Excerpt
Murder in the House of Omari
On a certain street corner, one day in the near future: —
Nestled in Osaka’s Central Ward (formerly East and South Wards) is an area called Semba, which stretches one kilometre east to west and two kilometres north to south. It has been a commercial hub ever since the days of the shoguns.
Bound by the Tosabori River to the north, by the Higashi Yokobori River to the east, by the old Nagabori River (now Nagabori Road) to the south, and by the old Nishi Yokobori River (now the Osaka–Kobe Highway) to the west, it was once connected to the outside world by some forty bridges.
In Osaka, streets that run north to south are called ‘suji’, while those running east to west are known as ‘dori’, and in Semba this crisscrossing of streets formed a chequerboard in which merchants’ houses of all kinds jostled side by side. The most renowned of these were the pharmacies in Dosho-machi, the furniture dealers in Dobuike, the drapers in Honmachi, the haberdashers and cosmetics manufacturers in South Kyuhoji-machi. It is no exaggeration to say that this is where the image of the typical ‘Osaka merchant’ was formed.
The culture there was unique, and reputation was paramount. The men and women working there had all endured rigorous training, serving live-in apprenticeships from a young age before working their way up to become shop assistants and then eventually head clerks. Perhaps the most peculiar thing about that culture was the singular brand of Osakan Japanese known as ‘Semba dialect’… …Bang! With a tremendous blast, the noticeboard and the wall to which it was affixed came crashing down. The neat string of characters, which appeared to have been handwritten, were broken off mid-sentence, making the remainder of the text impossible to read.
Nobody grumbled about this, much less regretted it—for there was nobody there reading the notice in the first place.
All around, jackhammers were striking the ground furiously, while excavators were swinging around arms powerful enough to knock down an entire wall with a single blow. Compressors were vibrating away incessantly, and industrial crushers were chewing up scrap materials with an insatiable appetite.
All in all, this was not an atmosphere in which one could easily pause to learn about the history of the area. And besides, this little corner was about to disappear for good due to redevelopment. Not only bland concrete boxes, but also the houses and shops that lent the area its distinctiveness, were being demolished, each without exception, reduced to rubble in the blink of an eye.
Misshapen now, that noticeboard lay at the side of the road, nothing more than a piece of junk.
Ah, Semba… Those lines that told of its past glories were not written by any government office or merchants’ association, but probably by some local philanthropist.
Whoever it was, the person surely no longer lived in the area, so perhaps it was a blessing that they weren’t around to witness all this.
Of course, the notice would have been removed in due co
urse anyway, being deemed unsuitable for the new area. That is, now that that the culture and history of the area were being forgotten—even the name of the place, too.
The demolition work was continuing apace, with the constant coming and going of heavy-duty vehicles. But then, just as the din seemed to subside, it was replaced by the swelling noise of a commotion.
‘Looks like they’ve found something…’
‘What
is that?’
‘It looks like a tunnel!’
‘A tunnel?’
‘Looks more like the remains of an air-raid shelter to me…’
There were as many voices speculating about what this discovery might be as there were those oohing and aahing—or, no, the former just had the majority.
For the men at work on a busy demolition site, covered as they were in sweat and dirt and surrounded by the clamour of machinery and choking dust, the discovery of the odd air-raid shelter was surely an event of no importance.
After all, the area had once been densely populated, and during the Second World War it had been targeted repeatedly in Allied bombings, so it was little wonder that many of the residents would have dug air-raid shelters, or that these would have been forgotten about and left unfilled. And yet…
‘What the hell is that?’ said the young foreman of the demolition company, as he gazed down into a gaping hole amid the rubble of a building that had just been torn down. The space looked every bit like some ancient tomb. It was rectangular, a little less than five square metres in area, and sunk at least a metre and a half into the ground.
‘Looks like a room,’ one of the site veterans said, squinting in the bright daylight as he tried to peer into the murky darkness.
‘Certainly looks that way,’ said the young foreman, nodding. ‘There’s a desk and some floor cushions. And look, there’s bedding and crockery, too. And over there, isn’t that a chest and a wicker basket? Maybe it was a storeroom of some sort.’
‘It looks more like a hideout if you ask me.’
The young man who had poked his head in had the appearance of what might once have been called a ‘skinnymalinks’, the weedy sort of boy that would hardly have been taken on to work at a demolition site, although nowadays he fitted in perfectly well with the others there.
‘A hideout, eh…’
‘You wouldn’t catch me hiding in a hole like that with no way out.’
Before they could reprimand the young man for this impertinent remark, the foreman and the others burst out laughing. Undeterred, the young man just raised his hand to shade his eyes and gazed into the hole.
‘And aren’t those… aren’t those books?’ he said, sounding surprised.
‘Books?’ said the foreman and the veteran in unison, each tilting his head.
‘Yeah, those are books all right!’ the young man said. ‘I’m going down to take a closer look.’
Ignoring the cries of ‘Stop!’ and ‘Wait, it’s dangerous!’, he jumped down into the hole.
Others who happened to be standing nearby rushed over to the hole and peered inside. Fortunately, the young man emerged from the darkness soon enough and, with a look of perfect composure, heaved these unwieldy items up out of the hole and set them down by the edge.
He then repeated the trip—not once, not twice, but three times. By the time he had finished, books were piled up beside the gaping hole in the ground that had once been an air-raid shelter like a second-hand book stall at the side of the street.
Though certain specialists might have recognized them, none of the men on the demolition site had seen any of these books before.
‘What are they?’ asked one of the workers. ‘Old novels?’
This was about as much as they could determine. That, and the fact that they all appeared to belong to the same genre.
The young man, however, looked as though he was in his element.
‘Well, what do you know!’ he said as he picked up various copies and flicked through them. ‘It’s a complete set of the Ryuko-Shoin world detective-fiction series. They’ve got Eden Phillpotts’s
The Red Redmaynes, Agatha Christie’s
Murder on the Orient Express… and here’s a copy of Croft’s
The Cask, which came out separately. Here’s Kuroshiro-Shobo’s Masterpieces of World Detective Fiction series and Shunjusha’s World Detective Fiction Library… Hey, they’ve even got Barnaby Ross’s
The Tragedy of Y. Those years around 1935 were an amazing time, you know! Of course, there were hardly any Japanese crime authors back then… Although, I suppose they did have Keikichi Osaka. Oh, and here’s Yu Aoi’s
The Tragedy of the Funatomi… Ichiro Kitamachi’s
Daydream… Shiro Tatara’s
The Mysterious Affair at the Rinkai Villa… and here are some clippings of Saburo Akanuma’s
Devil’s Apocalypse… Now what’s this, I wonder?
The Hollow Man…’
‘Hey, that’s enough showing off!’ said the foreman. ‘Get yourself back up here this instant!’
‘Right away, sir,’ the young man said, scratching his head.
The others just stood there looking dumbstruck. Paying them no mind, however, the youth hopped back up—but, curiously enough, in one of his hands he was clutching what looked like a dusty old rag.
‘What’s that?’ the veteran worker asked with a wry smile. ‘Even if the owner’s unknown, you can’t just go taking things willy-nilly.’
‘What, this? It’s the cloth that the books were wrapped up in. It must have come undone over the years. That’s why I could see the books inside.’
The young man spread out the cloth for all to see. There, below a family crest or perhaps a trademark in the shape of a temari ball, were some characters that had been left undyed against the background.
‘
Omari…’
‘…Hyakuyaku-Kwan?’
‘The House of Omari?’
Character by character, the old-fashioned logo revealed the company name.
Only, none of the men seemed to recognize it. Not one of them was acquainted with this area, nor did any of them have any familiarity with the land’s history.
Asking the locals—which they were loath to do—would have been a long shot, too, for the city’s past was forgotten, and the scant interest they showed in its once-flourishing culture was now little different from that shown by outsiders.
