Counterfeiter and Other Stories

THE
COUNTERFEITER

and Other Stories

THE
COUNTERFEITER

and Other Stories

T
UTTLE PUBLISHING
Boston • Rutland, Vermont • Tokyo

This edition published in 2000 by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd., with editorial offices at 364 Innovation Drive, North Clarendon, VT 05759 U.S.A.

Copyright ©1965 by Tuttle Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from Tuttle Publishing.

Cover photographs © Horace Bristol, "Fireworks over the Sumida River, Tokyo," ca. 1946-1956

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data in Process
ISBN: 978-1-4629-0077-0

Distributed by

North America
Tuttle Publishing
Distribution Center
Airport Industrial Park
364 Innovation Drive
North Clarendon, VT 05759-9436
Tel: (802) 773-8930
Tel: (800) 526-2778
Fax: (802) 773-6993

Asia Pacific
Berkeley Books Pte Ltd
61 Tai Seng Avenue, #02-12
Singapore 534167
Tel: (65) 6280-1330
Fax: (65) 6280-6290
[email protected]
www.periplus.com

Japan
Tuttle Publishing Japan
Yaekari Building 3rd Floor, 5-4-12
Osaki Shinagawa-ku,
Tokyo 141-0032
Tel: (03) 5437-0171
Tel: (03) 5437-0755

05 04 03 02 01 00      9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America

INTRODUCTION

H
UMAN
pathos and suffering, loneliness and isolation, Oriental fatalism and Buddhistic concepts of predestination form dominant strands in the fabric of virtually all of the writings of Yasushi Inoue. Probably his own separation from his parents when he was a child set the pattern for the basic framework of these moods, particularly that of loneliness. Here, it is perhaps interesting to note that the usual Japanese word for loneliness,
kodoku
, is made up of two Chinese characters—
ko
, "orphan" and
doku
, "alone." And Yasushi Inoue as a child was an "orphan alone" in almost every sense except the legal one.

Born in 1907 the son of an Army physician in Hokkaido, the northernmost of the four major islands that comprise Japan, Yasushi Inoue was taken during his infancy to live with his grandmother in a small village on the Izu Peninsula, some hundred and thirty-five miles south of Tokyo. This area is obviously dear to him; he calls it "my native Izu Peninsula" in
The Counterfeiter
and opens
Obasute
with references to his childhood there. One cannot help but feel that his delicate sensitivity to all natural beauty harks back to that time when separation from his family and personal loneliness led him, even as a child, to seek solace in Nature, which surrounded him in that mountain village. While separation and isolation strike gloomy chords throughout Inoue's works, it is to natural and other visual beauty that he inevitably turns for release, comfort, and meditation. It is one of the characteristics of his style to ease his readers down to earth again after the more dramatic sections of his stories by some gentle description of natural beauty.

This sensitivity to beauty appears to have been highly developed in the young Yasushi by the time he entered college and probably much before that. Although according to the dictates of filial duty he should have followed in his father's footsteps and become a doctor, science held no interest for him and he majored instead in aesthetics during his collegiate years at Kyoto University. It was probably during these years that the three persistent themes of the writings of Yasushi Inoue developed: a deep and abiding interest in Chinese history, stemming from his studies of Oriental art and particularly its Chinese antecedents; an ever-present consciousness of art and artists (many of his stories deal with artists and their works); and an involvement with social problems, present and past.

Inoue, who is one of Japan's most prolific writers today, started relatively late as a novelist. He was forty-two when he published in 1949 his first works, the two novelettes
Ryoju
*
and
The Bull Fight
, which the following year won for him the top literary prize in Japan, the Akutagawa Prize. His longer
Tiles of the Tempyo Era
(1957) deals both with art and ancient China;
Lou-Lan
**
and
The Flood
***
are short historical novels of China. Whether he is writing full novels, novelettes, or short stories, however, Inoue's penchant for detailed, exhaustive research and historical accuracy give his stories
a
flavor of authenticity. Even the characters in his stories can often be traced back to historical individuals. In the spring of 1964, Inoue went to the United States to start his research on what he personally believes will be his magnum opus, a multi-volume treatment of first, second, and third generation Japanese abroad, particularly in the United States.

Prior to his emergence as one of Japan's most prominent literary figures, Yasushi Inoue worked as a reporter for the
Mainichi Skimbun
in Osaka. In two of the stories in this book there are specific references to his employment as a newspaper man. One wonders if the dissatisfaction with newspaper work which he attributes to his brother in
Obasute
is not really autobiographical, for Yasushi did, as he relates in
The Counterfeiter
, resign from the
Mainichi Shimbun
and move to Tokyo shortly after his initial successes in literature with
Ryoju
and
The Bull Fight
.
During the war, he did in fact move his family to Tottori Prefecture, the main setting for
The Counterfeiter.
There are a myriad of other authentic autobiographical references to himself, his childhood, career, and character in all three of the stories in this book. He attributes to Toyama in
The Full Moon
some of his own attitudes toward human destiny, attitudes shaped in both cases by separation from parents at an early age.

The impact of his own separation from his parents is a constantly recurrent subject to which he alludes directly or indirectly, for it had a powerful influence on his personal reflections and on his reactions to all mankind. In the beginning of
Obasute
, when speaking of his childhood, Inoue writes, ". . . but what I do recall in my faint memory is that my grandmother—or was it my mother? —anyhow, a member of my family . . ." came out onto a porch to comfort him. "Just a few words" of comfort, he writes, and one is impressed that the neglect he felt as a child has stayed with him, a haunting reminder of his isolation and loneliness. In all three of the stories in this volume, separation occurs: a husband from his wife, a child from a parent, a sister from a brother, a mother from her two children. These are sorrows which in Inoue's case are felt with deep intensity. They are coupled with cold and gloomy darkness, slag heaps, and shadows "like spilled ink"—an expression he uses in both
Obasute
and
The Full Moon
.

Inoue's training in aesthetics and his experience as a reporter would seem to have had marked influences on his style as a writer. Just as his work as a newspaper reporter was probably responsible for his lengthy research into detailed data before writing his stories, his exposure to Oriental art shows through in his descriptive powers. Like a
sumie
-painter who suggests forms with subtle brushstrokes, Inoue has a highly developed skill of portrayal through the least suggestion. His economy of language enables him to present intense drama and complex human involvement even in his shortest stories. But, even more, his characters ring true and are made real and vivid through just the slightest possible descriptive statements.

He wastes little or no time on the physical characteristics of the figures in his stories, and even his references to their personalities are generally encompassed in a single sentence, a phrase or a word. Of course, this sometimes has engendered the criticism that he tends to deal in stereotypes. Yet, even if he evokes stereotypic images, this technique in itself adds further credence and reliability to the authentic situations with which he deals. Inoue is one of the most precise writers in contemporary Japan. Given the lack of precision in the Japanese language itself, the precision in his choice of words is quite astounding. Stylistically, two main currents are constantly at work in his writings: a tendency toward long, involved descriptive sentences, with a host of modifying clauses and phrases each of which has its clearly directed purpose of elaboration of detail, and a tendency toward the compactness of individual phrases characteristic of Japanese poetry. Inoue, in fact, had aspirations of becoming a poet before his success as a prose writer, but he freely admits to failure as a poet. Be that as it may, if economy of words is one of the prerequisites for good poetry, in that respect much that is contained in Inoue's fiction is poetry of the highest order, but unhampered by the tyranny of form that pervades so much of Japanese culture.

The three stories assembled here reveal yet another facet of Yasushi Inoue—his great compassion for his fellow human being. The tragic Hosen Hara in
The Counterfeiter
and the pathetic Kagebayashi of
The Full Moon
are not particularly pleasant people by any standards, Oriental or Western, but the sympathetic compassion with which Inoue handles them provides a real insight into the nature of the author. It therefore seems rather surprising to find in
Obasute
that Inoue harbors a fear that "misanthropic blood" possibly flows through his veins.

Finally, a word or two about these translations and the subject of translation itself. For some years a battle has been raging among the critics of translations regarding the functions of the translator and the liberties he may take with the language of the author's original work. On one side of this argument, there are those who challenge even slight deviations from the original and condemn the translator who departs at all from a literal rendition of the author's lines. On the other side, there is the group of translators themselves, and a few critics who support them, who wander rather far afield in trying to render the author's thoughts, his language, and his imagery in a more palatable form for the Western reader. This argument is not unique to the translation of Japanese literature, nor is it an argument that belongs only to modern times. One need only recall the various approaches to the translation of the Bible to realize how eternal this controversy is. The translations in this volume lie somewhere between the extremes of the two schools of thought. If anything, they tend toward literal renditions, and a purposeful attempt has been made to adhere as closely as possible to Inoue's originals. Some liberties have admittedly been taken, however; some of Inoue's long involved sentences have been broken up into two, three, or sometimes even more, sentences. An attempt has also been made to keep footnotes to a minimum because of a fear that they may detract from the flow of Inoue's language. As a result, it has at times been necessary to induce some descriptive language and circumlocutions to help the Westerner with words or situations that are peculiarly Japanese. In general, however, a conscientious effort has been made to present Inoue's stories in their original form, preserving their inherently Japanese character and tone with a minimum of departures from the original flavor. With the exception of these few explanatory departures, where deviations from the originals may have crept in, they should be blamed on the translator's misinterpretation of the text rather than purposeful distortions.

L
EON
P
ICON