ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Late last year, I found myself unable to resist the tantalising reviews at Winston’s Dad and JacquiWine’s Journal,  and so I lashed out and bought myself a subscription to Pushkin Press.  The first title arrived today…

It’s a selection of three short stories by Japanese author Yasushi Inoue (1907-1991) but the story that gives the selection its name is at 82 pages by far the longest.  Life of a Counterfeiter is ostensibly about a journalist’s failure to fulfil a commission to write a biography of a famous painter called Keigaku, but it becomes a quest to find out more about Keigaku’s forger, a man called Hösen.  The lives of both men are difficult to trace, but the narrator finds the forger a more captivating subject.  Through his research he learns that Hösen was very clever at avoiding detection, and that he had wasted his genuine talent as an artist even though he probably made more money selling famous poor quality fakes than he would have selling his own good quality artworks.  Hösen was also a keen hobbyist in the art of making fireworks, and yearned to create one that is a perfect semblance of a bell flower.

The prose is spare and simple, and the narrator’s voice is self-aware and introspective.  Occasionally he is quite hard on himself.

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 (sic) 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 realisation 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.  (p. 16)

However this guilt turn out not to be enough to keep him on task for very long! Hösen is a much more interesting man – and that’s because he’s a flawed human being compared to the rather anodyne Keigaku.  Research into the forger’s activities is much easier too.  Along the way, the narrator ponders the intrinsic value of real versus fake (as so many have in the world of art) and also explores the whole problem of fact and fiction in biography.  The story concludes with the narrator  resolving afresh to get on with the biography, but it doesn’t look promising:

These past two days, during which I added nothing to the biography of Keigaku, and sat staring out at the slopes of Mt. Amagi, the red crape (sic) myrtle in the corner of the garden suddenly lost most of its blossoms, colored so that they recall an earlier age, and at the same time, just like that, the white crape (sic) myrtle burst into bloom; the summer clouds that welled up constantly over the ridge of the mountain seemed – though I may have been imagining it – to have changed into autumn clouds, gliding along so slowly you could barely tell they were moving at all.  Looking at the calendar, I realised that it was indeed the first day of autumn. (p82)

(I really do not understand why an English publisher inflicts American spelling on its readers.  Plowed?  Crape?  It grates).

This is a calm and measured story.  There is little action, and as usual in the Japanese literature that I’ve read, there is a strong sense of restraint.  I suspect that perhaps there are semi-autobiographical elements in this story, and likewise I am quite sure that the story is full of Japanese myth and symbolism that has escaped me entirely.  Never mind, the only way to get to know another literature is to read it.  I have Death by Water by Kenzaburo Oe on my TBR – I shall see how I get on with that…

Read Tony’s review too….

Author: Yasushi Inoue
Title: Life of a Counterfeiter
Publisher: Pushkin Press, 2014
ISBN: 9781782270027
Source: Personal library

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Fishpond: Life of a Counterfeiter