The second volume of The Casebook of Hanshichi takes the Japanese Sherlock Holmes deeper into the shadowed streets and darkened households of old Edo, where nothing is ever quite what it seems. A cat lady’s twenty pets are drowned in the bay and she dies within the week, but only her son knows what really happened. A beautiful young woman born on the Day of the Snake is worshipped as a child of the goddess Benten until the waters of Shinobazu Pond reclaim her. A desperate samurai faces ritual suicide in a Hakone inn while his detective races down the Tōkaidō road to save him. And when a random spear-killer terrorizes the city at night, the investigation falls not to Hanshichi but to the old detective who came before him, a man who solves crimes by touch and instinct rather than observation.
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EXCERPT
Old Hanshichi kept a small calico kitten at his house. One warm day in February, I dropped by unannounced and found him on the south-facing veranda, stroking the soft back of the small creature curled on his lap.
“What a charming cat,” I said.
“Still just a baby.” The old man smiled. “Hasn’t learned how to catch a mouse yet.”
Bright midday sun lit the old roof tiles next door. From somewhere nearby came the clamor of cats squabbling. Hanshichi looked up toward the noise and laughed.
“This one will be doing the same before long, yowling in love, giving you writers material for your opening verses. Cats are really only lovable when they’re small like this. Once they grow large enough to look as though they might transform, they pass right through hateful into something that makes your skin crawl. People have always said that cats can turn into monsters. Do you suppose there’s any truth in it?”
“Well, there are plenty of old stories about monster cats,” I answered vaguely. “But whether they’re true or not, who can say?” This was old Hanshichi, after all. There was no telling what kind of living proof he might have tucked away. To dismiss the matter carelessly and then have it turned against me would have been mortifying.
Yet even the old man seemed not to possess a proven case of feline transformation. He set the calico down from his lap and spoke.
“I suppose you’re right. The stories have come down through the ages, but nobody can claim to have actually witnessed such a thing. Still, I did run into one strange business myself. Not that I saw it with my own eyes, mind you, but it didn’t seem to be a lie. Two people died on account of that cat commotion. When you think about it, it’s a frightening thing.”
“Did a cat devour them?”
“No, not devoured exactly. It’s a most peculiar story. Just listen.”
He shooed away the kitten, which had been clinging stubbornly to his lap, and began quietly to speak.
⁂
It happened on the evening of September the twenty-second, when the autumn of Bunkyū 2 was already waning and the ginger fair at Shiba Shinmei Shrine had ended the day before. In a back-alley tenement not far from the shrine grounds, an old woman named Omaki died suddenly. Omaki was sixty-six that year, born in the monkey year of Kansei, and she had a filial son called Shichinosuke. She had lost her husband in her forties and raised five children single-handed, but the eldest daughter had taken a lover at her place of service and run off to parts unknown. The eldest son had drowned while swimming at Shibaura. The second son had been carried off by measles. The third she had driven out herself for his thieving.
“I truly have no luck with children.”
Omaki was forever lamenting, but her youngest, Shichinosuke, had stayed safely at home. As if shouldering the filial duty of all his brothers and sisters combined, the boy had worked since childhood to support his aging mother.
“With such a filial son, Omaki is a lucky woman.”
The woman who had always bemoaned her fortune with children now found herself envied by the neighborhood. Shichinosuke was a fish-seller who hauled his board through the streets each day, making the rounds of his regular customers. A young man of twenty, working without vanity or pretension, burned dark by the sun. His was a peddler’s small trade, but it kept them from real hardship, and the two of them lived together contentedly, just the two of them. Beyond his devotion to his mother, Shichinosuke had a quiet, gentle disposition quite at odds with his rough trade. The neighbors were fond of him.
His mother’s reputation, by contrast, was in steady decline. Omaki had done nothing to earn anyone’s hatred, but she possessed one habit that drew their dislike. She had loved cats since she was young, and the passion had only intensified with age. By now she kept fifteen or sixteen, adults and kittens together. Keeping cats was her prerogative, of course, and strictly speaking no one had grounds for complaint. That so many animals crammed into a tiny house gave visitors a faintly unsettling, disagreeable impression, but that alone did not constitute legitimate cause to confront the owner. The animals, however, would not stay quietly indoors. They crept out and into the neighboring kitchens and raided them. No matter how well Omaki fed them, the thieving did not stop.
