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  THE GINZA GHOST

  Paul Halter books from Locked Room International:

  The Lord of Misrule (2010)

  The Fourth Door (2011)

  The Seven Wonders of Crime (2011)

  The Demon of Dartmoor (2012)

  The Seventh Hypothesis (2012)

  The Tiger’s Head (2013)

  The Crimson Fog (2013)

  (Publisher’s Weekly Top Mystery 2013 List)

  The Night of the Wolf (2013)*

  The Invisible Circle (2014)

  The Picture from the Past (2014)

  The Phantom Passage (2015)

  Death Invites You (2016)

  The Vampire Tree (2016)

  (Publisher’s Weekly Top Mystery 2016 List)

  *Original short story collection published by Wildside Press (2006)

  Other impossible crime novels from Locked Room International:

  The Riddle of Monte Verita (Jean-Paul Torok) 2012

  The Killing Needle (Henry Cauvin) 2014

  The Derek Smith Omnibus (Derek Smith) 2014

  (Washington Post Top Fiction Books 2014)

  The House That Kills (Noel Vindry) 2015

  The Decagon House Murders (Yukito Ayatsuji) 2015

  (Publisher’s Weekly Top Mystery 2015 List)

  Hard Cheese (Ulf Durling) 2015

  (Crime Fiction Lovers Top 10 Nordic Noir 2016 List)

  The Moai Island Puzzle (Alice Arisugawa) 2016

  (Washington Post Summer Book List 2016)

  The Howling Beast (Noel Vindry) 2016

  Death in the Dark (Stacey Bishop) 2017

  Visit our website at www.mylri.com or

  www.lockedroominternational.com

  THE GINZA GHOST

  Keikichi Osaka

  Translated by Ho-Ling Wong

  The Ginza Ghost

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  First published in Japanese in Kaizō, Kitan, Profile, Shinseinen, Shin Tantei Shōsetsu and Teishin Kyōkai Zasshi, between 1932 and 1947.

  THE GINZA GHOST

  English translation copyright © by John Pugmire 2017.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  For information, contact: [email protected]

  FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Osaka, Keikichi

  [Twelve short stories]

  The Ginza Ghost / Keikichi Ōsaka

  Translated from the Japanese by Ho-Ling Wong

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  THE HANGMAN OF THE DEPARTMENT STORE

  THE MOURNING LOCOMOTIVE

  THE MONSTER OF THE LIGHTHOUSE

  THE PHANTOM WIFE

  THE MESMERISING LIGHT

  THE COLD NIGHT’S CLEARING

  THE THREE MADMEN

  THE GUARDIAN OF THE LIGHTHOUSE

  THE DEMON IN THE MINE

  THE HUNGRY LETTER-BOX

  THE GINZA GHOST

  ..

  INTRODUCTION

  Taku Ashibe

  “Is there any other Japanese writer who has shown such pure, such persistent love and understanding of the orthodox detective short story? Is there any other Japanese writer who has shown such profound mastery of the intelligent detective story?” - Rampo Edogawa (1936)

  “And I was shocked. Were there any other writers who could write such pure, honkaku short stories as he had done? I even felt enraged at the fact his works had been ignored.” - Tetsuya Ayukawa (1975)

  “He had a dream. His dreams were made out of tricks and logic. He poured all the unique experiences he had come across inside this fantastic mould he had of his dreams, and with that he gave life to his flawless creations.” - Masa’aki Tatsumi (2001)

  Keikichi Ōsaka was by no means a fortunate writer. He was too short-lived for that, and most of his career overlapped with the period in history when detective novels were ostracised. However, his works, which had been presumed forgotten, were then dug up by honkaku[1] mystery fiction aficionados, such as the writer Tetsuya Ayukawa. Now Ōsaka’s stories are received warmly by a whole new generation of readers, as if they had been written only yesterday. From a certain point of view, one could even say that there are no writers as fortunate as he.

  Keikichi Ōsaka (real name: Fukutarō Suzuki) was born on March 20th, 1912, in the city of Araki in Aichi Prefecture. After graduating from a commercial school, he published The Hangman of the Department Store in the magazine Shinseinen (The New Youth) in 1932 on the recommendation of mystery writer Saburō Kōga. It is said his pen name was derived from the way his younger brother signed his letters, “From Ōsaka. Keiji,” which made an impression on him.

  After his debut, he published short stories prolifically in the few detective story magazines that existed at the time, and his first book Shi no Kaisōsen (Yacht of Death) was published in 1936. In the same year, he published one story after another in Shinseinen for six months straight starting with The Three Madmen. This was an opportunity offered only to the most promising of writers. His deep, intellectual style and his penchant for coming up with the strangest incidents from commonplace settings like modern city life or worksites in the mountains or near the sea, were not, however, met with much support from his own generation.

  In addition, with the start of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, people started to consider the western-style fictional detective story as an undesirable element in society. Ignorant concerns were raised, claiming that the detective story constituted a danger, as tales about Japanese people wounding and killing each other would suggest that public order in the country was in disarray.

  For this reason, Ōsaka had no choice but make the switch to comedy and spy stories. He kept on writing, but was finally drafted in 1943, and sent as a soldier to China, and afterwards to the Philippines.

  He died on Luzon Island on July 2nd, 1945 (some sources say September), having succumbed to a disease under the very harsh circumstances. If he had survived, he would have been witness to the revival of the detective story in Japan after World War II. And the style most coveted in that revival period was the honkaku mystery story he had mastered.

  Sadly, the Japanese detective story moved on after the war without Ōsaka, and in time his name was forgotten. But, more than thirty years after his death, his works started to be rediscovered and included in new anthologies, introducing him to a new generation. And, once the internet generation started, Keikichi Ōsaka fan sites sprang up, where information about him and his works was exchanged. This development led to several new publications of his work.

  The stories in this collection are a selection from Ōsaka’s oeuvre focusing mainly on his impossible crime stories, but also including two of his best whodunits. I will give a short introduction to each story below in order of appearance.

  The Hangman of the Department Store (1932) is Ōsaka’s debut work, and also the first story in his Great Detective Kyōsuke Aoyama series. The setting is the department store, a facility which had made its appearance in the modern cities of Japan, serving as a brand new space for consumers and entertainment. A person strangled to death is thrown off a department store roof in the middle of night, his body covered in mysterious wounds. It would have been impossible for anyone to enter the store from outside, but it doesn’t appear as though any of the persons inside the store could have been responsible for the
crime, either. What Aoyama deduces with the help of his magnifying glass is a truly ironic and grotesque truth.

  The Phantasm of the Stone Wall (1935) is the fifth work in the Kyōsuke Aoyama series. A woman is murdered in front of her home on an incredibly hot and stuffy summer day, and two men dressed in white kimonos are seen running away from the scene of the crime. But another witness coming from the other side of the road says he did not see them. Twin brothers are arrested, based on the footprints at the crime scene and the testimonies of witnesses. However, neither of them actually committed the murder: another, single individual was responsible. What made the midsummer illusion possible?

  In The Mourning Locomotive (1934), we are introduced to the workers in a railway locomotive depot. Cleaning away the remains after a deadly accident is just part of the daily routine for these people, but even they are surprised when one pig after another gets run over. And it’s always the same locomotive and the same operators which are involved. Meanwhile, we are introduced to a mysterious girl in a shop in a nearby town who is always looking outside through one of the windows…. The ending of the story is truly tragic and explains how this harrowing and puzzling case is due to the indescribable feelings of human beings. Many people consider this “crimeless tale of mystery” to be Ōsaka’s masterpiece.

  In The Monster of the Lighthouse (1935), a baffling series of events occurs in a lighthouse standing on a lonely cape in an isolated part of the sea. The top of the lighthouse is partially destroyed by a gigantic rock, and a monster, similar to a red octopus, is seen diving into the sea. It does not seem as though the monstrous destruction could have been the work of any human being, but Saburō Azumaya, the director of a nearby marine laboratory, manages to propose a perfectly logical explanation of the seemingly supernatural happenings, which also have a painful human side to them.

  The Phantom Wife (1947) was published posthumously. In order to fully appreciate the story, it’s important to understand the form of many Japanese ghost stories. Often, poor, weak women are cruelly tortured and killed by their despotic husbands, and only after their demise do they finally get the opportunity for revenge. Once they become ghosts, they leave their belongings around, together with their typically female footprints, scaring their enemies and the people around them. Also keep in mind that, in the time period when the story takes place, many traditional objects which had once been used and worn by both men and women had become mostly associated with women alone, as men had been faster at adapting to Western clothing styles.

  The Mesmerising Light (1936) starts off with the exciting, impossible phenomenon of a car disappearing from a mountain road which had been sealed off at both ends. The explanation for the car’s disappearance is still itself within the bounds of normal common sense, but the explanation of how the situation arose and the explanation of the midnight illusion are truly unique. We are presented with our third great detective after Aoyama and Azumaya: the attorney Taiji Ōtsuki who manages to solve the mystery of the murder which lies behind the accident from a simple glance at the murder weapon.

  The Cold Night’s Clearing (1936) is an eerie tale which occurs on a winter’s night. A set of ski tracks leads away from a chaotic murder scene into an empty field covered by snow. The tracks become shallower and shallower and eventually disappear, as if the murderer and the child they had kidnapped had flown off into the sky…. However, the truth of the case is beyond imagination. Let me add also that the fate of the child in this story is not unheard of, even in modern Japanese society.

  The Three Madmen (1936) is one of Keikichi Ōsaka’s best known short stories and the critical reception at the time of publication was exceptional, even though it is, in a sense, a very orthodox whodunit. In it, the logic of both sane and insane people vie for contention, and once these two kinds of logic switch position, a very surprising culprit is revealed. The idea of drawing parallels between reality and fantasy throughout the tale of a crime and its solution was unknown at the time the story was published. There is a reason why people in later generations grew appreciative of Keikichi Ōsaka.

  The Guardian of the Lighthouse (1936) was published several months after The Monster of the Lighthouse, in a magazine for organisations related to the Ministry of Communications, which controlled the mail, telephone, telegraph and lighthouses, and also uses the structure of the lighthouse in the plot. Perhaps Ōsaka tried his hand at this variation because the intended readers of this story were different from the people who usually read literary magazines like Shinseinen, where The Monster of the Lighthouse had been published. The horrible truth behind the disappearance of a person here is a simpler take on a theme often examined in Ōsaka’s stories: the relation between human beings and machinery, nature and other phenomena.

  The Demon in the Mine (1937) is the final story Ōsaka contributed as a honkaku mystery writer. A single miner is sacrificed in the name of safety inside a coal mine with extremely harsh working conditions. But then one death after another occurs, suggesting that the spirit of this miner is killing off the people who sealed him up inside a tunnel. And what does the line ‘We hit the sea!’ mean? This “locked room” story with human greed and Mother Nature as its background is of a scale not previously seen when the story was first released.

  The Hungry Letter-Box (1939) was written as a spy story, but one can also clearly recognise Ōsaka’s other side as a comedy author. What makes the story interesting is how Ōsaka uses the character of a spy as the person planning a unique crime and creating an impossible situation. I think it proves how good a detective writer Ōsaka really was.

  The Ginza Ghost (1936) starts with a murder in the backstreets of Ginza, the number one amusement area in Tōkyō, both in the present and the past. The crime happens on the first floor of a tobacco shop, witnessed by the waitresses of the bar directly opposite on the other side of the street. Two bodies are soon discovered, but while it appears to be clear who must have killed whom, medical examination concludes that the murderer had died much earlier than her victim! How could that be possible? Yet it is, simply by looking at things in a slightly different manner—a magic trick that only Keikichi Ōsaka could have pulled off.

  Keikichi Ōsaka wrote many other detective story masterpieces in addition to those collected here. Their settings vary from the brilliant setting of the modern city, with locations such as department stores, amusement areas and newly developed scenic driveways, to the Spartan worksites of the period, such as lighthouses, mines and whaling ships. While there are no gothic mansions or village communities cursed by some peculiar tradition in his stories, the incidents which do occur in his unremarkable settings are all unique and brimming with imagination.

  What is singularly unique in the world of Keikichi Ōsaka is that humans aren’t the only entities which can commit impossible crimes and create baffling mysteries. It is not unusual for even inhuman things to lay a trap for humans, or for humans to become one with machinery.

  What makes this all so surprising is that all of these ideas and themes of Ōsaka have been turned into true honkaku detective stories, and that a young man in this twenties accomplished all of that in just a couple of years. It is nothing short of a miracle.

  As previously mentioned, Keikichi Ōsaka was ill-starred enough to have been forced to turn away from his chosen path of detective fiction, after which the cruel hand of Fate struck him down at the tender age of thirty-three. Rumour has it that he visited Saburō Kōga before he was drafted into military service, and that he entrusted Kōga with the manuscript of a novel-length detective story he had written in secret. Unfortunately, Kōga passed away suddenly shortly afterwards, and to this day the manuscript has not been discovered.

  Could that manuscript have been a honkaku mystery story, the genre he had given his heart to, but had been forced to abandon? If so, can you begin to imagine the kinds of tricks and logic he would have used, and the miracles and illusions he would have showcased? All we can do is to read the works collecte
d in this book and his other works, and fantasise about the contents of that lost novel.

  And so I sincerely hope that people in the English-speaking world will learn about Japanese honkaku mystery and one of its greatest pioneers.

  Taku Ashibe Tokyo 2016

  Taku Ashibe is the author of more than twenty mystery novels and was the first recipient of the Ayukawa Tetsuya Award (western name Tetsuya Ayukawa).

  The English-language version of his novel Kōrōmu no Satsujin: Murder in the Red Chamber was published in 2012 by Kurodahan Press.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

  Ōsaka’s stories were written in a period when various measurement standards were used in Japan, depending on the industry. The Japanese government was encouraging the use of the metric system, but this was not uniformly followed. It was not unusual to see metres and kilograms mixed with traditional Japanese measures in the same text, as happens in several of these stories.

  Nevertheless, to avoid excessive interruptions and footnotes, the most frequently mentioned Japanese units are listed below, together with their approximate western equivalents: