The Izu Dancer and Other Stories: The Counterfeiter, Obasute, The Full Moon by Kawabata Yasunari, Yasushi Inoue

really be called a close association. Anyhow, the fact is that he counterfeited the sensei's works inordinately, and so he couldn't show himself in front of Keigaku- sensei ."
It was surprising, the degree to which this woman had disassociated herself from Hosen. She gave me the impression that as far as she was concerned all the bad acts of this man to whom she had been married for so long were already past, gone, and forgotten, and she had no connection with them.
"I separated from that man in 1935. From then until the time he died, he only came to visit me once. That was on the day the newspapers announced Keigaku- sensei's death."
Asa told me that on that day when Hosen came to visit her he had said something like, "Why won't you substitute for me and go and burn some incense at Keigaku's altar instead of me, because I can't hold my head up even at his funeral." Asa told me that she had wondered at the time why, instead of feeling the need to go and apologize for the great trouble he had caused Keigaku, he had acted as though a sadness over the death of an old friend was gripping him.
"No matter what anyone else says, I believe that his spirit was broken after coming to these mountains. Even though he had no reason for it, he held a grudge against Keigaku until then. When he used to drink, he would say that if he wanted to paint, he could paint pictures as well as the other fellow; when he was young, he was the more skillful of the two; he also had talent. But, after coming to these mountains, when mentioning Keigaku, he would sometimes say, 'It's such a great thing that he's so famous.' "
That was Asa's story. And the image that then drifted into my mind of Hosen who after reading the news of Keigaku's death had come up to this hamlet to visit the wife who had deserted him, the image of him moving along the winding, hilly road which I myself had just that very day walked, that image curiously crystallized as one of a little person together with the late autumn winds crossing the marvelous bamboo thickets that filled the slopes of the mountain range. However, thinking about it later, I recalled that the anniversary date of Keigaku's death was March third. So, it would have been a time when one side of these mountains was still covered with snow, and Hosen might have been wearing straw snowshoes and trudging stolidly across the snow packed mountain road to get to Shoyama. And even then , apparently, Asa had not gone to Keigaku's funeral in Kyoto, and that's the way the matter stood.
In any event, the fact that there was a day such as that in Hosen's declining years suddenly struck me like a ray of sunlight amidst the generally dark and dismal colorless monotone of this person called Hosen who was inexplicably commanding my attention.
Asa's talk about Keigaku ended, I asked her obliquely, though I myself thought it was rude, why she had decided to separate from Hosen. Soon after Hosen came to the mountains and started to manufacture fireworks, she began to want to leave him for doing that kind of work. She herself sometimes had to assist him—"Oh, well, it was making a living, if you can call it a living, so what could I do?"—but apparently she hated Hosen for engaging in that work even more she hated the job itself.
"Even when that man began to counterfeit Keigaku- sensei's work, he sneakingly kept it a secret from me. It finally came out in the open, but at first, as you might expect, just my knowing it seemed an embarrassment to him. He carried on these activities as secretly as he could so that I wouldn't know about them. And when he started making fireworks, it was just the same. This time it was not that he was doing anything particularly bad, although there are laws about amateurs handling explosives. It was just that he hid things from me, no matter what he did. If he had only been open about it, everything might have been all right. But when I wasn't there or after I'd gone to bed, he used to sneak over to the