Pathway to Japanese Literature

Two-Sen Copper Coin

Part 1

“I envy that thief.”
Times were so desperate back then that such words were exchanged between them.

This is a story from when Matsumura Takeshi and I lazed about in a single six-tatami room on the second floor of a shabby clog shop in the outskirts, two makeshift desks placed side by side, indulging in nothing but bizarre fantasies.

Having reached a complete impasse with no room left to maneuver, we two had sunk into such base spirits that we even found ourselves envying the masterful methods of that great thief who’d been causing such an uproar at the time.

Since that burglary incident holds great significance for the main thread of this story, I shall herein provide a rough account of it.

It was an incident that occurred on payday at a certain large electric factory in Shiba Ward.
Over a dozen payroll clerks, having calculated one month’s wages for nearly ten thousand workers from their time cards, were sweating profusely as they stuffed twenty-yen, ten-yen, and five-yen banknotes—withdrawn from the bank that very day, enough to fill an entire China bag—into mountainous stacks of pay envelopes when a gentleman arrived at the office entrance.

When the receptionist woman inquired about his business，I stated that I was a journalist from the Asahi Shimbun and would like to have a brief word with the manager.
Thereupon，the woman took a business card bearing the title “Tokyo Asahi Shimbun Society Section Reporter” and informed the manager of this matter.

Fortunately，this manager was a man who prided himself on his skill in handling journalists.
Moreover，though he considered it rather childish to boast to journalists and have his remarks published in the papers as “So-and-so’s comments，” no one could deny that such things felt gratifying all the same.
The man claiming to be a society section reporter was rather cordially ushered into the manager’s office.

The man—wearing large tortoiseshell-framed glasses, sporting a handsome mustache, and dressed in a smart black morning coat while carrying a fashionable briefcase—settled into the chair before the manager with an air of practiced ease.
Then, taking an expensive Egyptian cigarette from his cigarette case, he deftly struck one of the matches provided with the desk ashtray and blew a puff of bluish-tinged smoke right before the manager's nose.

“Your esteemed opinion regarding your workers’ treatment.”

With a reporter’s characteristic blend of overbearing confidence and an almost childlike, ingratiating manner—uttering some vague preamble—the man began like this.

The manager then proceeded to hold forth at length about labor issues—likely expounding on labor-capital cooperation and paternalistic policies—but as this has no bearing on our story, we shall skip over it. After spending roughly thirty minutes in the manager’s office, the journalist excused himself with a “Pardon me for a moment” to visit the restroom and promptly vanished.

The manager, merely thinking him a rude fellow, paid no particular mind and headed to the cafeteria as it was lunchtime. But shortly thereafter—as he sat stuffing his face with what was likely a steak ordered from a nearby Western restaurant—the accounting chief came rushing before him pale-faced to report:

“The money for paying wages has disappeared.”
“It was stolen!”

he said.

When the shocked manager abandoned his meal and came to investigate the scene where the money had disappeared, he was able to reconstruct the details of this sudden theft as follows.

At that time, with the factory’s office undergoing renovations, the payroll calculation work—which would normally have been conducted in a specially secured room—was being temporarily carried out in the reception room adjacent to the manager’s office that day. Yet during the lunch break, through some oversight, this reception room had been left unattended.
The clerks, each assuming someone else would stay behind, had all gone to the cafeteria without exception, leaving bundles of bills overflowing from the China bag abandoned in that unlocked room for nearly half an hour.
During that interval, someone must have slipped in and made off with the large sum of money.
Moreover, they hadn’t touched the portion already placed in pay envelopes or the smaller denomination bills, taking only the bundles of twenty-yen and ten-yen notes from the China bag.
The total loss amounted to approximately fifty thousand yen.

They investigated various leads, but ultimately concluded that the newspaper reporter from earlier was suspicious.
When they called the newspaper company, as expected, the reply came that no such man existed among their full-time employees.
There was a great commotion with them calling the police, since they couldn’t delay paying the wages, and requesting the bank to prepare new twenty-yen and ten-yen notes—resulting in a tremendous uproar.

The man who had claimed to be a newspaper reporter and engaged the good-natured manager in that fruitless debate was none other than the great thief whom the newspapers of the time had sensationalized with the honorific title "Gentleman Thief."

Now, when the judicial officer and others from the jurisdictional police station conducted an inspection and investigated, they found not a single clue.
Since he was a thief meticulous enough to even prepare a newspaper company’s business card, he wasn’t someone who could be caught through conventional means.
There couldn’t possibly be any evidence left behind.
The one thing known was the man’s appearance and demeanor as remembered by the manager, but these proved woefully unreliable.
This was because clothing could of course be changed, and even the tortoiseshell-framed glasses and mustache that the manager had presented as critical clues were, upon reflection, among the most commonly used tools for disguise—thus rendering them equally unreliable.

And so, having no other recourse, they went around questioning all those people—nearby rickshaw pullers, tobacco shop proprietors, street vendors—asking one by one whether they’d seen a man matching such-and-such description, and if so, which direction he had gone.
Naturally, this physical description circulated to every police box in the city.
In other words, a security cordon had been established—yet yielded no leads.
One day passed, then two, then three—every possible measure had been exhausted.
Guards were posted at every railway station.
Telegrams requesting cooperation were dispatched to police stations across every prefecture.

A week passed in this manner, yet the thief remained at large.
It began to seem hopeless.
It began to seem there was nothing to do but wait for that thief to be arrested for some other crime he might commit.
From the factory office, day after day, calls were made to the police station as if reproaching their negligence.
The police chief was troubled as if it were his own crime.

Amidst this state of despair, a single detective from the same station was meticulously visiting every tobacco shop in the city, one by one.

In the city, there were tobacco shops in each ward that stocked a standard selection of imported cigarettes—dozens in the busier areas, and around ten even in the quieter ones.
The detective had almost finished visiting them all, and now only the Ushigome and Yotsuya districts in Yamanote remained.

The detective—who had resolved that failure to find his target after combing through both districts today would mean true despair—walked with a feeling akin to checking lottery numbers, an ambiguous blend of hope and dread.
Occasionally stopping at police boxes to ask officers about tobacco shop locations, he trudged onward.
The detective’s mind overflowed with FIGARO. FIGARO. FIGARO.—the name of those Egyptian cigarettes.

However, it was when he was walking along that main street from Iidabashi’s tram stop toward Kagurazakashita, intending to visit a tobacco shop located in Ushigome’s Kagurazaka. The detective suddenly came to a halt in front of an inn. This was because, on the granite paving stone that doubled as a sewer cover in front of the inn, there lay a cigarette butt so inconspicuous that only an exceptionally observant person would have noticed it. And lo, it turned out to be none other than the very Egyptian cigarettes the detective had been searching for throughout the city.

Now, this single cigarette butt provided the lead that finally landed even the formidable Gentleman Thief behind bars. Yet the process from butt to arrest held such detective-story-like intrigue that a newspaper at the time serialized the achievements of a certain detective involved—indeed, my own account here is based on those very articles—though I regret that haste forces me to present only the simplest conclusion here.

As the reader may have surmised, this admirable detective launched his investigation from the unusual cigarette butt that the thief had left behind in the factory manager's office.
He had nearly completed rounds of every major tobacco shop across all wards, but even among stores carrying identical cigarettes, those that had recently sold FIGARO—a comparatively slow-selling brand even within Egyptian imports—proved exceedingly scarce, and all had sold them to buyers whose identities raised no conceivable suspicion.

However, on what was to be the final day—as I mentioned earlier—he happened to discover another of the same cigarette butts in front of an inn near Iidabashi and, on a mere hunch, decided to investigate that inn, which by sheer luck became the breakthrough that led to the culprit’s arrest.

After considerable struggle—such as finding that the tobacco’s owner lodging at the inn bore no resemblance to the description obtained from the factory manager—they ultimately discovered, beneath the charcoal brazier in the man’s room, irrefutable evidence: items of clothing like the morning coat used in the crime, tortoiseshell-framed glasses, and a fake mustache, thereby enabling them to arrest the so-called Gentleman Thief.

According to the thief’s confession during interrogation, on the day of the crime—having visited knowing it was the workers’ payday—he entered the adjacent accounting room during the manager’s absence and took the money. From the China bag that had contained only those items, he extracted a raincoat and hunting cap, then replaced them by stuffing part of the stolen bills into the bag. Removing his glasses and fake mustache, he wrapped his morning coat in the raincoat, swapped his bowler hat for the hunting cap, and fled through a different exit than he had entered while maintaining an innocent expression.
When questioned about how he had managed to smuggle out fifty thousand yen in small-denomination bills without arousing suspicion, the Gentleman Thief smirked triumphantly and replied as follows:

“We are made entirely of pockets.”
“As proof, examine the confiscated morning coat.”
“At first glance it looks ordinary, but it actually has hidden pockets wherever they could possibly be attached—just like a magician’s costume.”
“Hiding fifty thousand yen was child’s play.”
“Don’t Chinese magicians hide great bowls filled with water inside their very bodies?”

Now, had this theft case ended here, it would have been of little interest. But there was one peculiar aspect that set it apart from ordinary thefts.
And this is precisely what bears significant relation to the main thread of my tale.

The reason was that this Gentleman Thief never uttered a single word about where he had hidden the stolen fifty thousand yen.
Even when interrogated at the three checkpoints of police headquarters, prosecutor’s office, and courtroom—with tactics and approaches varied each time—he stubbornly maintained his ignorance.
And in the end, he even began spouting such nonsense as claiming he had squandered it all within a mere week.

For their part, the authorities had no choice but to rely on detectives’ efforts to locate the money. And it seems they searched extensively, but found nothing at all. Thus, the Gentleman Thief was sentenced to a rather heavy term of penal servitude on charges of concealing the fifty thousand yen.

The one in trouble was the victim’s factory.
For the factory, more than apprehending the culprit, they wanted the fifty thousand yen recovered.
Of course, the police hadn’t abandoned their search for the money, but their efforts felt rather half-hearted.
Consequently, the factory’s manager in charge announced a reward equivalent to 10% of any recovered amount for whoever discovered the money.
In other words—a five-thousand-yen bounty.

The somewhat interesting tale concerning Matsumura Takeshi and myself that I am about to tell occurred just as this theft case was unfolding in such a manner.

Part II

As I briefly mentioned at the beginning of this tale, Matsumura Takeshi and I had by then become utterly immobilized, writhing in the depths of poverty within a six-tatami room on the second floor of a geta shop in the outskirts.

But amid all this misery, there was one small mercy—it happened to be springtime.
This is a secret known only to the poor: from winter’s end to summer’s beginning, we paupers make our killing.
Or rather, feel as though we’ve profited.
For when warmth returns, we could haul off to the pawnshop’s vault all those winter necessities—haori coats, undergarments, even bedding and hibachi braziers in dire cases.
We too basked in this seasonal reprieve, managing to catch our breath—so long as we didn’t dwell on tomorrow’s uncertainties or next month’s rent.
And thus our circumstances improved enough that we could visit long-neglected bathhouses, get proper haircuts, and even splurge on sashimi with sake at eateries instead of our usual miso soup and pickles.

One day, when I returned from the public bathhouse steaming contentedly and plopped down before the battered, rickety lacquered desk, Matsumura Takeshi—who had remained alone in the room—asked me the following with a strange, somewhat excited expression.

"You're the one who placed this two-sen copper coin on my desk, aren't you? Where did you bring that from?"

"Ah, that was me. It's the change from when I bought cigarettes earlier."

“Which tobacco shop?”

“The one next to the eatery—that gloomy place where the old woman is.”

“Hmm, I see.”

For some reason, Matsumura fell into deep thought. And he continued to press relentlessly about that two-sen copper coin.

“At that time—when you bought the cigarettes—was there anyone else outside?”

“As far as I recall, there didn’t seem to be anyone there."
“That’s right."
"There’s no way there was anyone."
“At that time, that old woman was dozing off.”

Hearing this answer, Matsumura seemed relieved.

“But aside from that old woman, what sort of people work at that tobacco shop?”
“Don’t you know anything about it?”

“I’m rather chummy with that old woman.”
“Her perpetually sour mug happens to align with my abnormal predilections, you see.”
“That’s why I’m quite well-informed about that shop.”
“Apart from her, there’s only an old man even more dismal-looking than she is.”
“But what exactly are you after with these questions?”
“Have you gone off your rocker?”

“Ah, never mind.”
“I have my reasons.”
“By the way, if you’re so knowledgeable about it, why not tell me more about that tobacco shop?”

“Sure, I can tell you.”
“Between the old man and the old woman, they have a daughter.”
“I’ve caught sight of their daughter once or twice—decent looks, I tell you.”
“She’s apparently married into a prison supplier or something.”
“The prison supplier’s doing quite well for himself, so with those remittances, that gloomy tobacco shop’s somehow managing to stay afloat—or so the old woman told me once.…”

Just as I began explaining about the tobacco shop—to my astonishment—Matsumura Takeshi stood up as if declaring he no longer wished to hear it, despite having asked me to share this information moments earlier.
And then, he began lumbering from corner to corner across the not-particularly-spacious tatami room, exactly like a bear in a zoo.

The two of us had always been rather capricious individuals.
For us to suddenly stand up mid-conversation wasn’t particularly unusual.
However, Matsumura’s demeanor in this instance had changed to such an extent that it rendered me speechless.
Matsumura proceeded to pace back and forth across the room—this way and that—for approximately thirty minutes.
I remained silent, watching with a certain interest.
Had there been a bystander to witness that spectacle, they would undoubtedly have deemed it utterly deranged.

In the midst of all this, I grew hungry.
It was exactly dinnertime, and having bathed, I felt all the hungrier.
When I suggested to Matsumura—still continuing his deranged pacing—that we go to the eatery, his reply was: “Apologies, but you go alone.”
Reluctantly, I did as he said.

Now, when I returned from the eatery with a full stomach—to my astonishment—Matsumura had called an anma and was getting a massage.
A young student from the blind-deaf school—who had once been our regular—clung to Matsumura’s shoulder while chattering away in his usual manner.

“You mustn’t think this is extravagant.”
“There’s a reason for this.”
“Well, just stay quiet and watch for a bit.”
“You’ll understand soon enough.”

Matsumura spoke preemptively, as if to forestall any criticism from me.
After all, it was undeniably extravagant at this juncture that the lifespan of our shared funds—barely twenty yen obtained yesterday by practically strong-arming the pawnshop clerk—would be shortened by a mere sixty sen for a massage fee.

I felt a certain indescribable interest in these extraordinary attitudes of Matsumura. So I sat down at my own desk and pretended to be engrossed in reading an old storybook I’d bought from a secondhand bookstore or something of the sort. In truth, I was stealthily observing Matsumura’s behavior.

After the anma left, Matsumura too sat down at his desk and seemed to be reading something written on a scrap of paper, but before long he took out another scrap from his pocket and placed it on the desk. It was extremely thin—a small piece about seven centimeters long—entirely covered with fine characters. He appeared to be intently comparing and studying these two paper fragments. Using a pencil, he wrote and erased something in the margins of the newspaper, wrote and erased again.

As all this was happening, the lights came on; a tofu vendor’s trumpet passed along the main street; a stream of people, likely heading to some temple festival, continued for a while before dying out; and when it did, the plaintive reed pipe of a Chinese soba shop could be heard—before I knew it, night had deepened.
Yet Matsumura remained engrossed in this strange work, even forgetting meals.
I silently laid out my bedding, flopped down onto it, and—bored as I was—had no choice but to reread that same old storybook I’d already finished.

“You don’t happen to have a map of Tokyo, do you?”

Suddenly, Matsumura said this and turned toward me.

“Well, I don’t have such a thing. Why don’t you ask the landlady downstairs?”

“Hmm, I suppose so.”

He immediately stood up and went down the creaking ladder steps, soon returning with a Tokyo map that had torn along one of its folds. Sitting back down at his desk, he resumed his fervent research. I watched his demeanor with ever-intensifying curiosity.

The clock downstairs struck nine.
Matsumura, his long period of research having apparently come to a pause, stood up from his desk and sat down by my pillow.
And with a slightly hesitant manner,

“Hey, could you just hand over about ten yen?”

he said.
I harbored a profound interest in these mysterious actions of Matsumura’s—aspects still concealed from the reader—that belonged to me alone.
Therefore, I raised no objection to giving him ten yen—a sum that, for us at the time, amounted to half of our entire fortune.

Matsumura took the ten-yen note from me and, dressed in nothing but an old lined kimono and a crumpled hunting cap, left abruptly for parts unknown without saying a word.

Left alone, I began imagining various scenarios about Matsumura’s subsequent actions. And while smirking to myself, I eventually drifted drowsily into slumber. I had been dimly aware of Matsumura returning after some time through my half-dreaming haze, but from then on, I slept soundly until morning without knowing a thing.

Being quite the late riser that I was, when I awoke around ten o'clock, I was startled to find something strange standing by my pillow. For there stood a man dressed like a merchant—wearing a striped kimono with a stiff sash and sporting a dark blue apron—shouldering a small cloth bundle.

"What's with that weird face you're making?"
"It's me."

To my astonishment, it was this man who had spoken in Matsumura Takeshi's voice. Upon closer inspection, it was undoubtedly Matsumura, but his clothing being so completely different meant that for a while, I couldn't make sense of anything.

“What’s going on? And what’s with that cloth bundle on your back? What’s with that getup? I thought you were some shop manager or something.”

“Shh, shh! Keep your voice down!” Matsumura made a pressing-down gesture with both hands and whispered, “I’ve brought back an incredible souvenir.”

he declared.

“Did you go somewhere and come back this early?”

I too, drawn in by his strange behavior, unconsciously lowered my voice and asked.
Then Matsumura—his face brimming with an irrepressible smirk that kept overflowing no matter how he tried to contain it—brought his mouth right beside my ear and said in a voice even lower than before, so faint it might not have existed at all:

“Inside this cloth bundle here—you—is fifty thousand yen.”

Below.

As readers had likely already surmised, Matsumura Takeshi had brought back the fifty thousand yen that the Gentleman Thief had hidden away—retrieved from who-knows-where.
This was money that would entitle someone to a five-thousand-yen reward if delivered to his electric factory.
But Matsumura declared he had no intention of doing so.
He proceeded to explain his reasoning thus:

According to him, dutifully reporting this money would be not just foolish but downright perilous.
Here lay funds that even specialized detectives from that department had failed to uncover after nearly a month of searching.
"Even if we kept this money for ourselves, who'd suspect us? And honestly—wouldn't fifty thousand yen suit us better than some paltry five thousand?"

"But what's even more frightening is that bastard—the Gentleman Thief's revenge. This bastard is terrifying. If that bastard—no, that genius of wrongdoing one might rightly call him—were to learn we'd snatched this money he had hidden even at the cost of prolonging his prison term, he'd never let it stand—Matsumura spoke with something approaching reverence for the thief—yet even staying silent remained dangerous. Were we to return this to its owners and claim the reward money, Matsumura Takeshi's name would immediately appear in the papers. That would be tantamount to deliberately informing that bastard of the enemy's whereabouts—or so he argued."

“But at least for now, I’ve beaten that bastard. Ah, you see—I’ve beaten that genius thief! At this point, fifty thousand yen is certainly welcome, but more than that, I’m overwhelmed by this thrill of victory. My mind is sharp. At least admit it’s better than yours. What led me to this great discovery was the two-sen copper coin from your tobacco change that you left on my desk yesterday. The fact that I noticed that trivial detail about the two-sen copper coin—the one you overlooked—and from just a single two-sen copper coin, look here, unearthed fifty thousand yen—an amount two and a half million times greater! What does this prove? At least doesn’t this show my mind is superior to yours?”

If two somewhat intellectual young men were living together in a single room, it was only natural that a competition of wits would arise between them. Matsumura Takeshi and I, in those days, would often engage in vigorous debates during our idle hours. While chatting with such fervor, it wasn’t uncommon for dawn to break before we knew it. And so, Matsumura and I would insist, neither yielding an inch, that "I’m the smarter one." Thus, Matsumura sought to use this achievement—a truly grand one at that—as proof of which of our minds was superior.

“I get it, I get it.”
“Enough with your boasting—just explain how you got that money and lay out your reasoning.”

“Now, don’t rush me.
“Rather than that sort of thing, I want to think about how to use the fifty thousand yen.
“But to satisfy your curiosity, I suppose I’ll briefly give a simple account of my struggles.”

However, it goes without saying that this was not merely to satisfy my curiosity, but rather to gratify his own sense of pride.
Be that as it may, he began to recount what might be called his tale of tribulations in the following manner.
I was listening calmly from within the futon, gazing up at his chin area as it moved with triumphant vigor.

“After you went to the bath yesterday, while I was fiddling with that two-sen copper coin, I noticed something odd—there was a single groove running around its edge.”
“Thinking this strange, I kept examining it when—to my astonishment—the coin split into two pieces.”
“Look here—this is it!”

He took the two-sen copper coin from the desk drawer and, twisting it like one would open a Hōtan container, separated its top from bottom.

“This, you see, is hollow inside.”
“It’s some kind of container made from a copper coin.”
“What exquisite craftsmanship! At a glance, it looks no different from an ordinary two-sen copper coin.”
“When I saw this, something occurred to me.”
“I once heard a story about a saw used by jailbreak experts.”
“It was apparently something they inserted into a container made by wearing down two copper coins—a thing resembling a Lilliputian band saw, with teeth attached to a pocketwatch spring. With just this, they could effortlessly cut through even the most heavily fortified prison’s iron bars and escape.”
“From what I hear, it apparently originated from foreign thieves.”
“So I imagined that this two-sen copper coin must have somehow slipped out from the hands of such thieves.”
“But strange things didn’t end there.”
“What I mean is—a single sheet of paper emerged from inside it, one that provoked my curiosity even more than the two-sen copper coin itself.”
“This is it!”

It was that thin small piece of paper Matsumura had been earnestly studying the night before.
On the tissue-like Japanese paper—roughly two and four-tenths sun (about 7.3 centimeters) in size—there was something incomprehensible scribbled in fine script as follows.

Da, Mu Mi Butsu, Namu Mi Butsu, A Da Butsu, Mi, Mu Amida, Mu Da, Mi, Mu Mida Butsu, Mu Da, Da, Namu Da Butsu, Namu Butsu, Da, Mu Amida, Mu Da, Nan Butsu, Nan Da, Mu Mi, Mu Amida Butsu, Mi, Nan A Da, Mu A Mi, Nan Da Butsu, Nan Amida, A Da, Nan Mi, Namu Mi Butsu, Mu Amida, Namu Mida, Nan Mi, Namu Mi Butsu, Mu Amida, Namu Da, Namu A, A Da Butsu, Mu A Mi, Nan A, Nan A Butsu, Da, Nan A Da, Namu, Mu Mi Butsu, Nan Mi Butsu, A Mi, Mi, Mu Mida Butsu, Mu Da, Namu Amida, A Da Butsu,

“What do you suppose this monk’s delirious muttering is?”
“At first, I thought it was just a scribble.”
“I thought maybe some thief repenting his past crimes had written down a bunch of *Namu Amida Butsu* to atone for his sins.”
“And I thought someone might’ve put this inside the copper coin instead of jailbreak tools.”
“But even so, it’s strange none spell out ‘Namu Amida Butsu’ properly.”
“Fragments like ‘Da’ or ‘Mu Mi Butsu’—they all stay within those six characters, but not one completes them.”
“Some were single-character snippets, others four or five.”
“That’s when I sensed this wasn’t random scribbling.”

Just at that moment came the sound of you returning from the bathhouse.
I hurriedly hid the two-sen copper coin and that paper fragment.
Why did I go and hide them?
I don’t clearly understand why myself, but I probably wanted to keep this secret all to myself.
And once everything was revealed, I probably wanted to show it to you and boast about it.
But while you were climbing the ladder steps, a startlingly brilliant idea had flashed into my head.
That is, that Gentleman Thief.
I don’t know where he hid the fifty thousand yen in bills, but surely even that bastard wouldn’t plan to leave them untouched until his sentence was up.
Therefore, that bastard must have had someone—an underling or accomplice—to keep that money safe.
Now, supposing that bastard had been arrested unexpectedly and had no time to inform his accomplice of the fifty thousand yen’s hiding place—what then?
As for him, while in the detention center, he would have no choice but to find some way to communicate with his accomplice.
If this mysterious scrap of paper—whose nature remained unknowable—were indeed that message...

Such a thought had flashed through my head.
Naturally, it was pure conjecture.
But it was a rather naive fantasy.
“So that’s why I asked you those questions about where the two-sen copper coin came from.”
“But you’re the one who said the tobacco shop’s daughter married into a prison supplier’s family, aren’t you?”
“If the thief in the detention center tries to communicate with the outside, using the supplier as an intermediary would be the easiest way.”
“And if, for some reason, that plan were to go awry, that communication should remain in the supplier’s hands.”
“If that message hadn’t been transported to the relatives’ house by the wife of that household, how could I claim otherwise?”
Well, I became completely engrossed.

Now, if these meaningless characters on this scrap of paper were indeed ciphertext, what would be the key to deciphering it? I paced around the room thinking. It proved quite difficult—even compiling everything yielded only the six characters of Namu Amida Butsu and commas. What kind of phrase could one possibly form with these seven symbols?

I had done some research on ciphertexts before. I'm no Sherlock Holmes, but I knew about a hundred and sixty cipher methods myself.
(See Dancing Men)

So I mentally reviewed every cipher method I knew, one by one.
Then I looked for one resembling this scrap of paper.
It took considerable effort.
I believe you suggested visiting an eatery around that time.
I refused and concentrated fiercely.
Ultimately I found just two methods with even partial similarities.

One was Bacon's two-letter cipher—a system using various combinations of just a and b to spell any phrase.
For instance, representing "fly" would require sequences like aabab, aabba, or ababa.

The other was one frequently used in political secret documents during the reign of Charles I—a method employing a set of numbers in place of the alphabet.
"For example."

Matsumura laid out a scrap of paper at the corner of the desk and wrote something like the following.

A B C D …………………………

1111 1112 1121 1211…………………………

“In other words, it’s a system where you replace A with 1111, B with 1112, and so on.”
“I imagined that this cipher, like those examples, was created by substituting the forty-eight *iroha* characters with various combinations of *Namu Amida Butsu*.”

Now then—the method for solving this—if this were English or French or German like in Poe’s *The Gold-Bug*, all I’d need do is hunt for ‘e’ and be done with it. But here’s the rub—this thing’s unmistakably Japanese. Just to be thorough, I tried Poe-style deciphering, but it didn’t crack at all. I came to an abrupt standstill there.

Six-character combinations, six-character combinations—that’s all I could think about as I paced around the room again. I considered whether there was some hint in the fact that there were six characters. And I tried to recall everything I could that was composed of six numbers.

While haphazardly listing things linked to the number six, I suddenly remembered Sanada Yukimura’s six-coin banner emblem—the rokuren-sen—that I’d encountered in kōdan tales. Though such a thing couldn’t possibly relate to the cipher, I found myself muttering “Rokuren-sen” under my breath all the same.

And then—and then it hit me.
As if by inspiration, something sprang forth from my memory.
That was braille used by the blind—its form resembling a scaled-down version of the six-coin banner.
I inadvertently exclaimed, “Brilliant!”
“But I mean, this is a fifty-thousand-yen problem we’re talking about here.”

I didn’t know much about braille, but I did remember that it involved combinations of six dots.
That’s why I immediately summoned an anma and had him teach me.
“This is the basics of braille that the anma taught me.”

With that, Matsumura took out a piece of paper from the desk drawer.
On it were neatly lined up the braille syllabary, voiced sound marks, semi-voiced sound marks, contracted sound marks, geminate consonant marks, long vowel marks, numbers, and so forth.

“If you now arrange ‘Namu Amida Butsu’ starting from the left—three characters per line in two rows—it will match this braille configuration.”
“Each character of Namu Amida Butsu corresponds to an individual dot in braille.”
“By doing so, the braille ‘a’ corresponds to ‘Namu,’ and ‘i’ corresponds to ‘Namu Amida’ through this mapping.”
“You just need to keep deciphering it this way.”
“So this is the result of me solving the cipher last night.”
“The top line shows the original Namu Amida Butsu arranged in braille’s pattern, the middle line aligns it with actual braille, and the bottom line is the decrypted text.”

With that, Matsumura once again took out a scrap of paper similar to the one before.

“Gokenchō Shōjikidō kara omochiya no satsu o uketore uketorinin no na wa Daikokuya Shōten.”
In other words: receive the toy bills from Shōjikidō in Gokenchō; the recipient’s name is Daikokuya Shōten.
The meaning was clear.
But why on earth would someone receive toy bills?
At this, I was made to think again.
However, I was able to solve this mystery relatively easily.
And I found myself deeply impressed by that Gentleman Thief’s intelligence, agility, and above all, his wit akin to a novelist’s.

“Ah, you—isn’t this toy bill business brilliant!”

I imagined it like this.
And fortunately, all of my assumptions proved correct.
The Gentleman Thief, anticipating every contingency, must have prepared the safest hiding place for the stolen money in advance.
Now then, the safest way to hide something in this world is to hide it without hiding it at all.
A method of hiding that involves exposing it in plain sight before everyone’s eyes yet ensures absolutely no one notices it—that is indeed the safest approach.

That fearsome fiend had noticed this point.
That’s what I imagine.
And he devised this ingenious trick involving toy bills.
I imagined that this Shōjikidō was likely a shop that printed things like toy bills—and I was right about that too—There, he had placed an order in advance for toy bills under the name Daikokuya Shōten.

Lately, it seemed toy bills indistinguishable from real ones had been popular in places like the flower-and-willow world.
Had I heard that from someone?
Ah, that was right.
"You told me about it once."
"Things like jack-in-the-boxes, clay-made sweets and fruits indistinguishable from real ones, snake toys—you said they were all stylish connoisseur's toys meant to surprise and delight young girls."
"So even if that thief ordered bills matching real ones in size, there'd be no reason for suspicion at all."

Having set this up, that thief likely stole the real banknotes and then sneaked into the print shop to swap them with the toy bills he had ordered.
This way, until whoever placed the order came to collect them, those fifty thousand yen in legitimate currency would remain safely stored as toy bills in the print shop's storage room.

This might just be my imagination.
But it was a highly plausible speculation.
At any rate, I resolved to put it to the test.
When I looked for the town called Gokenchō on the map, I found it was located within Kanda Ward.
Now came the actual retrieval of the toy bills, but this part proved unexpectedly tricky.
The reason being, I absolutely must not leave even the slightest trace that I was the one who went to retrieve them.

If they were to find out, just imagining what kind of revenge that terrible villain might take was enough to make a coward like me shudder.
At any rate, I had to make it appear as much as possible that it wasn’t me.
That’s why I went through such a disguise.
With that ten yen, I changed my appearance from head to toe.
“Take a look at this! Isn’t this a rather clever idea?”

With that, Matsumura grinned widely, showing off his perfectly aligned front teeth.
There, in the spot I had noticed earlier, a single gold tooth was glinting.
He looked triumphant as he removed it with his fingertip and thrust it before my eyes.

“This is something sold at night stalls—gold-plated tinplate.”
“Just a trinket you cap over the tooth.”
“A mere twenty-sen scrap of tinplate proves quite useful, you see.”
“A gold tooth draws people’s attention fiercely.”
“So if anyone comes looking for me later, they’d naturally take this gold tooth as their first clue—wouldn’t they?”
“With all this prepared, I set out early this morning for Gokenchō.”
“The one worry was payment for those toy bills.”
“I figured that thief must’ve paid upfront, fearing resale—but if not, we’d need at least twenty or thirty yen.”
“Unfortunately, we didn’t have that kind of cash on us.”
“Ah well—I decided to bluff my way through and went out.”
“Just as expected, the print shop handed over the goods without a word about payment.—And so I neatly intercepted the fifty thousand yen without a hitch.”
“Now—how to use it.”
“What do you think?”
“Any ideas?”

It was rare for Matsumura to become this excited and speak this eloquently.

I was utterly astonished by the power of fifty thousand yen. I had avoided describing it each time, but Matsumura's joyful demeanor as he recounted this tale of hardship was truly something to behold. He seemed to be making great efforts not to show his undignified joy, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't conceal the inexpressibly delighted smile welling up from the depths of his being.

The indescribable grins tinged with madness that kept slipping through his story struck me as rather dreadful.
Yet considering tales of paupers driven insane by winning thousand-ryō lottery tickets of old, Matsumura's rapture over fifty thousand yen wasn't unreasonable at all.

I wished this joy would last forever.
I wished it for Matsumura's sake.

But there was one fact I couldn't alter.
Laughter I couldn't suppress exploded forth.
I berated myself not to laugh, but the little mischief-loving demon inside me refused to relent and tickled me mercilessly.
I laughed in an even shriller voice, like someone watching the most absurd farce.

Matsumura stood dumbfounded, watching me laugh hysterically.
And then, with a face like he bumped into something strange, he said.
“What’s wrong with you?”

I finally stifled my laughter and answered him.

“Your imagination is truly remarkable.
“You’ve truly accomplished such a grand feat.
“I will surely come to respect your mind several times more than I ever have before.
“Indeed, as you say—I can’t match you in intelligence.
“But do you really believe reality is that romanticized?”

Matsumura did not reply and stared at me with a peculiar expression.

“In other words—do you truly believe that Gentleman Thief possesses such wit? I admit your imagination is flawless for a novel. But the world is more realistic than novels, you see. And if we’re going to discuss novels, there’s a point I want to draw your attention to—could there be another way to decipher this ciphertext? That is, whether there isn’t a possibility of retranslating what you deciphered. For example—couldn’t we read this text by skipping eight characters at a time?”

Having said this, I added marks like those on the left to Matsumura’s translated ciphertext.

ゴケンチョーショージキドーカラオモチャノサツヲウケトレウケトリニンノナハダイコクヤショーテン

“What a joke!
“You—what exactly is this ‘joke’ supposed to be?”
“What—could this be a coincidence?”
“Doesn’t this mean it’s someone’s prank?”

Matsumura stood up without saying a word. And then, he brought before me that furoshiki bundle he was utterly convinced contained a stack of fifty-thousand-yen bills.

“But what about this crucial fact?”
“Fifty thousand yen doesn’t materialize from novel pages!”

His voice carried a seriousness akin to that of settling matters through a duel.
I became frightened.
And I couldn’t help but regret the unexpectedly enormous consequences of my little prank.

“I’ve done something truly inexcusable to you. Please forgive me. What you cherished so dearly and brought here is, after all, toy bills. Well, go ahead and open it up to see for yourself.”

Matsumura untied the furoshiki bundle with a peculiar manner—like someone groping in darkness—a sight that made me feel increasingly sorry for him as it took considerable time. Inside lay two square packages carefully wrapped in newspaper. One had torn wrapping that revealed its contents.

“I opened this along the way and saw it with my own eyes.”

Matsumura spoke in a choked voice and then proceeded to completely remove the remaining newspaper.

That was an utterly convincing counterfeit.
At a glance, every aspect appeared to be the genuine article.
However, upon closer inspection, the surface of those bills had the character 團 printed large in place of 圓.
Not twenty yen or ten yen—twenty dan and ten dan.

Matsumura kept looking them over again and again, as though he couldn’t believe it.
As he did so, that shadow of a smile vanished completely from his face.
And afterward, a deep, deep silence remained.
I was filled with guilt.
I explained about the prank I had taken too far.
But Matsumura would not even listen.
He spent the entire day in silence, like someone who had lost their voice.

And so, this tale came to an end.

However, to satisfy you dear readers' curiosity regarding my prank, I had to provide a brief explanation.

The print shop called Shōjikidō was actually my distant relative.
One day, in a moment of desperate straits, I recalled that relative whom I had long neglected.
And so, thinking that if I could arrange for some money—no matter how much—I reluctantly visited them for the first time in ages.—Of course Matsumura knew nothing about this.—The loan request failed as expected, but at that moment I unexpectedly saw those toy bills being printed—ones indistinguishable from genuine currency.
And I heard these were an order from a longstanding client called Daikokuya.

I had conceived this foolish prank—linking my discovery to our daily discussions about that Gentleman Thief case—in an attempt to stage a little performance of my own.
That was because I, like Matsumura, had long yearned to obtain evidence that would demonstrate my intellectual superiority.

That clumsy ciphertext was of course my own creation.
However, I possessed none of Matsumura’s erudition regarding foreign cryptographic history.
It had been nothing but a passing whim.
The tale about the tobacco shop’s daughter marrying into a prison supply business? Pure fabrication.
To begin with, I seriously doubted that decrepit shop even had a daughter to begin with.

However, in this entire performance, what I found most precarious wasn’t any of these dramatic elements, but rather a single point—utterly realistic yet trivial when viewed as a whole, tinged with a touch of absurdity.
It was whether those toy bills I had seen would remain undelivered at the print shop until Matsumura went to retrieve them.

As for the payment for the toys, I hadn’t worried in the slightest. Not only did my relative have ongoing transactions with Daikokuya, but what made things even better was that Shōjikidō employed extremely primitive, lax business practices—meaning Matsumura was unlikely to fail even without bringing Daikokuya’s owner’s receipt.

Finally, I regret that I must refrain from providing a detailed explanation here regarding the two-sen copper coin that served as the starting point for his trick. For if I were to write carelessly about this, the person who gave me that item might suffer unexpected repercussions in the future. Readers may simply assume that I had come into possession of it by chance.