Appraisal

I bought a landscape by Katei for three yen and hung it in the alcove of my study. Whenever men came over to visit, every one of them would stop in front of it, take a look, and say contemptuously, “Isn’t it a fake?” Even Mr. Takita Choin ran his eyes over it from top to bottom and declared flatly, “No good.” But I have always understood my rummaging out dubious-looking calligraphy and paintings to be my way of paying homage to unknown geniuses. So I announced, “I don’t hang it because it’s by Katei. I hang it because the painting itself is good,” and refused to be discouraged in the least. Yet all these gentlemen who called the landscape a forgery I simply judged to be speaking out of sour grapes. Some of them even said, with irritating smirks, “Well, at any rate, unknown geniuses are nice and cheap.” At that point, even I could not avoid saying a few words in defense of my three-yen Katei.

These so-called connoisseurs are apt to wave magnifying glasses about and try to intimidate us amateurs, but just how accurately can they really distinguish authentic works from fakes? Since they too are only human, they are hardly omniscient or infallible. For what they are expected to judge is the genuineness of a painting or a piece of calligraphy, or else, within the bounds of authenticity and forgery, its degree of skill. Yet when it comes to judging authenticity or skill, it is not as though one can always apply some objective measuring stick. If, for example, the physical elements such as signature, technique, even paper and ink, have been skillfully imitated, then what remains for determining authenticity is almost nothing but a kind of intuition. But no matter how keen that intuition may be, if the question is purely one of historical fact, whether a certain calligrapher or painter actually made the piece in the past, then unless the connoisseur also happens to be a fortune-teller, he can hardly hope to tell. Why, only recently there was that forged calligraphy or painting made by some fellow or other which, they say, even the original artist himself could not distinguish from the genuine article. And even when the forgery is not so consummately ingenious, as long as a connoisseur has any honesty at all, it is only natural that there should appear works of an intermediate shade, pieces that cannot decisively be called either genuine or fake. In that case, it is fair to say that, with certain kinds of calligraphy and painting, connoisseurs are no more able than we are to distinguish the genuine from the false. So if we turn back to this three-yen Katei, even if one cannot positively declare that it is by Katei, one can just as little positively declare that it is not by Katei. Since that is so, even if I choose to recognize it as a Katei and hang it on my wall, it does not in the least dishonor me. All the more so because I merely intend it as a tribute to an unknown genius—

By the time I had argued that far, most men would say, “All right, I get it. Enough about unknown geniuses.” If enough is enough, I shall stop here; but I suspect there are rather more people than one might think who, like me, take pleasure in dubious calligraphy and paintings and thereby pay their respects to unknown genius. Compared with the wealthy magnates of the world who toss away vast sums of gold on vulgar modern paintings without a second thought, such men deserve respect at least for the independence of their taste. And so, together with those kindred spirits, I wanted to assert the existence of a pure delight untroubled by the distinction between genuine and fake. That is why I have deliberately ventured to put this long-winded speech into print here. I only hope the antique dealers who trade in so-called Takemachi goods will not make use of it in their advertisements.