[Holmes Detective Chronicles] Episode 21: The Sign of the Butterfly Battle

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

Author: Conan Kidoyle

Episode 21: The Sign of the Butterfly Battle

~ The Sign of the Butterfly Battle ~

[Opening: London Era]

It was a July evening in 1892.

The living room at 221B Baker Street was dyed gold by the setting sun. Holmes was at his workbench, stirring some brown powder in a test tube, and said as if to himself,

"Watson, have you ever considered the nature of crowd psychology?"

I settled into the sofa and opened the evening paper. "That is a matter of sociology, I should think. It is not my specialty."

"However," Holmes said, holding the test tube up to the light, "as a doctor, it should concern you as well. When people are in a group, they lose their individual judgment. Once they are convinced of a certain point, even if contradictory evidence is presented before their eyes, they become blind to it. Faith is the purest form of this."

"Are you criticizing religion?"

"It is not a criticism, but an observation," Holmes replied, setting down the test tube and turning around. "Regarding the evangelist I saw on Tottenham Court Road the other day—what he called a miracle in the crowd was actually a very simple ventriloquism. Yet, no one doubted it. People only see what they want to see."

"You are cold," I said.

"I am not cold, I am accurate," Holmes answered. "The power of human belief is beautiful. But there are those who exploit that beauty. That is the problem."

That night, we were caught in an explosion in Lambeth on the south bank of the Thames. The factory walls collapsed, and rubble rained down. There was a flash, a roar, and then—darkness.

When I came to, I was somewhere else entirely.

[Main Story: The Incident in Edo]

—Narrated by Wato Santa—

Summer in Edo is fundamentally different from that of London.

London's summer is damp and gray, but Edo's summer is white, bright, and heavy. The air itself is thick with heat that clings to your skin. By July, the cicadas are buzzing from morning, and even when evening comes, there is no sign of the heat letting up. As I sat down on a stone step by the roadside, wiping the sweat from my brow with a hand towel and feeling dazed, Torimushichi, who had already settled down next to me, was puffing on a kiseru pipe with a cool expression.

"Santa, this is Honjo," he said.

Honjo is the area on the east side of Edo, across the Sumida River. The sense of the river acting as a boundary between the inside and outside of Edo is similar to London, where the City and Southwark have different atmospheres across the Thames, but Honjo was a slightly remote area where samurai residences and commoners' townhouses were intermingled. Storehouses lined the banks of the Okawa, and narrow canals ran in every direction.

Torimushichi had his jitte tucked into his kimono sash again today, and he held a kiseru in his hand. The amount of tobacco you can smoke in a pipe from London days compared to a kiseru is like heaven and earth—a kiseru can only be packed with a tiny amount of shredded tobacco, and it turns to ash after one or two puffs. Therefore, Edo smokers are constantly tapping the bowl of their kiseru against a tobacco tray to knock out the ash and refill it. Torimushichi made this action a habit when he was deep in thought—with the exact same rhythm as when he used to twirl his pipe back in London.

"Has there been an incident?" I asked.

"One is about to happen."

"What?"

"The matter at Tatekawa," Torimushichi said, skillfully knocking the ash from his kiseru. "Haven't you heard?"

I shook my head. Ever since I was reincarnated into Edo, all my information has come through word of mouth. In London, there was The Times, The Standard, and newsboys shouting on the streets. Here, there is something called a kawaraban, but the content is mainly fires, double suicides, and ghost stories, so it can hardly be called systematic news.

"It seems it happened last June," Torimushichi began. "At Tatekawa in Honjo—a canal that flows near here—tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of butterflies swarmed. White butterflies, black butterflies, and butterflies of all colors flew as if to cover the surface of the river. This continued for two or three days."

"Butterflies..."

"It is a rare occurrence, but if you call it a natural phenomenon, it is a natural phenomenon. However, there is a nun named Zensho near here. She is a woman who has a small hermitage in Matsuzaka-cho and gathers believers by enshrining a statue of Benten, and it seems she said this."

Torimushichi changed his tone of voice and continued.

" 'The butterflies of Tatekawa are a sign of impending disaster. Something terrible will happen in this neighborhood soon.'—that is what she said."

"A prophecy?"

"A prophecy. And, quite obligingly, she announced that she would perform a great goma fire ritual for fifteen days to prevent that disaster."

A goma is a Buddhist ritual of the Esoteric sect, where sutras are chanted while firewood and incense are piled up and burned on a platform called a gomadan. In London terms, it has an impression similar to a solemn Catholic mass, but it has a stronger visual effect of flames and smoke, giving believers a powerful spiritual impression.

"Assuming the great goma ritual is fine," I said, "was the disaster prevented?"

"That is where it did not go so well. During the goma, Zensho suddenly hid the Benten statue. She said she had received a divine revelation that it must not be seen for one hundred days, and she forbade believers from approaching the inner sanctuary. The morning after the goma ended—when the believers forced their way into the hermitage, Zensho was gone. What was there instead was..."

Torimushichi continued quietly.

“The Benten statue is shining as always, and there is the headless corpse of a nun.”

I couldn't help but gasp.

“The head... is gone?”

“It is,” Torimushichi said flatly. “And while the statue is unharmed, Zensho’s head is nowhere to be found.”

The man who brought this case to us had come through connections with the Okappiki (detectives) in Honjo; he was a merchant in his fifties named Chubei who ran a rice shop near the Tatekawa River.

The chonin (townspeople) of Edo were a collective term for commoners living in the city who were neither samurai, farmers, nor monks. They included merchants, artisans, and bōtefuri—peddlers—and it was these people who effectively drove the Edo economy. They might be equivalent to the middle class in London, but under the system, they were placed below the samurai and were generally not permitted to have surnames.

Chubei sat on the edge of the nagaya (tenement) veranda, sweat glistening on his forehead, and spoke while fanning himself vigorously.

“I am also a believer in the Benten-do, and I have been greatly indebted to Zensho-sama. But now, such a terrible thing has happened...”

Benten-do refers to the faith that worships Benzaiten. Benzaiten is a goddess originally from India, said to preside over music and wealth, and she was particularly popular among merchants and entertainers in Edo. In London terms, it was a gentle and familiar religious sentiment, similar to the popular devotion to the Virgin Mary.

“What kind of person was Zensho?” I asked.

“He was a little over fifty, I suppose. I understand he originally came from outside Edo, but before we knew it, he had taken root in Honjo and built that hermitage. The blessings of Benten-sama are truly real; when my business was failing and I went to pray, it recovered the following month...”

Torimushichi placed his pipe on his knee and quietly interrupted.

“Are you aware of the incident three years ago where an offering thief died?”

Chubei’s eyes went wide. “You knew about that? The man who stole the offerings and even ate the sacrificial sweets died in agony from a stomach ailment—we all whispered that it was divine punishment.”

“Was there anything strange about that man’s death?”

“Strange...? No, I thought it was just retribution for doing something bad.”

Torimushichi said nothing. He simply tapped the bowl of his pipe quietly against the tobacco tray, and as he packed it with new shredded tobacco, he looked off into the distance.

I know that look. It is the same look he has had since our London days, the look he wears when he sees through something.

The next day, we visited Zensho’s hermitage in Matsuzaka-cho.

An iori (hermitage) originally refers to a simple hut in the mountains, but in Edo, it often refers to a small building used by commoners as a religious meeting place. As the name suggests, Zensho’s hermitage was modest; on a small plot of land surrounded by a wooden fence, there was a six-mat room that served as the main hall, followed by living quarters in the back.

A statue of Benten was enshrined at the front of the main hall.

It was a beautiful statue covered in gold leaf, and the figure of the goddess sitting cross-legged and holding a biwa certainly gave viewers an impression of divine efficacy. Compared to the altar statues in London churches, it was far smaller and far more dazzlingly golden.

"The headless body was discovered just before this inner sanctuary, correct?" I said.

"That is correct," replied one of the believers who had remained at the hermitage. "When we opened the doors in the morning, Zensho-sama was in front of the inner sanctuary... his face..."

"Where is the head?"

"We don't know. Not inside the hermitage, nor outside. It's as if," the believer said, his voice trembling, "as if Benten-sama took it away..."

Torikiri Shichi walked silently toward the back of the inner sanctuary and stared intently at the Benten statue. The pedestal of the statue, the wall behind it, the corners of the floor—the same systematic and calm gaze that Holmes used when examining crime scenes in London crawled over every corner of the room.

Next, he went outside the hermitage and walked along the edge of the wooden fence.

"Santa," he said, stopping at a corner of the fence. "Try touching this board."

I did as I was told and pushed the fence board. It moved slightly.

"It's designed to be removable."

"It was made to be removable three days ago," Torikiri Shichi said, rubbing the wood shavings on the edge of the board with his finger. "These are fresh scratches. A person could enter and exit from here."

"Then, did the person who took the head escape through here?"

"Or perhaps they brought it in," he said quietly.

I did not understand what he meant.

The next place we headed was to the home of En'un, a monk who lived near the Tatekawa River.

I had heard from Chubei that En'un was an old acquaintance of Zensho. He was a stout monk in his fifties, and his half-closed eyes made him look like he was either hiding something or simply sleepy.

Torikiri Shichi asked him point-blank.

"Is the Benten statue authentic?"

En'un's half-closed eyes opened slightly. "What are you talking about?"

“Zensho said he wouldn't show the statue for a hundred days. Did he hide the statue during the Goma ritual, or did he swap it—which was it?”

There was silence.

Summer cicadas were buzzing noisily outside.

“...Why do you ask that?” En-un said slowly.

“There is fresh lacquer on the back of the statue's pedestal. It wouldn't be unnatural if it were a repair to an old statue, but while the statue as a whole is well-aged, only the back of the pedestal had new lacquer. When he swapped it, the work on the pedestal probably didn't go well, so he repainted it later. And then,”

Torikiri Shichi twisted his pipe.

“The death of the offering thief. Three years ago, a man died after eating the offering sweets—there must have been poison in those sweets. It was likely a trap set by Zensho himself in case someone tried to steal them. That wasn't divine punishment; it was poisoning. To make the believers believe the Benten statue had real miraculous powers, he needed a reputation for divine retribution against the wicked.”

En-un let out a long breath.

“...I see, you saw right through it.”

The story from there was as follows.

The Benten statue was originally a work by a famous Buddhist sculptor, kept hidden in the storehouse of a certain daimyo family. It was stolen decades ago and, after passing through several hands, ended up with Zensho. Zensho knew the origin of the statue, but he hid it, gathered believers, and built up the statue's miraculous reputation through years of faith.

En-un was a member of a different faction and was trying to take over the very organization of believers that Zensho had built. He was aiming for the number of believers and the offering income obtained from them—this was a considerable interest even in Edo.

Hiding the statue temporarily during the Goma ritual was Zensho's own intention. The oracle saying, 'Do not show the figure for a hundred days,' was a pretext; in reality, he had a plan to keep the statue away from prying eyes and sell it off somewhere. The statue was a genuine masterpiece and would fetch a high price as an antique.

However, En-un sensed the plan and killed Zensho.

Because he was killed before he could sell the statue, the statue remained in the hermitage. The reason he cut off the head and took it away was not to make him treated as a missing person—

“If there is a head, it can be identified as Zensho. If there is no head, the possibility arises that it is someone else,” Torikiri Shichi said. “In fact, at first, the magistrate's office had trouble confirming whether the body was Zensho. During that time, En-un spread the story among the believers that Zensho had run away, and he tried to take the seat as the successor to the Benten temple. But the whereabouts of the statue were unknown. If Zensho had told someone about his plan, there would be an accomplice. En-un was anxious that the accomplice might have taken the statue.”

“Is the statue still in that hermitage?”

“It is. However,” Torikiri Shichi said, “that is not the real one. During the Goma ritual, Zensho had already swapped it. The real one has been moved somewhere else. I have an idea where it is hidden.”

The place Torikiri Shichi suspected was the storehouse of Chubei's rice shop.

Although Chubei was a believer of Zensho, he was also Zensho's accomplice. It is true that he was saved by Zensho when his business was failing, but as the price for being saved, he was forced to share Zensho's secrets. The real Benten statue was hidden deep behind the rice bags in Chubei's storehouse.

“Why do you think Chubei is an accomplice?” I asked.

“When he brought this matter to us, he stated exactly where Zensho’s body was found,” Torikiri Shichi said. “He said it was in front of the inner sanctuary, but no one who wasn’t present at the scene of the discovery should know that much detail. Chubei is a believer, but other believers said he wasn’t one of the first people at the hermitage that morning. If so, why does he know the detail about it being in front of the inner sanctuary?”

“……”

“Also, the breeze from the folding fan he brought was blowing eastward, but his rice shop is on the west side. If he had walked from west to east on a hot day, sweat should have been running down his back. However, sweat was glistening on his forehead and face—indicating that he didn’t come directly from the east to the west, that is, from his rice shop, but came here after moving around elsewhere.”

“……Is that all?”

“I checked the storehouse because I needed to confirm it. That is all.”

Torikiri Shichi’s observations were always like this. The evidence piled up, and the deduction remained unshakable.

It was the following day that we handed them over to the constables of the North Town Magistrate’s Office.

Enun was blamed for the murder of Zensho, and Chubei was to be interrogated as an accomplice. The real statue of Benten was discovered in the rice shop’s storehouse, and procedures were taken to return it to its original owner—though the matter became complicated because it was stolen property from a daimyo family.

The Town Magistrate’s Office is an institution responsible for the administration and justice of Edo. There are two, North and South, which take turns on monthly duty. The Town Magistrate, who is the chief, is like a combination of a London magistrate and a police chief, and under him are officials called yoriki and doshin. We okappiki are in a position like subcontractors to the doshin, but we are not official government employees; we act as private collaborators by being entrusted with a jitte. We have no salary and live on fees and gratuities, which is not much different from the detective business in my London days.

“However,” I said to Torikiri Shichi on the veranda on the evening the case was settled. “What about the swarm of butterflies? Was that really a natural phenomenon?”

Torikiri Shichi turned his eyes toward the Tate River. The surface of the river was shining orange, reflecting the sunset.

“In July, flowers that butterflies like bloom on the grass along the Tate River. It must have been a year where the conditions were right for swarms to form. However,” he said, “Zensho was waiting for that moment. Or perhaps he intentionally guided the swarm of butterflies somewhere—he might have planted a large amount of the plants they feed on along the river, or used some other trick.”

“So it wasn’t a prophecy, but a setup?”

“Just as people see what they want to see, one can create a situation where people are prone to feeling fear. A large swarm of butterflies is indeed a mysterious sight. If you give it the interpretation of a ‘harbinger of disaster,’ people’s hearts will drift in that direction. Zensho took advantage of that.”

“That,” I said, “is similar to what you, Holmes, said before. That people only see what they want to see.”

Torikiri Shichi narrowed his eyes slightly.

“Did I say that?”

“In London.”

“……Perhaps so.”

The surface of the Tatekawa River rippled in the evening breeze. Across the river, a single firefly glowed. I recalled the words of the neighborhood tofu seller, who told me that the end of summer in Edo always arrives quietly.

"However," Torimushichi said, his eyes suddenly looking into the distance, "one cannot entirely rule out the possibility that the butterflies were truly a harbinger of disaster."

"That is not scientific."

"Thinking that science can explain everything is the same as the arrogance of a believer."

I laughed.

I thought that this man was the same, no matter where he was.

[Conclusion: The London Era]

Before I knew it, I was in the living room on Baker Street.

Instead of a fireplace, the setting sun shone through the window, and Holmes stood motionless in front of his laboratory bench. He was holding a test tube, looking somewhere far away.

"Holmes," I said. "I had that dream again."

"So did I," Holmes said. He quietly placed the test tube on the stand. "A dream of butterflies, Watson. A swarm of butterflies filling the river surface."

"I saw it too. It was a river in Edo."

"It is called the Tatekawa," Holmes said. "And there was a nun, a headless corpse, and a swapped Buddhist statue."

We faced each other in silence for a while.

"Holmes," I finally said. "Before the dream, you were talking about crowd psychology. You said that people only see what they want to see."

"I did."

"That nun—Zensho—used that as a weapon."

"Indeed," Holmes walked over to the window. The London sunset cast an orange hue over the soot-covered rooftops. "Human faith is inherently beautiful. It comes from the primal emotion of wanting to believe in something, of wanting to be protected. But those who exploit it will always appear. In Edo, and in London."

"And the people who are exploited?"

"They get hurt. However," he said, "it is better not to lose the power to believe. The problem is not faith, but the laziness of refusing to look at the evidence. Believing and thinking can coexist."

"Is that your conviction?"

Holmes smiled for just a moment.

"At the very least, it is my observation."

Outside the window, a flock of birds crossing the London evening sky looked, for an instant, like butterflies.

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

Author: Conan Kidoyle

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