[Holmes Detective Chronicles] Episode 28: A Study in Snowman

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Holmes Detective Chronicles: The Great Detective of London Reincarnates as an Edo Constable

Author: Conan Kidoyle

Episode 28: A Study in Snowman

~ A Study in Snowman ~

[Prologue: The London Era]

It was the end of January, 1895.

Snow had piled up in the Baker Street living room, a rare occurrence. London snow falls only a few times a year, but this year was exceptional; the streets outside the window and the bases of the gas lamps were all equally wrapped in white cotton.

I was spreading out a medical journal in front of the fireplace. Holmes was crawling on the floor, placing small glass fragments on a precision scale, measuring something.

"Holmes," I said. "What is the experiment today?"

"The specific gravity of glass beads," he replied. "There are small toy spheres called marbles. They look exactly the same on the outside, but their specific gravity differs slightly depending on the material. Between those mixed with lead and pure glass—"

"What is the purpose of that?"

"It is a case brought to me. By an antique dealer." Holmes looked up from the scale. "The other day, a certain university professor claimed that an ancient Roman glass bead had been mixed into a child's toy. The seller sold it as a mere toy, but the professor is a connoisseur of antiques. To the amateur eye, they are indistinguishable, but the specific gravity is different."

"An ancient treasure inside a toy?"

"That is not all," Holmes said, standing up and stretching in front of the fireplace. "The problem is where that toy shop sourced the glass bead. The seller's testimony keeps changing. Watson, when a secret lurks within a trivial object, it does not necessarily mean that everyone who touched it is lying. However, one person is definitely lying."

"And so, who is the culprit?"

"I do not know yet," Holmes said, looking at the snowy landscape outside the window. "But I have noticed something interesting. Behind this request lies a much larger web of human relationships. The toy shop, the antique dealer, and the professor—there is one more invisible person between these three."

That evening, we set out for Soho to visit the antique dealer.

The snow continued to fall. The snow piled on the streets was being trampled by carriage wheels and beginning to turn into ice. The carriage we were riding in suddenly lost control near Charing Cross. The horse slipped on the ice, the carriage tilted—and I was thrown into the snow along with the carriage body.

There was a sensation of slowly sinking into the white cold.

The coldness of the snow reached the depths of my consciousness from somewhere far away.

And then—everything became quiet.

[Main Story: The Incident in Edo]

—Narrated by Santa Wato—

When I woke up, I was in the snow.

It was cold. But it was somehow different from the coldness of the snow in London. London snow contains soot and turns gray, and when it begins to melt, it mixes with mud to become an ugly color. But the snow here is white. Looking around, the wooden fences, the groves of trees, and the cobblestones of the alley were all covered in an equally clean white.

I was standing in front of a nagaya.

A nagaya, as I have mentioned before, is a wooden apartment complex where Edo townspeople live. Multiple families live separated by a single wall. At this moment, I already understood through my reincarnation memories that this was the nagaya behind Kanda where I and Shichi Torikiri were staying.

"Santa."

I heard a voice and turned around to see Shichi Torikiri standing under the eaves of the nagaya. He was wearing a thick padded cotton haori over his kimono and had a kiseru pipe in his mouth. A padded cotton garment is a piece of clothing stuffed with cotton for protection against the cold, equivalent to a London coat, but much lighter and easier to move in.

"Santa, the snow has piled up," he said. "It's a winter that is truly typical of Edo."

"It snows in London, too."

"But they don't make things like that with London snow."

When I looked in the direction Shichi Torikiri indicated, I saw a white, round lump at the end of the alley.

A yukidaruma—I understood immediately.

It is a snow sculpture that Edo children make by rolling up fallen snow. They stack two snowballs, one large and one small, draw eyes and a mouth on the top ball with charcoal, and make arms out of twigs. The concept of the shape is similar to the snowman that London children make, but the Edo yukidaruma is modeled after Bodhidharma—the founder of Zen—with its face looking forward, and it has a unique, stout silhouette.

"It's cute," I said.

"Cute," Shichi Torikiri repeated. But there was a strange resonance in his voice, as if something was bothering him. "Perhaps. But that size—"

He said nothing more.

It was the next morning that the consultation for the case was brought to us.

The owner of an inn located east of Kanda, one of the post towns, sought help from Torikiri Shichi through the local constable in charge.

An inn, or 'hatago', is a lodging house that provides accommodation and meals, equivalent to an inn in London. Travelers in the Edo period were diverse, ranging from processions of samurai on 'sankin-kotai'—a system where feudal lords periodically traveled between Edo and their home provinces—to merchants on business and pilgrims, and inns accommodated all of them.

The owner, Kasuke, a small man of about sixty, sat respectfully before Torikiri Shichi and me, and said in a trembling voice,

"Please help me. Inside the snowman in front of my place..."

"A corpse appeared," Torikiri Shichi quietly continued for him.

Kasuke opened his eyes wide. "H-how did you know?"

"Rather than knowing, I simply deduced it," Torikiri Shichi replied. "Even though such a large snowman was built in the alley, there are no children around. Furthermore, the lower half of that snowman shows signs of having been rolled by human hands, rather than being formed by fresh snow piling up from above. The shape is unnaturally large, and the base is too tightly adhered to the ground. A normal snowman is made by rolling the base sphere, so the bottom forms a rounded arc. However, the bottom of that snowman is flat. It is as if something was placed inside before snow was piled up around the outside."

Kasuke gasped, his mouth opening and closing.

"Please continue," Torikiri Shichi said. "Who is the corpse?"

Later investigation revealed that the corpse was a man named Jinuemon, a farmer who had come from Joshu Ota—present-day Ota City, Gunma Prefecture.

Joshu is the old name for present-day Gunma Prefecture, located inland about 45 ri (approximately 170 kilometers) north of Edo. Ota was known as a production center for silk fabrics, and many farmers there raised silkworms to produce raw silk in the spring and went to nearby markets to sell it in the autumn.

Jinuemon had been staying at Kasuke's inn for three days. He was a man of about forty with a plain appearance, who spoke little, did not drink alcohol, and spent his days going out to the neighborhood and returning in the evening. Even when asked by the inn staff, he would only reply, "I have some business," and would not reveal what it was.

And last night—on the morning the snow had piled up, the inn staff found a large snowman built in the alley in front. At first, they thought children must have made it during the night, but because it was so large, Kasuke became suspicious and poked it with a long stick, revealing a frozen human foot from inside.

"What about the luggage in Jinuemon's room?" Torikiri Shichi asked.

"Well, you see..." Kasuke said, and continued as if it were difficult to say. "There are glass beads. A large quantity of them."

"Glass beads," I repeated.

"In London, we would call them marbles," Torikiri Shichi added from the side. "They are small glass spheres, used as children's toys. However, in Edo, they are also used as material for decorative items."

"Why would a farmer have a large quantity of glass beads?"

"That is the question."

We headed to the inn to examine the room Jinuemon had been using.

A room at an inn is different from a guest room at a London inn. Instead of a bed, you sleep on a futon laid out at night in a room covered with tatami—flat mats with a rice straw core. There is almost no furniture, and travel luggage is placed in a kōri—a basket-like travel bag woven from bamboo or willow—in the corner of the room.

Inside Jinuemon's kōri, in addition to a change of clothes and a small amount of food, there were a large number of glass beads in a cloth bag. Counting them, there were about three hundred. It was clearly too large a quantity for a simple toy.

Torimushichi picked up the glass beads one by one with his fingertips and held them up to the light.

"Santa, look at this," he said, handing one to me.

The bead was slightly heavier than the others. And inside, there was a fine golden swirl pattern.

"It's beautiful," I said.

"It is, isn't it," Torimushichi said, returning the bead. "This isn't just a toy. It's a custom-made decorative piece crafted by a artisan from Kutani or Arita. A single bead costs dozens of times more than a regular glass bead. Jinuemon was collecting these. But why would a farmer need such an item?"

"A gift?"

"Or perhaps, for repayment."

Torimushichi said nothing more.

The next day, Torimushichi left in the morning without telling me anything.

When he returned in the evening, his eyes held that unique, quiet light that appeared when the threads of a case had come together.

"Santa," he said, sitting down on the wooden veranda of the tenement house. "I went to Shinagawa."

Shinagawa is a post town located at the southern edge of Edo, flourishing as the first post station on the Tokaido road. It is the first place travelers heading down the Tokaido from Edo stay, and it was also famous for its yūkaku—a pleasure district where courtesans were kept. A yūkaku was a type of sex industry managed by the Edo shogunate, where women took customers as 'jorō' (courtesans). Women who found themselves here were often sold to pay off debts, and 'miuke'—paying a ransom to free them from the yūkaku—was the only way to gain their freedom.

"What were you doing in Shinagawa?"

"I met a man named Toyokichi, a metalwork artisan," Torimushichi replied.

A metalwork artisan is a craftsman who processes metal to make accessories—such as hairpins, obi clasps, and pipe fittings. They possess the skills to precisely process gold, silver, and copper, and are among the most highly skilled of Edo's craftsmen.

"Does this man named Toyokichi have a connection to Jinuemon?"

"One could say he did," Torimushichi said, taking a long puff from his pipe. "About half a year ago, Toyokichi ransomed a courtesan from a Shinagawa yūkaku. A woman named Okin. However, he didn't have enough money for the ransom, so he borrowed it from Jinuemon. Jinuemon is Okin's older brother. He helped Toyokichi in order to save his sister from the 'kukai'—a world of suffering, in this case, the yūkaku."

"I see. A bond between siblings."

“But the problem is that Toyokichi couldn't pay back that debt. Toyokichi is a skilled craftsman, but he loves gambling and spends every cent he gets. Jinemon came to Edo to press for payment—but he was killed by someone before he could meet Toyokichi.”

“Did Toyokichi kill him?”

“That is the question,” Torimushichi said. “Toyokichi knew that Jinemon had come to Edo. Last night, Toyokichi had an appointment to meet Jinemon. However, Toyokichi told me, ‘We met, and I apologized that I couldn't bring the money. Jinemon backed down for the time being.’ After that, Jinemon was killed in the snow.”

“Do you think Toyokichi is lying?”

“Toyokichi is not lying,” Torimushichi asserted.

I looked at him in surprise.

“Why can you say that so definitively?”

“The Nankin beads,” Torimushichi said quietly.

Torimushichi's explanation was as follows.

The custom-made decorative Nankin beads that Jinemon had been collecting. Three hundred of them. The price of a single bead was dozens of times that of an ordinary Nankin bead—in other words, the total value of the three hundred beads was by no means small.

But what is important is the maker of those Nankin beads.

As a result of Torimushichi's investigation in Shinagawa, there are only two craftsmen in and around Edo who can make those custom gold-leafed Nankin beads. One of them was the metalwork craftsman, Toyokichi.

“Jinemon had promised to accept the Nankin beads made by Toyokichi in place of the debt that Toyokichi could not pay in cash,” Torimushichi said. “Repaying with goods instead of cash is not unusual for craftsmen. And Toyokichi had delivered those Nankin beads to the inn in advance—before meeting Jinemon. In other words...”

“The Nankin beads in Jinemon's room were the repayment goods from Toyokichi.”

“Exactly. And that is proof that Toyokichi and Jinemon had settled things peacefully. There was no longer any reason for Toyokichi to kill Jinemon.”

I thought in silence.

“Then, who killed him?”

“There was a blade wound on Jinemon's body. But it wasn't a wound from a fight—it was a single thrust. A wound from a practiced hand,” Torimushichi said, slowly turning the bowl of his pipe with his finger. “Santa, there were several people besides Toyokichi who knew that Jinemon had come to Edo. The innkeeper, people in the neighborhood. But the most important thing is—who would be most troubled by Jinemon coming to collect the debt?”

“If it wasn't Toyokichi...”

“There is someone who lent money to Toyokichi,” Torimushichi said. “It is not unusual for a gambling-loving craftsman to take on another debt after a large expense, such as redeeming someone from a pleasure quarter. And if that lender is a loan shark—Jinemon receiving repayment from Toyokichi means that repayment to the loan shark is delayed.”

“In other words—the loan shark killed Jinemon?”

“That is the case. If Jinemon had accepted the repayment, Toyokichi’s debt repayment would have begun out of a sense of duty to Jinemon. The loan shark eliminated Jinemon before that could happen. And the reason he used the strange method of hiding him inside a snowman was—to buy time for the few days until the snow melted. A body in the snow would not be discovered until the snow melted. In the meantime, he could destroy the evidence.”

“But the snow melted the very next morning.”

“In Edo, most snow melts by the next day,” Torikiri Shichi said with a slight wry smile. “The killer’s calculations were off. Or perhaps he thought it would keep piling up for days, like the snow in London.”

The subsequent developments were swift.

The loan shark identified by Torikiri Shichi was a man named Misawa, who operated a money exchange business near Kanda. A money changer was a merchant whose business was exchanging gold, silver, and copper coins, possessing functions similar to a London bank, but they also engaged in money lending.

To explain the Edo monetary system briefly, multiple types of currency coexisted in this era. One ryo of gold coin was the basic unit, with one ryo divided into four bu, and one bu into four shu. Furthermore, the copper coin Kanei Tsuho was the smallest unit, the mon, and four thousand mon were roughly equivalent to one ryo. Money changers would convert these complex currencies to collect fees, while simultaneously lending money to earn interest. Loan sharks, in particular, lent money at exorbitant rates and seized property or labor from those who could not repay.

At the magistrate’s examination, Misawa initially denied any involvement, but when Torikiri Shichi carefully unraveled the threads of evidence tied to the glass beads, he eventually confessed everything.

Afterward, Toyokichi ended up repaying his debt to the money changer Misawa little by little by diverting the repayment he was supposed to receive from Jinemon. I heard from the official in charge later that the woman named Okin was living quietly by her husband Toyokichi’s side.

“What kind of person was Jinemon in the end?” I asked Torikiri Shichi after the case.

“He was an older brother who came from a distant land as a debt collector for his sister’s sake,” Torikiri Shichi replied. “But by accepting the glass beads, he likely intended to cancel the debt. He had no intention of collecting it forcefully. That kindness—was what cost him his life.”

I remained silent for a while.

“He probably never thought he would be hidden inside a snowman.”

“No one would,” Torikiri Shichi said, looking at the white alley outside the window. “But snow melts. Even if you hide something, what is meant to disappear will not. What is meant to remain will remain.”

The snow in front of the tenement house was quietly beginning to melt under the spring-like midday sun.

[Conclusion: The London Era]

When I realized it, I was in the living room on Baker Street.

The fireplace was burning red. Snow had piled up outside the window. Holmes was sunk deep into his chair in front of the fireplace, his eyes closed.

“Holmes,” I said.

“I am awake,” he replied. Without opening his eyes.

I had a dream of Edo. It was a story about a corpse found inside a snowman.

I had the same dream, Holmes said, slowly opening his eyes. But Watson, there is something that bothers me. The glass bead.

How does it bother you?

The glass bead on the scale, Holmes said, looking at the scale on his desk. That experiment where we were measuring specific gravity. I feel that it—and the glass bead from Edo—are connected somehow.

Connected?

I do not know, Holmes said quietly. But when a dream poses the same question, there is some reason for it. Watson, have you ever considered how great a secret might be hidden in the weight of a single glass bead?

I have not, I answered honestly.

You should think about it tonight.

Holmes closed his eyes again.

Outside the window, the London snow was slowly beginning to melt. The heat from the gas lamp caused the snow piled on the window ledge to flow down in a single stream of water.

Even if you hide it, what is meant to disappear will disappear.

Those words melted quietly in front of the fireplace.

This work is written with respect and gratitude to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle and Hanshichi Torimonocho by Kido Okamoto.
Written by: Conan Kidoyle

Author: Conan Kidoyle

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