TRANSLATION: The Cat Commotion

The second volume from the case files of Japan's great mystery detective

The Casebook of Hanshichi Volume II: The Cat Commotion by Kidō Okamoto is this week’s new translation.

The ebooks have already gone out to the subscribers. It’s now available on Amazon for Kindle, KU, and soon, audiobook.

The second volume of The Casebook of Hanshichi takes the Japanese Sherlock Holmes deeper into the shadowed streets and darkened households of old Edo, where nothing is ever quite what it seems. A cat lady’s twenty pets are drowned in the bay and she dies within the week, but only her son knows what really happened. A beautiful young woman born on the Day of the Snake is worshipped as a child of the goddess Benten until the waters of Shinobazu Pond reclaim her. A desperate samurai faces ritual suicide in a Hakone inn while his detective races down the Tōkaidō road to save him. And when a random spear-killer terrorizes the city at night, the investigation falls not to Hanshichi but to the old detective who came before him, a man who solves crimes by touch and instinct rather than observation.

These ten stories span the full range of Okamoto Kidō’s remarkable series. There are ghost stories that turn out to be something far more sinister than ghosts: an elaborate conspiracy of staged hauntings designed to seize a merchant’s fortune, a geisha’s terrified silence as the dead girl she met on the road keeps reappearing at her student’s door. There are comic procedurals: the shogun’s prize hawk escapes a brothel window because a courtesan was flirting too loudly, and Hanshichi must find it before its young keeper is ordered to cut his belly. A New Year’s street performer hides a stolen baby and a tortured dancing cat behind the mask of holiday cheer. And at the series’ darkest edge, a branded criminal imprisons a girl in a riverside storehouse while a great serpent watches from the shadows.

Okamoto Kidō’s 68-story Hanshichi Torimonochō, serialized between 1917 and 1937, is one of the most celebrated mystery series in Japanese literary history, yet for more than a century it remained almost entirely unknown to English-speaking readers. The new translations in this volume are rendered as English prose in their own right, preserving the atmospheric precision, dry wit, and psychological depth of the originals while delivering stories that read like the mystery classics they are.

The ten stories included in the second volume are:

11. The Morning Glory Mansion

12. The Cat Commotion

13. The Benten Maiden

14. The Night of the Mountain Celebration

15. The Whereabouts of the Hawk

16. The Tsunokuniya

17. The Mikawa Manzai

18. The Spearman

19. Oteru’s Father

20. The Villa at Mukōjima

About the Author

Okamoto Kidō (岡本綺堂, 1872–1939) was a playwright, novelist, and essayist whose career spanned the Meiji, Taishō, and early Shōwa eras. Born in Tokyo to a former samurai family, he grew up steeped in the customs and oral traditions of a city still living in the shadow of the old regime. He became one of the leading figures in the shin-kabuki (new Kabuki) movement, writing plays that brought psychological realism to the classical stage, and was widely regarded as the foremost Kabuki dramatist of his generation. His deep knowledge of Edo-period law, social hierarchy, and daily life gave the Hanshichi Torimonochō its extraordinary texture and authority. The series, published between 1917 and 1937, established the torimonochō genre — period detective fiction set in Edo — and inspired generations of Japanese mystery writers. Okamoto’s work remains in print in Japan more than eighty years after his death.

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Excerpt

One New Year’s Day, while the gate pines still stood along the streets, I paid a visit to the house in Akasaka. Old Hanshichi was standing at his lattice door, watching the bustle of the New Year’s traffic passing through the neighborhood.

“Well now, come in, come in. A happy New Year to you.”

I was shown into the usual room, and once we had exchanged the customary greetings, the familiar old maid brought out the tōso tray. If I remember correctly, this was the second time I had shared the New Year’s spiced sake at his house. In those days, unlike today, few people contented themselves with sending a postcard for their annual respects, and the streets were never empty of callers until nightfall. The music of lion dancers and the beat of manzai drums drifted in, carrying the first scent of spring.

“It seems livelier on this side of town than around Kōjimachi,” I remarked.

“I expect so,” the old man agreed with a nod. “Akasaka used to be quieter than Kōjimachi, but now the positions have reversed. Both of them were considered yamanote in the old days, and the New Year atmosphere was always thin compared to the shitamachi districts downtown. There’s even a senryū about it: ‘Teetotalers’ rounds: Akasaka, Yotsuya, Kōjimachi.’ The joke being that the heavy drinkers collapsed somewhere in the shitamachi, while only the sober ones kept trudging uphill to make their New Year calls at Yotsuya and Akasaka and Kōjimachi. Coming all the way up here at the start of the year marked you as a dull fellow. But when it came to manzai, the yamanote had the best. There were so many samurai estates, you see, and each estate had its own dedicated manzai performers. House manzai, they were called. Since Meiji did away with the old estates, the manzai have been declining year by year. Before long, they’ll exist only in pictures.”

“Did every estate have its own manzai?” I asked.

“They did. A house manzai troupe had its fixed patron estates and would never set foot in any other house, let alone a commoner’s dwelling. They would stay in Edo for several days, complete their round of patron estates, and go straight home. The town manzai, the ones who went door to door among the common folk, were derided as beggar manzai. So you see, for manzai at least, the yamanote was the finer side of town. And speaking of manzai, I’ve just remembered a certain story.”

“What sort of story?”

“Oh, nothing to sit up straight for,” the old man said. “The year escapes me now. Bunkyū three or Genji one, I can’t say which. But it was on a cold morning, the twenty-seventh of December. A man was found collapsed outside the Kanda Bridge gate, at the place they now call Kamakuragashi. He appeared to be a country person, twenty-five or twenty-six years old, and he was holding a baby girl against his chest. That is where this story begins.”

The man was dead. The baby, cradled through a long December night in the arms of a corpse, had cried herself hoarse and could produce no more than a feeble whimper, but she was still alive. It had happened practically on his doorstep, so Hanshichi was at the scene before the coroner arrived. The dead man’s body bore no wounds and no marks of violence. The baby, too, was unharmed. But what startled Hanshichi were the two sharp fangs she carried. The child could not have been more than two or three months old, yet a single fang protruded from each side of her upper jaw. She was what the common people called a demon child.

A demon child in the arms of a man who had collapsed and died in the street. There had to be more to it. Inquiries among the neighbors produced a witness who had seen a man fitting his description late the previous night, hailing a passing soba cart and drinking heated sake against the cold. From this and other accounts, Hanshichi judged that the man had drunk himself senseless to ward off the freezing air, collapsed where he lay, and never woken. He carried nothing but a cotton purse with a few small coins, nothing that might serve as a clue. But when Hanshichi examined the man’s right palm, he found the thickened calluses that came from years of beating a hand-drum. The man was almost certainly a saizō, the drummer who partners with a manzai performer.

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• The Casebook of Hanshichi Volume II: The Cat Commotion by Kidō Okamoto

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