Pathway to Japanese Literature

1

A mere hundred meters after stumbling off Ginza's paved streets, there stood a gate so shabby it defied belief.

“Ah, here it is—”

Tsujinaga raised his cane and cautioned me, who was trailing behind.

“Hmm—”

It was no different than a gate in form only, like those attached to country houses that brew local sake.

“Alright, let’s go in.”

Tsujinaga lightly doffed his straw hat to greet the guard, then quickened his pace.
I hurried after him as well, but with rails laid out so haphazardly, I couldn’t walk as I wished.
And then I lost sight of Tsujinaga.

I was a detective novelist.
Tsujinaga was a private detective.

So even though we had known each other for less than a year, we appeared closer than friends of ten years.
This was because both of us lived for our shared fascination with detective work.
But to be honest, Tsujinaga was far more intelligent than I.
He would drag me into cases just to take pleasure in challenging how my mind worked.
I tried to dismiss it as one of his bad habits, though at times I even wondered if there wasn’t some deeper scheme behind it.

“Hey! This way—”

From an unexpected direction, Tsujinaga’s voice came.
Thinking “Well, well...” I approached where the voice was coming from and found an old, dilapidated building.
As I rounded it lightly, an extraordinary scene suddenly unfurled before my eyes!

A towering mountain of cargo.
It was truly a towering mountain of cargo.
A mountain—unless piled this high with objects—would likely not be called a mountain at all.
This was indeed the grounds of S Station, renowned as a major freight terminal.

Tsujinaga stood beside a mountain of large wooden crates, pressing his face so close he might smash his nose against them.
Already he seemed to have grasped something.
Unlike a mere novelist, as a true detective, he was always quick to grasp things.
So skilled was he that there were times I forgot my own profession and grew jealous of his prowess.

“This is it, this is it, Yamano!” he shouted my name involuntarily.
“I’ve completely figured out when and where those boxes were made!
“The first box was manufactured on July 4.
“The second one was manufactured on July 18.
“And we’ve determined the third was manufactured exactly one week ago—August 8, to be precise.”

“How’d you figure that out?”
I was utterly dumbfounded.

“Oh, this? I mostly figured it out through effort.”
“Today I wanted to know what shape they’d stacked that mountain of boxes into and how many there were.”
“Then you work backward through the shipping ledger’s quantities—that tells you when they loaded those crates and consequently when they manufactured them. That’s the procedure.”

Though I didn't fully comprehend it, I couldn't help but be impressed—this was Tsujinaga's sharp intellect at work.

The aforementioned boxes were those from the famous Boxed Corpse Incident—discovered across three separate occasions—those very crates themselves.

To spare the details, all three corpses were discovered inside beer crates piled in this freight storage yard.
The crate was not only large enough to slowly accommodate a human body but could also hold five-dozen bottles of beer in the remaining space—a massive wooden crate.

When we lined up the incidents, there were strange commonalities.
First, all of the victims were young salarymen or people fresh out of academia.
Second, while it might not seem particularly strange that they were all Tokyo residents, it remained a mystery nonetheless.
However, the addresses of the three were scattered rather than clustered.
Third, the three corpses bore similar bruises and abrasions, yet showed no gunshot wounds or signs of stabbing.
Fourth—and most crucially—none of them had any circumstances that would justify being killed.
As a supplementary detail, all three reportedly carried business card holders, allowing their identities to be swiftly confirmed.

The beer company explained that they couldn’t understand how these young men’s corpses had ended up inside the boxes.
They thoroughly inspected every corner of the factory but found no trace of those young men having sneaked in.
There was a large machine that automatically packed beer bottles into boxes after covering them with straw tubes.
This machine operated nonstop, twenty-four hours a day, never having been shut down before, but they deliberately stopped it to investigate.
Those results also yielded nothing of value.

The case had entered a labyrinth—such was the gist of the Boxed Corpse Incident.

2

“Let’s go to the beer company.”

No sooner had Tsujinaga said this than he started walking briskly toward the station gate.
I was still tagging along.

At a distance that cost eighty sen after haggling down a one-yen taxi fare stood the beer company’s towering building that seemed to pierce the clouds.
The setting sun struck the old brick-walled structure as if blazing.
On the distant rooftop, a thick chimney with wind-catching wings spread wide stood propping up the sky like a monstrous medieval knight.
Toward those high windows, coal hoists likely transporting coal piled on the ground moved one, two, three… maintaining proper intervals—a considerable number swaying lazily as they went.

Without waiting long, we were guided into the factory. What I particularly wanted to see was indeed the facility where beer bottles were automatically packed into crates. It was truly an elaborate contraption. When a large shaft connected to the motor via belt was rotated, the motion transferred to another shaft, spinning a separate belt that in turn activated another mechanism—cutting planks where required, driving nails where needed, packing bottles where intended—until finally, a fully assembled beer crate materialized near the exit.

Immediately, a trolley would be waiting to carry it outside. While it was crude in its simplicity to the extreme, it was an incomparably convenient mechanism.

“Don’t you think this is a truly terrifying array of machinery?”

Tsujinaga exclaimed in awe.

“Hmm, that with just the flip of a single switch, these giant machines spring to life and accomplish work beyond even a thousand-armed deity—all at once…”

“No—what’s truly terrifying are these idiotically faithful machines and what they do.” “Even if something else were to mistakenly leap between these belts and gears, the machinery would process it without so much as a flicker—treating it no differently than beer bottles and wooden crates.”

Tsujinaga let out a heavy sigh.

"So you're saying those unfortunate young men fell victim to this machinery?"

"I think it's possible they could get caught in it."
"I won't state it definitively."
"But..." He suddenly frowned and looked out the window.
"If there were cases of humans entering through this window, then this would become much clearer, you see."

“Do you know of anything that could serve as such a clue?”

I stuck my head out the window and looked outside.

“Gah!”

As I looked up from that window, I saw a coal hoist laden with charcoal swaying gently as it ascended above my head.

“What’s wrong?” Tsujinaga asked, looking out the window behind me.
“Oh, it might be a coincidence, but there’s something interesting here.”
“There’s a ventilation window here protruding a full meter outside.”
“Look—there’s a small accumulation of coal dust in the corner near the building.”

“I see—you have sharp eyes.”

“So you see—if someone were riding on the coal hoist and it fell down, instead of dropping to the ground, they’d catch on this ventilation window.”
“With that momentum, you can imagine them sliding smoothly into this room.”
“Once they slip inside—it’s this terrifying array of machinery.”

“Even if humans were riding the hoist, I can’t imagine they’d only come falling down onto this window.”

“Yeah.
“But look at that!” Tsujinaga leaned halfway out the window and pointed overhead.
“Over there, the bracket protrudes like a gate.
If that hoist were loaded only with coal, it could pass effortlessly beneath there—but if a long human body were aboard, it would snag on that bracket and plummet down in an instant.”

“I see—so that’s how it works,” I said, increasingly astonished by my friend’s keen insight.

“However, there’s another condition we must consider—the humans aboard that hoist were unconscious.”

“Hoh.”

“If they were conscious, they’d never be brought all the way up here in the first place. And if their bodies had been bound, they wouldn’t have been able to fall down below.”
“Well, if that cable’s suspicious, then the problem becomes where the hoist’s master loaded those human bodies from.”
“Let’s go down to the coal storage area and check it out.”

3

When we descended, each time the coal hoist passed through the coal mountains, it would fill its basket to the brim and ascend again.
Tsujinaga had been searching intently around the coal bunker,

“I’ve found something good!” Tsujinaga grew even more animated.
“Huh—this is an advertisement for a cotton shop.
“And looks like someone peeled this right off where it had been stuck on that fence.”

Tsujinaga picked up a completely blackened paper fragment from beside the coal bunker and showed it to me.

“When you say ‘the wall’—”

“When you say ‘the wall’—that’s the one.”
“That black wall!”
“This had been pasted on that wall.”

Beyond the coal bunker loomed a severely weathered wall. Tsujinaga pivoted sharply and broke into a run. With gymnastic precision, he planted his hands on the wall and swung his body onto its crest in one fluid motion.

"This is an abominable place!"

His voice twisted in alarm. Then, gathering himself abruptly, he dropped to the ground with a heavy thud.

“Hey, what’s wrong?”
“No—this place is truly dreadful beyond measure.”

With that, Tsujinaga turned slightly pale and began his explanation.
According to him, beyond the wall he had just scaled lay a place known in certain circles by the colloquial name "Jewish Alley."
It was merely a narrow alley spanning just over three blocks that could be traversed, but it contained an entrance to the Jewish Secret Society.
There appeared to be some mechanism that guided members to this entrance at a specific hour of the night, though the details were unclear.
They likely marked members through their clothing or facial features, watching from houses as they passed through.
The story went that when they spotted an approaching member, activating a switch would make the ground split open abruptly and swallow them whole—this supposedly being how members were guided to the society's headquarters.
After all, this was the Jewish Secret Society—completely beyond anyone's reach.
Those who knew of it trembled at its eerie, unfathomable terror.
Given that "Jewish Alley" lay just beyond that wall, I thought it no wonder Tsujinaga had changed color.

“This might—” Tsujinaga began haltingly, “be a case where those three young men were done in by the Jewish Secret Society.”

"Hmm."
"But there were no dagger wounds on the corpses," I pressed, feigning ignorance of what we both knew.

"If it were me," he began, "I'd reason like this."
"The young men passed through this alley by chance and got mistaken for members."
"Once they'd seen inside the secret society's sanctum, execution became inevitable."
"The method's brutally straightforward."
"Beat them unconscious, haul them over that wall, dump them on the coal hoist."
"That's all it takes."
"The killing machines handle the rest with factory efficiency."
"Look here!"
"You can see where they scaled the wall!"

With that, Tsujinaga pointed out fresh cracks in the wall and splattered mud marks.

“Why did those young men ever come into this alley?”
I wondered suspiciously.

“That’s precisely what we’ll investigate now.”

Overwhelmed by Tsujinaga’s detective intuition, I trailed behind him through Jewish Alley.
Though twilight still lingered in the sky, I felt no comfort.

Tsujinaga walked on in silence, glancing left and right.

Before long, the surroundings grew increasingly dark.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that a pistol bullet might come whistling through the air from somewhere.
My friend wandered through Jewish Alley three times without fear.

“Oh!”

I couldn’t help but cry out.
Tsujinaga suddenly started walking briskly.
It seemed he had grasped yet another new clue.

It was on the street crowded with numerous small two-story houses beyond Jewish Alley that Tsujinaga resumed his leisurely pace.
As we walked on, a woman stood beneath the dim eaves of one house.
She was a plump woman with pale skin.
She appeared eighteen or nineteen years old.
Her dress was made of thin, translucent fabric.
——Having abruptly noticed us from across the way, she flashed a practiced wink.

“Let’s go up.”
“Got that?”

Tsujinaga whispered rapidly into my ear.
However, I lacked the practical nerve of someone like Tsujinaga.

“Shouldn’t we call it off?”

“Then do it like this.”
Tsujinaga said with a slightly trembling voice.

“Wait at Bar Canaria.”

Bar Canaria was a small bar located in the backstreets of Ginza. Even before we became friends, the two of us had been separate patrons at Bar Canaria. Therefore, every time we went out to the Ginza area, we would take each other by the hand and push open Canaria’s small door.

Looking back, that woman—the Sakuranbou type—had wrapped her supple white arm around Tsujinaga’s waist and smiled bewitchingly. And their figures vanished into the latticework as if sucked in.

4

Had I waited at Bar Canaria for an hour and a half?
I had been kept waiting an exceedingly long time, but found it not particularly tedious.
This was because I kept Michiko close by my side, spinning endless delightful tales.
If possible, I wished Tsujinaga would never appear at this Bar Canaria again.
While he remained engrossed in his detective work, I even felt a mutinous urge to lure this woman away and hide somewhere with her.
So thoroughly did Tsujinaga’s brisk detective manner depress me—though I couldn’t say why.

Just then, Tsujinaga came bursting in like an energetic Shepherd.

“Total victory!”
“Total victory!”

He appeared to be forcibly restraining himself from leaping out.

“Hey Michiko.
Tonight’s my treat.
Come on—let’s toast!
Make Yamano something decent.
I’ll take a Concodous cocktail—blend up one of those rare vintages for me.”

“Concodous?
Now really.
Nothing good comes from drinking that.
And Mr. Tsujinaga—you look positively ghastly tonight.
What’s gotten into you?”

Truth be told, I’d been aware of Tsujinaga’s poor complexion for some time.
It held an unnatural yellow cast.

“Nah, it’s just fatigue mixing with the thrill of success.—Bring it quick.”

“Then Mr. Tsujinaga will have the Concodous.”
“Mr. Yamano, wouldn’t the Queen Knob Nile suit you?”

When Michiko went over there, Tsujinaga took out a notebook from his pocket as if he couldn’t wait.
In it were small characters divided into several items.

“You.”
“Take a look at this part here.”
Tsujinaga pointed at the headings written there with the eraser end of a pencil.

The following was written there.

——○ Girl’s House (It was said there had been three mysterious incidents where guests vanished during the night).

“What’s this?” I asked.

“It turned out all three youths who ended up boxed had stayed at that woman’s place earlier.”
“Because all three disappeared in the middle of the night, they apparently remember it well.”
“Personal effects were also found.”

“Oh?”

“However, it seems those youths all bought anti-itch medicine from a nearby pharmacy as if by prior agreement and applied it to their bodies.”

“All three of them?”

“That’s exactly it.
“All three of them.
“That’s why they bought anti-itch medicine at this pharmacy and applied it to their bodies.
“According to the woman, apparently before that, they’d writhed all over their bodies as if dying from the itching.”

“Why would they go out of their way to take in guests who were itching like that?”

“No, see—the itching (starting just before reaching home)—why would they have been itching from the very beginning?”

“Then they must have picked up those guests somewhere, right?”

“This is it.
“○ Street Girl (lured in Ginza)—meaning they started itching while being taken from Ginza to that place.”

“Why did they start itching?”

“I’ll explain that later.”

Michiko came over carrying glasses.

“Hey, go buy me some cigarettes.”
“Then I’ll give you a champagne glass, so chill it and have it ready.”

Tsujinaga issued Michiko a rapid succession of tasks.

“My, someone’s feeling generous today.”

Michiko offered glasses to the two men and went over there.

“C’mon, let’s have a drink!”

“Mm-hmm.”

“How about it—why don’t you try drinking this? I think it’d suit your palate though.”

And he—trying to offer the glass placed before him toward me—let out another exclamation.

“Oh ho!
“Professor Michiko—you’re off your game tonight!
“She didn’t put the Concodous by me—she properly placed it right in front of you, didn’t she?
“Slick work for a fool.”

With that, Tsujinaga gazed at the two glasses from the side.
What caught my eye were the yellow liquid in Tsujinaga’s glass and the transparent liquid in mine.

“Is Concodous colorless and transparent?”

Thinking that being made to drink strange liquor would be unbearable, I asked just to be safe.

“No, no.
“Concodous is yellow stuff like lemonade.”
“That... That’s right...” he said, pointing at the colorless, transparent liquor before me.

“Isn’t that one yours?” I pointed at the yellow liquor contained in his glass.

“No, it’s nowhere near this brown,” he denied,

“Come on, let’s toast!”

He quickly drained the yellow liquid from the glass.
I felt like a fox had tweaked my nose, but when it comes to alcohol, I can’t resist—so I gulped down the colorless cocktail before me (which he claimed was yellow) in one breath.

“That’s good.”
“That’s good.”
“Extremely delightful!”

5

Tsujinaga seemed to be growing increasingly excited.
At this rate, he would probably soon get drunk and lose all sense of his surroundings.
I thought I should get the rest of the story from him now while I still could.

“So about that story—what’s the reason behind the itching?”

“You want to know why it itches? Alright, I’ll tell you.—In the West there exists a mysterious liquor production. They produce forbidden liquor and sell it at exorbitant prices to those with a taste for it. To slip through the legal net, they put even liquor bottles into ordinary whiskey bottles, placing on the labels marks that only a connoisseur could discern. You’d understand that such mysterious liquor exists.”

“……”
I nodded silently.
That must refer to the bootleg liquor containing aphrodisiacs and such.

“This is incredibly expensive stuff—the kind that would never normally reach a country like Japan—yet one bottle has somehow made its way here to Ginza.”
“It’s sitting on a shelf in some bar’s corner.”
“But the owner of that very bar doesn’t even know the true effects of this liquor—isn’t that an absurd tale?”

“Then could it be…”

“Just listen!” Tsujinaga cut me off.
“They almost never sell this liquor to customers.”
“But there are special clients they’ll serve it to, and sometimes accidental sales too.”
“That happens on Monday nights when the bar owner takes his occasional breaks—an inexperienced madam sometimes serves this stuff to patrons.”
“Of course she doesn’t realize it’s cursed liquor—thinks it’s just cheap whiskey.”
“Now then—once you’re forced to drink this, something dreadful happens.”

“What do you mean, something terrible?!”

“That’s right.”
“It’s beyond terrible—your body ends up packed into a crate.”
“Of course, you’ll be dead by then.”
“Never again will you bask in sunlight.”

“Hey, Tsujinaga! Just spit out the name of that Western liquor already!” I stood up from the table.

“Now settle down! I said settle down!”
His complexion had become indistinguishable between red and yellow, eyes gleaming.
“Aren’t you staggered by the sharpness of my detective’s eye? Listen well.”
“When you drink that mysterious liquor and leave the bar, around the time you start staggering about, the effects manifest at one o’clock.”
“First comes the urge to urinate.”
“Second comes an uncontrollable surge of suspicious excitement.”
“Now then, after leaving that bar when the urge hits, you need to take care of it somewhere—but there’s no suitable place.”
“When you think ‘Somewhere…’—what comes to mind is the riverbank right ahead.”
“You go relieve yourself at that riverbank.”
“But right there lies Sakuranbou’s trap—that street girl everyone knows.”
“Though she mainly targets café-hopping youths, she won’t turn away customers who’ve stumbled out of Bar Canaria drunk on that liquor.”
“The customers aren’t just willing—they’re already half out of their minds.”
“So they become Sakuranbou’s captives, hail an entaku, and dash toward her house.”
“Before long, that mysterious liquor reacts again—this time making their whole body itch.”
“By the time they’re writhing from the itch, the car’s reached her neighborhood.”
“They get off near the house to hide their tracks and walk the rest.”
“But the itching becomes unbearable—they start thrashing about.”
“So they pound on a nearby pharmacy’s door to wake them up and buy anti-itch medicine.”

“So—where do you think this path leads next?”

“No—I think that’s an overly arbitrary line of reasoning.”
At first, I had felt as though intoxicated by his sharp detective’s eye, but as I listened to his explanation, I grew somehow uneasy about how neatly everything was constructed.

“This isn’t some delusion—it’s an undeniable fact, understand?” Tsujinaga said in a pressuring tone. “That anti-itch medicine is also a dreadful drug—it stops the itching, but produces side effects when combined with that mysterious liquor. As a result, when midnight comes, it makes the man slip out from Sakuranbou’s bed. Whether awake or in a dreamlike state, he would put on his clothes and rush out of the house. He becomes somewhat like a sleepwalker.”

“No way—”

“It’s a fact—there’s no helping it.”
“The pseudo-sleepwalker staggers out dazedly and inevitably stumbles into that Jewish Alley.”

"That's just a coincidence."

"No—the terrain itself pulls them into Jewish Alley."
"The rest is simple."
"That sleepwalker-like gait serves as their means of identification."
"The sleepwalker arrives."
"They declare him a member and drag him to headquarters."
"When interrogated under those conditions, something feels off about him."
"His true identity gets exposed—but once their headquarters is compromised, they can't let him live."
"They beat him unconscious and toss him over the black wall onto that coal hoist, sending him creaking up to the brewery's high window."
"Then machinery naturally swallows him whole—breath stops—corpses get crated up and shipped out with beer—"

“Do you really think this gear mechanism would work so smoothly?”
“If it works, it’s a miracle.”

“Since when does a miracle create three victims?”
“Proceed it will—”
“The fourth victim has already begun their journey.”

“What?”

“Just imagine! Starting with that mysterious liquor—the riverbank, the pharmacy, the girl’s house, Jewish Alley, the black wall, the crane and coal hoist, the beer factory’s high window, the packing machinery, and from there to the freight station—all these elements are linked one after another.”
“An urgent need to urinate, lust, itching, sleepwalking, the terrain, Jewish Alley’s laws, the moving crane, the moving packing machinery—all these elements form a long tunnel.”
“The tunnel’s entrance is that mysterious liquor; its exit is the beer crates.”
“Once you enter that entrance, there’s no escape until you’re packed into a crate as a corpse.”
“What a horrifying mechanism!”

6

I too gradually came to understand the terror in Tsujinaga’s explanation.
A bone-chilling shudder crept up my spine—.

“In the very heart of bright Tokyo lies this terrifying thoroughfare—starting from that bar and stretching all the way to the beer company.”
“It’s a road leading to death.”
“A highway to hell!”
“Even now, you dare doubt my detective’s eye?” Tsujinaga roared with rainbow-like fervor.

I had completely lost confidence.
My face must have turned as white as paper.
My hands began to tremble uncontrollably.

“I’ve figured it out.”
“You’re trying to send me down that terrifying Hell Street because of Michiko, aren’t you?”
“The drink you made me have earlier—that’s the mysterious liquor, isn’t it?”
“That’s exactly it.”

I could no longer sit or stand still.
It was that the secret struggle between him and me over Michiko had been thrust into its final act.
It was absolute enmity.
It was artillery-shell malice.

“Ha ha ha,” Tsujinaga laughed lightly. “Now settle down. That liquor wasn’t something I made you drink—it was originally brought before you by Michiko, and you’re the one who grabbed it and drained it all yourself, aren’t you? What do I know? I merely showed you the way to Hell Street—that’s all. I’ll give you one final warning—the effects are about to begin. If you want to survive…”

And just as he said that, Tsujinaga choked back his voice as if under attack and suddenly widened his eyes. He shot upright from his chair—but then bent over clutching his lower abdomen with a pained expression and dashed toward the restroom.

“Open the door! Open it!”

“Wait a moment, please,” called out the proprietor—who, despite it being a Monday, had unusually kept regular hours—as he rushed over in alarm. “The restroom is currently being used by another customer, so please wait just a moment, just a moment. Please wait a little longer.”

“Gyaaagh!” Interrupted by the proprietor, Tsujinaga let out a beast-like cry.
How could this be the composed Tsujinaga?
He whirled around and kicked through the front door to dart outside.
I understood everything.
Truly, Tsujinaga had drunk that mysterious liquor himself.

“Hey, wait! Tsujinaga!”
I too rushed outside after him.
The streets approaching midnight lay eerily quiet.
Looking for Tsujinaga’s figure, I thought the black shadow scrambling beneath a distant eave-side lamp must be him.
I chased while calling his name but couldn’t catch up.

I searched everywhere for the riverbank he’d mentioned but found nothing.
Sakuranbou was nowhere to be seen either.
Exhausted from searching, I leaned against the bridge railing.
As I worried about how much time had passed, a car appeared like wind and sped by.

“Agh! Tsujinaga!”

In the car, I clearly recognized Tsujinaga’s form. Pressed tightly against his side was indeed that girl called Sakuranbou. I dashed out into the middle of the road, but it was already too late. It seemed I had been searching along the wrong stretch of riverbank.

From that direction came the pattering footsteps of a woman approaching.
She seemed to be heading straight toward me.
I started.
If this were that street girl again—if I too had been made to drink that cursed liquor—ah, what unspeakable horror awaited...

“Mr. Yamano. Did you find that person?”

That was Michiko.
I felt slightly relieved.

“It was no use.”

“He seemed to have jaundice.”

“Jaundice!”
“Speaking of jaundice—it’s that disease where everything, even him, looks yellow, right?”
“That’s right.”

“So I realized,” I said. “He mistook the colorless liquor in my glass for yellow Concodus and his own yellow Concodus for an even yellower liquor. Therefore, the Concodus had been placed before Tsujinaga exactly as ordered from the very beginning. He must have been skillfully steering the conversation to make me drink it.”

“You’re still talking about Concodus? —Where could Mr. Tsujinaga have gone?” Michiko asked. “I wonder if he’s all right?”

“Hmm—”
I was at a loss for a reply.
Left as he was, Tsujinaga would be boxed.

"Anyway, let's go back and have a drink—" I took Michiko's hand.
As I drank now, using the sight of him flitting bat-like down Hell Street as my snack, I supposed contemplating whether to save him or not wasn't such a bad feeling after all.