Matatabi Travel

Matatabi Travel (またたびトラベル, 2004) is a children's book by MOICHI Kumiko (茂市久美子, born 1951), made up of a series of linked stories. The "Matatabi Travel" of the title is a small travel agency in the second floor of a dilapidated residential house, "Matatabi House", approached by a rickety staircase on the outside of the building. This is one of those mysterious shops that seems to be have appeared out of nowhere. Matatabi is the Japanese name for silver vine, a plant which seems to be the Japanese equivalent of catnip. The almond eyed young man who runs the travel agency is in fact a cat; and his customers are or become people who look after stray cats.

The stories are essentially modern fairy tales, but with a linked setting and theme. As you might expect in such stories, most customers come upon the building by chance. Often they are not even looking to book a trip when they go in.

By the way, Saburou had not come to Matatabi Travel on purpose.

He had been working late into the night, and on his way back home, for some reason, he had wandered into a narrow alley he never went down. On top of that it was raining horribly. The place he happened to seek shelter under was the eaves of Matatabi Travel's building.

There was a light on in Matatabi Travel and an 'Open' sign hanging in the door.

'Hey, they're working pretty late. It doesn't look like the rain is going to let up. I'll pass the time a bit in there.'

 Some of the stories seem a little flat to me. The 'fairy tale style' tends towards a certain restraint, a deliberate simplicity, which can lead towards a feeling of lack of substance when the subject matter does not compensate. The stories are more comfortable than thought provoking or impressive. Perhaps the most distinctive thing the book does is reflect its young readers' nervous anticipation of the adult world waiting for them. The customers are all young adults. Their problems are the kind of problems that face young working people, finding work, affording a home, loneliness, the feeling that they have made a wrong choice.

Boy Science Detective: Ultraviolet Rays

[You may want to check the warning on this blog's translations.] 

 

  This story completes the translation of the book Boy Science Detective by KOSAKAI Fuboku. Previously we had:

• Preface (and general introduction)
• 1. The Scarlet Diamond
• 2. A Fight in the Dark 
• 3. The Riddle of the Beard
• 4. The Secret of the Skull  
• 5. The Wisdom of a Fool

As Kosakai promised in the preface, he did go on to write more Boy Science Detective stories; but having translated a whole book (even if it's not a very long one), I think I'd like to give my attention to the works of some other writers for a while. 

The story was first published in 子供の科学 (kodomo no kagaku, Children's Science) from July to September 1926. You can read the story in the original Japanese on Aozora Bunko here. I've put in footnotes that look like this[1]; I'm afraid that they aren't actively linked. You'll have to scroll down (or use find) to the footnotes at the end. As always, I've put the translation after the break, so click to read on.

Boy Science Detective: The Wisdom of a Fool

[You may want to check the warning on this blog's translations.] 

 Another translation: this is the fourth Boy Science Detective story by KOSAKAI Fuboku. Previously we had:

• Preface (and general introduction)
• 1. The Scarlet Diamond
• 2. A Fight in the Dark 
• 3. The Riddle of the Beard
• 4. The Secret of the Skull 

Most of the stories from the series have had something in them to make them worthwhile. To be honest, this one is one I might have been tempted to leave untranslated. It does not have much of the detective or scientific interest that the other stories had; and its central idea is one of the worst plot elements of the detective story (and probably back around 1600 people were saying, "I don't know, Will, that scene seems a bit clichéd to me"). But since I was already two thirds of the way through the six stories that made the first collection, I thought it was a pity not to translate the whole book.

The story deals with intellectual disability, in a way that did not ring true to me; but that may be because the people I have known were more mildly affected. The question of what language to use comes up here. In general I mostly aim for the most polite expression which still sounds more or less like something someone might have said at the time. But I don't know how successful I was here.

The story was first published in 子供の科学 (kodomo no kagaku, Childrens' Science) from January to March 1926. You can find the original Japanese on Aozora Bunko here. As always I've put the translated story after the break; so click to read on if you're interested.

11 Cards

The puzzle detective story is itself a curious thing; and it is not surprising if its writers are often interested in contrivances and curiosities. I don't know of any writer who shows a greater fondness for such things than AWASAKA Tsumao (泡坂妻夫). He was an amateur magician himself and his books often feature such things as stage magic, intricate mechanical toys, codes and word puzzles. Some of them are themselves intricate toys, not just in the mystery, but in the construction of the book. These enthusiasms are already on show in his first full length mystery 11枚のﾄﾗﾝﾌﾟ (juuichi mai no toranpu, Eleven Cards, 1976). The setting is the world of amateur magicians and the story features a book within a book that is a necessary part of solving the mystery.

The amateur magicians' club in the little town of Majiki (真敷) is putting on a show. We see the performances of each of the eleven members. Some go perfectly, some are disasters. At the end comes the worst failure of all. Shimako (志摩子), the young woman who was supposed to appear as part of the final magic trick in which everyone takes part never turns up. The other performers are left standing on stage while the meaner children in the audience start chanting, 'It's gone wrong, it's gone wrong.' After the show, one of them, a police doctor, is called away. When he returns, he is accompanied by two policemen. They have found the missing Shimako murdered in her nearby flat.

Stranger still, arranged around her dead body are a variety of objects, all broken. They all point to one of the stories in a book that one of the club members had written, Eleven Cards. This book forms the central part of Awasaka's Eleven Cards. The stories could be called detective stories, but they are not detecting crimes. They describe magic tricks, each one performed by a member of the club (the same people we have just met in the outer story), either on the other members or in their presence to a different audience. The other club members puzzle over how the trick could have been done, until one of them comes on the answer. The fictional author's prologue emphasises that as he has no powers of invention himself, the stories are taken from what really happened in life.

The final part of the book returns us to the outer story. Several months after the murder the club members are gathered at an international magic convention in Tokyo, where some of them are performing. In the midst of the chaos of the convention, the club members find new clues to the murder.

This is an incredible first novel. As often in Awasaka, not everything works; but the invention and ambition is really impressive, and the trick stories in the middle would be an interesting idea even if they weren't supporting a larger mystery.

Shots exchanged across the Atlantic

This post has major spoilers for Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers and The Greek Coffin Mystery by Ellery Queen. So read no further if you haven't read those yet.

Eugenia

ユージニア (Eugenia, 2005) by ONDA Riku (恩田陸) won the Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 2006. The book describes a mass poisoning and its aftermath over several decades.

The family of a respected doctor in the Hokuriku town of K (which doubtless stands for Kanazawa) are celebrating a major family anniversary. A motorcycle delivery man brings alcohol and juice, saying that it is sent by an old friend of the doctor. When the family and visiting neighbours drink a toast together, all of them, including several children, die, leaving only a servant and the daughter of the family, blind middle school student Hisako.

Ten years later, one of the children who discovered the mass murder, Makiko, then in junior school, now a student, interviews those witnesses she can find about the crime. Her researches result in a book, The Forgotten Celebration, which becomes a bestseller. The book, though, has some oddities that might make you wonder what her aim in writing it was. Now, decades after that book, someone is interviewing the surviving witnesses again. Most of the chapters are a dialogue with one voice (the interviewer's) removed. A few chapters are internal monologues of characters from the present or the past, or told by an external narrator.

As the various narrators contribute, it becomes clear that most people suspect the blind Hisako of having engineered the massacre. The story becomes a kind of horror story, filling the reader with unease about what Hisako, Makiko, and the unseen interviewer are looking for. The story has 'clues' of a sort, marked bits of the narrative which are obviously going to be explained later; but the explanations when they came seemed fairly abritrary (that is I felt the writer could have spared us the clue).

In my case much of the unease was a suspicion that the story was not going to make any sense. And did it? I don't really know, to be honest. The book was something of a struggle to read; and I had lost interest long before the end. Neither the characters nor the narration were really vivid; most were dreamlike, half sedated. The format, in which we frequently switch between speakers, without an indication of the change, was probably more demanding for me, since as a language learner I miss a lot of the subtler clues that a Japanese speaker would pick up on.

Boy Science Detective: The Secret of the Skull

[You may want to check the warning on this blog's translations.] 

 Another translation: this is the third Boy Science Detective story by KOSAKAI Fuboku. Previously we had:

• Preface (and general introduction)
• 1. The Scarlet Diamond
• 2. A Fight in the Dark 
• 3. The Riddle of the Beard

I imagine most children's detective stories prefer to stay with less serious crimes. The Boy Science Detective stories start with an incident that is hardly a crime at all and move on to theft and then in the third story murder. This one goes even further. The murder of children is a crime that writers were a little shy of using in stories that were meant essentially for entertainment; but here we have the murder of a child as the fourth mystery in the series. The only respect in which this is a children's story is that it has a child as protagonist and (as always) the solution is a bit obvious. I hope you won't think that means it isn't worth your time. The answer is obvious, but you might well miss the clues; and the story is an interesting reflection of the state of forensic science at the time.

I've glossed most of the things that need explaining in the translation itself. So I think we can get away without footnotes this time.  I'll put a few links in advance. The Great Kantou earthquake took place on Sep. 1, 1923 and caused massive destruction in Tokyo. The most interesting part of the story is the forensic facial reconstruction which is central to the plot. The late nineteenth century reconstruction of Bach's face was performed by Wilhelm His and Carl Seffner. The detective called Williams that Kosakai mentions seems (from Google) to be Lieutenant Grant Williams, bureau of unidentified dead, Manhattan,  who in 1916 identified a skull found on a farm in Brooklyn as Dominick La Rosa leading to arrest of Giovanio Romano (Brooklyn Eagle Oct 10, 1916). Kosakai probably did not know of another more recent case where Williams had been called in by a former subordinate, Mary Hamilton to investigate a skull found  in Rockland County, N.Y. and had reconstructed the face as a missing girl, Lillian White. Hamilton's investigations lead to a suspect James Crawford, who was also missing at the time, but captured in 1925 after a different crime. 

One last thing: this is a bit spoilerish, but if you don't know how kimonos are worn, you might search out some photographs or prints on wikimedia commons or elsewhere on the internet to get an idea.

The story was first published in 子供の科学 (kodomo no kagaku, Children’s Science) between October and December 1925. It's in the public domain, so you can read the original Japanese on Aozora Bunko, here.

As always, the actual story is after the break. So click below to read it.