Thirty Pieces of Silver

It begins in Judea, in a harlot's room. Mary Magdalene tells Judas he may have her for thirty pieces of silver, and while he is out finding the money Jacob the leather-merchant arrives with a purse and takes his place. But Kunieda's Judas does not betray for a woman. He betrays because he has worked out that nothing governs the universe, that the miracles are an Arab conjurer's tricks, and that a man who says I myself am that bread is a monstrous egoist. He follows Jesus into Gethsemane, hides behind a linden, watches him beg for help like a frightened child, and is satisfied.

Then the story jumps to Nagoya in the nineteen-twenties. Ichijō Hiroshi, a novelist with Basedow's disease who takes an X-ray dose once a week and smokes on a park bench on the way home, is befriended by a returned traveller and collector named Saeki Junichirō, shown the legendary thirty coins, and pressed to take all thirty home as material for a book. Each coin carries a different portrait inside a laurel branch — Christ, the twelve apostles, then Moses, Abraham, Job, Solomon, Samson, and Judas himself, bald at the crown with hair ringing his head and a sceptic's melancholy over the whole face. The signatures are in Roman letters, which is what proves them counterfeit.

His wife Kumeko, who calls him a child and coddles him, brings out a platinum ring and holds it against a coin. They match exactly. The two of them take a taxi across the winter fog of Tsurumai Park to give the coins back, and find red police lanterns flickering at Saeki's gate. What follows is a slow ruin — the wife turning vamp, going out to keep appointments, a detective calling her a prostitute, the husband thrown down to standing about in the street and beginning his apprenticeship as a beggar — before a taxi driver arrives with a message and drives him to a mansion with his own name on the plate.

Kunieda ends it in a small domestic key: a wife whose looks have gone off from hard work, a husband with more grey hair than his years warrant, a brisk answer about the prefectural governor, and a stratagem explained in the last line. First English translation, complete and unabridged, all twenty-five chapters.

English-language digital edition. Translated by Valentin Sarić.

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