by I. J. Parker
About the Author
I.J. Parker was born and educated in Europe and turned to mystery writing after an academic career in the United States. She has published her stories in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, winning the Shamus award in 2000. Several stories have appeared in collections, such as Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense and the recent Shaken. The award-winning “Akitada’s First Case” is available as a podcast.
The Akitada series of crime novels features the same protagonist, an eleventh century Japanese nobleman/detective. At present there are eight titles in print and electronic formats, with an ninth to be released soon. These books are also available in audio format and have been translated into twelve languages.
Pronunciation of Japanese Words
Unlike English, Japanese is pronounced phonetically. Therefore vowel sounds are approximately as follows:
“a” as in “father”
“e” as in “let”
“i” as in "kin”
“o” as in “more”
“u” as in “would.”
Double consonants (“ai” or “ei”) are pronounced separately, and o or u are doubled or lengthened.
As for the consonants:
“g” as in “game”
“j” as in "join”
“ch” as in “chat”.
Introduction
Akitada's First Case” was one of the early stories and still went through the hands of the late Cathleen Jordan, editor of ALFRED HITCHCOCK MYSTERY MAGAZINE. She was the first to publish my writing,, and I shall always be immensely grateful for that.
To my astonished delight, “Akitada’s First Case” was nominated by the Private Eve Writers of America as best short story in 2000 and subsequently won the coveted Shamus award. This in turn jump-started my writing career.
Akitada’s role as a detective in the novels and the other short stories usually disqualifies him for the Shamus, because he is normally working for the government and does not accept private fees for his work. In this story, however, he has just been dismissed and in his despair, being very poor, he accepts money to find a grieving fathers child.
The short stories were not written in sequence like the novels; some deal with a young Akitada and others with a middle-aged or elderly one. This story belongs to the beginning of Akitada’s life story.
As a detective, Akitada works strictly within the legal system of his time. This was originally based on the Chinese organization of local wardens, constables, tribunals, and judges. Criminals were generally arrested by local constables or by the police, or kebiishi. Confessions were required for comictions, but they could be obtained through flogging. The alternative to the death penalty (generally not permitted by Buddhism) was exile, which frequently proved fatal.
The events in the story take place when Akitada is barely twenty. He is poor, unsure of himself, plagued by a demanding mother, and bullied by his co-workers and his superior at the Ministry of Justice. Because he succeeds beyond his expectations in solving the disappearance of a young woman and bringing justice to her grieving father, he embarks on a career of criminal investigation that will last throughout his life.
Heian Kyo (Kyoto): 11th century--sometime during the Poem-Composing Month (August)
The sun had only been up a few hours, but the archives of the ministry were already stifling in the summer heat. A murky, oppressive air hung about the shelves of document boxes and settled across the low desks. These were normally occupied by scribes and junior clerks, but at the moment they were empty.
Akitada, having celebrated his twentieth birthday with friends the night before—an occasion which involved emptying a cup of wine each time one failed to compose an acceptable poem--had overslept and crept in the back way. Now he knelt at his desk, feeling sick and staring blindly at a dossier he was supposed to be copying.
He winced when two of his fellow clerks, Hirosawa and Sanekana walked in, chattering loudly. “Sugawara!” Hirosawa stopped in surprise. “Where did you come from? The minister’s been asking for you. I wouldn’t give much for your chances of keeping your position this time.” Sanekana, a pimply fat fellow, sniggered. “You should have seen his face,” he announced gleefully. “He was positively gloating at the thought of getting rid of you. Better go to him quick!”
Akitada blanched. He could not afford to lose his clerkship in the Ministry of Justice. It had been the only position offered to him when he graduated from the university. If only the minister had not formed such an instant dislike for him. Inexplicably, His Excellency, Soga Ietada, had found fault with everything Akitada had done until he had become too nervous to answer the simplest questions. As a result, the minister had banished him to the archives to do copy work alongside the scribes.
To make matters worse, his fellow clerks had recognized Akitada as a marked man and quickly disassociated themselves from him.
Akitada eyed Sanekana and Hirosawa dubiously. “I don’t suppose you would cover for me?” he asked. “I might have stepped outside when you looked for me.”
They burst into laughter.
With a sigh, Akitada rose.
His heart was beating wildly and his palms were sweating when he was shown into the great man’s office with the painted screens of waterfowl, the lacquered document boxes, and the broad desk of polished cryptomeria wood. On the desk stood the porcelain planter with a perfect miniature maple tree, the bronze brazier with its enameled wine flask, and the ministerial seal carved from pale jade—all of them witnesses to Akitada’s prior humiliations.
The minister was not alone. A thin elderly man in a neat, dark grey silk robe was kneeling on the cushion before the great man’s table. “It is a matter of honor, Excellency, no, of life and death to me,” he said, his voice uneven with suppressed emotion. “I have, as I explained, exhausted all other possibilities. Your Excellency is my last hope.”
“Nonsense!” barked Soga Ietada. Being stout, he was sitting cross-legged at his ease, tapping impatient fingers on the polished surface of his desk. “You take it too seriously. Young women run away all the time. She’ll show up one of these days, presenting you with a grandchild, no doubt.”
The old man’s back stiffened. He did not glance at Akitada, who hovered, greatly embarrassed, near the door. “You are mistaken,” the man said. “My daughter left my home to enter the household of a nobleman. She would never engage in a fleeting, clandestine affair.”
Soga raised his eyes to heaven, caught a glimpse of Akitada and glared, saying coldly to his guest, “As you say. I can only repeat that it is not in my power to assist you. I suggest you seek out this, er, nobleman. Now you must excuse me. My clerk is waiting to consult me on an urgent case.”
Akitada’s heart skipped a beat. Maybe it was not another reprimand after all. A case? Would he finally be given a case?
The older man bowed and rose. He left quickly, with only a passing glance at Akitada.
When the door closed, the minister’s expression changed to one of cold fury. “And where were you this morning?” he barked.
Akitada fell to his knees and touched his forehead to the floor. “I . . . I was feeling ill,” he stuttered. Well, that was the truth at least. His stomach was heaving and he swallowed hard, waiting for the storm to break over his head.
“No matter!” snapped the minister. “Your work has been unsatisfactory from the start. As you know, you came here on probation. Since you have proved inept at all but copying work and are now far behind in that, you cannot afford the luxury of ill health.”
“Yes, Your Excellency. I shall make up the time.”
“No.”
Akitada looked up and caught a smirk of satisfaction on Soga’s face. “I assure your Excellency . . .”
he began earnestly.
“I said ‘no’!” thundered the minister. “Your time has run out. You may get your property and leave the ministry this instant.” He slapped a pudgy hand on the document before him. “I have already drawn up the papers of dismissal. They spell out your gross inadequacies in detail.”
“But . . .” Akitada sought frantically for some promise, some explanation which might sway the minister’s mind, at least postpone his dismissal. “Your Excellency,” he pleaded, “you may recall that I earned my position by placing first in the university examinations. Perhaps if I had been given some legal work, I might have proved satis . . .”
“How dare you criticize my decisions?” cried the minister. “It is a typical example of your poor judgment. I shall add a further adverse comment to my evaluation of your performance.”
Akitada bowed wordlessly and left the room. He went straight to his desk, ignoring the curious eyes and whispers of Sanekana and Hirosawa, and gathered his things. These consisted of some writing implements and a few law books and were easily wrapped into a square of cloth, knotted, and tossed over one shoulder. Then he left the ministry.
Suffering under the humiliation of his dismissal, he did not pause to consider the full disaster -- the fact that he would no longer draw the small salary which had kept rice in the family bowls and one servant in the house to look after his widowed mother and two younger sisters -- until he had passed out of the gate of the Imperial City.
Then the thought of facing his mother with the news made his knees turn to water, and he stopped outside the gate. Lady Sugawara was forever reminding him of a son’s duty to his family and complaining about his inadequate salary and low rank. What would she say now?
Before him Suzaku Avenue stretched into the distance. Long, wide, and willow-lined, it bisected the capital to become the great southern highway to Kyushu--and the world beyond.
He longed to keep walking, away from his present life, with his bundle of books and brushes. Somewhere someone must be in need of a young man filled with the knowledge of the law and a thirst for justice.
But he knew it was impossible. All appointments were in the hands of the central government, and besides he could not desert his family. A son’s first duty was to his parents. He despaired of finding a clerkship in another bureau. If only there were someone, some man of rank, who would put in a good word for him, but Akitada was without helpful relatives or patrons of that sort.
He sat down on the steps of the gate, and put his head into his hands.
“Young man? Are you ill?”
Akitada glanced up. An elderly gentleman in a formal robe and hat regarded him with kindly interest. Belatedly recognition came. This was the man who had just been turned away by Soga, a fellow sufferer. Akitada rose and bowed.
“Are you not the young fellow who came in while I was with the minister?” the man asked.
“Yes.” Akitada recalled the embarrassing subject under discussion and blushed. “I am very sorry, but I had been sent for.”
“I know. But I thought you had an urgent case to talk over with the minister?”
Akitada blushed again. “I have been dismissed,” he said.
“Oh.”
A brief silence fell. Then the older man said sympathetically, “Well, it looks like we’ve both been dismissed. You look pretty low.” He paused, studying Akitada thoughtfully, then added, “Maybe we can be of assistance to each other.”
“How so?” Akitada asked dubiously.
The gentleman gestured for him to sit, then gathered the skirt of his gown and lowered himself to the step next to him. “I have lost a daughter and need someone to help me find her, someone who knows the law and can quote it to those who keep showing me the door. And you, I bet, could use the experience, not to mention a weekly salary and a generous reward?”
Akitada looked at the gentleman as the answer to a prayer. “I am completely at your service, sir,” he said with fervent gratitude. “Sugawara Akitada is my name, by the way.”
“Good. I am Okamoto Toson.”
“Not the master of the imperial wrestling office?”
The modest man in the grey robe smiled ruefully. “The same. Let’s go to my house.”
# # #
Okamoto Toson lived in a small house which lay, surrounded by a garden, in a quiet residential street not far from the palace. He was a widower with two daughters. It was the younger who had disappeared so mysteriously.
Okamoto took him to a room which was, like the rest of the house, small, pleasant, and unpretentious. Yet Okamoto was known to be wealthy and he was well respected by nobility and commoners alike. He was a man of the people who had been drawn into the world of the great due to his knowledge of wrestling and his managerial ability.
The walls were covered with scrolls showing the rankings of wrestling champions, but one scroll was a painting of a court match with the nobles seated around the circle where two massive fighters in loincloths strove against one another. The emperor himself had attended and was enthroned under a special tent. Over toward one side of the picture, the artist had depicted the small figure of Okamoto himself.
Akitada wondered why the minister had dismissed such a man without giving him the slightest encouragement.
Okamoto’s story was brief but strange. Recently widowed, he had been left with two young daughters. The older had taken over the running of the household, but the younger, Tomoe, was a dreamer who spent her time reading romantic tales and talking of noble suitors. Being apparently something of a beauty according to her father, whose face softened every time he spoke of her, she had attracted the eyes of a certain nobleman and permitted his secret visits--no doubt after the pattern of the novels she had read--and the man had convinced her to leave with him.
All this had taken place without the father’s knowledge, and Okamoto was apologetic. Akitada gathered that the death of his wife had caused him to withdraw from all but court duties, and since his older daughter Otomi had run the household efficiently, he had seen no cause to worry.
It was, in fact, the older daughter who had reported her sister’s elopement with a nameless nobleman.
At this point in the story, Okamoto excused himself to get his daughter Otomi. Akitada stared after him in dismay. Either the girl had been incredibly foolish or someone had played a very nasty trick on her. No member of the aristocracy would take a young woman as his official wife or concubine without her father’s knowledge.
Okamoto returned with a pale, plain young woman in a house dress. He said, “This is my elder daughter, Otomi. Please ask her anything.”
Akitada and the young woman bowed to each other. She went to kneel behind her father’s cushion, her eyes downcast and her work-reddened hands folded modestly in her lap.
Akitada was unused to speaking to strange young women, but he tried. “Did you know that your sister had a . . . er . . . met someone?”
The young woman shook her head and said, “My sister did not confide in me. She is a foolish girl. She is always reading stories, and sometimes she makes them up. I did not think anything when she said she had fallen in love with a nobleman.”
“You did not share a room?” Akitada asked, puzzled how a lover could have visited Tomoe without her sister’s knowledge.
To his dismay, Otomi began to weep in harsh, racking sobs. Akitada shot a helpless look at Okamoto.
The older man smiled a little sadly. “Hush, Otomi!” he said, explaining, “The girls did not get along. Tomoe said her sister snored, and Otomi wanted her to stop reading by candlelight.”
Otomi sniffled. “I think she just said those things because she wanted to be alone to receive this person. How could she go away with him like that in the middle of the night without a word to anyone! But my father has always allowed her to do whatever she wished.”
Okamoto shook his head. “No, Otomi. You exaggerate.” Turning to Akitada, he said, “This is really not like Tomoe. No good-by! Not so much as a lette
r! I am afraid the poor child has been abducted by a man who had no intention of treating her honorably. That is why we must find her.” His short, stubby hands became fists. “This person of rank knew we are only ordinary people without learning and he thought it would be easy to fool us. You, being a young gentleman yourself, will understand much better than I the person who took my child. What do you think we should do? Please speak frankly. I shall not take offense. My child’s life is precious to me.”
Akitada hesitated. It crossed his mind that Tomoe had run off with some commoner, perhaps even a rich man’s servant. He said awkwardly, “I do not want to worry you more, but I am wondering why the minister dismissed you. You are a highly respected man, and have had the honor of addressing His Majesty.”
The older man looked uncomfortable. “I was a little surprised myself. Still, I am nobody. It is only my association with wrestling which brings me in contact with the ‘good people.’”
Akitada turned back to the young woman. “I assume you never saw your sister’s visitor. But perhaps she described him when she talked about him. Anything, the smallest detail, may help me to find him.”
She nodded. “Tomoe said he looked exactly like Prince Genji. And that, like Prince Genji, he wore the most ethereal perfumes in his robes. Is there such a man among the great nobles?”
The question struck Akitada as incredibly naïve. He blurted out, “Prince Genji is a character in a novel.”
“I thought so.” Otomi’s expression was almost triumphant. She reached into her sleeve and produced a crumpled bit of paper. “There,” she said, extending it to Akitada. “She left this behind.”
It was a poem, or rather a fragment: “By the pond the frogs sing in the branches of the fallen pine; / Let the two of us, like a pair of ducks, join their . . . ” Either the author had been interrupted or had discarded a draft. But the brush strokes were elegant; both the calligraphy and style were those of a courtier. Apparently that much of Tomoe’s story had been true.