If you are a fan of Sherlock Holmes or detective stories in general, you really don’t want to miss The Casebook of Hanshichi by Okamoto Kido, the first volume of which is now available in an original translation from Castalia House. I regretfully note that a small Japanese press has beaten us to the first complete translation of all 69 stories by about a month, but while I cannot attest to the quality of those, I think you will find that the quality of Castalia’s translations are excellent.
This is an excerpt from the seventh story from The Ghost Master, which is now available on Kindle, KU, and audiobook. Paid subscribers to Castalia Library receive a new translated ebook every week; next week’s book will be the second volume, after which we’ll start alternating with additional releases from the excellent Spanish Episodios Nacionales of Benito Perez Galdos. Both series will eventually be published in print editions; Trafalgar from the latter is already in print and available at both Amazon and NDM Express.
I returned to Tokyo at the height of August, the heat still fierce, after a summer holiday of about a fortnight. Bringing a few small gifts, I called on old Hanshichi and found him just back from the bathhouse, sitting cross-legged on a rush mat on the veranda, fanning himself in great sweeps with a round fan. A cool evening breeze was blowing through the narrow garden, and from the neighbor’s window came the chirping of crickets.
“Of all the insects, the cricket is the most truly Edo,” the old man declared. “I grant you they’re cheap, and they may well be the humblest of singing insects, but somehow they feel more like Edo than the pine cricket or the bell cricket ever could. You can be walking along any street, and when you hear a cricket singing from some window or eave, the summers of old Edo come flooding back. The insect sellers would hate me for saying so, but your pine crickets and grass larks are nothing but expensive. They’re not Edo at all. To use the modern phrase: the most plebeian, and for that very reason the most Edo, is the common cricket, and nothing else.”
The old man held forth at length on the subject, lavishing praise on a creature that nowadays is barely more than a child’s plaything, worth perhaps three sen apiece. If I was going to keep insects at all, he urged, I should keep crickets. From insects we moved on to wind chimes, and from wind chimes to the observation that tonight was the fifteenth of August by the new calendar.
“The calendars don’t match, you see, so August by the new reckoning is still as hot as this,” the old man said. “Under the old calendar, mornings and evenings would have turned properly cool by now.”
He began reminiscing about moon-viewing in the old days. In the course of this, the following story emerged, adding one more entry to my notebook.
It was the evening of August the fourteenth, in the second year of Bunkyū. Hanshichi had come home earlier than usual and was thinking of finishing his supper and stopping by a neighborhood mujin gathering, when a woman of about forty appeared at his door. She wore her hair in a small round chignon, and her face was heavy with care.
“I do apologize for the long silence, sir. I trust you’ve been keeping well.”
“Why, Okame. It’s been quite a while. Young Ochō must be turning into a fine girl by now. She’s a good, steady worker from what I hear, so her mother can rest easy.”
“It’s Ochō I’ve come about, actually, sir. I’m at my wits’ end, and I hardly know what to do.”
Looking at the lines on the woman’s forehead, Hanshichi had a fairly good idea what this was about. Okame ran a tea shop near Eitai Bridge with her daughter Ochō, who was seventeen this year. The girl was refined and beautiful, and if her one fault was a tendency to be too quiet, she had more than enough charm to draw the young men in. Okame was proud of having borne such a beautiful daughter. If she had come here troubled about the girl, even a man less shrewd than Hanshichi could guess the nature of it: dutiful Ochō had found someone who mattered to her more than her own mother. Given the trade they were in, making a fuss about it would only be boorish.
“So that’s it, is it. Young Ochō’s got herself into something and now she’s giving her mother grief. Well, I’d say you’d do better to let it pass. She’s young. If there isn’t a little fun in her life, she won’t have much heart for the work, will she? You must remember what that was like yourself. Best not to make too much of it.” Hanshichi was laughing as he spoke.
Okame did not so much as smile. She fixed him with a steady gaze.
“No, sir. It’s nothing of that sort at all. If she’d taken up with some man, some frivolous little affair, I’d do exactly as you say and let it pass. But this is something else entirely. The girl shakes, and she weeps…”
“That is odd. What exactly has happened?”
“My daughter sometimes disappears.”
Hanshichi went on laughing. A young tea-shop girl who vanished from time to time: his expression said this was scarcely worth troubling over. Seeing it, Okame pressed forward with greater urgency.
“No, it’s nothing to do with men or anything of that sort. Please hear me out, sir. It was just before the river-opening in May. A fine-looking samurai, with one attendant, happened to pass in front of my shop and caught sight of my daughter inside. He came wandering in, drank his tea, rested a while, and left a full isshū for the tea. A very generous customer indeed. About three days later, the same samurai came again, but this time he had a woman with him, thirty-five or thirty-six, very refined, with the bearing of someone in service at a great house. They didn’t seem to be husband and wife. The woman asked Ochō’s name, asked her age, and again left an isshū for the tea. Then, about three days after that, Ochō was gone.”
“I see,” said Hanshichi, nodding.
They were a type of kidnapping ring, he judged, people who disguised themselves as persons of rank to carry off a good-looking girl.
“And the girl never came back?”
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