And with no further explanation, Sherlock began to walk away. Ito glanced at Mutsu in chagrin. The Minister returned his gaze, blinking several times.
Ito chased after Sherlock. “If you have made a discovery, I would like to hear it.”
“It is too early for me to stand by any conclusions.” Sherlock didn’t slow his pace.
“Could I be of some assistance? Mr. Holmes, please, you need not take full responsibility on your own.”
“Indeed, there is something I would like you to look into. There will be a place where the trees or rice plants are withering. Nearby there will be a river, where a large number of fish have suddenly died. I would appreciate if you could ascertain this location.”
“Wait, a place where trees and rice—”
Mutsu’s deep voice interrupted them suddenly. “Ashio, in Tochigi,” he said.
Sherlock stopped. He turned around slowly. Ito looked at Mutsu, falling silent.
Mutsu approached them, his expression grave. “Representatives from the local governments report problems in their farming villages to the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce. As minister, I am naturally informed of such issues.”
Ito nodded. “I am aware of this issue as well. When I was Prime Minister, the death of the fish was brought up for discussion. But why is this relevant now, Mr. Holmes?”
Sherlock narrowed his eyes. “You two already know? Then the situation is more dire than I had feared!”
32
Though it was part of his duties, Ito found the meeting of the Privy Council that day to be stupefyingly boring. It was four in the afternoon before he was finally freed. He boarded a carriage and raced home. Sherlock had already returned before him. He had surely made progress on the case.
Ito was walking swiftly along the veranda when he spotted Umeko—frozen in place, staring through an open sliding door with a bewildered expression upon her face. “Oh, this is awful!”
What could have happened? Ito hurried over and peeked into the room. He was left speechless.
The tatami room was in a state of total disarray. Every inch of the floor was covered in a sea of loose papers. Each sheet was covered densely in Japanese writing—they were pages from his copy of the translation of The Complete Work on Russian Natural Sciences. Sherlock crawled back and forth over them like a dog. He picked up one stack of papers only to toss it aside a moment later and repeat the same action elsewhere.
“Mr. Holmes…” ventured Ito.
“A moment, if you will.” Sherlock approached the low table, across which several pages had been flung. He snatched them up, one after the next, and then fanned them out in a semicircle around himself. “The Russian word for cat is koshka. Where did I put chapter 47…”
Umeko turned toward her husband, distressed. “How am I supposed to serve dinner?”
Ito groaned. “Set the table in my room.”
“Of course,” Umeko said, and walked away down the veranda.
He is like a wayward child, thought Ito. “I’d thank you not to treat this place like your lodgings at Baker Street! This space is where I spend time with my family.”
Sherlock snorted. “I believe I played at least some part in restoring domestic harmony to the Ito household. Surely that is justification enough for allowing me to borrow the space for a moment as I work on your case.”
“And you have my full cooperation. But this hardly seems efficient.”
“Watch where you step. It may appear haphazard, but every page has been carefully sorted and placed.”
“Really?” Ito stepped gingerly onto a small patch of open floor. “May I at least ask what you are doing? I know you cannot read Japanese. If you are simply practicing code breaking again I admit I will be very disappointed.”
“Worry not. I am investigating something of utmost import. Your daughters were most kind and offered to help, but I refused them. I doubt they understand Russian anyway, and looking over so many pages is a daunting task.”
“It did take the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce a hundred men to translate.”
“Which is why I am doing it myself.”
“It? What is it that you are doing?”
Sherlock momentarily stopped and clambered onto his knees. “Exactly what it looks like. First I look at the original Russian text to identify the word that appears most, and from there attempt to determine the subject of that section. I then look at the same section in Japanese to determine if the corresponding kanji or katakana appears with similar frequency. If they match, then that word is the subject. I do not need to know what the word means. If there is a noticeable difference between the two, however, then I look up the meaning of the subject word in a Russian-to-English dictionary.”
“You are looking for mistranslations? But the frequency of the subject words won’t always match. During translation, subjects and objects can be omitted or even added. Words may be replaced with pronouns, or pronouns with proper nouns.”
“That is true. Which is why I narrow the passages down further to those which seem most consequential.”
“Consequential?”
“The phonetic subject words I leave for later. Kanji, however, are pictorial in nature. Two trees is a forest, three is a wood. Two fires on top of each other are a blaze. Characters with the sanzui element are related to water. If the original meaning is apparent to some degree from the pictography of the characters, the likelihood that it has been correctly translated is high.”
“Wouldn’t a Japanese-to-English dictionary be more helpful? Shall I bring you one?”
“Asako made the same offer. I declined. Using a dictionary would take far too much time. It is more effective to observe the shapes and strokes with my own unvarnished eyes, rather than through the preconceptions of reflected knowledge. Kanji are pictographs that have taken root across multiple cultures. Naturally they can be processed most swiftly through intuition.”
“But if the point is to verify, wouldn’t it be faster to rely on a Japanese person with knowledge of Russian?”
“Yes, but who can we trust?”
“Does that mean you have discovered something?”
Sherlock cleared a bundle of papers from the floor, revealing the original The Complete Work on Russian Natural Sciences, open beneath them. “This is one of the sections where the frequency of what appears to be the subject differs greatly between the original and the translation. It is a section in chapter 56, describing the effect of changes in the salt density of the tides. I attempted a rough translation using a Russian-to-English dictionary, which suggests that when fish are hit by the tide there is a high probability of mass deaths due to the change in salt concentration. The subject word is ryba, which means fish. And the Japanese. Let me see…Where is chapter 56…”
“Perhaps you might endeavor to be a little less disorderly?”
“Here it is.” Sherlock retrieved one of the stacks of paper. The character for fish had been circled. “This character means fish, correct? Judging from its appearance, it is shaped to resemble a single fish on its side.”
“Yes. That is correct.”
“I am already familiar with the character for ‘death,’ it appears frequently in the newspapers. That word is also used frequently, though not as often as fish. The word that appears with the next highest frequency in the original is sea, or ocean water.”
“Umi, in Japanese.”
“I do not know the character for umi, but I used the same process, searching for a character that would correspond in frequency to sea or ocean water. The word that appeared with the next highest frequency, after fish and death, was this.” Sherlock pointed.
Ito didn’t understand. “This is the character for kawa. It means river, not sea. In fact, this whole sentence…”
“Differs from the original? Judging from the appearance of the character, whic
h consists of only three lines, I too assumed it meant river, waterfall or something to that effect, rather than ocean or sea.”
“The word for waterfall is taki.”
“I took less than a minute to ascertain all of this. Almost entirely by intuition, I was able to deduce that although the Japanese translation concerned the death of fish, the premise involved rivers or waterfalls rather than seawater.”
“My god, you are correct.” Ito removed his reading glasses, in agitation. “The cause of death is also different. It says that when the feeding hierarchy is disturbed and one of the species increases by too much, that species will die off suddenly in great numbers…Completely different from the original!”
Sherlock flipped through his copy of the original book. “Chapter 38 explains how trees can wither due to changes in Arctic pressure patterns. In the North American permafrost, forests have withered and died due to water shortages brought about by thawing ground and low rainfall. Forests have also been dying off more frequently in Siberia, despite heavy rains, due to the extreme damp. The gist of the article is that forests are dying in Siberia from too much water, and in Alaska from too little. And here, on the other hand, is the Japanese translation.”
Ito read the section Sherlock presented to him. “This says that underground lava activity robs soil of the nutrient- and water-retention abilities that plants need to grow, so the trees in volcanic regions simultaneously die off. This is different too!”
“You taught me furu, the kanji for old. I deduced that the character combining furu, or old, with ki, or tree, must mean wither. It was clear that the translation also addressed the withering of trees. And yet, although water was involved in the original article, the sanzui element was noticeably absent. I noticed that the character for fire was present instead. It appears together with a different character.” Sherlock pointed to another spot. “Here.”
“That is yama. It means mountain.”
“As I gathered. The character appears frequently in other sections of the book as well, and by comparing those sections to the original I was able to deduce that this meant mountain. In this section however, fire and mountain always appear together. It seemed probable that this pairing referred either to forest fires or volcanoes. Regardless of which, that meaning did not appear in the original.”
Ito was overwhelmed. “And you did this—for all 80 chapters?”
“I am still investigating the remaining entries, but so far I have identified 16 sections that are clearly suspicious.” Sherlock rifled through the pages of the original once more. “I am only showing you a few of the most outlandish examples. In chapter 14 there is an entry detailing the mechanism by which rice blight kills rice plants. It is a type of mold, which occurs under conditions of high humidity. Now look at the Japanese translation.”
Sherlock held out another document, which Ito now read. “When spring water with high levels of hydrochloric acid contaminates paddies, the rice plants will wither and…Wait! These are the discoveries that Kubo was so excited to report to me the first day we visited.”
“Yes, it appears that a great number of unexplained phenomena that have plagued the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce are included in this book, along with explanations of their causes. And yet in the translation the key points all differ from their original. In the Japanese translation for this entry, as well, the character for ‘wither’ is present, and judging from its frequency I assume this character—” Sherlock indicated yet another kanji, “—means rice plant. But the original article describes a pathological mechanism. I knew the character for ‘disease,’ having seen it several times on hospital billboards. I searched for it in the Japanese translation, but it did not appear even once.”
“But why? Mere mistranslations could hardly explain such a drastic difference.”
“At first I suspected the persons in charge of the translation. I even had my doubts concerning top officials at the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce. However, when I questioned Mr. Kubo the other day he seemed to lack the vaguest glimmer of information from the original. He was quite modest about his lack of knowledge of Russian, but he seems serious and ardent by nature. I assume he made some attempt to read the original and to compare it to the translation. Doubly so, on those points that had so excited him the day before.”
Ito was surprised. “So you believe that the original possessed by the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce differs from your own? Why? Did the Russians not wish to teach us about rice blight, or dead fish, or arctic winds?”
“Quite the opposite. They wished very much to teach you the wrong information. The information in this version claims to be the latest scientific knowledge, but the arguments presented within are quite bizarre. Imbalances do occur in feeding hierarchies, but I have never heard of that leading to the spontaneous death of large schools of fish. And of course trees can wither when a volcano erupts nearby and the lava cools and hardens, but that has nothing to do with underground lava. And here, if enough salt had entered a rice paddy to kill off the plants, that should be obvious just from testing the water. Such knowledge would amount to common sense in the natural sciences. Japan, however, is far behind in this field of study, and displays a willingness to trust in Western science uncritically. The Russians took advantage of that innocence.”
“When you put it that way…I have to agree. In hindsight, it seems obvious something is not right about these explanations. In Japan, however, the West seems like a treasure trove of unknown science—and that belief can take precedence over more somber reflection. First we accept, and then we proceed to our own research. That is the Japanese way.”
After noticing errors in the original Anatomische Tabellen, Genpaku Sugita based his New Text on Anatomy on his own corrections, proving that as far back as the Edo Period it was common knowledge that Western science could not be trusted out of hand. Regardless, Western technology had seemed like a miracle in Japan, from firearms to shipbuilding to railways. And like any miracle, it had inspired faith. Having modernized so quickly—with only 24 years since the Meiji Restoration—Japan had lost the habit of distrust of Western technology. The country was impatient. If they were to catch up with the West, they needed to be open to accepting what it had to offer; the “how” and the “why” could come later. Especially when dealing with information that had been formally presented to them by a foreign dignitary.
Ito stared at Sherlock’s original copy of The Complete Work on Russian Natural Sciences. “The phenomena are similar, but the details have been almost entirely changed…”
“And this ensures that it will be nearly impossible for anyone who is not intimately familiar with both languages to notice a difference at just a glance. That is the ingenuity of the thing. When you only skim, the original and the Japanese translation share many words in common. There appears to be no issue. The first thing people would see is that the topic, dead fish, is the same, before they got around to noticing, for instance, that the ‘oceans’ had become rivers. And why check any further?”
Naturally, the contents of the original Complete Work at the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce would match the Japanese translation, ensuring a thorough comparison would not reveal the truth. Sherlock had only stumbled upon the changes because of his unaltered copy. Still, were it not for his exemplary powers of observation, the switch would have gone undetected. It was just as Sherlock said—one might attempt to check the entries slowly, using a dictionary, and never notice anything was wrong. The alterations had been inserted into the text too skillfully for the common eye.
But why go to such elaborate ends? Ito did not understand what it all meant. Something dire was unfolding; he could feel it in his bones. He stared. “Ambassador Shevich, perhaps…”
“No,” Sherlock said, rising to his feet. “It was Shevich who gave me the unaltered copy. He arranged for a book to be sent from Russia. He must have been unaware that
the copy given to the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce had been altered.”
Ito gasped. “Then that leaves only one possibility.”
Sherlock gave an enigmatic nod. “The truth was hiding where least expected. Chairman, I believe you have been right after all. Whatever it is that Sanzo Tsuda started, the trouble has yet to end.”
33
A twilit sky was visible through the window of the carriage, across which a domed copper-plated roof floated into view. This was the Nikolai Cathedral, just completed in March. The cathedral had no connection to Tsarevich Nicholas, but was rather named after the Orthodox hieromonk of the same name. The brick-and-stone structure had been built on a Greek Cross plan, but its construction had caused no inconsiderable amount of trouble for the area. Agitators had protested the Nikolai Cathedral on grounds that its steeple overlooked the Imperial Palace, and was disrespectful.
Though it pained Ito to admit it, in many ways Japan was still an immature country. He himself was no exception. What difference was there between the protestors who had attempted to block the cathedral’s construction, and the passionate youth who had so strongly believed in joui? Or even between himself and Sanzo Tsuda, for that matter?
One needed to first know the world to serve their country. Ignorance and idealism were poor weapons to be armed with; knowledge was true power. A nation could only free itself from subservience to the Great Powers through erudition. But in Japan, that work was far from complete. Even now, one of their own government bodies dangled at the mercy of a mere book from Russia.
Yet Ito had not fully grasped the situation. Sherlock still refused to explain the key points. Perhaps he wished to build anticipation, so that when he solved the mystery it would prove all the more dramatic. The detective could be childish in that way. Mostly, however, Sherlock simply demanded complete confidence. Ito had no choice but to respect that wish.
Sherlock Holmes Page 27
