The Case of the Sharaku Murders (30 page)

He had no trouble finding the shop. As Yosuke entered, the owner, a fat man in his fifties, greeted him affably. There were no other customers. Yosuke briefly stated his business. When he realized Yosuke had not come to buy anything the owner looked put out, but he listened to what Yosuke had to say without interrupting him.

“Ah, yes… him.” The fat man remembered Yoshitake well. “Now that you mention it, he hasn't been here lately.”

“I think he's given up stamp collecting.”

“That was wise—won't get anywhere if you go about it half-assed like he was.” The man gave a loud laugh.

“Now, about this postcard…” said Yosuke, ignoring the man's remark and handing him a photocopy of the postcard addressed to Yoshitake's grandfather. The owner stared at it for a while.

“Beats me. I
did
buy a bunch of postcards from him, but I don't remember every single one. Anyway, it's not like this is rare or anything. I probably just stuck it in with a bunch of other cheap ones and sold them as a set.

Against the left-hand wall of the shop there stood a row of divided shelves filled with bundles of postcards held together with rubber bands, each containing several dozen postcards and labeled with titles such as “Trolley Cars of the
'
30s and
'
40s,” “Japanese Volcanoes,” and “National Parks.” Then there were single cards encased individually in cellophane sleeves. Yosuke was astonished at the prices. There were even several dating to the late nineteenth century showing scenes of Asakusa.

“Now if it'd been something like
this
,
” said the owner, indicting a Meiji-era postcard of Tokyo's first “skyscraper,” the famous Asakusa Twelve-Stories, “I might remember it but…”

“So you've no recollection of it at all?” Yosuke pressed him. If he gave up now all his efforts would have been for nothing. “What title might you have categorized it under?” he asked, trying to jog the man's memory.

“Let's see… ‘Hot Springs Resorts,' I suppose,” replied the owner.

On Yosuke's photocopy of the postcard the caption in the bottom right-hand corner was illegible. “Apparently it's a photograph of Naruko Onsen,” he explained.

“Is it? That's near Sendai… Wait a minute,” said the owner, searching his memory. “Maybe it was
him
…”

“Have you remembered something?”

“No, it's just… I can't say with absolute certainty, but last summer there was a guy who came in here regularly. He said he was looking for scenes of famous places in Tohoku. I can't remember selling him this one, but he did buy a number of others, better than this of course, much older… of Matsushima and Hirosaki Castle and such; mostly late-nineteenth century.”

“What was this man like?”

“Oh, I don't know… just an ordinary guy. Let's see, I think I have his business card here somewhere. Hold on a sec, it should be in this drawer…”

The man rummaged around in a drawer below the cash register.

Yosuke's heart began to pound.

“Ah, here it is! See, on the back it says ‘Looking for Tohoku postcards.' I wrote that to myself as a reminder.”

The owner handed Yosuke the card. He took one look at it and caught his breath.

Him
! But why? What did it mean? Yosuke began to feel dizzy. “Are you
sure
you don't remember selling this postcard to this man?” he persisted. Everything now hinged on the man's answer.

“Well, if it's
that
important…” the owner folded his arms across his chest and tried to remember.

Just then a woman's voice called out from the doorway at the back of the shop.

“I'm back!”

Looking relieved, the owner called the woman's name. She came out wearing a blue smock. The owner explained why Yosuke had come and showed her his photocopy of the postcard.

“I think I bundled it together with some other postcards of hot springs resorts,” he added.

“Was it that bunch labeled ‘Postcards from Tohoku,' I wonder?” the woman said.

“That's it!”

“In that case, it was definitely
that
gentleman who bought it,” the woman said emphatically. “He came in once while you were out—asked me to reduce the price because he wasn't interested in two-thirds of them. But I said I couldn't do that without asking you first. In the end he caved in and bought the whole lot and left.”

“Ah, is that what happened?” said the owner.

“When was that?” asked Yosuke, flustered.

“Must've been sometime last October. It was a bit cold that day but we hadn't gotten around to turning on the heat yet…”

Around the time Sato's catalogue turned up
,
thought Yosuke.

He stood there for a long time, silently contemplating the significance of what he had just learned. He completely forgot that he still hadn't eaten anything.

“I'm not sure. Right now he's at a ramen shop in front of Fuchu Station. So far I haven't observed anything suspicious. I followed him to a café in Gotanda where he had a long conversation with some punk who looks like he's in a motorcycle gang, but being on my own I couldn't get close enough to overhear what they were saying… Yeah, that stamp shop in Shinjuku will be closed by now but I'll check it out first thing tomorrow. Anyway, seeing as I've been following Yosuke Kokufu all this time and turned up nothing, I guess he must be innocent after all. I expect he'll head straight home now. Is it okay if I knock off after that?… Right, got it.”

With a relieved look, the young detective put down the telephone.

January 31

A CALL CAME for Inspector Onodera. It was from Tokyo.

“I see… nothing suspicious, huh?”

Onodera heaved a sigh of relief.

“You're right. It's probably got nothing to do with the case. Maybe some work-related errand… A postcard, you say? No, haven't got a clue. What's that? He's looking for the person who bought it?”

The voice on the other end of the line rattled off a name.

“Oh, I see…”

Suddenly the information sunk in.

“W… wait a minute!” he stammered. “What was that name again?”

The voice repeated it.

What the hell? What's
he
got to do with this?
he wondered.

Onodera was stumped.

February 1

RETURNING to his office after lunch, Yosuke found a note on his desk. On it were written Minegishi's name and telephone number.

So he's finally back
,
thought Yosuke. He'd been trying to call Minegishi for days, but the photographer had gone to Kyushu for work and had not been at home. Yosuke immediately dialed the number.

“Hi there, I heard you called a number of times while I was away,” said Minegishi, picking up the phone right away. The number Yosuke had dialed was for the apartment in Yotsuya which Minegishi used as his office. Yosuke asked if he could see the sketchbook.

“Boy, word travels fast. Who told you about it?” asked Minegishi suspiciously.

Yosuke mentioned Ryohei's name.

“I see. That's right, I'd forgotten you were also one of Professor Nishijima's students.” Minegishi laughed. His confusion was understandable given he had only ever met Yosuke at Saga's house. “Well, actually I'm in the middle of photographing it now. I have it right here.” He invited Yosuke to come by and see it.

The company where Yosuke worked was in Kanda, less than twenty minutes away by taxi. Asking one of his colleagues to cover for him, he ducked out of the office with an apologetic bow.

“As far as I can tell it looks genuine,” said Minegishi as he brewed a pot of black tea.

Yosuke was hunched over the sketchbook. “It's certainly a fine work of art,” he said.

“I meant the inscription, not the sketches.”

“Are you sure?” asked Yosuke.

“Uh-huh. I compared it to other samples of Kiyochika's writing and couldn't find anything wrong with it,” said Minegishi. “Now, I don't claim to be a handwriting expert or anything, but I photographed dozens of examples of his signature from paintings he made around the same time and blew them all up to the same size. I noticed a few minor discrepancies in the spacing of the characters, but the balance of the strokes matches perfectly. Boy, though, did it give me a headache!”

“Wow, that sure beats anything any of us could do hands down.”

“All in a day's work. It's my bread and butter, after all,” said Minegishi, looking rather pleased with himself. “Anyway, what do
you
think?” he asked Yosuke.

“Well, if the inscription
is
authentic…”

“Who would have thought it? Two works by Kiyochika fall into our laps and we don't know which to believe. In fact, it only confuses the situation even more.”

Yosuke said nothing.

“Incidentally,” continued Minegishi, changing the subject, “I stopped at Kosai and Miho on my way back from Kyushu.”

“You mean in Shizuoka?”

“Yes. Kiyochika spent two years there in service to Tokugawa Yoshinobu. I thought I might find out something about Sato Masakichi there.”

Kiyochika had been a vassal of the shogun. After the Meiji Restoration, the last shogun, Yoshinobu, was sent back home to Shizuoka accompanied by many of his vassals.

“Learn anything?” asked Yosuke.

“Not a thing. Kosai is really just a municipal district made up of various towns and villages, so it has virtually no records of its own. I had my hopes pinned on Miho but that turned out to be in vain too. But now that I think about it, Kiyochika wrote that he met Sato
in
Shizuoka; he never said Sato was
from
Shizuoka. I guess it was naïve of me to suppose I could trace him so easily. If they really were such close friends then at the very least Sato's name should have turned up in the scholarly literature on Kiyochika by now.”

Yosuke and Minegishi both sighed.

“I guess there was nothing in Akita either?” asked Minegishi.

“On Sato? Apparently not.”

“I wonder if Yoshimura really looked very hard,” said Minegishi, unaware it was really Ryohei who had gone to Akita.

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, I assume he was focused more on Shoei than on Kiyochika…”

“Yes, but he searched the public archives and the historical society for information on Sato,” Yosuke explained on Ryohei's behalf.

“But why didn't Yoshimura go to Shizuoka?”

“I suppose there was no need to. Sato was just an art collector who happened to take an interest in Shoei's work. If nothing had turned up on Shoei in Akita then a trip to Shizuoka might have been necessary, but something
did
turn up—the mystery of Sharaku was solved. Sato became irrelevant.”

“I see. I always suspected scholars simply ignored anything that didn't fit their preconceived theories; now I'm convinced of it!” said Minegishi with a forced smile. Then he added, “Personally,
I
still think Kiyochika is more important as an artist.”

“By the way,” said Yosuke, remembering something he had wanted to ask the photographer. “Albumen printing was still being used in 1907, wasn't it?”

“Albumen printing? Oh, you mean for photography,” replied Minegishi, a bit surprised at the abruptness of Yosuke's question. “Yes, at that time the photographic plates used in magazine and book publishing were mostly albumen prints.”

“But the plates in Sato's catalogue weren't what I typically think of as albumen prints—the paper was thick and kind of shiny. I wonder what sort of technique they were using in Akita around then?”

“But albumen printing has nothing to do with the type of paper,” said Minegishi.

“It doesn't?”

“They're just called albumen prints because they use albumen—egg white, that is—to bind the photographic chemicals to the base.”

“So the thickness and color of the paper doesn't matter?”

“No. Publishers generally opt for thinner paper to cut costs. But in theory they could use any type of paper. Plus, unlike bromide paper or gaslight paper, which we typically use today, albumen prints use photosensitive paper. So there's no need for a dark room. It's really quite a simple process.”

“Photosensitive paper?” asked Yosuke.

“You know, like those pinhole cameras you must have played with as a child—they use photosensitive paper.”

It was all starting to make sense to Yosuke.