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

edge of the porch and stealthily grind things in his mortar. It was because he did that sort of thing that I got to dislike fireworks."
What apparently first motivated Hosen to tinker with explosives was that there was someone he liked, the owner of a curio store, who made fireworks, and during the time he was associated with that person, he himself developed an interest in making fireworks. When Asa first became aware of it, Hosen was furtively wrapping all sorts of chemicals in paper in roughly equal quantities of about an ounce-and-a-half each and igniting them to see what color their flames would be.
"Why in the world did he find fireworks so interesting?"
"Well," replied Asa a bit pensively, "he was a funny man. I don't know where he ever got the idea, but once he was trying to produce a certain deep blue-violet color and he acted as though he was obsessed. He generally could get that color by mixing Paris green with chlorate of potash and pine resin, but he seemed to be trying to find some means for producing a chrysanthemum of this deep bluish violet—it was supposed to be the color of bell-flowers—but it always ended up a little pale and different from the original bell-flower color."
Hosen lost three of his fingers when he was making shooting stars. He had incorrectly inserted a fuse in the side of an explosive he had been devising, and it accidentally ignited, the explosives nearby catching fire in the process. It was quite a serious thing. Although Asa was quite upset by the incident itself, it additionally provided her with an excuse for leaving him—and she made up her mind to do so. Ever since he had begun working secretly with explosives, she said, she had developed a strong dislike for Hosen, and her dislike had continued. When the explosion accident occurred, it was the last straw, and she really wanted to leave him for good.
"Did he ever achieve that blue-violet?" I asked.
"Mm-m, I wonder. He apparently was not very satisfied with it while I was still with him," she replied but acted as though she really had little interest in that subject. While she was relating stories about Hosen, some of the earlier love and affection she had felt toward him, even though he was such a strange person, had more or less been revived, and even though she now displayed an attitude of cold indifference and detachment, she certainly did not say anything bad about him intentionally.
"In the final analysis, he was an unfortunate man, that man, don't you think? I really think so. It may look as though I wasted my whole life on account of him, but I sometimes wonder if he wasn't even more unhappy than I was. It was his curse to care more about painting pictures than about his three meals a day; in the long run, he got started on the wrong track and ended up without painting a single worthwhile picture; when he made fireworks, he lost three fingers; he was almost driven to distraction over 'deep purple, deep purple'— but he couldn't even produce that! He wasn't a particularly bad man, but I guess he was just born unlucky."
For over an hour I listened to Asa's tales. While listening to her stories, I was captivated by the way she talked about this person Hosen as she stared fixedly into the distance and by the way she was in certain respects still bound up with him.
It was my observation that during the course of almost thirty years that she had lived with him during their marriage, she had been an individual unto herself and had developed a special kind of mentality not generally found in women.
"Do you know the proprietor of the big saké distillery in Wake?" I asked, recalling the owner's statement that Hosen and she had frequently visted his home.
"No, I don't," she answered promptly, as if the distillery was something completely unknown to her. Perhaps my reference to something in her younger days had displeased her. The thought also suddenly occurred to me that the person who used to frequent that house with him might have