The Case of the Sharaku Murders (3 page)

“Mr. Saga was an interesting man,” Yosuke went on. “You know, at first I was wary of approaching him, worried that if he found out I'd been a student of Nishijima's he'd suspect I'd been sent as some sort of spy, which might have made the professor look bad. But he did find out, and you know what? It didn't bother him at all. If anything, it seemed to ingratiate me with him. Later I heard the professor himself had told him about me, back when they were still on speaking terms. I can just imagine what he must have said—just thinking about it makes me break out in a cold sweat!”

“But you were one of the professor's star students.”

“That's a joke! I didn't publish a single paper; that hardly makes me a star student.”

“But that's how Iwakoshi always talks about you.”

“Hah! I always used to boast around him,” Yosuke snorted. “So is he still working for the professor?”

“Yeah. It's just the two of us, but we're managing.”

“That must be rough—eight years as a teaching assistant! I don't know how you do it. I take my hat off to both of you for hanging in there.”

“Well, it's only been four for me.”

Yosuke nodded. “Anyway, perhaps we should get going.” Looking around, Ryohei noticed the café had become quite crowded. “How about going someplace else?” asked Yosuke. “It's been a while since we had a drink together. There's a bar in Fuchu I go to a lot. You're free, aren't you?”

“Sure… But shouldn't you to be getting home?” Not having seen Yosuke for so long, it occurred to Ryohei he might have gotten married.

“That's very thoughtful of you, but I'm still single. No wedding bells yet, I'm afraid,” replied Yosuke with a cheerful laugh.

“DON'T TURN around,” Yosuke suddenly murmured to Ryohei. They had gotten off the train at Fuchu Station about five minutes ago and were now in the midst of a busy shopping and entertainment district. The nearby racetrack had closed for the day but there were still lots of people out and about.

“What is it?” asked Ryohei.

“Just keep walking and act natural.”

“Is something wrong?”

“There's a guy who's been following us since we left Hachioji. You probably didn't see him—he was sitting behind you in the café—but I'm positive I recognize his face. When I saw him on the train I thought it was just a coincidence. But to come this far? It can't be a coincidence. I'm sure he's tailing us.”

“Sure it's not someone who knows you from somewhere?”

“In that case he would have greeted me in the café.”

“What does he look like?” asked Ryohei, beginning to tremble. He'd never experienced anything like this before.

“Short hair, somewhat scrawny, stoops, needs a shave. He's a bit shorter than you, looks a few years older than me; seems to be from out of town: he's carrying a coat, so it must be colder where he comes from.”

“Boy, you don't miss anything, do you?” said Ryohei, taken aback by Yosuke's powers of observation.

“I was watching him on the train. It was obvious he was pretending to be asleep, which struck me as odd seeing as the train wasn't even crowded.”

“I see. Well, what do you think we should do?”

“Why don't we confront him? I doubt he'd try anything here, not with all these people around. Anyway, there's two of us and only one of him.”

Ryohei nodded. At the same time, he and Yosuke stopped and turned around.

The man, who had been walking about ten yards behind them, came to a sudden halt. A look of confusion momentarily flashed across his face, but it quickly transformed itself into a smile. Then, making a slight bow, he approached Ryohei and Yosuke.

“What do you want?” Yosuke asked menacingly.

“Did you notice me following you? I thought as much,” said the man, flashing an embarrassed smile. “I didn't mean to—honest. Sorry if I caused you any distress.”

Having delivered this apology, the man made a deep bow.

Ryohei and Yosuke turned and looked at one another.

“YOU SURE gave me a start back there when you flashed your badge at us and said, ‘Inspector Onodera, Iwate Police,'” said Yosuke, grinning as he poured the detective a shot of whisky. The three men were seated in
More
,
Yosuke's favorite bar. A bottle of White Horse with Yosuke's name scribbled on it sat on the counter in front of them.

“Yeah. Sorry ‘bout that,” said Onodera, scratching his head sheepishly. “It's the only ID I've got.” His eyes had a warmth about them that Ryohei hadn't noticed outside in the street. He began to feel more at ease.

“Say, why didn't you approach us in the café?” asked Yosuke.

“Good question. It's kind of hard to explain. You see, when I'm on duty I don't care where I am or who I'm dealing with; I just do what I have to do to get the job done. But this is unofficial business, you see. I'm always causing people grief in my line of work, so I wanted to spare you two all of that. I was just trying to be tactful for a change.”

Ryohei and Yosuke burst into laughter. Tactful was the last word one would have used to describe the detective.

Onodera continued: “Most people don't like it very much when someone like me comes up and suddenly starts bombarding them with questions. Now, if the person's a criminal I could care less about his feelings. But I try to go easy on innocent folks… To make a long story short, I was looking for an opening to approach you in the café but I blew it.”

At this, Ryohei and Yosuke erupted into renewed laughter.

“Say, is it already snowing up in Iwate?” Yosuke blurted out as though suddenly remembering something.

“You must be joking. It's way too early for that. Anyway, I live in Kuji, which is in the warmest part of the prefecture.”

“You call that warm?” retorted Yosuke. “I was up there just last week and it felt pretty damned cold.”

“You were in Iwate recently?” broke in Ryohei, whose hometown, as Yosuke was surely aware, was Morioka, the capital of Iwate Prefecture.

“Yeah. I drove up with Mr. Saga's brother-in-law to look for him after he went missing… We didn't have time to stop in Morioka though. Anyway, I expect that's why Inspector Onodera is here. Isn't that right?”

“Correct. But right now there's something else I want to ask you about.”

“Something else?”

“How shall I put it? Maybe I should begin with Mr. Saga… You see, I think I know why he killed himself.”

“You found a suicide note?”

Ryohei and Yosuke both leaned forward in their chairs. Yosuke was considerably better acquainted with the facts of the case than Ryohei, who only knew what he had read in the newspaper about Saga's supposed suicide.

“The night before last,” Onodera went on, “I got a call from a clerk at the lost-and-found office at Kuji Station. It seems among the lost articles brought to the office on the ninth was something apparently belonging to Mr. Saga.”

“Something he left behind on the train? Not a suicide note, then.”

“No. I rushed straight over to the station. It turned out to be a small parcel addressed to a rare book dealer in Sendai. No return address, just Mr. Saga's name. And no stamps on it either. He'd probably intended to take it to the post office after getting off the train.”

“Where was it found?”

“In one of the overhead luggage racks on the 10:46 a.m. train from Hachinohe to Fudai. One of the cleaning ladies found it while the train was stopped at Fudai Station before turning around and heading back to Hachinohe. The train arrived in Fudai at… let's see…” Onodera paused to check his notebook. “At 1:25 p.m. That's the train we thought he must have taken. Now, if he arrived in Fudai at one thirty in the afternoon he would have reached his vacation cottage near Kitayama around three. So now we had a better idea of Mr. Saga's movements on the day he died, but the parcel raised a whole new set of questions. The autopsy report pointed to suicide, but would a man planning to end his life really go to the trouble of mailing a parcel?”

Yosuke and Ryohei left the question unanswered. Onodera continued:

“To be honest, I started to have my doubts… That's how I ended up here in Tokyo.”

“So you found something here to confirm those suspicions?” asked Yosuke.

“No. It turns out it really
was
suicide,” said Onodera, dejectedly. “But let's back up. First we needed to know what was in the parcel. One of my colleagues rang up the rare book dealer in Sendai. No answer. ‘The shop must be closed today,' he said. ‘We'll have to wait until tomorrow.' You see, we couldn't open the parcel without the permission of the addressee. I decided to go to Sendai and check out the shop myself. I arrived there around noon yesterday and telephoned from the station. This time I got through. The shop's called Hirose Books. I went straight over and showed the owner the parcel. Fujimura Genzo's his name—said he'd never heard of Mr. Saga, so why would he mail him a parcel? He refused to accept it, saying there must be some mistake.”

“How strange,” said Yosuke, shaking his head.

“Strange indeed. Why send a parcel to someone you don't know? And on the day you were planning to commit suicide, no less. It doesn't make sense. Anyway, there was no mistake it was addressed to Mr. Fujimura, so in spite of his protests I talked him into opening it in front of me.”

By this point, Yosuke and Ryohei were hanging on Onodera's every word.

“What do you think was inside?” the detective asked, his eyes fixed on them. Then with a grin he answered his own question: “Two old books, wrapped up ever so carefully in newspaper. Now, I'm not one for books myself. To me these just looked like moth-eaten old tomes. But Mr. Fujimura was beside himself.”

“What were they?” Yosuke pressed him.

“Let's see…” Onodera paused to consult his notebook again.

“Fujimura said they belong to a series of one hundred Noh plays—called ‘Suminokura Books' or something like that.”

“By Koetsu!” exclaimed Yosuke.

“That's right. That's the name he mentioned.”

“Koetsu… You mean
that
Koetsu?” asked Ryohei, looking incredulously at Yosuke.

Today, Hon'ami Koetsu is remembered as one of the so-called Three Brushes of the Kan'ei Era (along with Konoe Nobutada and Shokado Shojo). In the early 1600s he was commissioned by a wealthy merchant and shipping magnate named Suminokura Ryoi and his son Soan to produce a series of deluxe, hand-printed editions of Japanese literary classics—hence the name “Suminokura Books.” A sword-appraiser by profession, Koetsu also happened to be a versatile artist with a highly refined aesthetic sense who dabbled in pottery and lacquerware design. But nowhere did his genius find fuller expression than in this series of books. His calligraphy served as the template for the woodcuts and the paper was underprinted with his own designs.

“Now that you mention it, I do recall that Mr. Saga was collecting that particular series of plays,” said Yosuke. “He even showed me a few. I reckon he had about half of them.”

“Half! Then his collection would easily have been worth a cool ten million yen,” said the detective, whistling.

“Where did you come by that information?” asked Yosuke, smiling.

“Mr. Fujimura,” replied the detective. “He told me all one hundred volumes together would fetch about twenty million yen.”

“Ah, I see. But that's only for a complete set. Individually the books aren't worth nearly as much as they are together. You have to have them all. I don't know exactly how much it would affect the price, but my guess is even if you were missing just one volume, you could only get half that much.”

“Is that right? So that last volume alone would be worth ten million!” Onodera's eyebrows shot up.

“In theory. In every series there's usually at least one book that eludes collectors. Sometimes that's because only a few copies of that particular volume were printed. Or it could be that it was banned by the authorities. Whatever the reason, without that last volume it's impossible to assemble a complete set. That's what collectors a ‘trump card.'”

“A ‘trump card,' huh?” His interest aroused, the detective scribbled this down in his notebook.

“If I'm not mistaken,” added Yosuke, “there are two or three trump cards in Koetsu's One Hundred Noh Plays.”

“So perhaps,” broke in Ryohei as though struck by a sudden thought, “those two volumes in Mr. Saga's parcel were the trump cards.”

“If they were, Fujimura didn't say so.”

“So why was he so surprised when he opened it?”

“Ah, now this is where it gets interesting. He said the books had been stolen from his shop.”

Yosuke and Ryohei were speechless.

“You see,” the detective went on, “for some time Fujimura's been collecting the same series of plays, though so far he's only tracked down about twenty of them. Eventually he intends to collect them all. Rare books are as much a business as a hobby to him, you see. Apparently, the ones he had he kept on display in his shop window. They weren't for sale, of course. Anyway, this past February two of them were stolen. That's what bothered him even more than the shock of being robbed: Why only two? Fujimura was certain it was the work of a fellow bibliophile, maybe even one of his regular customers, who had succumbed to temptation. So he didn't report the theft to the police. He thought if he waited, the books would eventually be returned. He waited and waited, but nothing happened. Finally, he lost patience and last month he took out this ad…”