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

been some other woman, so I dropped the subject.
At that point, without even having a cup of tea, I cut short my curious visit with this stranger from whom I had heard things that really infringed on her privacy, and I left so as not to be late for my five-o'clock truck.
Of all the things I had heard from Hosen's widow that day, the story about Hosen trying to shoot off the blue-violet chrysanthemum interested me most. At the time that I heard it, it didn't even seem particularly important, but it curiously remained in my mind, cropping up unexpectedly from time to time.
After we moved out of our evacuation site and were living in an Osaka suburb, I casually disclosed to my wife the desire—or, to overstate the case, the dream— that Hosen had cherished in his declining years. As soon as she heard it, she winced and spontaneously exclaimed, "Awful!"
"Why 'awful!'?"
"Because. I can't really explain it, but for some reason it gave me an unpleasant feeling—ghastly! A deep-violet flare opening against the black sky! That was probably what made me feel so queasy."
Then, I too was struck by the thought that I was dabbling in something I should not touch. With that, I hurriedly dropped the story of Hosen I had intended to tell. That is all there was to it and it had no particular significance, but my wife's attitude of that moment has remained fixedly in my mind as a totally unexpected and revealing discovery. I believe I generally understand my wife's feelings, but even when I probed this thing in depth, there was something incomprehensible, or at least I couldn't understand it. I could believe that there was something discernible in Hosen that could have caused my wife to feel something intolerably unpleasant just as it caused his wife to leave him. Although she had managed to go tagging along after him through a life of several decades of counterfeiting, there must have been something—something incomprehensible to people like me—something deep-rooted in the physical revulsion she felt, so that she as a woman could not trail after the Hosen who produced explosives.
Hosen's production of fireworks, the gunpowder, and the chemicals he used, these cold and dismal things somehow engendered the same feelings even in me. I could not, however, feel this in the same way my wife and Hosen's widow might have felt it. I could catch at least a fleeting glimpse of the piteous beauty which a multi-petaled bell-flower color bursting open for an instant in the night sky might have meant to this one counterfeiter whose life had been wrecked and who possessed nothing. However, I still wondered if this dream of Hosen Hara had really ever opened up in the sky at night. There was no way of asking the deceased man and confirming that it had. But certainly, had it on the other hand not been the color of petals opening, wouldn't the two women have winced anyhow and wouldn't they have reacted just as tempestuously?
That was the line of my thought.
V
AFTER that, the case of Hosen Hara gradually disappeared from my mind without my realizing it. As time went by, the not-too-cheerful story of this dead counterfeiter whom I had learned about accidentally and through hearsay from people at our evacuation site would, in the course of events, rather naturally become dim in my memory. Two years after the war, however, Hosen was once again brought before my mind's eye as though it were a finale to the stories I had heard about him.
It was summer. At that time, I was all involved and wrapped up in problems of provincial culture. For the first time in a year and several months, I took a train on the Harima-Bizen Line which crosses over to Yonago from Okay ama Prefecture. I was on my way to cover a general art exhibition at one of the San-In Prefectures around the Japan Sea in order to do an article for the Sunday supplements.
As the train pulled up to the platforms at the small mountain-top stations where I had gotten on and off so often loaded down with