were extremely large, and it was the first time any of us, either I or the young men, had ever set eyes on leather gloves. One after another we slipped our hands inside, but they were so loose no one could have worn them.