The Red Locked Room Read online

  His best novel-length exploit is The Villa Lilac Case (Rira-sō Jiken). There are few novels, both in and outside Japan, which can come close to this masterpiece about a series of murders in a mountain villa.

  As the title The White Locked Room (1958) suggests, this story has the problem of ‘no footsteps in the snow’ as its theme. One victim and one witness are found in a house surrounded by snow. If the witness is innocent, the murder becomes an impossible crime. Both the solution and the true meaning hidden within the eccentric and almost prophetic questions asked by Hoshikage are sure to shock readers. Perhaps they might also think that Ryūzō Hoshikage reminds them of Sir Henry Merrivale or Dr. Gideon Fell after a successful diet.

  The Blue Locked Room (1961) may not have some grand-scale idea, but the twisty solution is highly enjoyable. The culprits in the Red and White locked rooms go through a great deal of trouble to create their locked rooms, but that is not the case here. But what is the meaning behind that? The way the mystery is presented and the skill with which the author plays with logic is impressive.

  The Clown in the Tunnel (1958) is about an impossible disappearance. A clown suddenly appears in a house where musicians live and, after attacking people there and killing one person, he disappears equally quickly. He escapes through a narrow passage, basically a tunnel, but nobody sees him leave from the other side. In order to solve the apparent miracle, perhaps one might even be tempted to turn to the author’s other detective for help.

  The Red Locked Room (1954) is the best-known short story featuring Hoshikage and is undoubtedly one of the greatest impossible crime stories ever written in any language. How could a dismembered body have been introduced into an autopsy room completely locked from the inside save for a small air vent? The crime appears to be utterly impossible, but Hoshikage’s deductions slowly unravel the mystery. While the brilliant solution will surely surprise, many a reader will wonder how they missed the many clues dangled in front of them.

  Now let me introduce Chief Inspector Onitsura. The rational and cool-headed police detective decided to go to Northeast China due to a broken heart. As an officer of the Japanese police force, he was first posted in Harbin and later Dalian, where he solved several cases. Upon his return to Japan, he was assigned to the Metropolitan Police Department. He had spent much of his younger days abroad, so his intelligent, gentlemanly attitude is more reminiscent of an inspector of Scotland Yard when compared to his Japanese colleagues.

  Onitsura has a partner in his subordinate, Detective Tanna. Interestingly, Chief Inspector Tadokoro, who brings Ryūzō Hoshikage most of his cases, is a direct colleague of Onitsura, so perhaps Onitsura has met Hoshikage.

  Whose Body? (1957) gives one a miraculous taste of how the impossible becomes possible. One could say this story does not feature any locked rooms or fabricated alibis, but one could also claim that’s not exactly correct. The story features a Grand Guignol-worthy tragedy and a relentless stream of mysteries offered by the suspects. With what prop is Tetsuya Ayukawa deceiving the reader? Time? Space? Characters? In any case, this is a story that makes you realise how far an author specialising in illusions and surprise can go.

  Death in Early Spring (1958) involves a perfect alibi. A crime which seemed utterly impossible time-wise, suddenly becomes possible simply by changing the viewpoint ever so slightly. In the eyes of Tetsuya Ayukawa, an alibi is basically a “locked room in time.” A locked room on the other hand is an “alibi in space.” It is therefore only natural he was such a master of both the alibi trick and the locked room mystery.

  The Five Clocks (1957) is a masterpiece written at the request of Edogawa Rampo. The manner in which Ayukawa managed to include such an intricate fabricated alibi and the solution to the problem within the restraints of so few pages makes one think of precision machinery. In order to save a person framed for a murder he did not commit, Onitsura has to break down the alibi of the real culprit. An alibi protected completely by five separate clocks. Each step in the solving process is imposing, but the wit of the whole deal when everything is revealed also invites a smile.

  I hope you too can now agree with the statement that Tetsuya Ayukawa is the Japanese honkaku mystery story. This collection only offers a glimpse of his oeuvre. He has also written for television, radio and YA audiences, and naturally basically all of this output too belongs to the mystery genre. I can only hope that the publication of this short story collection will lead to more of his work being published in English.

  Tōkyō, 2020.

  Addendum.

  The initial selection of stories for this collection was conducted by Alice Arisugawa and Taku Ashibe. Five stories each were chosen from the Onitsura and Hoshikage series, as well as one non-series story. It was decided to not pick stories from the Number 3 series until the final page count of the collection was decided upon. Ashibe wrote summaries for the eleven selected stories, which were translated by Ho-Ling Wong. The final selection of the stories to be included was made by Ashibe and Wong.

  The White Locked Room

  1

  It had been snowing since noon due to a weather front, but nobody had foreseen how high the snow would pile up. At first the snow was powdery, dropping gently from the sky, but by the evening, the flakes had become as large as the feathers of swans. Just as it seemed likely that the snowfall would continue through the night, it suddenly ceased before nine o’clock. As usual, the forecast from the Meteorological Agency had been completely wrong. Although their misreading was understandable, as they lacked sufficient data, the officials at the Agency must have been quite embarrassed by the sheer amount of snow that fell. It was almost sad to hear them being accused of squandering taxpayers’ money. Yet it was those very same meteorologists who played a vital role in the incident, subsequently dubbed “The White Locked Room Murder Case,” by correctly recording the exact time the snow stopped as 8:40 p.m.

  It was the night after a full moon, and after the snow had stopped, its bright face shone from between the clouds as if to laugh at the agency officials. Like a giant spotlight hanging above a children’s theatre play, it cast a dreamlike cream colour on the metropolis, making Professor Zama’s snow-covered home in Nishi-Ōkubo look like the perfect Christmas picture. He had a fancy cottage-like house, befitting someone who had lived for a long time in Europe, and a garden of over 600 square metres with several Himalayan cedars.

  The pale illumination from an 80w light hanging on the porch reached about half the garden.

  Kimiko Satō stood on the porch and stamped a few times on the floor to get the snow off her boots. She placed a slender finger on the white button on the wall and pressed it. She could faintly hear the noise of a buzzer inside, but there was no answer. She waited a minute and pressed the button again, but again there was no answer. Only at the third attempt did she hear a reaction from inside.

  A man with a long, pale face and protruding teeth answered the door. She had never seen him before. He was wearing a beret and appeared to be about forty years old. He was not the person she had expected to appear, so she reflexively stepped back from the door. Professor Zama had been single his whole life and it had always been he who answered the door, as he had no wife or housekeeper.

  ‘Excuse me, is the professor at home?’

  ‘He’s here, but I am afraid he’s in no condition to see you,’ the man replied bluntly. His unfriendly face betrayed feelings of confusion. Kimiko frowned as she detected the smell of alcohol on the man’s breath. There’s no smell as unpleasant to those who don’t drink as the odour of stale alcohol.

  ‘Why, is there something wrong with him?’

  ‘You could say that. He’s dead.’

  ‘When did that happen? Was he ill?’

  ‘No, he was murdered. I only got here just now. It gave me the shock of a lifetime. I was just about to phone the police.’

  Kimiko would have cried out, but her lips were dry.

  ‘Are you a student at the Kyōwa Women’s Medical U
niversity?’ the man asked, after noticing the badge on her overall.

  ‘Yes. I attend the professor’s seminars.’

  ‘A doctor in training? Perfect. Could you please come inside? We’d better make sure it was murder before phoning the police.’

  Without waiting for Kimiko’s reply, he turned and went into the study next to the entrance hall.

  The night was silent because of the snow. But the silence in the house was different: it was painful. Kimiko could feel it in every hair on her body, affecting all her nerves. A pair of wet shoes had been tossed carelessly on the tiled floor of the entrance hall. Kimiko removed her own boots, placed them next to the shoes, and went into the study. She had visited the house several times previously with her fellow students and was already familiar with its layout.

  The thick curtains of the large window facing the garden had been drawn shut. The study was a business-like room devoid of any feminine touch, with three of the walls hiding behind thousands of medical books. A large table and swivel-chair had been placed in front of the window and the gas heater nearby was puffing noisily.

  The professor was lying face down in front of a sofa opposite the window. The pool of blood that had coloured his charcoal grey jacket red had also covered the edge of the green carpet, the mosaic floor and the legs of the sofa. Kimiko could feel herself getting tense but, as expected of a medical student, she managed to inspect everything calmly, as if she were accustomed to such a sight.

  ‘There’s no weapon, so I think it’s probably murder.’ The man, who was standing near the wall, had spoken so softly Kimiko could hardly understand him. She didn’t answer immediately, first taking a closer look at the wound in the professor’s back.

  ‘Yes, it must be murder. Even if there had been a weapon here, no one could have stabbed themselves at such an angle.’

  ‘Very well. We’ll have to call the authorities.’

  He stepped around the feet of the body and picked up the receiver of the telephone on the table with a handkerchief. Kimiko absently watched the movements of his fingers as he dialed the number.

  2

  The following is a reprint of an article entitled The White Locked Room, originally published in the January issue of the middle-brow magazine New Century, and written by its editor-in-chief Nobuo Mine. Due to page constraints, the article has been shortened.

  I was the moderator in the discussion between Professor Zama and the spirit mediums published elsewhere in this issue, but only heaven could have foreseen that, on the following night, I would be confronted with the professor’s death. I had called the professor that evening because I wanted him to proofread the article I had written based on the aforementioned discussion, and was told that I could come at nine-thirty. If I am allowed to express my personal feelings here, I have to confess that, while the professor had scolded me occasionally, he had really looked after me during these last ten years when we worked together, and I am deeply moved now knowing that the phone call would be the last time I would ever hear the professor’s voice. Setting aside his academic achievements, the professor was also a gentleman of strict principles, who did not accept any ambiguities of conduct.

  I arrived at the professor’s house in Nishi-Ōkubo about three minutes before my nine-thirty appointment. The gate was open, so I made my way through to the garden to the porch, and rang the bell as always. Looking back, I realise that my sixth sense had already noticed something out of the ordinary had occurred. There was no answer despite my constant ringing, and, when I tried turning the door knob, it opened without any trouble. Leaving the door unlocked was unlike the professor, who was cautious by nature. I became more suspicious and called out several times before removing my shoes and entering the study, where I discovered the appalling sight of the deceased professor.

  I was absolutely stunned. I had heard the professor’s lively voice a mere two hours before, so I could not believe he had committed suicide. But if it was murder, who was the murderer? The outrage welling inside me made me temporarily forget my duty. I was only brought back to my senses by the noise of the doorbell being rung by someone at the porch. I might sound like a coward, but for a moment I felt nothing but fear that the murderer might have returned. Of course, thinking about it calmly, even if the murderer had some reason to return, he would hardly have rung the bell first. To be fair, it was no wonder I could not think clearly, as I was standing in front of a blood-stained corpse.

  If the murderer had come back, I had to hide somewhere. I harboured feelings of intense anger against him, but it was up to the authorities to judge him and it was not my place to avenge the professor there and then. I looked for some place to hide in the room, but the doorbell kept on ringing incessantly. When I finally gave up and answered the door, I found, not the killer, but a beautiful young girl. As soon as I noticed the school badge of Kyōwa Women’s Medical University, where the professor taught, pinned to her chest, I could feel all the tension ebb away from my body out of relief. I had expected a dangerous killer, so it was quite a surprise to find a beautiful specimen of the fair sex at the door.

  I had her examine the body and, after she determined it was indeed murder, I called the police. I was later asked by the police why I had not informed them at once, but I knew of past incidents where a suicide had been reported erroneously as a homicide, and that had acted as a psychological brake.

  I made my call at nine thirty-five. The loud sirens of the police car that arrived five minutes later actually calmed me. Almost immediately the patrol officers discovered an overcoat which had been left in the garden. They had only found the coat lying beneath the shrubs by accident, as they walked around my footprints and those of the student as a precaution.

  The student, who had been silent up until then, suddenly declared that it was the professor’s overcoat. The coat had looked familiar to me too, but what had caught my attention first was the blood on the coat. Unlike the student or the police, I was not used to the sight of blood and so I found the bloodstains intimidating.

  The patrol officers quickly grasped what had happened and used the phone on the desk to contact Investigative Division I of the Metropolitan Police Department. The student and I stood anxiously in a corner of the room as things developed.

  At about ten minutes past eleven, voices came from behind the house. The police detectives had come in through the rear entrance following the patrol officers’ warning about the footprints in front. The hulking plain-clothes detective standing in front of the officers in uniform and the forensic examiners in white coats was Chief Inspector Tadokoro, known to be one of the most impulsive men of Division I. I had met him myself a few times, so even when I was later put in a difficult spot, I was able to handle him relatively calmly.

  Even the most routine medical examination would probably look remarkably gruesome to the uninitiated like myself. A portly bearded police surgeon crouched across the body and performed a detailed examination. Then photographs were taken, fingerprints were checked and the professor’s remains were taken away. With the master of the house now absent, a sudden air of loneliness came over the study.

  Meanwhile, other forensic investigators and the chief inspector appeared to have been busy in the garden. I soon realised they were conducting an extensive examination of every trace left in the snow, including our footprints. Their meticulous examination determined that the only footprints were those of myself and the female student, and nobody else. The case was therefore theoretically an impossible crime. I was surprised to learn, a few days later, that Chief Inspector Tadokoro and forensic officials had actually considered the method used by the murderer in Carter Dickson’s novel The White Priory Murders, but had determined that the method would not apply to the Zama case.

  After the chief inspector concluded his investigation of the garden, he returned to the study to give orders to his detectives. As I watched them work, I realized that their orders were to search the house. As the chief inspector had not found any
footprints of the murderer leaving the premises, it was only natural to assume he might still be hiding somewhere in the house. I shuddered to think what might have happened if the murderer had shown himself before the patrol officers arrived. The student and I would most definitely not have been left unscathed. After an hour, the whole house had been searched, even the loft, but not even a mouse was found. While it relieved me to learn that the murderer was not in the house, it also meant that another possible solution to the impossible crime had been eliminated.

  3

  Questioning commenced around one in the morning. It was only then that I learned that the female student’s name was Kimiko Satō, aged twenty-one, and that she lived alone in an apartment in Tozuka. I don’t mind the company of a beautiful woman, no matter the occasion. Her large, deep eyes and small red lips, reminiscent of Western dolls, especially made an impression. Beneath her overcoat she wore a midnight-blue sweater and a camel skirt, a cute outfit which looked good on her.

  ‘Miss, what was the reason you went to visit the professor?’

  Even Chief Inspector Tadokoro spoke more softly when questioning a woman. He spoke in a coaxing manner, quite unbefitting his appearance.

  ‘I had some questions for the professor regarding my graduation thesis.’