Volume 1: Will his brush bring hope — or destruction?
Utsumi Sokei is a painter of undeniable talent, yet the ghost paintings he creates refuse to sell. Driven to desperation, he crosses a line he swore he never would — taking on a one-time job forging a masterpiece.
The meticulous depiction of the forgery's creation and the nail-biting tension of the sale are not to be missed. Art meets crime in early Showa-era Tokyo, rendered by Yumi Kurokawa.
[About the Author]
Yumi Kurokawa was born in Hi...
Intriguing start to a new series
I really enjoyed this first volume of 贋; yet again Harta series continue to impress.
In this volume we meet our three main characters: 馨 (かおる), a young (probably late-20s, early-30s) artist living with two young girls, 撫子 (なでしこ) and 杏子 (あんず). Their landlord is about to throw them out, as the rent hasn't been paid in months and the only responsible adult, 撫子's mother, has been travelling with her performing troupe for some time now. (How responsible she really is is left to the reader for this volume...) 馨 decides to try to sell some of his work to no avail: he specializes in horror-themed artwork, which is definitely not in vogue in 昭和8 (1933), which prefers artwork featuring nature, but manages to get lucky in selling a copy of a piece of artwork done by his now-deceased teacher. This sparks some inspiration, and 馨 decides to forge an all-new original piece of art by that same teacher in order to raise money.
This leads to the crux of the difficulty in the book: the text is sparse, but when people do start talking, it's for the most part going to be furigana-less discussion about art techniques and art materials. This is primarily a potential problem of vocab for any learner, however; the grammar wasn't particularly unusual as far as I found, and for better or worse the vocab wasn't repeated especially much in this first volume, so how much of it the reader needs to commit to memory is up in the air.