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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Vertigo
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
A classic Japanese mystery, from the author of The Honjin Murders 'The Japanese Agatha Christie' Sara Cox, Between the Covers Tokyo, 1947. The Pink Labyrinth is one of the bomb-scarred city's most shady neighbourhoods. There, in the dead of night a patrolling policeman catches a young Buddhist monk digging in the back yard of The Black Cat Cafe, a notorious brothel. In the shallow grave at his feet lie the dead body of a woman, her face disfigured beyond recognition, and the corpse of a black cat. Who is the murdered woman, and how was she connected to the infamous establishment? And where did the dead cat come from, given that the cafe's feline mascot seems to be alive and well? The brilliant sleuth Kosuke Kindaichi investigates, but as he draws closer to the truth, he finds himself in grave danger... PRAISE FOR SEISHI YOKOMIZO 'The diabolically twisted plotting is top-notch' - New York Times 'Readers will delight in the blind turns, red herrings and dubious alibis... Ingenious and compelling' - Economist 'With a reputation in Japan to rival Agatha Christie's, the master of ingenious plotting is finally on the case for anglophone readers' - Guardian 'This is Golden Age crime at its best, complete with red herrings, blind alleys and twists and turns galore... A testament to the power of the simple murder mystery and its enduring appeal' - Spectator 'Plenty of golden age ingredients... with a truly ingenious solution' - Guardian, Best New Crime Novels 'Truly ingenious' Guardian 'The king of the locked-room mystery' CrimeReads 'The Japanese Agatha Christie' Sara Cox, Between the Covers 'Fiendishly complex and wonderfully atmospheric' S.J. Bennett, author of Murder Most Royal
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PRAISE FOR SEISHI YOKOMIZO’S MYSTERIES
‘Readers will delight in the blind turns, red herrings and dubious alibis… Ingenious and compelling’
Economist
‘At once familiar and tantalisingly strange… It’s an absolute pleasure to see his work translated at last in these beautifully produced English editions’
SundayTimes
‘The perfect read for this time of year. Short and compelling, it will appeal to fans of Agatha Christie looking for a new case to break’
Irish Times
‘This is Golden Age crime at its best, complete with red herrings, blind alleys and twists and turns galore… A testament to the power of the simple murder mystery and its enduring appeal’
Spectator
‘The diabolically twisted plotting is top-notch’
NewYorkTimes
‘A stellar whodunit set in 1940s Japan… The solution is a perfect match for the baffling puzzle. Fair-play fans will hope for more translations of this master storyteller’
PublishersWeekly, Starred Review
‘With a reputation in Japan to rival Agatha Christie’s, the master of ingenious plotting is finally on the case for anglophone readers’
Guardian
‘A delightfully entertaining locked room murder mystery… An ideal book to curl up with on a winter’s night’
NBMagazine
‘Never anything less than fun from beginning to end… Truly engrossing’
BooksandBao
‘A classic murder mystery… Comparisons with Holmes are justified, both in the character of Kindaichi and Yokomizo’s approach to storytelling—mixing clues, red herrings and fascinating social insight before drawing back the curtain to reveal the truth’
JapanTimes
‘The perfect gift for any fan of classic crime fiction or locked room mysteries’
MrsPeabodyInvestigates 2
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Contents
MURDERAT THE BLACK CAT CAFE
Prologue
My dear Mr Y——,
Please forgive my long silence. When last you wrote, you mentioned that you were ill, but, judging from the fact that the publication of DeathonGokumonIslandcarries on apace, I trust that it was nothing too serious. I read the monthly magazine instalments with avid interest. While there are one or two parts that seem to me a little exaggerated, I realize this cannot be helped when it comes to novel-writing. I do hope you will continue to write them. (Only, please, be gentle with me!)
Now, then. When I last paid you a visit, you said to me something along the following lines. That with TheHonjin Murders you were able to write a kind of ‘locked room’ mystery, and now you would like to try your hand at a ‘faceless corpse’ one; and that if I were ever to come across such a case, you would be grateful if I would provide 10you with the materials. Well, my friend, and what do you suppose my very first case was after I arrived in Tokyo? Why, yes! The ‘faceless corpse’ mystery that you were hoping for. And what’s more, it was quite different from the so-called ‘faceless corpse’ formula that you described to me.
Ah, my dear Y——! I cannot help recalling that fusty old saying: that truth is stranger than fiction. At the outset of TheHonjinMurders, you wrote that we ought to be grateful to the murderer for having hatched that ingenious plan. Very well! Now you shall have to sing the praises of the villain who planned this horrific ‘faceless corpse’ case. It may not have the elegance or beauty of TheHonjinMurdersor the triple murder in DeathonGokumonIsland—in which regard you may be somewhat disappointed—and yet, in terms of the sheer blackness and bestial savagery of the killer’s plan, it is altogether in a league of its own. At least, that is my opinion; for now, though, I shall refrain from saying too much more about it. I have posted to you separately all the relevant documents and leave the rest to your good judgement. The documents are numbered sequentially, so please read them in that order. I am eager to see how you will digest the material and adapt these miscellaneous records.
Respectfully yours…
11It was the spring of 1947 when this letter from Kosuke Kindaichi reached me in that little village in the Okayama countryside where I had been evacuated during the war.
Imagine my excitement as I read the letter! But then, was it truly excitement that I felt? Or was it not a sense of dread? The detective’s words had made such a strong impression on me, and I could tell that this was no ordinary case. But still, this was the ‘faceless corpse’ mystery for which I had so longed!
The documents that had been sent separately arrived three days after the letter. What follows is an account based on those documents, a record of that heinous crime and the deductions that exposed it. But before I get to that, I had better clarify my relationship with Kosuke Kindaichi.
It all came about in the late autumn of the previous year, when, in the rural village where I had been evacuated, I received an unexpected visitor.
I was poorly at the time, and all I seemed to do was sleep. On the date in question, I had spent the entire day dozing as I lay sprawled out on the futon. The others in the house had gone off to dig for yams in the fields on the mountainside, leaving me all alone. But just then, a man came clattering in.
Given that the building was a farmhouse, there were none of those smart features—a vestibule, for instance—that I had in my own home. Instead, the front door opened onto a broad earthen-floored room with an imposing shoji 12screen on the other side. This shoji was awfully heavy and difficult to open and close, so it would be left ajar throughout the day. On the other side of the earthen floor there was a tatami room about twelve square feet in size, and beyond it a slightly larger sitting room, visible from the entrance through the open fusuma. It was there that I would always sleep. Because of a longstanding chest condition, I was used to keeping doors and windows open, and so, whenever I had the opportunity, I always did the same in that farmhouse, too. Hence, anybody entering would of course be sure to spot me sleeping in the back the very moment they set foot in the place.
It was dusk, and I seem to recall that I had a slight temperature. As I lay there, dozing, I suddenly sensed another person’s presence. I hauled myself over in bed and quickly sat up.
There, standing on the earthen floor, I saw a short man of around thirty-five. He had on a haorijacket over an Oshima kimono and wore a pair of hakama. His hat was perched precariously at the back of his head. In his left hand he carried an Inverness coat, and in his right, a rattan cane. Both the kimono and the haorilooked rather worn, and, all told, the young man had an altogether shabby appearance, with little to redeem it.
We stared at each other for a few seconds, before I eventually called out from my bed, asking who it was. The young man grinned. He set down his cane and Inverness coat, 13removed his hat and slowly mopped the sweat on his brow, before asking me whether I was the owner of the house. His cool demeanour set me a little on edge, so I asked him again, and somewhat reproachfully this time, who he was. But the man only grinned once more. Then, with a slight stammer, he introduced himself: ‘I-I’m…’
He said, of course, that his name was Kosuke Kindaichi.
I shall spare you the details about how surprised, or rather how alarmed, I was to hear this, but I ought to say a few words about what the name Kosuke Kindaichi meant to me. I was, at the time, in the process of writing a novel based on what I had heard from the locals about a murder that had taken place in the old honjinin the village. The novel, moreover, was being serialized in a magazine. But the protagonist of that novel—or, perhaps I should say the protagonist of that case—was none other than Kosuke Kindaichi. Not only had I never met the man, but I had never even seen him before. And, of course, I had written the book without his permission. I had merely based it on what the villagers told me, embellishing their recollections with my own imagination. And yet, this very man had now turned up unannounced on my proverbial doorstep. It should be little wonder then that I was both surprised and alarmed. I could feel the cold perspiration, brought on by a sense of guilt, drip from under my arms. Even when we exchanged greetings after he entered the tatami room, I was at a loss for words.
14Kosuke Kindaichi watched me hum and haw, grinning before he offered at last an explanation for his visit.
He was on his way back, he said, from Gokumon Island, a small, isolated spot in the Seto Inland Sea, but before going there, he had paid a visit to a patron of his, a certain Ginzo Kubo, from whom he had heard, much to his surprise, that somebody was writing a novel about him. He had, it transpired, read the novel himself, so, before leaving for the island, he had sent a letter to the magazine, asking for the address of the author, and now, having found the reply waiting for him upon his return, he had made a beeline for the village.
‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you,’ he said, smiling amiably.
Hearing the jovial tone in his voice, I finally relaxed. Not only was there not a hint of malice in his words, but there was even a certain affection. Emboldened by this, I asked what he thought of the novel. It was rather presumptuous of me, I must admit, but once again he grinned and said that he thought it was ‘spot on’. He said he was flattered that I had painted him in such a complimentary light, but, ‘If I could suggest one thing,’ he added, ‘it would be that you write a little more about what a handsome devil I am!’
He roared with laughter as he scratched the bird’s nest of hair atop his head. And so, in short, we hit it off splendidly.
Kosuke Kindaichi stayed with me for three nights, during which time he told me all about his most recent case on Gokumon Island and, moreover, gave me his blessing to 15write about it. In other words, he adopted me as his official biographer.
Over the course of those three days that he spent with me, we discussed all manner of things having to do with detective novels, and it was then that I broached the subject of the so-called ‘faceless corpse’ murder. I recall telling him that around twenty years ago I tried to classify all the detective stories in a certain magazine. The magazine is long gone now, so I cannot say with certainty, but I seem to recall observing that the ‘double role’ type, the ‘locked room’ type and the ‘faceless corpse’ type were among the most common ones. Two decades have passed since then—a time in which detective novels have come on by leaps and bounds—but it is interesting to note that to this very day those three archetypes still occupy the top spots in detective writing.
If you scrutinize these three archetypes, you will soon realize that there are significant differences between them, however. That is to say, the ‘locked room’ mystery and the ‘faceless corpse’ are challenges set for the readers, who will recognize, almost as soon as they open the book, what kind of mystery awaits them. Yet, the same cannot be said of the ‘double role’ type. This, instead, is a trick that must be kept secret right until the very end, and, if the readers suspect that the novel is of this kind, then the author has lost the game. (Naturally, in all manner of detective novels, the culprit will seem like a good person, so, while this is 16a kind of ‘double role’, it is distinct from the ‘double role’ type of which I write here.)
In that sense, the ‘double role’ type is very different from the ‘locked room’ mystery and the ‘faceless corpse’, but then those two other types are also very different from each other. This is because the ‘locked room’ type always presents the same problem, only with an infinite number of solutions; or perhaps I should say that, with this type, what both the author and the reader are interested in is how many different solutions can be offered for the same problem.
That is not true of the ‘faceless corpse’ type, however. If ever you come across a case in a detective novel in which the face of the body is unidentifiable—that is, a case in which a face has been horribly mutilated, or in which a head has been severed, or in which a body has been discovered in the ruins of a fire that has rendered the features unrecognizable, or even, come to think of it, one in which the whereabouts of the body itself is unknown—in such cases, you can be reasonably sure that the victim and the perpetrator will have switched places. In other words, in most ‘faceless corpse’ cases, Person A, who is believed to be the victim, will in fact be the murderer, while Person B, who is thought to be the murderer—and who has apparently absconded, of course—will turn out to be the deceased, i.e. the victim. This, with few exceptions, has been the solution offered in most detective novels that have dealt with this theme until now.
17‘Don’t you find it odd?’ I said, with a look of triumph on my face, after setting all this out. ‘One of the most important conditions for the appeal of a detective novel is the unexpectedness of the ending, yet in every instance of the “faceless corpse” type, the victim and the murderer always trade places. Effectively, from the very outset, the reader always knows who the murderer is. This is a real problem for the author. And yet, despite its disadvantages, most crime authors feel drawn to tackle it at least once in their career. Such is the allure of this problem.’
‘So, what you’re saying is,’ said Kosuke Kindaichi, ‘that whenever there’s a “faceless corpse” in a detective novel, you can be sure that the victim and the culprit will be confused?’
‘Exactly. There will be the odd exception to this rule, but it would appear that authors find the formula of switching more interesting.’
‘Hmm,’ said Kosuke Kindaichi, as he paused to think. ‘But it isn’t an incontrovertible fact that this formula is more interesting than the exceptions to the rule, is it? That’s simply the case with the novels that have been written until now. It’s not inconceivable that someday there’ll be an even more interesting “faceless corpse” novel in which the victim and the culprit haven’t switched places.’
‘That’s just what I’ve been thinking!’ I said, leaning forward. ‘Say, Kindaichi-san, have you handled any cases like this, ones where the truth has proved stranger than 18fiction? I may be only a humble writer of detective stories, but one day I’d like to take up this theme and surprise all those mystery buffs with an ending that goes beyond the usual formula.’
As I pictured it, I was practically frothing at the mouth with excitement.
‘Well, now, let me see,’ said Kosuke Kindaichi, grinning. ‘I don’t believe I’ve ever come across anything of the kind before. But please don’t be discouraged. All sorts of things do happen. And the world is full of the most inventive people. So, I could well stumble upon a case that fits your aim at any moment. If I do, I promise to let you know about it straight away.’
And so he did, keeping his promise to me.
I shall spare you the details of how thrilled I was when that package arrived, and how I shuddered as I read those documents; otherwise, you readers will start to lose your patience with this rather longwinded introduction of mine.
But there is one more thing that, with your indulgence, I should like to add. As Kosuke Kindaichi mentioned in his letter, these documents were truly a collection of all kinds of records, and I agonized over how best to handle them. I considered laying them out in order, as is often done in foreign novels, but I worried that this would be too confusing for the reader, so in the end I opted to write it in the style of a novel. Whether or not I have succeeded in this endeavour is for you readers to judge.
Chapter One
G—— Town, where the events of this case took place, is situated outside the Tokyo metropolitan railway’s circle line and is in such a far-flung spot that, to get there, you have to get off at Shibuya and then transfer to another line, heading west. The entire neighbourhood is very hilly, with steep slopes wherever you go. According to the elderly residents, there are ninety-nine slopes in all. Even if that number is something of an exaggeration, there are certainly a lot of hills in the area. Perhaps this topography is why this suburb of the capital was late to develop. Until around fifteen years ago, houses there were a rarity, and the place still retained many of the rustic features of old Musashino. But all that had changed in the late thirties, with the start of the so-called China Incident. After a large munitions factory and several subcontracting factories were built in the local area, G—— Town suddenly sprang to life. Houses were built one 20after another, and, in the blink of an eye, the ninety-nine hills were filled up. The roads around G—— Town Station were asphalted, and a shopping precinct was created. Dubious-looking bars and cafes began popping up all over the place. And so, in place of the quaint Musashino of the past, a town far bleaker, drearier and more disorderly came into being.
I do not know how the town changed during the war; however, judging from the newspaper articles that Kosuke Kindaichi sent me, it would seem that while some damage was inflicted, there was none of the total devastation seen elsewhere in the capital. The shopping precinct around the station at least remained intact. What’s more, as was the case with all areas that escaped the ravages of war, G—— Town also saw a sharp increase in the number of residents afterwards, and, unlike the rest of postwar Japan, it seemed to enjoy a prosperity even more chaotic and unsavoury than before the conflict.
The shopping precinct was a stretch that ran down the hill directly in front of the station, heading west for about three blocks. All its charm lay in that downward slope: one of the supposed ninety-nine hills, it had been known historically as G—— Hill but was now called simply the High Street. Just step off the main drag, however, and you would soon see what a seedy area it really was.
Behind the main street lay warrens of backstreets and alleyways that were commonly known as ‘the pink labyrinth’ and ‘the alleys of temptation’. Come nightfall, these narrow, 21dark, maze-like streets would be lined on both sides with hundreds of red and violet lanterns, and, in each house, two or three garishly made-up women would stay up till the small hours, playing the gramophone loudly or crooning lewd songs—and occasionally taking turns to disappear upstairs with a man.
What was unique about the place, however, was that even amid this hellish maze of lust and desire, there still remained quite a few vestiges of old Musashino: next door to a bar with its red lantern outside, you might see a thatched cottage or traditional farmhouse, while behind a violet-lit knocking shop (known in the local area as ‘cafes’), you could just as easily find an old temple or a graveyard, which added an even more complex and bizarre colour to the local scenery. For the most part, it appeared, this scene had remained unchanged since the war.
It was in one such corner of the town that the incident I am about to relate took place.
It happened just after midnight on the 20th of March 1947. Constable Hasegawa, who had been assigned to the police box on the High Street, was diligently making his rounds of the pink labyrinth.
Ever since the war, the policing of areas like this had become awfully lax, but one benefit of the disrupted transport system and the danger of the city at night was that trading hours were shorter now than they had been in the past. Whereas in former times midnight would have been 22but the start of the evening, now most of the shopkeepers had already turned out their lights and gone to bed.
That night, Hasegawa was making his way slowly down a meandering hill in the northern part of the town. It was a backstreet commonly known as ‘the Back Cut’, and it ran through a neighbourhood where the traces of old Musashino were particularly strong—a temple here, a cemetery there—while to the north there was a fairly large area that had been razed during the fire-bombings, lending the place an air of true desolation.
As Hasegawa came ambling along the dark, desolate Back Cut, he suddenly stopped in his tracks and peered down the hill in front of him. From that point on, the hill became steep, and for about twenty yards or so the path seemed almost to fall away, before returning to a gentler incline just as it crossed a road running north–south. If you turned left there and followed the road down, you would come out onto the High Street.
What had caught the policeman’s attention was the garden of a property on the left-hand side of the junction. Not only could he see a light flickering there, but he could also hear the telltale sound of somebody digging in the earth. It was little wonder, then, that his chest was pounding.
Hasegawa, who was well familiar with the geography of the area, knew exactly what the building was. It was called the Black Cat Cafe, and it was the sort of establishment that, come evening, would put out a violet lantern. The policeman 23recalled that, until recently, the Black Cat had been run by a couple who had sold it off only a week ago before moving away. The new owner was still in the process of having the place done up, so at night the building would lie empty.
Remembering this, Hasegawa, with a deep sense of foreboding in his heart, tiptoed down the hill and stole up to the back gate. Then, stooping because the gate was a step lower than the road, he peered in through the gap between the doors, and his heart began to thump all the more violently.
The garden was of modest proportions, certainly no more than 400 square feet. Behind the Black Cat stood an old Buddhist temple called the Renge-in, which belonged to the Nichiren sect. Its grounds stood higher than those of the Black Cat, however, and so the garden was bounded on two sides by a steep bank. And the further away that bank was from the temple, the more it overhung the garden, creating a kind of irregular triangle. The flickering light was coming from the furthest corner of that triangle.
As his eyes became accustomed to the light, Hasegawa saw that there was a paper lantern hanging from a tree on the bank and that there was a person with his back to him, digging in the ground intently. Since the light was coming from the opposite side, the policeman couldn’t quite make the figure out, but it looked as though he was wearing a kimono and had tucked the hem of it up at the waist. The figure would pitch the spade into the ground and then, using his foot, stamp down on top of it. Thus was he 24shovelling the earth away. Why this man was digging a hole in such a place and at such an hour was a mystery, but he was fixated on the task in hand and would pause from time to time only to wipe the sweat from his brow.
The rhythmic sound of the shovel striking the earth continued, and an eerie feeling spread throughout the darkness that hung all around.
‘Oh!’ The man digging let out a deep groan. He then threw down the spade, got on all fours like a dog, and began rummaging around in the dirt with his hands. His heavy breathing, mixed with the sound of soil flying all over the place, was a sign of just how frantic he was.
‘Argh!’ The man suddenly let out a shriek and leapt back, as though he had been pushed. He then just stood there, staring timorously at the hole in the ground.
Even in the dark, Hasegawa could see that the man’s back was shaking, so he started banging loudly on the gate.
‘Open up! Open up!’
However, in the time that it took Hasegawa to shout these words, he realized that it would be quicker simply to climb over the wall. The policeman sprinted a few steps up the hill and, using that momentum, scaled the wall. When he looked inside, he saw the man in question hunched over, looking back at him, but there was no sign that he was about to run away.
‘What’s going on here? What are you doing?’ Hasegawa asked, jumping down from the wall.
25The man suddenly stepped back, as though frightened by the sight of the policeman running towards him, and went around to the other side of the hole he had been digging. Only then did the light from the lantern and that from the policeman’s torch fall directly on the man’s face, allowing Hasegawa to see at last who it was: it was Nitcho, a young monk from the Renge-in.
‘Oh, it’s you!’ said the policeman. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’
The monk seemed to want to answer, but his jaw was trembling so much that it was impossible for him to get his words out.
Hasegawa was on the point of repeating the question when he glanced down at the hole by the man’s feet. Crying out in fright, he staggered back. Then, as though doubting his eyes, he pointed his torch down and looked again. There, inside it, lay the half-buried body of a woman. It appeared as though the monk had been digging and pulled her partly out. The lower half of her body was still covered in earth, but despite this Hasegawa could tell that it was a woman right away because the corpse itself was naked; and while the upper half was still covered in soil and dirt, the body was lying on its back, and the slight mounds of her breasts were impossible to mistake.
Hasegawa drew the circle of light towards the face of the corpse, but just then he let out an inaudible scream and gripped the handle of his torch so tightly that it very 26nearly broke. After taking a couple of breaths, Hasegawa instinctively turned to the monk and looked at the damp cloth in his hands. He then looked back at the corpse’s face and clutched the handle tighter still. The monk must have dampened the cloth in a nearby puddle and tried to wipe the mud off the face; it looked as though he wanted to find out to whom the body belonged right away, but could anybody have identified that face?
No, you couldn’t even call it a face anymore. If anything, you would sooner have called it the remains of what had once been a face. The lips had already decomposed, shrivelling up to reveal the white of bone underneath. The eyes and nose were completely gone, and, where they had once been, there were now just gaping holes, while the little bit of flesh left around them had curled up and hardened to grey. There appeared to be some skin left on the head, and there were a few remaining hairs, wet and stuck down to the remains of the face, but it was impossible to tell whether they belonged to a man or a woman.
This sight of this alone was eerie enough, but what made it even more so were the countless tiny white maggots covering the remains. Because of their ceaseless wriggling, the entire face seemed to flinch in the light of the torch.
Feeling as though he might vomit at any moment, Hasegawa suddenly averted the light of his torch from this appalling sight and turned to Nitcho.
27‘Wh-what’s the meaning of this?’ he pressed the monk. ‘Whose body is that? And what on earth were you doing digging here?’
