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third year after Hosen moved to this village, he exploded some gunpowder and lost three fingers from his right hand. After that accident occurred, a resentment developed among the villagers toward the repugnant things that he had been tinkering with, and Hosen rather abruptly lost his popularity with them. Curiously though, after he had had the accident, Hosen turned cocky, and from then on he produced half-publicly the fireworks that he had been turning out furtively until then.
    The villagers did not go near Hosen's house very often, but on the rare occasions when they did try poking around his house, they would find him in the workshop he had converted from a barn or see him sitting there constantly making all sorts of toy fireworks, apparently on order for Yonago.
    It was just half a year after Hosen lost his fingers that he and his wife Asa separated. At that time, even though she had deserted him, Senzo Onoe acted as a go-between and went to Asa's family home at Shoyama to appeal to her to come back to Hosen. But Asa simply and persistently just kept saying, "/ won't do it!" Neighbors one after another also went up to Shoyama two or three times, but it was useless. At length, Hosen said that if he was such a despicable person, he, for his part, would abandon the idea of reconciliation with Asa—and that would be that. The villagers furthermore did not particularly condemn Asa for leaving the husband to whom she had been married for such a long time. Minus the three fingers, Hosen's right hand was quite unsightly, and as he tinkered with gunpowder in his dismal workshop, he had a gloominess that would cause anyone to despise him, even a wife.
    He could not produce the fireworks publicly because it was of course against the law. He nevertheless continued to turn them out and apparently became fairly well off. It seems that he regularly donated money for the construction of the town roads and made sizeable monetary contributions to the neighborhood functions with donations that appreciably exceeded what was expected. Once—Onoe didn't know when it was—a policeman came around and hauled Hosen off to the police station in a neighboring town, but somehow he was acquitted and did not have to pay a fine. Even after that, Hosen continued to make his living the same way as before, still in his dark and gloomy workshop.
    At any rate, the fact is that before he died in 1940, Hosen spent almost ten years of his lonely life in this hamlet. For about the last three years, however, because he had made a small fortune, the villagers rarely saw him produce fireworks. Usually, he was just on the porch, sometimes just sitting there, sometimes sleeping, mostly just doing nothing but gazing abstractedly ahead. Still, in the summer, when he was asked to do so by the neighborhood youths, he would make a few fireworks and accept the small gratuities they offered him. Moreover, if he was badgered into it, he would wrap up some of the fireworks he had made and go himself to shoot them off in the neighboring villages at the summer festivals. As a result, it appears that he was regarded more affectionately as "Uncle Hosen" by the people in other villages than by those in this one.
    Hosen's death came suddenly. Early one morning when the autumn rain had been pouring down continuously, his next door neighbor, who actually lived a full block away, became curious about the fact that "Uncle Hosen" had not shown up for two or three days, so he went over to visit him. Hosen was lying on his face in the doma , dead. When the neighbor tried touching him, it was obvious from the rigidity and coldness of the dead body that many hours had passed since his death. The cause of Hosen Hara's death was apoplexy.
    An interesting thing in connection with Hosen's passing away was that just prior to his death he apparently had been intending to work with his paintbrushes. This could be deduced from the fact that in the storeroom there was a blanket, folded in two,