Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Pushkin Vertigo
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Winner of the Mystery Writers of Japan Award and the Honkaku Mystery Prize. Osaka, 1943. The Second World War rages, and American bombers rain down death upon Japan. The once prosperous Omari household, now ruined by the terrible conflict, is struck by a succession of ghastly murders. Young trainee doctor and budding sleuth Natsuko is desperate to help her old friend, Mineko Omari, to solve the mystery and bring an end to the gruesome deaths tearing the family apart. To do so, the pair will have to delve into the Omari clan's past, where a dark and deadly secret has been festering for decades...
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 507
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
123
MURDER IN THE HOUSE OF OMARI
TAKU ASHIBE
TRANSLATED FROM THE JAPANESE BY BRYAN KARETNYK
Contents
56
List of Characters
Prologue
On a certain street corner, one day in the near future: —
Nestled in Osaka’s Central Ward (formerly East and South Wards) is an area called Semba, which stretches one kilometre east to west and two kilometres north to south. It has been a commercial hub ever since the days of the shoguns.
Bound by the Tosabori River to the north, by the Higashi Yokobori River to the east, by the old Nagabori River (now Nagabori Road) to the south, and by the old Nishi Yokobori River (now the Osaka–Kobe Highway) to the west, it was once connected to the outside world by some forty bridges.
In Osaka, streets that run north to south are called ‘suji’, while those running east to west are known as ‘dori’, and in Semba this crisscrossing of streets formed a chequerboard in which merchants’ houses of all kinds jostled side by side. The most renowned of these were the pharmacies in Dosho-machi, the furniture dealers in Dobuike, the drapers in Honmachi, the haberdashers and cosmetics manufacturers in South Kyuhoji-machi. It is no exaggeration to say that this is where the image of the typical ‘Osaka merchant’ was formed.
The culture there was unique, and reputation was paramount. The men and women working there had all endured rigorous training, serving live-in apprenticeships from a young age before working their way up to become shop assistants and then eventually head clerks.10
Perhaps the most peculiar thing about that culture was the singular brand of Osakan Japanese known as ‘Semba dialect’…
…Bang! With a tremendous blast, the noticeboard and the wall to which it was affixed came crashing down. The neat string of characters, which appeared to have been handwritten, were broken off mid-sentence, making the remainder of the text impossible to read.
Nobody grumbled about this, much less regretted it—for there was nobody there reading the notice in the first place.
All around, jackhammers were striking the ground furiously, while excavators were swinging around arms powerful enough to knock down an entire wall with a single blow. Compressors were vibrating away incessantly, and industrial crushers were chewing up scrap materials with an insatiable appetite.
All in all, this was not an atmosphere in which one could easily pause to learn about the history of the area. And besides, this little corner was about to disappear for good due to redevelopment. Not only bland concrete boxes, but also the houses and shops that lent the area its distinctiveness, were being demolished, each without exception, reduced to rubble in the blink of an eye.
Misshapen now, that noticeboard lay at the side of the road, nothing more than a piece of junk.
Ah, Semba… Those lines that told of its past glories were not written by any government office or merchants’ association, but probably by some local philanthropist.
Whoever it was, the person surely no longer lived in the area, so perhaps it was a blessing that they weren’t around to witness all this.
Of course, the notice would have been removed in due course anyway, being deemed unsuitable for the new area. That is, now 11that the culture and history of the area were being forgotten—even the name of the place, too.
The demolition work was continuing apace, with the constant coming and going of heavy-duty vehicles. But then, just as the din seemed to subside, it was replaced by the swelling noise of a commotion.
‘Looks like they’ve found something…’
‘What is that?’
‘It looks like a tunnel!’
‘A tunnel?’
‘Looks more like the remains of an air-raid shelter to me…’
There were as many voices speculating about what this discovery might be as there were those oohing and aahing—or, no, the former just had the majority.
For the men at work on a busy demolition site, covered as they were in sweat and dirt and surrounded by the clamour of machinery and choking dust, the discovery of the odd air-raid shelter was surely an event of no importance.
After all, the area had once been densely populated, and during the Second World War it had been targeted repeatedly in Allied bombings, so it was little wonder that many of the residents would have dug air-raid shelters, or that these would have been forgotten about and left unfilled. And yet…
‘What the hell is that?’ said the young foreman of the demolition company, as he gazed down into a gaping hole amid the rubble of a building that had just been torn down. The space looked every bit like some ancient tomb. It was rectangular, a little less than five square metres in area, and sunk at least a metre and a half into the ground.
‘Looks like a room,’ one of the site veterans said, squinting in the bright daylight as he tried to peer into the murky darkness. 12
‘Certainly looks that way,’ said the young foreman, nodding. ‘There’s a desk and some floor cushions. And look, there’s bedding and crockery, too. And over there, isn’t that a chest and a wicker basket? Maybe it was a storeroom of some sort.’
‘It looks more like a hideout if you ask me.’
The young man who had poked his head in had the appearance of what might once have been called a ‘skinnymalinks’, the weedy sort of boy that would hardly have been taken on to work at a demolition site, although nowadays he fitted in perfectly well with the others there.
‘A hideout, eh…’
‘You wouldn’t catch me hiding in a hole like that with no way out.’
Before they could reprimand the young man for this impertinent remark, the foreman and the others burst out laughing. Undeterred, the young man just raised his hand to shade his eyes and gazed into the hole.
‘And aren’t those… aren’t those books?’ he said, sounding surprised.
‘Books?’ said the foreman and the veteran in unison, each tilting his head.
‘Yeah, those are books all right!’ the young man said. ‘I’m going down to take a closer look.’
Ignoring the cries of ‘Stop!’ and ‘Wait, it’s dangerous!’, he jumped down into the hole.
Others who happened to be standing nearby rushed over to the hole and peered inside. Fortunately, the young man emerged from the darkness soon enough and, with a look of perfect composure, heaved these unwieldy items up out of the hole and set them down by the edge.
He then repeated the trip—not once, not twice, but three times. By the time he had finished, books were piled up beside the 13gaping hole in the ground that had once been an air-raid shelter like a second-hand book stall at the side of the street.
Though certain specialists might have recognized them, none of the men on the demolition site had seen any of these books before.
‘What are they?’ asked one of the workers. ‘Old novels?’
This was about as much as they could determine. That, and the fact that they all appeared to belong to the same genre.
The young man, however, looked as though he was in his element.
‘Well, what do you know!’ he said as he picked up various copies and flicked through them. ‘It’s a complete set of the Ryuko-Shoin world detective-fiction series. They’ve got Eden Phillpotts’s The Red Redmaynes, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express… and here’s a copy of Croft’s The Cask, which came out separately. Here’s Kuroshiro-Shobo’s Masterpieces of World Detective Fiction series and Shunjusha’s World Detective Fiction Library… Hey, they’ve even got Barnaby Ross’s The Tragedy of Y. Those years around 1935 were an amazing time, you know! Of course, there were hardly any Japanese crime authors back then… Although, I suppose they did have Keikichi Osaka. Oh, and here’s Yu Aoi’s The Tragedy of the Funatomi… Ichiro Kitamachi’s Daydream… Shiro Tatara’s The Mysterious Affair at the Rinkai Villa… and here are some clippings of Saburo Akanuma’s Devil’s Apocalypse… Now what’s this, I wonder? The Hollow Man…’
‘Hey, that’s enough showing off!’ said the foreman. ‘Get yourself back up here this instant!’
‘Right away, sir,’ the young man said, scratching his head.
The others just stood there looking dumbstruck. Paying them no mind, however, the youth hopped back up—but, curiously enough, in one of his hands he was clutching what looked like a dusty old rag. 14
‘What’s that?’ the veteran worker asked with a wry smile. ‘Even if the owner’s unknown, you can’t just go taking things willy-nilly.’
‘What, this? It’s the cloth that the books were wrapped up in. It must have come undone over the years. That’s why I could see the books inside.’
The young man spread out the cloth for all to see. There, below a family crest or perhaps a trademark in the shape of a temari ball, were some characters that had been left undyed against the background.
‘Omari…’
‘…Hyakuyaku-Kwan?’
‘The House of Omari?’
Character by character, the old-fashioned logo revealed the company name.
Only, none of the men seemed to recognize it. Not one of them was acquainted with this area, nor did any of them have any familiarity with the land’s history.
Asking the locals—which they were loath to do—would have been a long shot, too, for the city’s past was forgotten, and the scant interest they showed in its once-flourishing culture was now little different from that shown by outsiders.
Thus did the stash of detective novels discovered among the remains of that air-raid shelter in Semba, along with the various household items found with them, go unclaimed by the landowners, although neither did anybody take the decision to dispose of them. Whether or not the young enthusiast was able to take them is unknown.
At any rate, this strange space, which had not seen the light of day in almost eighty years, was soon filled in again, and this time it vanished for good, reminding nobody of the vibrant way of life 15and commerce that the House of Omari had once brought to the area—nor of the mysterious series of murders that occurred there during its final days.
*
Curiously enough, though, in a certain room several dozen kilometres away from that demolition site, the name of that very shop was being mentioned.
Here, not a single speck of dust was floating in the air, nor was there the ferocious din of heavy machinery. Instead, all that could be heard was the monotonous rhythm of faint electronic beeping and the breathing of devices and pumps.
Compared to the demolition site, which teemed with various khaki or brightly coloured fluorescent work clothes and reflective vests, this room was a picture of stark white clothing, with no trace of sweat or dirt.
It was a hospital room for the terminally ill.
Everything there testified to this, from the medical equipment and various charts and clinical records to the whispered conversations between the doctors and nurses, to say nothing of the patient lying upon the bed.
How old was this person? When you reach such advanced age, a difference of ten or twenty years does not seem to matter so much. Nor does your sex or the kind of life you have lived until then.
Lately, this patient had been spending most days, if not all of them, dozing. But today, they seemed to be in good spirits and were more talkative than ever.
It was the job of the medical staff to listen kindly and interact with patients, but unfortunately very little of what this one said rang any bells for them. 16
The war, air raids, Osaka, Semba, old merchant families, head clerks, shop assistants, errand boys… and reputation.
Those words, which in former times would have been so evocative, now meant precious little.
Still, the elderly figure carried on talking like this to the men and women in white coats, who were unable to hide their confusion.
‘Long, long ago, there was something called the House of Omari. It belonged to one of the hundreds of old merchant families in the Semba district of Osaka. There, everything was different from the outside world across the bridges. That world had already begun to change, but there in Semba, the people stubbornly resisted these changes. Or maybe they just couldn’t change.
‘I’ve lost you, have I? In the old days, you know, there were so many plays and dramas set in the merchant houses of Semba, even if they were full of mistakes and exaggerations from the point of view of those who’d seen the real thing—everybody used to know those head clerks, the errand boys, the masters and mistresses.
‘Yes, it’s a world you lot can’t even begin to imagine… People today are just business owners, but back then the owner and his family would preside over their workers and fashion their lives like deities. The servants, on the other hand, would leave their family homes after they finished primary school and would be set to work from dawn till dusk with little or no pay. As they climbed the ladder, they would be given “privileges”, such as the right to wear a haori or to smoke cigarettes, but if they weren’t careful, they’d find themselves still living in the shop by the age of thirty or forty, without any prospect of ever marrying…
‘But then, those on the owner’s side weren’t exactly free either. They’d push out everyone bar the son and heir, or else just let them rot there. Having said that, even if you were lucky enough to be born the eldest son, nothing was certain: if you were incompetent 17or didn’t have a nose for the job, you’d be kicked out, and one of the daughters would be made to marry instead—even a lowly servant, provided he was good for the business.
‘But I was an outsider who came late to the House of Omari, and even though I couldn’t do anything about the way things were, nor could I just accept it.
‘So that’s why I killed the lot of them…’
In that moment, the air in the hospital room seemed to freeze. Even those who had been paying no attention to the patient’s story suddenly turned to look.
Just then, however, the patient’s eyes closed, and all that could be heard was the beeping of medical equipment over shallow breathing. 18
CHAPTER 1
21ThereisoneimportantthingthatisneglectedinOsakathesedays.ThepeopleofOsakahavethemselvesforgottenit.Imean,ofcourse,theerrandboysofthecity.Foritwasnoneotherthantheywhobuiltupthisgreatcityofgold.Osakais,towit,thecityoferrandboys.
Harutaka Hayashi,The Errand Boys of Osaka22
Meiji 39 | 1906
The Panorama Museum, Namba
Well, if you really insist… I’ll give you the whole story, chapter and verse. That day, I’d been sent to accompany the young master, Sentaro Omari, so it must have been I, the errand boy Tsurukichi, who was the last person to see him.
Perhaps you’ll have noticed that strange round building just across from the Nankai Railway’s Namba Station, in the Nanchi district of Osaka? It’s round, only not in the shape of a ball—more like a squat cylinder, with walls that curve around smoothly and not a corner in sight. On top of it, there’s an enormous roof that slopes down.
This was shortly after I began to serve my apprenticeship at the House of Omari, and it was the first time that I’d been sent out on an errand to this neighbourhood.
Since coming to Osaka, I’d seen and heard all manner of unusual things, but never before had I set eyes on such a queer-looking building. Even from a distance, the sheer oddity of that enormous edifice captured my imagination.
‘What are you looking at, Tsurukichi?’
It was the young man, Sentaro, who asked me this as we were making our way back from his school.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have been permitted to address the young master, but I thought it would be rude of me to remain silent when asked a direct question. 24
‘I was just wondering,’ I ventured timidly, ‘what that building over there is.’
‘It’s the Panorama Museum,’ he said curtly.
In spite of his answer, I was still none the wiser. I stared back at the young master blankly.
‘Behind those round walls,’ he continued, ‘lies another world. My memory’s quite vague now, though, since I was only little when I saw inside it. But I do remember seeing a landscape of a distant country… I seem to recall hearing afterwards that it was a panorama of the Battle of Sedan during the Franco-Prussian War.’
His words only mystified me further still.
Inside that building was another world, one that stood apart from the Semba in which I toiled day in, day out, a foreign land far away in both time and space… What’s more, there’d have to be hundreds of thousands of people crammed into that cylindrical building if they were fighting a war. It stood to reason! And yet, for all its size, it looked smaller than the Joto Parade Ground.
Could it really be true? Had the old master taken this boy to see the what’s-it of Sedan? As I recall, the old boy passed away just after I began my apprenticeship, but, for the young Sentaro, this trip to see the Panorama Museum with his grandfather must have been a fond memory.
According to the young master, the building—known as the Namba Panorama Museum—had opened in 1891 and, owing to its novelty, had seemingly attracted vast crowds for some time afterwards. Gradually, however, people had grown tired of it, and the building has passed through various hands since then.
‘So what is it now?’ I asked, finally taking the bait.
‘I hear it’s just lying empty,’ he answered off-handedly. ‘Maybe they’ll pull it down one of these days. Still, there are plenty of other things to entertain oneself with in Osaka.’ 25
This news was something of a disappointment, and so, with that, I forgot all about the Panorama Museum and this ‘other world’ that lay inside it—until, that is, it was decided to reopen it last year, and I came across a newspaper article advertising its latest exhibit: a great naval battle from the Russo-Japanese War.
I wondered what this could mean. I hadn’t the slightest idea how they might stage a battle on land, so how they intended to build the ocean and make battleships sail upon it seemed the stuff of dreams to me. Being an errand boy, though, I couldn’t go to get even the briefest glimpse of it, and so I abandoned the idea altogether.
Meanwhile, the year of the Fire Horse* began, and, in the blink of an eye, spring arrived together with the third lunar month. The young master left school, and the family celebrated his graduation with a meal at Naniwa-tei, the renowned Western-style restaurant in Kitahama. Although the likes of us employees were not quite treated to a slap-up Western meal, we were given an extra side dish at dinner, which pleased us all greatly.
The day after these celebrations, the young master came to me and said:
‘I’ll be going to see the panorama one day soon, Tsurukichi. Would you like to come with me? You remember, the Panorama Museum by Namba Station? The one we talked about? I’ll put a word in with Mother and the head clerk.’
How could I possibly refuse an offer like that?
I waited with great anticipation, and finally the day arrived.
Unfortunately, I was quite late to bed on the eve of our outing, because I had been studying and learning about various products, 26but, as ever, I woke up at five o’clock and began by sweeping the shop front and watering the plants, after which I swept and scrubbed the shop floor, replenished the water for the inkstone by the front desk, and, just as I was finishing polishing the tobacco tray and cleaning out the bamboo ashtray, I heard the call for breakfast.
After the meal, I would ordinarily have had to start packing and unpacking things, and, in the few spare moments between running errands, fix a broken nail here, fill a paper bag there, but just then, one of the maids, O-Sai, came in.
‘The young master’s calling for you. Go and get ready, quick!’ she said impatiently.
Though she told me to ‘get ready’, I didn’t have to change my usual striped kimono and apron, and so I went to find Sentaro just as I was.
When I stepped outside, I found the young master standing there with a broad smile on his face, dressed not in his usual uniform, but in a brand-new kimono—it was what I believe is called a shosei-gasuri, a dark navy background with a pattern of little white cross-hatches scattered across it, which he wore with a pair of hakama, but still he wore his student’s cap on his head and a pair of Western-style shoes on his feet.
‘I need to borrow Tsurukichi for a little while,’ he said.
Heeding the boy’s words, the head clerk behind the lattice grille laughed and bowed his head.
It was a little after nine o’clock when the young master and I left, as everybody in the house knew.
I was sure that we’d take Sakai-suji and make our way south, or else that young Sentaro would take a rickshaw and I would have to run after him, but he took a turn and instead started heading east, and he wouldn’t even let me carry his luggage. 27
As everybody knew, the young master was kind-hearted and good to us servants, but occasionally he’d do things that we couldn’t understand. We soon reached Kyuhoji Bridge, and that was when he turned and looked back at me for the first time.
‘Why the funny face?’ he said. ‘We’re taking a boat from Honmachi Bridge. Once we’re on board, the rest is easy!’
Did the young master really say that we’d take a boat? I knew about the steamboats that had been introduced three years ago for the last industrial exposition and plied not only the four canals surrounding Semba, but also the Dojima and the Aji rivers, as well as the Dotonbori and the Kizu rivers—but never before had I actually ridden one.
Just as the young master said, after enjoying the cool breeze from the river and the view along waterfront, we eventually reached our stop at Ebisu Bridge. It was ever so convenient—a world away from having to push a barrow or lug along the riverbank a stack of luggage taller than your head, eyeing up the riverboats enviously all the while… Ah, but I’m getting carried away with myself. I do humbly beg your indulgence.
From there, the young master and I crossed Mizo-no-Gawa and strolled leisurely down the already-bustling shopping street. I can still remember the feeling of exhilaration, almost as though I were on holiday.
Now, what came next? Ah, yes… The young master asked me about the way I spoke.
‘You’re from Bishu, aren’t you, Tsurukichi?’ he said. ‘I bet people there don’t speak the same way as they do here.’
‘That’s right enough, sir. When I first came here, I couldn’t understand what the people around me were saying, and whenever I opened my mouth, they’d just burst out laughing. It was a real pain, so it was.’ 28
‘But how could you learn to change the way you speak when you haven’t grown up speaking like this? There’s the accent, and all the different words and phrases you have to learn…’
‘What can I say? If you want to become a first-class merchant, you’ve no choice but to come to Osaka and work in Semba. And, since you’ll only be able to do that properly if you speak the language, I picked it up from the more senior errand boys, and from the shop assistants and the head clerk while I stayed up late, practising my abacus.’
‘They say that’s the way it has to be. It’s a tough life for an errand boy. Kids of ten or so are made to run around from dawn till dusk, and, so that they don’t have to be let home from time to time, the employers use their contacts and hire them from as far away as possible. What’s more, they take away the name given to them by their parents and even stop them speaking the way they’ve been brought up to speak… You mayn’t realize it, but if you were to take even one step out of Semba—just across the canal into Shimanouchi or Utsubo—you’d find that fewer and fewer people in Osaka these days speak that old-fashioned Osakan Japanese you do.’
‘Oh?’
‘You bet. When I’m at school, the teachers tell me off if I don’t speak standard Japanese, but when I get home, I have to switch back. It’s so annoying…’
As he spoke, I could see that he was getting more and more worked up, which put me on edge. But, true to his nature, the young master soon smiled shyly and said:
‘Sorry, there isn’t much point in me telling you all this, is there? Hey, look over there!’ he said, pointing to the round building with the sloping roof. ‘It’s so big that it already looks as though we’re close, doesn’t it?’ 29
Though I’d seen the Panorama Museum several times from afar, this time, seeing it up close, I was struck even more by its unusual shape and the sheer enormity of it.
Although it was a weekday, there was a long queue of people lining the path leading up to the main entrance. Halfway down, there was a signboard with information:
THE GREAT PANORAMA
Open from 25 December
Painted by the renowned master Yoshimitsu Nomura
russo-japanese war
the siege of port arthur
Adults: 10 sen | Children: 5 sen
Military personnel: half price
Namba Panorama Museum, by Namba Station
Evidently the old ‘Battle of Tsushima’ exhibition from last year had been taken down, but that so many people were still queuing to see its replacement was really quite extraordinary.
Perhaps noticing my look of awe, the young master said unprompted:
‘There were several panorama buildings built in Osaka and Kyoto, but none as big as this. It’s a symbol of great pride for the people of Osaka.’
Being an outsider in Osaka, I was at a loss for how to reply to the young master’s remark, but just then he seemed to notice my consternation. Taking something that looked like a clipping out of his pocket, he turned to me and said:
‘Here, they were even praising it in the newspaper. “The panorama being shown at the Namba Panorama Museum depicts the scene just before the fall of Port Arthur. It has been painted by 30Yoshimitsu Nomura, a scenery painter from Kyoto, and, from its handling of colour to its splendid viewpoint, is quite the best panorama ever done by the hand of a Japanese painter. It is not to be missed. The capture of the wounded, the Cossacks’ retreat, the destruction of the abattis, the wire obstacles, the trenches, the batteries, and so forth are depicted in all their brutality…” Hey, we’re here! The entrance is this way… What’s the matter?’
‘It’s nothing, sir,’ I answered. ‘I was just wondering what that writing in English was.’
Above the entrance was some decorative horizontal lettering, similar to that found on the labels of some of the imported goods that were sold back at the shop. Unfortunately, not having attended school, I could only tell that they resembled English.
The young master burst out laughing.
‘It’s hard to tell whether it’s English or not. “OSAKA NAMBA STESHION MAE PANORAMA KWAN.” That’s what’s written there, only it’s spelled wrongly… What’s the matter? I haven’t said anything to offend you, have I?’
‘No,’ I said, blushing, and, not wanting the young master to see my face, hurried towards the main entrance, beckoning him to follow me.
‘Please, sir, hurry! They’re coming in droves behind you. If we don’t take our place in the queue, we’ll be waiting for a long time.’
And so, we entered the Panorama Museum without any difficulty. However, just as I was thinking we would see the inside of it straight away, I was proved wrong. Much to my surprise, we were instead led along a narrow path, which was every bit as dark as a tunnel.
Perhaps because it would have been too dangerous to have no light at all, the way was lit with rapeseed oil lamps, which were scattered at our feet. This wasn’t quite enough, though, and, to make 31matters worse, the walls on either side were painted with black lacquer, just as if we were walking through the fabled interiors of the Zenko-ji temple at Nagano.
Worse still, when I glanced down at my feet, I saw that the floor was made of what looked like woven hemp palm. Not only had I lost sight of the young master, who was supposed to be right in front of me, but now, because of this carpeting, even the sound of my own footsteps was muffled, and I could scarcely tell whether there were any people around me or not.
I pressed on, and after a short while I glimpsed up ahead of me something tall and thin rising out of the ground. It was shaped like a corkscrew, and the people I could see seemed to be going around and around, climbing higher and higher. It alone shone brightly, making the dust floating in the air shimmer like powdered silver and gold. It seemed to be some kind of staircase, and there must have been a void above it, letting the light in. Desperate to escape this hell of darkness, I kept my eyes trained on it as I gradually made my way nearer.
Just then, I felt the presence of somebody at my side.
‘Tsurukichi?’ Hearing my name spoken like this took me a little off guard, but no sooner had I felt the warm breath at my ear than the young master’s voice continued: ‘It’s what’s known as a “spiral staircase”. When you go up, you’ll find yourself in another world. Have you ever heard of the Buddhist temple in Aizuwakamatsu called the Sazae-do? It’s apparently built along the same principles.’
‘Can such things truly exist?’ I mused aloud.
However, no reply came. I was surprised and had an ominous feeling.
‘Sentaro?’ I called out in a high-pitched voice, but still there was no answer. 32
The young master had been so close to me that I could sense his presence, his breath, but in the blink of an eye all that had vanished, leaving me perfectly alone, even amid a crowd of people. It was a curious thing…
By and by, I noticed a figure that looked like Sentaro making his way up the spiral staircase, as though he were being drawn up into the light that was shining down from above.
‘Wait!’ I cried out, hastening after the young master.
Gripping the handrail, I began to make my way up the strange spiral staircase, around and around, until suddenly I emerged into the light and the scenery, in all its splendour, unfolded before me.
Ah, never in my all my days shall I forget what I saw then or the ineffable sense of wonder that I felt. Truly, it was another world.
What Sentaro had said was no lie, nor was it any exaggeration. Since I have been instructed to tell this story, omitting no detail, I would like to state the following.
What suddenly caught my eye was a mountain towering over its surroundings, and at its summit a building spewing out fire. Before me stood a low hill, and beyond it spread out a vast range of rugged mountains. Everywhere the eye looked, there were figures crowding, Japanese flags and ensigns fluttering, fires raging, smoke billowing, and blood spurting.
It was a battleground in a foreign land: the Siege of Port Arthur, the fierce fighting on Hill 203, Japanese and Russian soldiers everywhere.
When the young master told me about the Panorama Museum, I had thought it would be something that was viewed from one side, like the stage scenery for a play. But that was not the case.
Whichever way I turned, I saw soldiers charging, crossing swords, discharging their rifles, firing cannon, or else being 33blown to pieces or carried away on stretchers. The scene was just as the young master had read about in the newspaper article.
The landscape seemed to extend not only beyond the building’s walls, but beyond the very horizon itself. And, when you looked up, instead of the usual Osakan sky that was clouded over with smoke from the city’s many chimneystacks, there stretched out a bottomless field of azure.
The scene was so terrifying that I could not help but think of it as some strange and beautiful vision. Outside the Panorama Museum, where we had only just been, there were trains coming and going, and not only had there been hordes of people milling about in the vicinity of the station, but the bustle of Nanchi had rung in my ears. Yet now, it was as if all that had been a dream.
When Sentaro and his younger sister Kiyoe had been little, there was apparently a book of fairy tales that they used to read. Now I wondered whether this was the magic of which the book had told.
Oddly, time did not flow on this battlefield, nor did any sound reach me. All around, I could see smoke and surging flames that had frozen in time, rivers running perfectly still through mountain valleys—nothing there moved.
What was most terrifying of all, however, was the sight of those two armies fighting. There were soldiers falling backwards, eyes wide open, having been hit by bullets or cut down by somebody’s sabre, and, frozen as they fell, their cry stopped mid-breath, they looked as though they would continue to suffer like that for all eternity…
Fortunately, it wasn’t long before I was jolted out of this dizzying dream, and the panorama’s spell was broken. The trigger for this 34was the sound of the noonday gun being fired at Osaka Castle. It being the cue for lunch, I’d never miss it, and that day, so it would seem, was no different.
My dream was shattered by the reverberation of that cannon, and when I suddenly came back to my senses, I found myself standing on a round observation platform about ten metres in diameter, with a handrail running all the way around.
Only then did I realize that all the people and all the scenery that I could see, every last bit of it, was nothing but decoration. The landscape, which seemed to go on forever, was painted on the inside of the cylindrical walls. The mountains and hills were nothing but a sham, and the soldiers were mannequins. The ones nearest the observation platform were as big as real people—their faces and bodies were carefully crafted, their costumes authentic—but the further away the figures, the smaller they became, and the more slipshod the workmanship. As for the soldiers in the background, they were just painted figures on the wall. The further into the distance everything was, the smaller it became; it was all so impressively arranged that it tricked the viewer’s eyes and made the farthest reaches, which in reality were only a short sprint away, appear as though they were the endless plains of Manchuria.
But just as the spell of the panorama was broken, something else happened—something that was many hundreds of times scarier and more horrifying than the events on that sham-battlefield stretching out beyond the railing of the observation platform.
It was just awful: the young master was nowhere to be seen! Yes, indeed. One moment he had been by my side, and now he had vanished like a puff of smoke.
Realizing this, I weaved my way through the crowds of people gathered on the platform, looking for him. At first, I thought that 35I just hadn’t spotted him, or that the young master was playing a trick on me. But gradually it dawned on me that this was not the case.
In that instant, what shook me was not so much my remorse at having let the young master out of my sight and lost him, but rather a sense of dread that I’d been abandoned in this world that was not my own.
I wondered whether it was the magic of the panorama again, but at any rate my entire body had broken out in a cold sweat, my heart was pounding, and my limbs had begun to tremble as if the floor beneath me had begun to crumble away.
Well might I have recalled the time when word reached the owner that I’d happened to nod off in the shop, and he thrashed me with a length of bamboo. What weighed on my mind now, however, was not the thought that I would be chastised if I returned to the shop like this, but rather that something untoward might have happened to the young master, something serious that could have put his life in jeopardy… You may well think that I am exaggerating—for which, I beg your indulgence—but the sense of foreboding I felt was indescribable.
I searched high and low, looking frantically for the young master. Try as I might, though, I just couldn’t find him. I made several rounds of the observation platform—so many, in fact, that in the end I began to feel dizzy.
‘Sentaro!’ I cried out. ‘Sentaro, where are you? If you’re here, won’t you please answer me!’
I didn’t mean to raise my voice so much, but the people around me—there must have been around two dozen of them there—seemed to realize that something was amiss.
Some turned to me with a look of curiosity, wondering what the matter was, while others seemed to take pity on me, perhaps 36guessing at my predicament. Then there were those who, realizing that something had gone wrong, smirked.
‘So, your charge has wandered off, has he?’ some venerable old gent said to me quite nonchalantly, looking perfectly unconcerned by all this.
Lest others begin to pry, I shook my head and made my way back over to the spiral staircase, where there was a desk with a guard who also happened to be selling exhibition guides.
I asked him whether he’d seen a young man answering to the description of Sentaro.
Curiously enough, he didn’t seem at all concerned.
‘There’s not much I don’t see from here,’ he said, tilting his head in puzzlement, ‘but I’m afraid I haven’t seen any young lads answering to that description. No, young man, I remember seeing youcome from down there. That’s because you were in such a hurry. But was there any young lad dressed like that who came up ahead of you? No, I certainly don’t recall that. But then, there’s been nobody like that among the visitors who’ve just left, either… Hey! Young man! Where are you going? You can’t go that way!’
Ignoring the guide-selling guard’s admonitions that echoed after me, I headed straight for the staircase whence I had just come. It was little wonder he’d told me that I couldn’t go that way, however, for I was immediately pushed back onto the observation platform by the steady stream of newly arriving visitors coming up the stairs. There were, so it transpired, twospiral staircases—one up and one down—which intertwined like a pair of snakes.
Why hadn’t I listened more carefully to what the young master had been telling me? What was it he’d said? That the Sazae-do in Aizuwakamatsu had a spiral staircase? That it corkscrewed all the way up to the top? He’d said that the staircase at the Panorama Museum was built along the same principles, but he 37never mentioned that the visitors going up and down never met one another! Perhaps he didn’t know… At any rate, I made my way over to the other staircase and went tearing down the steps.
If Sentaro had not yet made it up to the observation platform, he could not have come down these stairs, but right then I had no other option…
At the foot of the stairs, I found a corridor leading towards an exit. Only, this one was not dark like the last, nor did it have a carpet made of hemp palm. On the contrary, for visitors on their way out there was a row of stalls selling souvenirs, and, what’s more, one of them had flags and banners bearing the name and logo of the House of Omari.
I wasn’t expecting to come across anything like this here, so I was a little taken aback by it all. But it was then that I suddenly realized that the girl on the stall probably worked for our shop in South Kyuhoji-machi and would surely have recognized the young master’s face.
I dashed over to her, very nearly tripping over myself.
‘You haven’t seen the family’s eldest, have you? You know, Sentaro? He would’ve passed by only a short while ago!’
The salesgirl’s eyes widened as she found herself suddenly assailed by me, but she looked me square in the eyes.
‘Oh, you’re from the shop?… Well, I’d certainly recognize young master Sentaro, but I didn’t see him pass by here. I’d have hardly missed him if he did. Even if I don’t see everybody’s face, there’s no missing a boy like him. And this is the only way out of the panorama. If you want to double-check, you could always try asking outside.’
She spoke kindly, yet, even though I was satisfied by what she had said, it brought me little relief. I proceeded outside and asked the guard there, after which I explained, once again, the situation 38to the official in charge of the Panorama Museum and asked him to help me find the young master, but still we were unable to find the boy.
Could I have been dreaming? It made me wonder whether I really had come here with the young master in the first place. Or perhaps was I losing my mind? It might have been better if that had really been the case…
Yet it transpired that people had indeed seen me enter the Panorama Museum with him. Nobody, however, had seen him go down the spiral staircase, along the corridor and out the exit. Which meant that he must still be inside the round building, although it was clear for all to see that he was not.
I even wondered whether Sentaro had not been spirited away into the enormous panorama itself. The more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t help fearing that my head might split.
After that, I returned to the shop, informed everybody of what had happened and, as I believe you already know, apologized profusely for my negligence.
This is all I can say. I am prepared to accept whatever punishment you deem fit and humbly await whatever judgement you shall pass upon my wretched self…
*
Yes, yes… But who else should have been at the Panorama Museum in Namba just when the young scion of the House of Omari vanished? That’s right. Yours truly. I’d heard about the reopening of the building, and I happened to be out shopping in Mizo-no-Gawa when, quite on the spur of the moment, I decided to go and take a look for myself.
I looked around and was mightily impressed. As I was taking it all in, I realized that my pocket watch had run down. I still have 39that particular imported artefact, as you can see. So, I took it and began to wind it a few times like so… There! See? You can’t turn it any more without damaging the mechanism.
At any rate, when I looked up, there he was, right in front of me—Sentaro! Or at least somebody who looked like him. You see, at the time, I couldn’t quite remember who he was. I stood there, trying to place the face, but then, before I knew it, he was gone. Never mind, I told myself and made my way down the spiral staircase, heading towards the exit.
On my way out, though, I spotted a stall being run by the House of Omari. And that’s when it came to me. The boy I’d seen must have been young Sentaro. But never would I have dreamt then of the terrible commotion that ensued after I left.
Did I go to the House of Omari and tell them all this afterwards? No, I didn’t… Why not? Well, you see, Sentaro had apparently been dressed in a kimono, whereas the boy I’d seen was wearing what looked like a school uniform, so I assumed that it had been a chance resemblance and that I must have been mistaken. I didn’t want to add to their troubles by muddying the waters. Naturally, I would have told them all this, had they asked me.
What’s that? Sentaro was never found afterwards? A most regrettable incident. Come again? Oh, but that doesn’t make much difference. In a merchant family like that, it doesn’t matter what happens to the odd one or two, even if they are the heirs presumptive to the family business. It isn’t something that the likes of us shed tears over…
* In the Japanese zodiac, the year 1906.
Taisho 3 | 1914
The Namba Shrine, Bakuromachi
Hama-kajiki, ima wa ukiyo to ko-fushi-do
Hirano-awaji ni kawara-bingo
Half a dozen children were running along a narrow road crammed with carts and wagons, singing as they went. The boys and girls were used to this dangerous playground, and they skilfully weaved their way among the many people and vehicles.
They would split into groups before coming back again and bursting into the song. It didn’t really have much of a tune, though: it was more of a word game than a song.
Azuchi-honmachi, kome ni kara
Kyuda-kyuda ni kyu-kyuho
Bakuro-junkei, ando-shio-hama.
It was a mnemonic song for remembering the street names in Semba. Starting with Kitahamaand Kajiki-machi, it carried on through Imabashi, Ukiyo-shoji, Koraibashi, Fushimi-machi, Dosho-machi. Then it listed all the various neighbourhoods: from Honmachi, Komeyamachi and Karamono-machi, to North and South Kyutaro-machi, North and South Kyuhoji, Bakuro, Junkei, Ando-ji and Shio-machi, before finally alighting at Hama, the district on the southernmost bank, where the Nagabori Road runs east to west. 41
The children would sometimes make little changes to the song, but for the people who lived in the area—and especially for the young errand boys—this little ditty was indispensable.
In Semba, there were thirteen streets running north to south and twenty-three running east to west; the neighbourhoods, known as machi, were formed at the crossroads. In the closing days of the old shogunate, there had been 137 of these neighbourhoods, but in the decades after the Restoration, their number was consolidated and counted officially at 110.
For the child who’d come from foreign parts and been put to work immediately as an errand boy, mastering this geography was his first test, and that’s where the song came in handy.
All of a sudden, the children stopped singing. No sooner had they done this than they all began to run with cheers and cries of joy. They seemed to have hit upon something interesting—something unusual.
‘There’s a wedding over at the Inari Shrine!’ one of them shouted. ‘Quick! Let’s go and watch the procession!’
And so they headed, all clamouring over one another, towards the Namba Shrine in Bakuro-machi, which had been founded to enshrine Emperor Nintoku as a deity and had come to be much loved by the locals for its Inari Shrine.
The children arrived just as the bride in all her splendour was leaving through the stone toriigate. The girls, in particular, were enchanted by the sight of her.
‘She’s so pretty!’
‘I wish I could wear something like that on my wedding day!’
Though quick to voice their admiration, the children were, alas, fundamentally mistaken on one point. This was perfectly understandable, though, since nothing here looked out of the ordinary. 42
Naturally, some adults were watching on with curiosity, too.
‘My, my! That’s quite a wedding procession!’
‘Strictly, it’s not a wedding. They’re adopting a son-in-law. A young head clerk is being adopted into the family as a husband for the daughter of the house. A common enough story…’
‘Oh, I see… In the old days, they did all that at home, but I suppose nowadays people like to have a priest do the honours.’
‘They all look pretty dolled up, don’t they? But then, would you expect anything less from the future owners of the House of Omari?’
‘Oh, the ones who make the “Radium Water” and “Liquid Beauty”?’
‘The very same. That’s old Omari’s daughter, Kiyoe. And the guy beside her is their head clerk, Mosuke. Actually, saying that, until recently he was only a shop assistant…’
‘If only their eldest boy hadn’t disappeared like that, he’d have been the right age by now. Sentaro, wasn’t it?’
‘Hush! The very mention of it still brings tears to the mistress’s eyes. You mustn’t speak of it.’
‘That may be… But soon young Miss Kiyoe will be the mistress of the house, and the current one will be cast aside. There’s bound to be some changes over there.’
As the onlooker said this with deep emotion, the children recommenced their antics.
‘Look, they’ve got cars!’
‘Hey, he’s right! Look at them all lined up!’
‘I’ve never seen a wedding procession made up of cars before.’
Just as they said, a number of box-shaped motor cars, including Chevrolets and Fords, were lined up outside the shrine gate. The streets in Semba, however, were narrow, and so these sizeable cars had very little room to manoeuvre. 43
Naturally, the children were overjoyed by the sight of these vehicles, and some of the boys even risked a telling-off by running behind the cars and trying to sniff the sweet aroma coming from their exhaust pipes.
The minds of the adults, on the other hand, turned to less innocent pursuits, of course.
‘Queer things, those cars… And what an extravagance! To get to their shop in South Kyuhoji-machi from here, all you have to do is to cross Mido-suji, and then it’s only a stone’s throw.’
‘Is it the fashion or just the times? I heard that, once the service at the shrine is over, they won’t hold the celebrations at home, but host a banquet at a hotel. At that Western-style “Osaka Hotel”, no less!’
‘You don’t say… What times we live in!’
The Osaka was a hotel that had opened in Nakanoshima Park in 1906, the same year as the incident at the Panorama Museum, and had since been taken under new management. Its original purpose had been to provide foreigners with room and board, but over time it had come to serve as a salon of sorts for the citizens of Osaka and was now used as a venue for meetings and wedding ceremonies.
When the days of the shogunate reached their end in 1868, the House of Omari had been one of several general-goods wholesalers in the South Kyuhoji-machi neighbourhood of Semba, although back then it was known under a different name. In those early days, they had sold powder and paint, hand mirrors and combs to shops in the licensed quarter, where these goods became beloved by the working girls and the daughters of good families alike.
Later, during the Meiji years, they changed the shop name to the House of Omari. There was a great vogue in those days to style businesses dealing in fashionable products ‘the House of…’ 44and to add the owner’s surname, hence why old Omari decided to rename his company—although very little changed about the way they did business. It wasn’t until around the time of the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894 that the business changed direction and began to focus solely on cosmetics—the reason being the unexpected success they had when they began selling imported perfume under the name ‘Omari-brand eau de toilette’.
Those years also saw the arrival of Western-style beauty, which brought with it a demand for cosmetics that had hitherto never been seen. One after another, women began to demand new and novel products that far outstripped their previous tastes and fashions. As a result, the rate of consumption grew to unprecedented proportions, and the products now garnered attention as being suitable for export. It was Manzo Omari, the seventh-generation head of the family (who passed away only the year before last), who noticed this and expanded the business into manufacturing as well as wholesale. By then, however, it not only dealt in cosmetics, but had also begun selling over-the-counter medicines.
In the old days, of course, many cosmetics manufacturers were small, and it was common practice to make cosmetics such as rouge, white powder, and fragrant oils that were applied directly to the skin, by boiling them up in vats in dingy backstreet tenements. Yet the days of customers being unconcerned by what they could not see were over, and the demand for product safety grew. To that end, it was necessary to impart the message that although Omari-brand products were more expensive, they were also a world apart from those other ‘unhygienic’ products.
In the Meiji world, new public authorities were born, and they were much respected. Advertisements for medicines would often include such phrases as ‘Dispensed by Dr So-and-So of the Such-and-Such Hospital’ or labels bearing the words ‘Recommended by 45Professor X’, and even foodstuffs began to be pushed as ‘healthy’ or ‘nutritious’.
It was against this backdrop that the House of Omari began selling products such as ‘Omari-brand royal toothpaste’, ‘Omaribrand leadless face powder’, ‘Omari-brand skin-whitening cream’ and ‘Omari-brand hair liquid’—each of which laid claim to long-lasting results and bore comparisons to similar products from other companies, which were all derided as either poisonous or toxic in everything but the word itself. For in those days, white face powders containing lead, which were used to smoothen skin, and hair dyes containing cadmium, were starting to cause problems.
It was not until the 1910s that the House of Omari, in an attempt to reach a wider market, began selling dubious yet alluringly named products such as ‘Liquid Beauty’, which promised beauty with only a daily application, and ‘Radium Water’, whose benefits could be obtained by applying it directly to the skin or even imbibing it. These new products were promoted by posters showing images of beautiful women taken straight from works of Art Nouveau.
For those in the know, it was reputed that Kiyoe, the family’s eldest daughter, whose nuptials we just witnessed, had been heavily involved in these new business strategies. Nor was it difficult to imagine that this big step away from old Manzo’s policy of ‘tried and tested’ had been the result of much persuasion by his daughter, on whom he had doted so lovingly.
What had everybody wondering, however, was where on earth a simple merchant’s daughter like her had got the ideas in the first place.
Given the nature of the products, though, perhaps young ladies were better placed to give an opinion. And besides, Kiyoe had 46attended a girls’ school. The names of the products themselves were a dead giveaway.
At least, that was what people assumed. But with the adoption of the head clerk, Mosuke—who until only recently had been a shop assistant known as Moshichi—things became much clearer to some.
‘Oh, I see…’ several people now said.
‘Ah, so that’s how it is, is it?’ others muttered under their breath as they watched the new couple get into the car.
However, most of the people there knew very little of the ins and outs of the House of Omari as it gained ground in the world of cosmetics. Instead, they merely wondered at the appeal of this unlikely groom, with his tall, slender figure, his pale complexion and the gentle smile that was fixed upon his face.
Heedless, naturally, of the onlookers’ excitement, the family and its entourage, in all their finery, got into the motor cars and drove off. Alone among them, a single errand boy was left behind in front of the torii gate.
