On the night of the wedding, Saburo had walked his great-uncle home to K—town, and spent the night there. In other words, of all the people concerned, Saburo had the clearest alibi, proof that he hadn’t been near the scene of the crime. But perhaps that point would turn out to be of the greatest significance…
Inspector Isokawa sat there twisting his moustache.
CHAPTER 8
Kosuke Kindaichi
It was 27th November, or the day after the discovery of the Ichiyanagi family murder.
A young man alighted at N—station on the Hakubi Line, and came sauntering down the road towards K—town. He was around twenty-five or -six, of medium build, on the pale side, and he would have been completely unremarkable if it weren’t for his unusual choice of clothes. He wore a matching set of short haori jacket and kimono in a kind of splash-pattern dye, with a traditional hakama skirt of narrow stripes over it. However, the haori and kimono were full of wrinkles, and the hakama, conversely, had lost any trace of its crisp pleats. His toenails were beginning to poke through the ends of his tabi socks, his wooden geta clogs were worn down, his hat had lost its shape… In short, for a young man in the prime of life he seemed shockingly indifferent to his appearance.
This youth crossed the T—river and approached K—. His left hand was stuck in his pocket, and in his right, he carried a walking stick. His haori was bulging at the chest; it appeared to be stuffed full of journals or notebooks.
In those days, Tokyo was full of characters like this one. You’d find them hanging around the boarding houses in the Waseda University area, or in the writers’ room in theatres in the seedy part of town. This was the man that Ginzo Kubo had summoned by telegram: Kosuke Kindaichi.
In the collective memory of the villagers, even those most closely involved in the case, this young man is still something of an enigma.
“How could that scruffy-looking youth manage to do what a police inspector couldn’t? I suppose they make them different up in Tokyo. Anyway, that was the gossip at the time.”
This is how I first heard that the young man had played such an important role in the solving of the Honjin Murder Case. Since then I have pieced together all the different accounts, and have begun to believe that the youth with his apparently relaxed, easy-going demeanour had something of the Antony Gillingham about him. Please, Ladies and Gentlemen, don’t be confused by my sudden throwing out of a foreign-sounding name—this is the lead character in the detective novel The Red House Mystery by my favourite British author, A.A. Milne. Antony Gillingham was also an amateur detective.
Milne first introduces the character of Antony Gillingham with these words:
He is an important person to this story, so that it is as well we should know something about him before letting him loose in it.
I will also adopt Mr Milne’s approach and straight away offer you some insight into the character of Kosuke Kindaichi.
The family name Kindaichi is rather unusual; the reader will doubtless immediately think of the famous scholar of Ainu studies of the same name. I believe that particular Kindaichi was from the north-eastern Tohoku region of Japan, or perhaps Hokkaido in the far north. Kosuke Kindaichi hailed from somewhere in the same general area. He spoke that northern dialect with a strong regional accent, and additionally had a tendency to stammer.
At the age of nineteen he graduated from his local school, and with lofty ambitions made his way to Tokyo. He entered a certain private university, hung about in his digs in Kanda for a while, then before a year was up, decided that Japanese universities were boring and hopped on a boat to America. He had no particular purpose in mind, and when it transpired that there wasn’t much to interest him in America either, he ended up wandering from place to place, supporting himself by washing dishes and the like. On a whim he tried some narcotic drugs and gradually got hooked.
If things had continued as they were going, he would have ended up one of those lost, drug-addicted Japanese immigrants, but something unusual happened. There was a famous and quite bizarre murder in San Francisco’s Japanese community that had remained unsolved for a long time. And when a certain young drug addict by the name of Kosuke Kindaichi stumbled upon the case, he succeeded in solving it once and for all. Surprisingly, there was no bluff or deception involved in his methods. From the start he employed reasoning and logic in a focused attack on the case, leaving the local Japanese community astonished, nay, dumbfounded. Overnight the hitherto good-for-nothing drug addict became a hero.
It just so happened that at the time all this occurred, Ginzo Kubo was visiting San Francisco. He’d had initial success with his fruit farm in Okayama Prefecture, and was planning a further venture. Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m sure you have memories from before the Second World War of enjoying a bag of Sunkist-brand raisins. Well, many of the grapes used by this brand were cultivated by Japanese farmers in California. Ginzo had got it into his head to try to grow the same grapes in Japan, and had come to San Francisco to observe the farming techniques. One evening he attended a meeting of Japanese residents and was introduced to Kosuke Kindaichi.
“Don’t you think it’s about time to stop messing with those drugs? Shouldn’t you apply yourself to some kind of study?”
“I’ve been thinking that exact thing. It turns out drugs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”
“If you really mean it, I’d be prepared to pay your tuition.”
“I’d appreciate that very much.”
As he bowed his head to Ginzo, Kosuke gave it a good scratch, causing his already shaggy mop of hair to become even wilder.
Shortly after that, Ginzo returned to Japan, but Kosuke remained in America for three more years and finished college. When he finally returned to Japan, he alighted in Kobe and immediately headed to Okayama to see his benefactor, the man whom he now affectionately called “Uncle”.
“Well…” Ginzo asked him. “What do you plan to do next?”
“I’ve decided to become a detective.”
“A detective?…”
Ginzo stared for a moment in shock, but then recalling the incident from three years earlier, he thought, Why not?… This youth was never going to be the type to pursue a respectable career:
“I’m not really familiar with the business of being a detective,” he admitted, “but I suppose like in the movies, they go around with a magnifying glass and a tape measure.”
“No, I’m not going to use anything like that.”
“So what tools are you going to use?”
“I’ll use this.”
Grinning, Kosuke tapped his head, his hair unkempt as ever. Ginzo nodded appreciatively.
“But no matter how much you plan to rely on your brains, you still need some capital to get started.”
“I s’pose so. I guess I’ll need about three thousand yen for office equipment and stuff. And more for the time being to live off. I don’t imagine that the minute I put a sign up I’m going to be overrun with customers.”
Ginzo wrote a cheque for five thousand yen and handed it to him. Kosuke took it, nodded his thanks and without another word, left for Tokyo. It wasn’t long before he set himself up in that rather eccentric line of work.
As expected, Kosuke Kindaichi’s detective agency didn’t flourish right away. The correspondence that he sent Ginzo from time to time described his office as being like a ghost town, its sole resident barely able to stifle his yawns. To pass the time he apparently read mystery novels. It was often hard to tell whether these reports were serious or joking.
But about six months after he’d set up his detective agency, the tone of the letters to Ginzo began to change. And then one morning, out of the blue, there was a large photograph of Kosuke in the morning newspaper. Wondering what trouble his young protégé had got into this time, Ginzo read the article only to discover that Kosuke Kindaichi, private detective, had managed to solve a major case, a crime that had been famous throughout Japan, and was being honoured in the paper fo
r his distinguished service to the nation. They had printed a quote from the great detective himself.
“The police investigate footprints and look for fingerprints. I take the results of these investigations and by piecing together all the available information logically, I am able to reach a conclusion. Those are my methods of deduction.”
Ginzo recalled how Kosuke had told him he’d use his head rather than tape measures and magnifying glasses, and smiled with satisfaction.
How was it that Kosuke had been visiting Ginzo’s house at the time of the Ichiyanagi murder case? Well, there had been another major crime, this time in the city of Osaka, and Kosuke had been called from Tokyo to investigate it. He’d managed to solve the case unexpectedly fast, and, as he hadn’t visited for a while, decided to continue on to Okayama Prefecture and take a short break at Ginzo’s house. After seeing Ginzo and Katsuko off to the wedding, he had decided to take it easy for a few days until Ginzo returned. When he got Ginzo’s telegram he’d set off immediately.
The distance from the part of Okayama where Ginzo had his orchards to the Ichiyanagi home in O—village was only about twenty miles, but the public transportation system was rather inconvenient. Kosuke had to take the Tamashima road to the Sanyo railway line and then at Kurashiki change to the Hakubi Line, arriving finally at N—station. After that, he had to walk another two and a half miles back in the direction he’d come from. It was the same route that Ginzo and Katsuko had taken on the wedding day.
Kosuke had just crossed the T—river and was approaching the main highway at K—town when he heard shouting. Several people were yelling and cursing. There was a curve in the road ahead and he ran on to see what the fuss was about.
When he rounded the bend, he saw that right at the end of the main K—shopping street, a public bus had run into a telegraph pole. A large crowd had gathered. Kosuke drew near just as the injured passengers were being carried out of the vehicle. From the conversations he could hear, Kosuke learned that the driver had swerved to avoid an ox cart and had collided instead with the pole.
Kosuke had seen the same bus back at N—station, and about half of its passengers had arrived on the same train as he had. If he had taken that bus, he would have met with the same misfortune. He was just moving on, counting his blessings, when his eye was caught by the figure of a woman who was being carried out of the wreck. He’d seen her before.
As I explained just now, early that morning Kosuke had travelled from Tamashima and then east on the Sanyo Line before changing to the Hakubi Line at Kurashiki. This woman had also changed trains at Kurashiki, although she had arrived from the opposite direction. She’d been sitting in the seat across from Kosuke and had seemed anxious and jittery.
The woman appeared to have bought several local newspapers along the way, and they were piled in her lap. She was reading intently and when Kosuke saw that she was absorbed in the reports of the Ichiyanagi family killings, he had taken another good look at her face. He guessed she was around twenty-seven or -eight. She was dressed in a rather plain kimono and a purple hakama. Her hair, although tied up in a traditional chignon style, was terribly frizzy, and she had a noticeable squint; she was far from what he would have called a beauty but she had the air of someone intellectual, which made up for her plainness. Kosuke would have guessed her to be a teacher at a girls’ school.
Kosuke suddenly remembered that the bride, Katsuko, had also been a girls’ schoolteacher. Perhaps this woman might be connected to Katsuko in some way? If he spoke to her he might be able to get some information that would help him with the case, but there was something stand-offish about her demeanour. Before he managed to strike up a conversation, they had arrived at N—station and he’d missed his chance.
It was definitely this woman who was being lifted now from the crashed vehicle. What’s more, she appeared to have suffered the worst injuries of anyone. She was so completely pale and limp that Kosuke wondered for a moment if he should accompany her, but just then he happened to overhear a conversation in the crowd, and it stopped him dead in his tracks.
“Have you heard? They say the three-fingered man turned up again at the Ichiyanagi place last night.”
“So they say. The police have been in a right flap about it since early this morning. Be careful—they’ve cordoned off the whole area. If they catch you hanging around looking shifty, they’ll pick you up right away.”
“What are you talking about? I’ve got all five of my fingers. But now that you mention it, where d’you think he could be hiding?”
“He’s probably camped out in those hills somewhere between here and H—village. They say they’ve got together a group of young men from over there to go hunting him in the hills. Anyhow, sounds pretty serious.”
“It’s like there’s some sort of divine punishment being wreaked on that family. The way Sakue-san met his death—and didn’t Ryosuke-san’s father, the old head of the branch family, commit seppuku in Hiroshima?”
“Right. There was an article about that in today’s paper. Saying ‘the blood of the whole clan is cursed’ or something… You know it’s always felt like that family has had some kind of shadow hanging over it.”
As a matter of fact, the curse that the K—residents were talking about had indeed been mentioned in that morning’s paper and so Kosuke already knew all about it. This is how the story went…
Sakue, the father of Kenzo and the other Ichiyanagi siblings, had passed away around fifteen or sixteen years earlier, or shortly after Suzuko was born. But it hadn’t been a normal kind of death. Sakue had been known for his gentleness and understanding, but he also used to fly into blind rages. He’d reportedly got into a dispute over farmland with someone in the village. This quarrel festered over time until finally one night, Sakue attacked his adversary with a sword and killed him. Sakue also suffered a severe injury in the fight and died at home that same night.
The village elders had begun connecting that past incident with the current murder case, and had even embellished the story, claiming that the cursed Muramasa katana that Sakue had used to kill his opponent that night was the very same sword that had been used to murder Kenzo and Katsuko. They were shamelessly claiming that the Muramasa had somehow cursed the whole Ichiyanagi family, but in fact there was no truth in the tale at all. The katana that Sakue had used back then wasn’t the same one at all. Moreover, that sword had been offered to Bodaiji Temple after the incident. According to police records, the katana that had been used by the murderer of Kenzo and Katsuko was a Sadamura. However, it was understandable that the newspaper editors would get excited and use phrases such as “cursed blood”, since, famously, Sakue’s younger brother Hayato, the head of the branch family and father of Ryosuke, had also died violently and by the sword.
Hayato Ichiyanagi was a military man. During the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5, he had been a captain stationed in Hiroshima. However, he bore the responsibility for an internal scandal and ended up taking his own life by seppuku—ritual disembowelling with a sword. At the time it was considered admirable that he felt such a strong sense of responsibility, but all the same seppuku was an overreaction, people said. For something so relatively trivial to have been the trigger for suicide meant that he was hypersensitive to the point of being neurotic. The real cause of his suicide was considered to be this character flaw. To sum up, the Ichiyanagi family had suffered for generations from stubborn, headstrong men and their intense personalities.
Setting that aside for now, this was the first Kosuke Kindaichi had heard of the three-fingered man making another appearance at the Ichiyanagi residence. He knew he shouldn’t hang around in K—town any longer—he needed to find out what had happened. He decided to leave behind the injured woman, but not without first confirming that she had been taken to the local Kiuchi Hospital. Then he made his way as quickly as possible to the Ichiyanagi home.
CHAPTER 9
The Cat’s Grave
It was just before noon when Kosu
ke Kindaichi arrived at the Ichiyanagi residence in Yamanoya. There was a buzz of activity around the house, and policemen were everywhere. There was no doubting that there had been some kind of incident.
When Kosuke arrived, the Ichiyanagi family was assembled in the sitting room as usual, Ginzo in his customary corner. When he heard Kosuke’s name announced, the older man was instantly filled with energy. He rushed to the front door to welcome his friend.
“It’s so good to see you.”
Ginzo’s face betrayed an almost inappropriate level of happiness, given the circumstances.
“Uncle, I am so sorry—”
“Never mind all that for now. Come on, I’ll introduce you to everyone.”
The previous evening, Ginzo had announced that Kosuke Kindaichi would be arriving the next day, so that the assembled family members were all curious to meet this famed character.
Unfortunately, the man who showed up was a far from impressive figure: a scruffy youth barely older than Saburo, with bird’s-nest hair. Everyone was a little taken aback, but Suzuko couldn’t help herself.
“What, you’re the famous detective?” she asked.
Stunned into silence, the dowager Itoko, Saburo and Ryosuke all stared at the figure before them. Only Ryuji thanked him politely for making the long journey.
Introductions over, Ginzo took Kosuke to his room and did his best to explain everything that had happened since the night before last. Kosuke already knew some of the details from the newspaper, but there was much that he was hearing for the first time. When he’d finished, Ginzo had this to add:
“…And at this moment, they believe that this mysterious three-fingered man is the killer, but there’s a lot more that I don’t understand. First of all, Ryuji—he turned up unexpectedly early on the morning after the murders, walking into the grounds with Saburo, saying he’d just got back from Kyushu. But I could swear that when I travelled from Tamashima with Katsuko one day earlier, he was on the same train.”
The Honjin Murders Page 7