二銭銅貨 English

Part One

"I envy that thief."

That such words could pass between the two of us was a measure of how desperate things had become in those days.

This is the story of a time when Matsumura Takeshi and I were living together in a single six-mat room on the second floor of a run-down clog shop at the edge of the city, with two battered lacquered desks side by side, doing nothing but lying around and indulging in outlandish daydreams.

We had hit a dead end in every direction and could not move at all; and it was just then that we found ourselves in the pitiful state of envying the slick methods of a great thief who was causing a public sensation at the time.

That robbery is closely bound up with the main thread of this story, so I will give a rough account of it here.

It happened on the very day the workers at a large electrical factory in Shiba Ward received their wages.

More than ten payroll clerks were busy sweating over time cards for nearly ten thousand workers, calculating each man's monthly wages and stuffing bundles of twenty-yen, ten-yen, and five-yen notes — drawn that morning from the bank and filling an entire first-class Chinese suitcase — into the piles of pay envelopes stacked before them, when a gentleman appeared at the front entrance of the office.

The receptionist asked his business, and he replied that he was a reporter for the Asahi Shimbun and wished to have a brief word with the manager.

The woman took his card — which bore the title "Reporter, Social Affairs Desk, Tokyo Asahi Shimbun" — and conveyed the request to the manager.

Fortunately for the visitor, this particular manager was the sort of man who prided himself on his skill at handling newspaper reporters.

Moreover, there is hardly a man alive who, however undignified he may know it to be, does not feel a certain pleasure at holding forth to a newspaper reporter or at seeing his words appear in print as "remarks of so-and-so."

The man who called himself a social affairs reporter was shown quite willingly into the manager's office.

Wearing large tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles and a neat moustache, dressed in a smart black morning coat and carrying a fashionable folding briefcase, the man settled into the chair across from the manager with the ease of someone entirely at home in such surroundings.

He drew an expensive Egyptian cigarette from his cigarette case, struck a match from the ashtray on the desk with practiced nonchalance, and blew a bluish stream of smoke straight at the manager's nose.

"Your views on the matter of worker treatment at your establishment —"

That, or something to that effect, was how the man opened the conversation, in the manner peculiar to newspaper reporters — at once overwhelming and yet somehow guileless and ingratiating.

The manager then proceeded to hold forth at length on the labor question — no doubt in terms of labor-capital harmony and the principle of benevolent management — but that has no bearing on this story, so I will pass over it; what matters is that after spending about thirty minutes in the manager's office, the man who had presented himself as a reporter said, "Pardon me for a moment,"

and stepped out, supposedly to use the lavatory, and then vanished entirely.

The manager thought no more of it than to consider the man ill-mannered, and since it was just then time for lunch, he went off to the dining room; but before long, as he sat there chewing his way through a beefsteak or some such dish brought over from a nearby Western restaurant, the chief accountant came rushing in, his face drained of color, to report:

"The payroll money is gone. We've been robbed."

So he said.

The astonished manager left his meal where it was and hurried to the scene of the theft, and upon examining the situation he was able to reconstruct the probable sequence of events more or less as follows.

It happened that the factory offices were under renovation at the time, so the payroll work, which would normally have been carried out in a special room with a secure lock, was being done that day in the reception room adjoining the manager's office; and somehow, during the lunch break, through some inexplicable oversight, the reception room had been left completely empty.

Each of the clerks had assumed that someone else would stay behind, and so every last one of them had gone to the dining room, leaving the suitcase stuffed with banknotes sitting in the unlocked room for approximately half an hour.

There could be no doubt that someone had slipped in during that interval and made off with the money.

What was more, the thief had not touched the amounts already stuffed into the pay envelopes or the smaller-denomination bills, but had taken only the bundles of twenty-yen and ten-yen notes from inside the Chinese suitcase.

The total loss was approximately fifty thousand yen.

Various inquiries were made, and in the end suspicion fell squarely on the recent newspaper reporter.

A telephone call to the newspaper confirmed, as expected, that no such man was employed there.

A great commotion ensued — the police were telephoned, and since the wage payments could not simply be postponed, the bank was contacted afresh about supplying more twenty-yen and ten-yen notes.

The man who had passed himself off as a newspaper reporter and made the good-natured manager sit through a pointless lecture was in fact none other than the great thief whom the newspapers of the day were styling a "gentleman burglar."

Now, when the investigating detectives from the local police station arrived on the scene, they found not a single clue.

A man who had gone so far as to prepare a newspaper reporter's calling card was not the sort to be caught by ordinary means.

There was of course no chance of any article being left behind.

The one thing that was known was the description of the man as retained in the manager's memory — and that proved thoroughly unreliable.

Clothing can of course be changed, and as for the tortoiseshell spectacles and moustache that the manager offered as the most useful identifying features, on reflection these are precisely the most common tools of disguise and could therefore not be counted on.

There was nothing for it but to search blindly — questioning rickshaw drivers in the area, the woman who ran the nearby tobacco shop, street vendors, and the like, asking whether they had seen a man of such-and-such appearance, and if so, which direction he had gone.

Naturally, a description of the suspect was also circulated to every police box in the city.

A cordon was thrown up, in other words, but there was nothing to show for it.

One day passed, two days, three days; every means was exhausted.

Watchers were posted at every railway station.

Telegrams requesting assistance were dispatched to police stations in every prefecture.

A week went by in this fashion, and still the thief had not been caught.

It seemed as though all hope was lost.

There seemed to be nothing to do but wait for the thief to be arrested for some other crime.

The factory offices telephoned the police station every single day, as if reproaching the authorities for their negligence.

The station chief tormented himself as though the fault were his own.

In the midst of this despair, one detective belonging to the same station was making his patient, methodical way from one tobacco shop to the next across the city.

In the city there were tobacco shops in each ward that stocked a full range of foreign cigarettes — dozens in the busier wards, no fewer than ten or so even in the quieter ones.

The detective had visited nearly all of them, and now only the uptown wards of Ushigome and Yotsuya remained.

Telling himself that if today's rounds of these two wards yielded nothing he would have to give up entirely, the detective trudged along with a feeling that was neither pure anticipation nor pure dread — something like the feeling of waiting to hear whether one's lottery number had come up.

He trudged along, stopping from time to time at a police box to ask the officer on duty the location of nearby tobacco shops.

The detective's head was filled with the name FIGARO, FIGARO, FIGARO — the brand of the Egyptian cigarettes.

He had set out to visit a tobacco shop in Kagurazaka in Ushigome, and was walking along the main boulevard from the Iidabashi tram stop toward the foot of Kagurazaka hill.

It was then that the detective stopped abruptly in front of a certain inn.

The reason was that on the granite paving stone that served as a lid for the drain in front of the inn, there lay a single cigarette butt — the kind that only an unusually observant person would have noticed.

And — what do you know — it was the very same Egyptian cigarette the detective had been searching for.

From that one cigarette butt a trail emerged, and the much-celebrated gentleman burglar was at last brought behind bars; there was a certain detective-story-like interest in the path from that cigarette butt to the criminal's arrest, and indeed one newspaper of the time ran the detective's exploit as a serial feature — it is in fact on that newspaper account that my own narrative here is based — but since I am in a hurry to get to the point, I regret that I have no room for anything more than the briefest summary of the conclusion.

As the reader will already have guessed, this admirable detective had followed the investigative trail from the unusual cigarette butt that the thief had left behind in the factory manager's office.

He had visited nearly every large tobacco shop in each ward of the city, and even when the same brand was in stock, the stores that had recently sold FIGARO — a relatively slow-selling variety even among Egyptian cigarettes — were very few, and in every case the buyer had been someone beyond all suspicion.

But on what turned out to be the final day, as I have just described, he stumbled by chance upon an identical butt in front of an inn near Iidabashi, and on a hunch ventured to make inquiries at the inn — and as luck would have it, that hunch became the very first thread leading to the criminal's arrest.

After considerable difficulty — including the fact that the owner of the cigarettes staying at the inn looked nothing like the description given by the factory manager — he eventually discovered, at the bottom of the man's charcoal brazier, the morning coat and other clothing used in the crime, along with the tortoiseshell spectacles and a false moustache; with this inescapable evidence, he was able to arrest the so-called gentleman burglar.

When the thief was interrogated and made his confession, it emerged that on the day of the crime — which he had of course visited knowing it was payday at the factory — while the manager was away, he had entered the adjoining payroll room, taken the money, placed only the stolen bills in the folding briefcase he had been carrying (along with a raincoat and a flat cap that had been inside), removed his spectacles and moustache, wrapped the morning coat inside the raincoat, put on the flat cap in place of the top hat, and walked out through a different exit from the one he had entered, as cool as you please.

When asked how he had managed to carry fifty thousand yen in those relatively small-denomination notes out of the building without arousing anyone's suspicion, the gentleman burglar smiled a smile of quiet satisfaction and replied:

"We are made of pockets from head to toe. The proof is there in the morning coat you've confiscated. At first glance it looks like an ordinary morning coat, but in truth it is fitted with hidden pockets in every conceivable place, just like a conjurer's coat. Concealing fifty thousand yen is nothing at all. Don't Chinese conjurers manage to hide inside their clothing even a large bowl filled with water?"

Now, if the robbery story had ended there, it would hold no particular interest; but here there was one curious point that set this thief apart from ordinary criminals.

And that point has a great deal to do with the main thread of my story.

The curious point was this: the gentleman burglar refused to reveal, by so much as a single word, where he had hidden the stolen fifty thousand yen.

Questioned and pressured by turns at the police station, in the examining magistrate's chamber, and in open court — all three gateposts — he held steadfastly to a single line: he knew nothing.

And in the end he even began to claim the absurd story that he had spent all of it in the mere week he had been free.

There was nothing for the authorities to do but try to discover the hiding place through detective work.

And they searched diligently, but found nothing at all.

And so the gentleman burglar was sentenced to a rather heavy term of hard labor for a theft offense, on the charge of concealing the fifty thousand yen.

The aggrieved party, the factory, was left in a difficult position.

What the factory wanted was not so much the conviction of the criminal as the recovery of the fifty thousand yen.

Of course the police had not abandoned the search for the money, but they seemed to be going about it half-heartedly.

The factory manager, who was himself directly responsible for the loss, therefore announced that he would offer a reward of ten percent of any amount recovered.

Five thousand yen, in other words.

The somewhat interesting story about Matsumura Takeshi and myself that I am about to tell took place while the robbery affair was developing in just this way.

Part Two

As I briefly mentioned at the opening of this story, at the time Matsumura Takeshi and I were stuck fast in the very depths of poverty in that six-mat room on the second floor of the clog shop at the edge of the city, with nowhere to turn and no way to move.

And yet, amid all our wretchedness, one piece of luck remained with us: it happened to be spring.

This is a secret known only to the poor, but from the end of winter through the beginning of summer, poor men can count on getting a fair bit ahead.

Or rather, they feel as though they have gotten ahead.

The reason is that everything needed only in the cold — a short jacket, undergarments, and in the worst cases even bedding and charcoal braziers — can be carried off to the pawnshop's storeroom.

We too benefited from that seasonal grace: setting aside our anxieties about the future — how things would go tomorrow, where we would find the rent by the end of the month — we were able, for the time being, to catch our breath.

We went to the public bath, which we had been avoiding out of economy; we went to the barber; at the cheap eatery, instead of our usual miso soup and pickles, we would occasionally splash out on a slice of sashimi and a cup of sake.

One day, I returned from the public bath pleasantly simmered, and had just settled myself with a thud at my battered, chipped, half-ruined lacquered desk, when Matsumura Takeshi — who had stayed behind alone — looked at me with a strange, rather excited expression and asked me this:

"Say, was it you who put that two-sen copper coin on my desk? Where did you get it?"

"Oh, yes, that was me. It's change from buying cigarettes."

"Which tobacco shop?"

"The gloomy place next to the eatery, where the old woman sits."

"Hmm, I see."

For some reason, Matsumura fell into deep thought.

And he continued to press me stubbornly about the two-sen coin.

"When you bought those cigarettes — were there any other customers in the shop?"

"I'm fairly sure there weren't. That's right, there couldn't have been. The old woman was dozing off at the time."

Hearing this answer, Matsumura seemed to relax somewhat.

"But apart from that old woman — who else lives in that tobacco shop? Do you know?"

"I'm on good terms with that old woman. It's her dour, unsmiling face that suits my abnormal tastes, you see. So I know quite a bit about that tobacco shop. Besides the old woman, there's only an old man, even more dismal than she is. But why are you asking me all this? Is something the matter?"

"Never mind, there's a reason. Since you claim to know about the place, tell me a bit more about that tobacco shop."

"All right, I'll tell you. The old man and old woman have a daughter. I caught a glimpse of her once or twice — not bad-looking. Apparently she married into a prison provisioner's shop of some sort. The provisioner's doing reasonably well, and the money he sends home is what keeps that miserable tobacco shop limping along. The old woman told me that once, come to think of it."

Just as I began telling him what I knew about the tobacco shop — having been asked to do so — Matsumura Takeshi, to my great surprise, stood up as though he could no longer bear to listen.

And he began to pace slowly back and forth across the small room, from one corner to the other, like a bear in a zoo.

Both of us had always been rather whimsical by nature.

Standing up in the middle of a conversation was not particularly unusual.

But Matsumura's manner on this occasion was strange enough to reduce me to silence.

Matsumura went on pacing back and forth across the room for about thirty minutes.

I watched him in silence, with a certain interest.

The scene, had there been a bystander to witness it, must have looked quite mad.

Meanwhile I was growing hungry.

It was just about suppertime, and having been to the bath I felt all the more hungry than usual.

I suggested to Matsumura, who was still pacing about in that unhinged manner, that we go to the eatery, and he replied:

"Sorry, but please go without me."

There was nothing to do but comply.

When I returned from the eatery pleasantly full, I found, to my great surprise, that Matsumura had called a masseur and was having himself rubbed down.

A young student from the school for the blind and mute — a former regular visitor — was gripping Matsumura's shoulders and chattering away as usual.

"Don't think this is an extravagance. There's a reason for it. Just watch quietly for a while. You'll understand soon enough."

Matsumura forestalled my objection, speaking to prevent criticism before it arose.

The sixty-sen masseur's fee was certainly an extravagance by current standards, cutting into the shared funds of twenty-odd yen that we had extracted — indeed virtually wrested — from the pawnshop clerk only the day before.

I found myself seized by an indescribable fascination with Matsumura's singular behavior.

I sat down at my own desk and pretended to be absorbed in a lecture novel or some such thing I had bought at the secondhand bookshop.

In reality, I was quietly watching Matsumura's every move out of the corner of my eye.

When the masseur had gone, Matsumura returned to his desk and seemed to be reading something written on a scrap of paper; presently he reached into his breast pocket and took out another scrap, which he placed on the desk.

It was very thin, about two inches square, densely covered in small writing.

He appeared to be studying the two pieces of paper side by side with great intensity.

Then, with a pencil, he wrote something in the margin of a newspaper, erased it, wrote again, erased again.

While he was doing this, the electric light came on; a tofu peddler's horn passed along the street outside; a stream of people heading to some roadside stall or festival came and went for a while, then died away; and in the silence that followed, the plaintive wail of a Chinese noodle vendor's clarinet drifted in, and before anyone noticed it the night had grown late.

Still Matsumura, forgetting even to eat, remained absorbed in this mysterious occupation.

I spread out my own bedding in silence, lay down, and had nothing for it but to re-read the lecture novel I had already read through once.

"Say, would you happen to have a map of Tokyo?"

Matsumura suddenly said this and turned to face me.

"Hmm, I doubt we have one. Why not ask the landlady downstairs?"

"Yes, that's an idea."

He stood up at once, clattered down the creaking stairs, and came back presently with a well-worn map of Tokyo, its folds nearly torn through.

He sat down again at his desk and resumed his absorbed study.

I watched him with ever-growing curiosity.

The clock downstairs struck nine.

Matsumura appeared to have reached a pause in his long investigation, for he rose from his desk and came to sit beside my pillow.

Then, as if finding it somewhat difficult to ask, he said:

"Say, could you lend me about ten yen?"

So he said.

I had a deep private interest in Matsumura's strange behavior — one I have not yet revealed to the reader.

For that reason, I raised not the slightest objection to handing him the ten yen — a large sum that amounted at the time to half our total fortune.

Matsumura took the ten-yen note from me, and without a word, dressed in a single old lined kimono and a creased flat cap, walked straight out the door and went off somewhere.

Left alone, I turned over various imaginings about what Matsumura might be doing.

While I was smiling to myself in secret satisfaction, I must have drifted off to sleep.

I was half aware of Matsumura returning sometime later, but after that I knew nothing and slept soundly until morning.

Being something of a late sleeper, I woke at around ten o'clock and was startled to find a strange figure standing beside my pillow.

There stood a man dressed like a tradesman, in a striped kimono with a square-tied sash and a dark blue apron, carrying a small bundle wrapped in a furoshiki on his back.

"What are you making that face for? It's me."

To my astonishment, this man spoke in Matsumura Takeshi's voice.

On closer inspection, it was unmistakably Matsumura, but the change in his clothing was so complete that for a moment I had no idea what to make of it.

"What's happened to you? What's all that with the bundle on your back? And that outfit — I thought you were some shop clerk."

"Shh, shh — you don't have to shout."

Matsumura pressed down with both hands in a gesture of restraint and whispered: "I've brought back quite a present."

So he said.

"Did you go somewhere already, this early in the morning?"

Drawn by his strange manner, I found myself lowering my voice as well.

Matsumura then brought his mouth close to my ear, his face irrepressibly suffused with a smirking grin that kept welling up no matter how he tried to hold it back, and spoke in a voice so low it was barely there at all:

"Inside this furoshiki bundle, my friend, there is fifty thousand yen."

Part Three

As the reader will already have surmised, Matsumura Takeshi had somehow come into possession of the fifty thousand yen that the gentleman burglar had hidden away.

It was the same fifty thousand yen that, if brought to the electric factory, would entitle the finder to a reward of five thousand yen.

But Matsumura said he had no intention of doing that.

And he explained his reasoning as follows.

In his view, to deliver the money honestly and report the discovery was not merely foolish but also extremely dangerous.

This was money that the professional detectives of the authorities had spent nearly a full month searching for, without finding it.

Even if we simply kept it as it was, who would suspect us? And surely fifty thousand yen was more welcome than five thousand.

What he feared more than anything was the revenge of that fellow — the gentleman burglar.

That was what frightened him.

If the man learned that someone had made off with the money he had concealed at the cost of a longer prison sentence — and that man was a genius in the execution of villainy, one might almost say — he would never let it pass; and Matsumura spoke of the thief with something approaching reverence. To simply stay quiet as things stood was risky enough, but to deliver the money to its owner and collect a reward would be to broadcast the name of Matsumura Takeshi in the newspapers for all to see.

That, he said, would be nothing short of telling the fellow exactly where his enemy lived.

"But at least for the present, I have beaten him. Yes — I have beaten that genius of a thief. Right now, I won't deny that the fifty thousand yen is certainly welcome, but what I can't stand is the sheer joy of this victory. Admit that my mind is good. At least better than yours. What led me to this great discovery was that two-sen copper coin you left on my desk yesterday — the change from your cigarettes. The fact that you noticed nothing about that coin and I did — well. And the fact that from a single two-sen coin I managed to track down fifty thousand yen — eh, two and a half million times two sen — what is that, if not proof that my mind surpasses yours?"

When two reasonably intellectual young men share a single room, it is perfectly natural that a rivalry over mental acuity should develop between them.

Matsumura Takeshi and I had often passed the time in those idle days arguing with one another.

It was not unusual for us to talk ourselves into oblivion and find that dawn had broken before we realized it.

And both Matsumura and I, refusing to yield an inch to the other, had each maintained that

he was the smarter one.

So it was that Matsumura sought to prove our relative intelligence by means of this exploit — and what an exploit it was.

"All right, all right. Never mind the bragging — tell me how you actually got hold of the money."

"Don't rush me. What I'd rather think about than anything is what to do with fifty thousand yen. But to satisfy your curiosity, I'll give you a brief account of how I did it."

It was, of course, not merely to satisfy my curiosity but far more to satisfy his own pride — as need hardly be said.

Be that as it may, he proceeded to tell his so-called tale of ingenious effort as follows.

I lay in my bedding, looking up informally at his jaw as it moved with self-satisfaction, and listened.

"Yesterday, while you were at the bath, I was toying with that two-sen copper coin when I noticed something strange: there was a fine line running all the way around its edge. I thought that was odd, and on closer examination — imagine my surprise — the coin split into two pieces. Here, look, this is it."

He took the two-sen coin from his desk drawer and, turning it like the cap of a camphor lozenge case, opened it into two halves.

"You see — the inside is hollow. It's some sort of container made from a copper coin. What exquisite craftsmanship — at first glance it looks no different at all from an ordinary two-sen coin. When I saw this, something came back to me. I once heard about a saw used by a master prison-breaker: it was a kind of band saw in miniature, made from a watch mainspring with teeth filed into it, and it was hidden inside a container fashioned from two worn-down coins — with that alone, they say, one could cut through the iron bars of any prison and escape. Apparently it originally came to Japan from foreign criminals. So I imagined that this two-sen coin had also somehow slipped out of a criminal's hands. But the strange thing didn't stop there. What piqued my curiosity far more than the coin itself was a scrap of paper that came out from inside it. And here it is."

It was the same thin little scrap of paper on which Matsumura had been laboring so intently the night before.

On the approximately two-inch-square piece of thin Japanese paper, in small handwriting, the following incomprehensible text was inscribed:

da, mumibutsu, namumibutsu, adabutsu, mi, muamida, muda, mi, mumidabutsu, muda, da, namudabutsu, namubutsu, da, muamida, muda, namubutsu, namuda, mumi, muamidabutsu, mi, namuada, muamimi, namudabutsu, namuamida, ada, namumi, namumibutsu, muamida, namumida, namumi, namumibutsu, muamida, namuda, namua, adabutsu, muamimi, namua, namuabutsu, da, namuada, namu, mumibutsu, namimitsu, ami, mi, mumidabutsu, muda, namuamida, adabutsu

"What do you suppose this priestly gibberish is? At first I thought it was idle scribbling — perhaps a thief in remorse had written out many repetitions of 'Namu Amida Butsu' to atone for his sins, and stored it inside the coin instead of a prison-breaking tool. But then it struck me as odd that 'Namu Amida Butsu' was never written in full. 'Da,' 'mumibutsu,' and so on — everything fell within the six characters of 'Namu Amida Butsu,' but not one instance was written complete. Some were single characters, others four or five. I sensed that this was no ordinary scribbling.

Just then I heard your footsteps coming back from the bathhouse.

I quickly hid the two-sen coin and the scrap of paper.

Why did I hide them?

I'm not entirely sure myself, but I suppose I wanted to keep the secret to myself.

I wanted to show them to you only after everything had become clear, and then boast about it.

But as you were coming up the stairs, a brilliant idea flashed through my mind.

It was about the gentleman burglar.

The banknotes are hidden somewhere — but surely even he couldn't intend to leave them there until his sentence is done.

So he must have a subordinate or an accomplice to hold the money for him.

Now suppose that, due to his unexpected arrest, he had no time to tell his accomplice where the fifty thousand yen was hidden — what then?

His only option while in the detention house would be to communicate it somehow to that associate.

What if this incomprehensible scrap of paper were that very communication?

That thought flashed through my mind.

Mere speculation, of course.

But rather an enticing speculation.

So that's why I asked you those questions about where the coin had come from.

And then you told me that the tobacco shop's daughter had married a prison provisioner.

If a man in detention wishes to communicate with the outside, using a prison provisioner as an intermediary is the most natural means.

And if the plan had gone awry for some reason, that communication would still be sitting in the provisioner's hands.

And who is to say it might not have been carried by the provisioner's wife to her parents' house?

I was beside myself with excitement.

Now, if the meaningless characters in this scrap of paper formed a cipher, what would be the key to decoding it?

I paced around this room, thinking.

It was quite difficult — taking stock of everything, there were only the six characters of 'Namu Amida Butsu' and punctuation marks.

What message could possibly be spelled out using just these seven symbols?

I had studied cipher writing a little in the past.

Not to be Sherlock Holmes about it, but I do know about a hundred and sixty varieties of cipher writing.

(See The Dancing Men.)

So I ran through every cipher method I knew, one by one.

And I looked for one that resembled this scrap of paper.

It took a long time.

That was when you offered to take me to the eatery, if I recall correctly.

I turned that down and went on thinking as hard as I could.

In the end, I found only two that seemed even remotely similar.

One was the two-letter cipher invented by Bacon, in which any message can be spelled out using various combinations of just two letters, 'a' and 'b'.

For example, to render the word 'fly,' one writes aabab, aabba, ababa, and so on.

The other was a method widely used for political secret documents in the reign of King Charles I, in which a set of numerals is substituted for the letters of the alphabet.

"For example—"

Matsumura spread a scrap of paper on the corner of his desk and wrote the following:

A B C D ……………………

1111 1112 1121 1211……………………

"That is, in place of A one writes 1111, in place of B one writes 1112, and so on. I guessed that this cipher likewise substituted the forty-eight sounds of the Japanese syllabary with various combinations of the six characters in 'Namu Amida Butsu.'

Now, as for how to decode it — if it were in English or French or German, one need only search for 'e,' as in Poe's 'The Gold-Bug,' and the rest would follow; but the trouble was that this was almost certainly in Japanese.

Just to make sure, I tried applying the Poe-style deciphering method, but it yielded nothing.

I was stuck fast right there.

Six-character combinations, six-character combinations — I kept thinking of nothing else and paced around the room again.

I wondered whether there might be some hint in the number six itself.

And I tried to recall everything I could that was made up of six units.

I was randomly listing things connected with the number six when my mind suddenly lit on the six-coin crest of Sanada Yukimura that I had read about in a lecture novel.

It could hardly have any bearing on the cipher, and yet for some reason the words 'six coins'

came to my lips in a murmur.

And then — and then —

something leaped up from my memory like an inspiration.

It was the braille used by the blind — shaped just like those six coins shrunk to miniature.

I couldn't help crying out, 'Splendid!'

I really did call out.

Well, there was fifty thousand yen at stake.

I didn't know braille in detail, but I did remember that it was made up of combinations of six dots.

So I called the masseur right away and had him teach me — that's what that was about.

And this is the braille syllabary the masseur taught me."

With that, Matsumura took a sheet of paper from his desk drawer.

It showed the braille characters for all fifty Japanese syllables, along with voiced-sound marks, semi-voiced marks, compound-sound marks, double-consonant marks, long-vowel marks, numerals, and the rest, laid out in order.

"Now, if you arrange the characters of 'Namu Amida Butsu' from left to right, three letters across and two rows deep, the result matches this braille layout exactly. Each character of 'Namu Amida Butsu' corresponds to one dot in braille. That means 'a' in braille equals 'Na,' 'i' equals 'Na-mu,' and so on — you can map them accordingly. All you have to do is decode it using that correspondence. So, this is the result of my decoding the cipher last night. The top line shows the original 'Namu Amida Butsu' characters arranged like braille; the middle line shows the corresponding braille characters; and the bottom line is the translation."

Saying this, Matsumura produced yet another scrap of paper of the kind mentioned above.

"GO KEN CHO SHO JI KI DO KA RA O MO CHA NO SA TSU WO U KE TO RE U KE TO RI NI N NO NA WA DAI KO KU YA SHO TEN. In other words: Receive the toy bills from Shoujikido in Gokenmachi; the recipient's name is Daikokuya Shoten. The meaning is clear enough. But why would he be receiving toy banknotes? That gave me pause. But the riddle turned out to be relatively easy to solve. And I found myself thoroughly impressed by the gentleman burglar — his sharp mind, his quickness, and on top of all that, a wit worthy of a novelist. Eh, toy banknotes — isn't that magnificent?

My reasoning went like this.

And as it turned out, every bit of it proved correct.

The gentleman burglar must have prepared in advance the safest possible hiding place for the stolen money, just in case.

Now, the safest way to hide something in this world is to hide it without hiding it.

To leave it in plain sight of everyone and yet have no one notice it — that is the safest concealment of all.

That formidable fellow had hit upon precisely this.

Or so I imagined.

And so he devised the clever trick of the toy banknotes.

I guessed that Shoujikido was most likely a printer that produced toy banknotes and such things.

And that too turned out to be right.

He had placed an order in advance with that printer under the name Daikokuya Shoten for a supply of toy banknotes.

I'd heard that realistic toy banknotes had recently become fashionable in the pleasure quarters and suchlike.

Someone had mentioned it to me.

Oh yes, that's right —

you mentioned it yourself once.

You said they were like jack-in-the-boxes or mud-made candy and fruit or snake toys — novelties for stylish gentlemen who enjoyed startling women, made to look exactly like real things.

So there would have been nothing suspicious about him ordering banknotes the same size as the real ones.

Having arranged all this, once he'd successfully stolen the real banknotes, he probably slipped into the printing shop and switched them out for his own toy-banknote order.

That way, until the person in whose name the order was placed came to collect them, fifty thousand yen in perfectly legal tender would sit safely in the printer's storeroom, masquerading as toy notes.

This may be nothing more than speculation on my part.

But it's quite plausible speculation.

I decided to try it and see.

I looked up Gokenmachi on the map and found it was in Kanda Ward.

Now came the actual business of going to collect the toy banknotes, and that posed a certain difficulty.

The difficulty was that I must not leave behind the slightest trace of my having gone there to collect them.

If that were discovered, I tremble to think what revenge that terrifying villain might wreak — and I am, despite appearances, a man of somewhat nervous disposition.

At all costs I had to make myself look as little like myself as possible.

That's why I put on that disguise.

With those ten yen I changed myself from head to foot.

Look at this — don't you think this was rather a clever idea?"

Saying this, Matsumura bared his well-aligned front teeth in a grin.

There, gleaming in the spot I had noticed earlier, was a single gold tooth.

With a look of pride, he removed it with his fingertip and held it out before my eyes.

"This is a tin thing plated with gold, sold at street stalls. You simply slip it over the tooth. A mere twenty-sen scrap of tin can come in quite handy. A gold tooth is something people are very quick to notice. So if anyone were searching for me afterward, that gold tooth would be the first thing they'd look for. Now, once I had all this ready, I set out early this morning for Gokenmachi. My one worry had been the payment for the toy banknotes. I was fairly sure the thief had paid in advance, not wanting his goods resold, but if he hadn't, we'd need at least twenty or thirty yen — and as you know, we have no such ready cash. I told myself I'd bluff my way through somehow, and off I went. And as expected, the printer didn't say a word about money — he just handed over the goods. And so I managed to make off with fifty thousand yen, neat as you please. Now, as for what to do with it — any ideas?"

It was rare for Matsumura to be so excited and speak at such length.

I was moved to marvel at the power that fifty thousand yen wielded over a man.

I spare myself the trouble of describing his expression throughout this account of his efforts, but the look of barely suppressed delight on Matsumura's face as he told his tale was really something to see.

He seemed to be making a great effort not to betray his jubilant glee in an undignified manner, but no matter how hard he tried, an irrepressible smile of sheer happiness kept welling up from deep within him, and he could not conceal it.

The inexplicable, half-crazed grin that slipped out between sentences was enough to make me feel, if anything, a kind of chill.

Yet there is the old story of the pauper who went mad when he won the grand lottery prize of a thousand ryo, so it could hardly be called unreasonable that Matsumura should be carried away with joy over fifty thousand yen.

I wished his joy might last as long as possible.

I wished it for his sake.

But there was one fact in my possession that nothing could alter.

A laugh I could not have held back even if I tried came bursting out.

I scolded myself not to laugh, but the small mischievous demon inside me was not so easily defeated, and he kept tickling me.

I laughed louder than ever, like someone watching the most hilarious farce.

Matsumura watched me rolling with laughter, taken completely aback.

Then, with the look of a man who has blundered into something strange, he said:

"What's got into you?"

I managed to swallow my laughter and replied.

"Your powers of imagination are truly remarkable. What a tremendous piece of work you've done. I will certainly come to respect your mind many times more than I did before. You are right that in cleverness I cannot match you. But do you really believe that reality is quite so romantic?"

Matsumura stared at me without a word, his expression strangely altered.

"In other words — do you really think the gentleman burglar possesses that degree of wit? I grant you, as a piece of fiction your story is absolutely impeccable. But the world is more prosaic than fiction. And if we are speaking of fiction, I would like to draw your attention to one point: is there not another way to decode that cipher? Might there be a possibility of translating your translation? For instance — could one not read every eighth character of this text?"

So saying, I marked the decoded text Matsumura had written as follows:

GO kenchosho JI kidokaraomochi YA nosatsuwouketo RE uketorininnonawaDA ikokuyashote N

"Go jyoudan. What, 'What a joke'? Could this be a coincidence? Might it not mean that someone has been playing a trick?"

Matsumura rose without a word.

And he brought before me the furoshiki bundle that he firmly believed contained fifty thousand yen in banknotes.

"But how do you explain this hard fact? Fifty thousand yen is not born out of fiction."

His voice carried the deadly earnestness of a man about to fight a duel.

I was frightened.

And I could not but regret the unexpectedly large effect of my small piece of mischief.

"I owe you a real apology. Please forgive me. What you've taken such good care of bringing home is, after all, toy banknotes. Go ahead and open it, and have a proper look."

Matsumura, with a strange fumbling movement as of someone groping for something in the dark — and watching it, I felt all the sorrier for him — spent a long time unwrapping the furoshiki bundle.

Inside were two square parcels, each wrapped neatly in newspaper.

The newspaper on one of them was torn, and the contents were visible.

"I opened this one along the way and saw it with my own eyes."

Matsumura said in a choked voice, and then removed the newspaper entirely.

They were counterfeits of remarkable verisimilitude.

At a glance, every detail was that of the genuine article.

But on closer inspection, the face of each bill bore, printed large, the character 'dan' in place of the character 'en' for yen.

Not twenty yen and ten yen, but twenty dan and ten dan.

Matsumura looked again and again, as if unable to believe it.

And gradually, as he looked, the shadow of that smile vanished completely from his face.

And afterward, a deep, deep silence remained.

I was filled with remorse.

I explained the prank I had taken too far.

But Matsumura would not listen.

For the rest of that day he sat as mute as a man who had lost his voice.

And here this story ends.

However, in order to satisfy the reader's curiosity, I must add a few words of explanation about my prank.

The printing shop called Shoujikido happened to be a distant relative of mine.

One day, driven to desperation, I thought of that relative — whom I had long been neglecting — in the hope of somehow arranging some money.

And with some reluctance, I paid a visit there for the first time in a long while.

Matsumura, needless to say, knew nothing of any of this.

The attempt to borrow money failed as expected, but it was then that I happened to see the toy banknotes — which were being printed at that very moment — so lifelike that they seemed no different from the real thing.

And I learned that they were an order from a long-standing customer named Daikokuya.

I connected this discovery with the case of the gentleman burglar — which had become our daily topic of conversation — and conceived the notion of staging a little play, a foolish prank.

The reason was that I, like Matsumura, had long been burning to lay hands on some evidence that would demonstrate my own intellectual superiority.

That awkward cipher was, of course, something I had composed myself.

But I, unlike Matsumura, was no student of the history of foreign ciphers.

It was nothing more than a passing fancy.

The story about the tobacco shop's daughter having married a prison provisioner was likewise pure invention.

To begin with, it was doubtful whether the tobacco shop even had a daughter.

What I had been most anxious about in this whole performance was not any of the dramatic elements, but one small, highly practical — and from an overall perspective, almost laughably trivial — point.

It was the question of whether those toy banknotes I had seen would still be at the printer's, uncollected and undelivered, by the time Matsumura went to get them.

About the payment, I had not the slightest worry.

My relative and Daikokuya were on deferred-payment terms, and what made things even more convenient was that Shoujikido ran its business in an extremely primitive, casual manner — Matsumura would have had no difficulty collecting the goods without presenting a receipt from the proprietor of Daikokuya.

As for the two-sen copper coin that was the starting point of the whole trick, I regret to say that I must refrain from offering any detailed explanation here.

If I were to write carelessly about it, a certain person who gave me the object might find themselves in serious difficulty at some later date.

The reader is welcome to assume that I simply happened to have it in my possession.