“What’s the matter?”
Ryosuke raised a finger and pointed. He was visibly trembling.
“Tha… That!”
Ginzo and Genshichi followed his gaze. What they saw made them gasp. About six feet away from the west end of the annexe house stood a tall stone lantern. Near its base, stuck blade-first into the snow, was a katana. Genshichi’s immediate reaction was to run towards it, but once again Ginzo had the foresight to stop him.
“Don’t touch it!”
Ginzo raised his lantern and looked around the dark thicket of bushes that surrounded them, but nowhere could he see a single footprint. Meanwhile Ryosuke went to investigate the rain shutters, but they were all properly closed and locked. They didn’t appear to have been disturbed in any way.
“Sir, shall I try to look in through the ranma up there?”
Genshichi indicated the decorative panel above the west-side shutters.
“Yes, give it a try.”
In the north-west corner, the lavatory area protruded from the rest of the building. In the bit of garden between this extension and the box that would hold the horizontally sliding rain shutters when they were open, there was a decorative stone basin. Genshichi climbed onto this basin and peered into the room through the transom.
Now this particular transom will come up again, so I will give a simple explanation of it right now. In traditional Japanese houses, the ranma is a wooden panel with openwork carving, situated above the wooden sliding amado, or rain shutters, and the shoji sliding paper doors. Its purpose is to let light and air into the room when the rain shutters and/ or the interior shoji doors are closed. The one at the west end of the annexe building was rather simple: a thick tree branch laid horizontally. It was uncarved and hadn’t been sawn into a flat plank. It had been left in its natural form, with even the bark intact, the beauty in its natural curves. Here and there it had been planed away slightly, so that it would rest against the door lintel below and the cross-beam above, but in other places, due to the natural curvature of the branch there was quite a gap where light and air could enter. That said, none of the gaps was over five inches at most—definitely not enough space for a person to climb in or out. The lintel and the cross-beam and the shutters around it were all painted red ochre, as I mentioned at the beginning of this story.
Genshichi peered through this ranma.
“One of the shoji doors at this end of the room is open. Then the shoji by the tokonoma is slightly open too… And the byobu screen has fallen over this way, but I can’t see anything beyond that. Nothing in the tatami part.”
The three men began again to call Kenzo’s and Katsuko’s names, but still there was nothing.
“We’ll have to break the shutters.”
The rain shutters were locked together all the way around the house, and there was no way to remove just one of them. Genshichi rushed off to retrieve the axe he’d left by the garden gate. As Ryosuke and Ginzo were waiting for him to return, they suddenly heard the sound of somebody up on the cliff behind them. They hurried to the corner by the lavatory extension.
“Who is it?” demanded Ryosuke. “Who’s up there?”
Right in front of them there was a towering camphor tree that blocked their view, but then from the bamboo thicket above came a voice.
“Is that the master of the branch family speaking?”
“Oh, it’s Sho-san. What are you doing up there?”
“I heard a strange noise so I ran out to look. And then I heard your voice, sir.”
“Who’s this Sho-san?” asked Ginzo.
“What? Oh, it’s the man in charge of the mill that polishes the rice. He comes to run the waterwheel. It’s Shokichi, one of our servants.”
I believe at the opening of this book I mentioned a broken-down waterwheel on the stream that ran along the west side of the Ichiyanagi property. Well, at the time of the story, the mill was still in operation, and Shokichi would come early every morning to hull and polish the rice. As you will discover later, this would prove crucial to the mystery.
“Shokichi-san, you say that you ran out of the mill the moment you heard the voices. Is that right?” asked Ginzo. “Did you by any chance happen to see any suspicious characters?”
“No. Not a soul. I heard the voices, came out of the mill and stopped for a bit back there on the bridge. That’s when I heard the koto the second time. That kind of ping ping and then the twanging noise. I climbed up and ran along the edge of the cliff, but I didn’t see a thing.”
That was when Genshichi returned with the axe. Ginzo asked Shokichi to keep an eye open for anything untoward and went back to the west side of the house. At Ryosuke’s orders, Genshichi swung the axe at one of the rain shutters. With the first blow a crack appeared in the wood large enough for Ryosuke to reach inside and slide the wooden bolt that locked it shut. He slid the shutter to the side.
The three men dashed in through the open space, crossed the engawa, the corridor running around the house, but were brought to a halt by the sight that met them in the room beyond. It was a scene of carnage.
Kenzo and Katsuko lay slashed and soaked in blood. The futon with its decorated cover, the freshly replaced tatami-mat flooring and even the gilded folding screen that had been knocked over, were all bloody. What had happened to the heavenly dream that was supposed to be their wedding night? All that was left was a tableau from hell.
Genshichi almost collapsed in shock but Ginzo caught him by the shoulder and steered him out of the room.
“Call a doctor and the police. Then make sure no one comes through that gate.”
After Genshichi ran off, Ginzo stared for a while at the two bodies, a look of fury on his face. Then he began to look around the tatami room.
The first thing he noticed was the koto. The black koto with its gold lacquer embellishments was by Katsuko’s side. As if someone with bloody fingers had been playing the instrument, twelve of its strings, right at the point where the musician would pluck them, were adorned with a streak of blood. The thirteenth string had been snapped right in the middle and both ends had curled up on themselves. The bridge that had supported the broken string was missing.
The string had snapped and the bridge was missing…
Next it occurred to Ginzo to check the locks on all the doors and windows. All the rain shutters, including those by the front entranceway, were undisturbed. One by one, he opened the doors to the oshiire closet in the smaller tatami-mat room, the lavatory area on the west side and the little storage closet opposite the toilet, and checked inside each one. At the end of the bit of corridor in front of the toilet was a small window, but there was no sign that anyone had opened it.
Returning to the main tatami room, he found Ryosuke still standing there as if frozen.
“I don’t understand it,” Ginzo told him. “It’s a mystery. There’s nobody hiding in here anywhere. And there’s nowhere anyone could have got out. Maybe…”
Maybe?… Ryosuke caught Ginzo’s meaning right away and shook his head furiously.
“It’s not possible. There is no way it could be suicide. Look at that screen.”
Ginzo followed Ryosuke’s gaze, and saw on the upturned side of the fallen byobu screen a bloody handprint, the blood still wet. Strangely, there were only three fingerprints—the thumb, index finger and middle finger. But there was something else that was truly bizarre about this three-fingered handprint…
CHAPTER 5
A New Use for a Koto Pick
The father of F—, the man who provided me with the background information for my story, used to be the village doctor. He is now sadly departed, but the morning after the murder it was Doctor F—who was the first to arrive on the scene.
The doctor appears to have been fascinated by the Honjin Murder Case, and made detailed notes which I am still able to consult today. Much of this story has been recreated from the content of those notes. Among them was a sketch of the scene in and around the annexe house. When writ
ing a book of this kind, such materials are extremely helpful for keeping track of what occurred, so I’m going to include the manuscript sketch.
It was about six o’clock and the sun was starting to come up by the time Doctor F—and the local police constable arrived. As soon as the constable saw the scene of the crime, he called the main police station in S—town to report a major incident. The S—town police station in turn called the prefectural police headquarters, so police investigators kept turning up, each more senior than the last. The location was so remote that it was reportedly already noon by the time everyone was assembled.
The investigators must have conducted a crime-scene investigation and interviewed everyone connected to the victims, but it surely isn’t necessary to cover all that in detail here. I really don’t want to bore my readers, so I will just summarize for you the findings of the chief investigator, Detective Inspector Isokawa.
PLAN OF THE ICHIYANAGI ANNEXE HOUSE
KEY
rain shutter broken by Ryosuke, Genshichi, and Ginzo
storage closet where the killer hid
box of koto picks in tokonoma alcove
shoji screen, slightly open
shoji screen, fully open
byobu folding screen, fallen
koto
marks left where the killer apparently slid down the cliffside
footprints
stone lantern
katana stuck in the snow
pile of fallen leaves
camphor tree
stone basin
lavatory area
garden gate
First, there was the problem of the footprints. Inspector Isokawa arrived around eleven that morning, but by then the snow had already begun to melt. There was no reason to doubt Ginzo’s, Ryosuke’s and the servant Genshichi’s testimonies that there hadn’t been a single footprint in the snow. This information caused the inspector great anxiety, but in fact it wasn’t quite true that there were no footprints whatsoever.
I invite you to take another look at the sketch of the annexe house. There’s a steep hillside, or a kind of cliff edge, to the north of the building. Between this cliff and the annexe there’s a strip of empty land about six feet wide. The clifftop is thick with bamboo trees that hang out over the edge with the result that the snow didn’t pile up directly below the cliff that night. It was in this empty area close to the east end of the annexe that there were some visible muddy footprints. And not only footprints—according to the police there were also signs that somebody had slid down the side of the cliff into the grounds. As you can see on the sketch, the footprints head towards the east entrance to the building, but once they get close they disappear, presumably because they were covered by a layer of snow. But then, on the earthen floor of the genkan entranceway, where shoes are removed before stepping up into the house, there were two more muddy footprints that appeared to be identical to the others. In summary, whoever had slid down the side of the cliff had then walked east and entered the annexe house by its front door.
Those footprints were strangely misshapen—there was an extremely deep impression at the toe, and a much lighter, twisted one at the heel. It was clear to anyone that they had been made by a pair of old, worn-out shoes. There was nobody in the Ichiyanagi household who owned a pair of shoes like that; thus it was reasonable to assume that the footprints belonged to the murderer. In other words, the murderer had come sliding down the cliff behind the annexe house and had crept in through the main entrance. But what time could this have happened?… Well, the snow was very useful in working this out.
The snow had started falling around nine o’clock the previous evening, and had stopped at around three in the morning. This meant that the murderer had snuck into the house before nine, or at least before it began to snow heavily around 2 a.m. However, the footprints inside the genkan didn’t seem to have been made by shoes that had trodden in snow, so the conclusion was that they had been made before 9 p.m.
Additionally, according to Akiko, who had walked around the engawa at around 7 p.m. to close all the rain shutters, there hadn’t been any footprints inside the genkan at that time. It was decided that the killer must have crept in between 7 and 9 p.m.—most likely while the wedding ceremony was underway in the main house. So far, this all seemed to make sense.
But what did the murderer do after sneaking into the house? Again, please take a look at the sketch. There’s a little storage closet just opposite the toilet. It is believed that the murderer hid in there. This particular closet was filled with discarded bedding and some cotton filling that had been removed from old futons. There were clear imprints left in the cotton wadding that indicated somebody had been lying there. Not only that, but the scabbard of a katana, presumably the one that had been used as the murder weapon, was lying on the closet floor.
This sword belonged to the Ichiyanagi family and had been on display on a shelf in the tokonoma of the larger room earlier that day. The killer must have taken it into the closet with him. This means that during the sake ceremony the katana was already missing, but nobody noticed, probably because the folding screen had been placed in front of the alcove.
It seems strange though that the killer waited until 4 a.m. to commit the murder. After all, the bride and groom had gone to bed around 2 a.m. There were many theories about this, but the most persuasive argued that since it was their wedding night, Kenzo and Katsuko were probably not in a hurry to go to sleep, and the killer wanted to wait for them to drop off before attacking. Well, this was the most accepted theory, but I’d like you to take one more look at the location of that closet.
Between that closet and the larger tatami room where the newly-weds were sleeping, there is only a single wall. The murderer must have been able to hear everything, feel everything that passed between them—every whisper, every breath, every sigh… This was the most nauseating aspect of this case. When Ginzo heard it from the police detectives, his face turned dark with anger and disgust.
Having waited until the couple fell asleep, the killer ventured out of the closet, blade drawn. He would have opened the shoji sliding doors that separated the west-side corridor from the tatami rooms and entered the bedroom area. But before that, he did something a little strange. Or so it seems.
The shoji door closest to the tokonoma alcove had been left open just a crack. After Katsuko finished her koto performance, Akiko of the branch family reported having placed the box containing the koto picks in the back right-hand corner of the tokonoma. But when the crime scene was discovered, the box of picks was found in the front left corner, right by the small opening in the shoji. The killer had evidently slid the door open a little, reached in through the opening and picked up the box. Then he had removed three koto picks from it, slipped them onto his fingers and put the box back in a different location.
The police came to this conclusion after examining the bloody three-fingered handprint on the gold-leaf byobu screen. I mentioned at the end of the previous chapter that there was something bizarre about this handprint, and now I can reveal that there were no prints at all left by the fingers, just scratch marks left by koto picks.
Perhaps this would be the right moment to remind you of the nature of koto picks. Unlike other kinds of musical picks or plectrums, the koto pick resembles a false fingernail attached to a ring. The ring slips over the finger, with the nail part covering the pad of the finger. In other words, if you were wearing koto picks, your fingerprints would be obscured. Knowing this, the killer had slipped koto picks onto his fingers before committing the murders… or so the police believed. As the three missing koto picks were found covered in blood on the shelf above the handbasin in the lavatory area, it seems to have been a reasonable conclusion.
So the killer with three koto picks on his hand and brandishing a katana, crept into the room where the newly-weds were sleeping. First he attacked Katsuko, who was sleeping on the side nearer the entrance, slashing her several times. There was evide
nce that Katsuko had struggled briefly, but with no great force; it seemed the blade of the sword had killed her almost immediately.
No doubt woken by the noise, Kenzo had sat up, only to be cut down by the killer with a blow that sliced open his arm. Undaunted, he had then thrown himself on top of Katsuko’s body to protect her, at which the killer ran him through with the katana, leaving the bridegroom’s body, pierced straight through the heart, lying lifeless on top of his bride.
This was the scenario that Inspector Isokawa constructed in his mind, but there was a lot more that he didn’t understand.
I have already mentioned that the koto had been brought to the bedside and appeared to have been played with bloody fingers, but why on earth had the murderer paused his attack to play a musical instrument? And then there was the bridge from under the broken string. Why was that missing and where had it gone? The investigators had searched the whole annexe building but it was nowhere to be found.
However, even more mysterious was the disappearance of the killer himself. How had he escaped? Every single door or window of the building had been sturdily locked from inside. There was not a single opening through which anyone—man or woman—could have squeezed.
And yet someone had killed Kenzo and Katsuko and, after playing the koto, had apparently gone out through the shoji doors on the west side and onto the engawa. He’d left the three bloody koto picks above the handbasin and, just inside the amado rain shutter that Ryosuke and Genshichi had broken with the axe, he’d dropped a small hand towel, crumpled into a blood-smeared ball. But that wasn’t all—on the inside of the smashed rain shutter itself was a bloody handprint with only three fingers. But this time, the fingers were not covered by koto picks—the prints were faint but visible.
This piece of evidence suggested that the killer had made his escape through the rain shutters, or at the very least had tried to open them. The question was: had the shutter really been bolted shut before Genshichi had broken it with the axe? Ryosuke was the one who had reached inside and unlocked it, and he didn’t take too kindly to suggestions that he might have been mistaken.
The Honjin Murders Page 4