The Black Lizard and Beast In the Shadows

by Rampo Edogawa

  ‘Ōe Shundei…’

  I said it as if to myself, but loud enough for the driver to hear. Then I looked intently at the reflection of his face in a small mirror mounted above the driver’s seat. But of course it was only my fantasy. The driver’s expression showed not the slightest change. What is more, Ōe Shundei was not the type to carry out such a Lupin-like trick. However, when the taxi arrived at my lodging, I had him keep the change and began to ask some questions.

  ‘Do you remember when this button came off?’

  The driver replied with an odd look on his face, ‘It was torn off from the start. I got it from someone, see. The button had come off, but it was still new, so Mr Oyamada, him that’s dead now, he gave it to me.’

  ‘Mr Oyamada did?’ I blurted out, considerably surprised. ‘The man from the house I’ve just left, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. He treated me well when he was alive – it was mostly me that took him to the company and picked him up.’

  ‘When did you start wearing these?’

  ‘Well, they were given to me in winter, but as they were such good quality it seemed a pity to use them and I decided to look after them. Then my old gloves got damaged and today I pulled them down to use for driving for the first time. If I don’t wear gloves, the steering wheel slips. But why are you asking?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve got my own reasons. I wonder if you would sell them to me my good man?’

  In the end, I purchased the gloves from him for a hefty consideration. After entering my room, I took out the metallic object I had found in the attic and it was exactly the same size and fitted into the metallic seat of the hook enclosure perfectly.

  As noted above, this matching of the two objects seemed all too coincidental.

  That Ōe Shundei and Oyamada Rokurō had worn gloves with the same ornamental markings on the hook closure and that the metal button that had fallen off matched exactly the closure’s metal seat seemed unthinkable.

  I later took the glove to be examined at Izumiya, a premier importer of Western goods located in Tokyo’s Ginza. This type of glove was apparently rare within our shores: it might well have been manufactured in England, and R.K. Bros. Co. did not have a single outlet in Japan. Given what the owner of Izumiya had told me and that Oyamada had been overseas until September of last year, it seemed Rokurō was the owner of the glove and that therefore the ornamental button that had fallen off had been dropped by him. It seemed impossible that Ōe Shundei could have obtained such gloves in Japan or that he would just happen to have owned the same gloves as Oyamada.

  ‘So what does that mean?’

  Leaning on the desk with my head in my hands I mumbled oddly to myself over and over ‘it means that… it means that…’, while at the same time massaging my temples in a desperate attempt to focus my concentration to the core of my being and achieve some solution.

  Finally, a strange idea came into my head. Yama no Shuku was a long, narrow district and as the Oyamada household was located in the part adjoining the Sumida River it naturally had to touch the river as it flowed past. When I went to the Oyamada household I had from time to time looked at the Sumida River from the window of the Western-style wing without thinking much about it, but now, I was struck by a new significance as if I had discovered the waterway for the first time.

  A large letter ‘u’ appeared in the swirling mist in my head.

  The upper left section of the letter contained Yama no Shuku, while Ko-ume machi (where Rokurō’s go partner lived) was in the upper right section.

  The lower section of the ‘u’ corresponded exactly to Azuma-bashi. Even now, we were convinced that Rokurō had left the upper right section that evening and travelled to the left part of the u’s trough, where he had been killed by Shundei. But we had not taken into account the river’s current. The Sumida River flowed from the upper section of the ‘u’ to its lower section. It seemed more natural to suppose that rather than the corpse being at the site of the murder, it had floated downstream after being thrown in, reached the ferry landing site under Azuma-bashi and come to a halt in the eddying current.

  The body had floated down. It had floated down… But where had it floated from? Where had the fatal weapon been used? I found myself sinking further and further into the delusional mire.

  I kept thinking about it night after night. Even Shizuko’s allure seemed less powerful than this monstrous suspicion and as I became more and more obsessed by these bizarre fantasies it was if I had somehow forgotten about Shizuko.

  During that time I questioned Shizuko twice in order to confirm something, but she must have thought it strange because after completing this business I told her I had to leave urgently and rushed home. Indeed, her face seemed quite sad and forlorn when she saw me off in the entrance hall.

  In just five days, I created an incredible delusion. As I still have the statement I wrote to send to Inspector Itosaki, I shall spare myself the trouble of detailing this delusion by reproducing the statement below and inserting some additional comments. The deductions therein are of a sort that it would probably have been impossible to assemble without the imaginative ability of a crime writer. I later came to realize that it contained something of profound significance.

  …When I realised that the metallic object I picked up in the attic above Shizuko’s parlour in the Oyamada household had to have fallen from the closure of Oyamada Rokurō’s glove, I recalled a series of disparate facts that had caused me disquiet. These included the fact that Oyamada’s corpse wore a wig; that this hairpiece he had adorned himself with had been ordered by Oyamada himself (for reasons I note below, it did not trouble me that the body had been unclothed); that Hirata’s threatening letters had stopped at the same time as the bizarre death of Oyamada Rokurō, much as if by arrangement; and that belying appearances Oyamada had been a terrible sadist (though appearances are often deceiving in such cases). It may seem that these facts were a coincidental collection of oddities, but when I thought about it intensely I realized that they each pointed to the one thing.

  When I became aware what that was, I started to gather together the materials to further confirm my deductions. First, I visited the Oyamada home and after obtaining the permission of Oyamada’s wife I searched his study, for nothing tells you so much about a person’s traits and secrets than his or her study. Unconcerned about what Mrs Oyamada might be thinking, I spent about half a day looking through book cabinets and drawers. I discovered that one section alone of the book cabinets was locked very securely. I asked for the key and was told that when he was alive Oyamada always carried it about with him on his watch chain and that on the day of his death he left the house with it in his waistband. As there was no other way, I eventually obtained Mrs Oyamada’s consent to break open the door to the book cabinet.

  Inside I found it was full of Oyamada’s diaries for the past several years, documents contained in a number of bags, bundles of letters, and books. After searching through them one by one, I discovered three documents connected with this case. The first was the diary for the year in which he had married Shizuko. The following phrases were inscribed in red ink in the margin of the entry three days prior to the wedding ceremony: ‘…Know about relationship with youth called Hirata Ichirō. But along the way Shizuko came to dislike the boy and no matter what methods he employed she was unresponsive. Next, she used opportunity of father’s bankruptcy to hide from Hirata. All well and good. Don’t intend to rake up the past.’

  Thus, by some means Rokurō had known all about his wife’s secret from the start of their marriage. In addition, he had not said a single word of this to his wife.

  The second document was ‘Games in the Attic,’ the collection of short stories written by Ōe Shundei. I was very surprised to find such a volume in the study of an entrepreneur such as Oyamada Rokurō. In fact, I could not believe my eyes until his wife Shizuko told me that he had
been quite a fan of fiction. The frontispiece of the short story collection included a collotype portrait of Shundei and I was very interested to see that the author was credited in the colophon under his real name, Hirata Ichirō.

  The third document was issue twelve of volume six of Shin Seinen, published by Hakubunkan. This magazine for younger readers did not contain a story by Shundei, but it did reproduce a photograph of his manuscript in the frontispiece without any reduction in size. This image commanded half a page and the caption in the margin read ‘Ōe Shundei’s handwriting.’ The strange thing is that when a light was shone on this reproduction, the thick art paper everywhere reflected marks something like those that would be left by a fingernail. It seemed clear that someone had laid a thin sheet of paper on this photograph and traced Shundei’s handwriting over and over with a pencil. It frightened me to see that my speculations continued to hit true.

  The same day I requested Mrs Oyamada to search for the gloves that Rokurō had brought back from overseas. The search took considerable time, but eventually a glove was found that matched exactly the dimensions of the glove that I had purchased from the taxi driver. When she handed the glove to me, Mrs Oyamada said with a troubled look that she was sure there had been another glove exactly the same. If you so desire, I can at any moment produce these pieces of evidence, including the diary, the collection of short stories, the magazine, the glove, and the metallic object I picked up in the attic.

  There are a number of other facts that I have ascertained, but based only on the key points noted above I think it seems clear that Oyamada Rokurō had a most peculiar character, and that behind his friendly mask he was energetically carrying out a ghoulish plot. Perhaps we were too conscious of the name Ōe Shundei. Being aware of Shundei’s blood-thirsty works and his bizarre lifestyle, we may have arbitrarily decided that only he could have committed such a crime. How could he have so completely concealed himself? Does it not seem somewhat strange that he should be the criminal? If he is innocent, it could be that he is so difficult to track down simply because his misanthropy (an aversion that becomes more severe the more his fame grows) led him to cover his trail. It may well be as you once said that he has fled overseas. He could be puffing away on a water pipe in some corner of Shanghai passing himself off as a Chinese. Even if this is not the case and Shundei is the criminal, how could we explain him forgetting the main purpose of a detailed revenge plot put together over months and years with such tenacity and suddenly giving up after killing Oyamada, who was simply a diversion along the way? Anyone who knew his fiction and lifestyle would think this very unnatural and unlikely. Moreover, there is something much clearer. How is it that he could have dropped the button from Oyamada’s glove in that attic? Given that this foreign-made glove was unobtainable in Japan and that the ornamental button had been pulled off the glove presented to the taxi driver, it would surely be illogical to think that it was Ōe Shundei rather than Oyamada who had been lurking in the attic (if I say it was Oyamada, you may ask whether he would give such a vital piece of evidence to a taxi driver even unwittingly; but as I note later that is because he was not committing any particular crime from a legal perspective; it was simply a sort of game for someone who enjoyed weird things; thus, even if the glove button was torn off and left behind in the attic, that would be of no consequence to him because he had no need to worry whether the button had fallen off while he was walking in the attic or whether it would serve as evidence).

  There is still other information that ought to rule out Shundei from the crime. That the evidence mentioned above, including the diary, Shundei’s short story collection, and Shin Seinen, was in the lockable book cabinet in Oyamada’s study and that Oyamada always kept the only key to this lock on his person proves that he was involved in an underhanded piece of mischief. Even if we pause and consider that Shundei could have attempted to cast suspicion on Oyamada by forging these items and placing them in his book cabinet, it seems completely impossible. First, the diary was not something that could be forged and only Oyamada was able to lock and unlock the book cabinet. Although we have thus far believed Ōe Shundei–Hirata Ichirō was the criminal, if we take everything into consideration we must conclude that surprisingly enough he was not a presence in this case from the very start. We could only have come to believe that he was the criminal due to the truly amazing deception of Oyamada Rokurō. It surprises us completely to learn that while this wealthy man had a childishness manifested in the detailed scheme noted above, beneath that mask of benevolence he transformed into a terrible fiend once in the bedroom and lashed the fair Shizuko repeatedly with his foreign-made riding whip. However, there are many instances in which the benevolence of a virtuous man and the guile of a fiend have resided together in one person. Indeed, the more benevolent and appealing to others a person is, the easier it is for the devil within to find disciples.

  Now then, let me tell you what I think. About four years ago, Oyamada Rokurō travelled to Europe on business, where he lived for about two years. He was chiefly in London, but he also stayed in another two or three cities. I think it may have been in one of these metropolises that his evil habits budded and were fostered (I have heard rumours of his situation in London from an employee of Roku Roku Trading). It seems to me that when he returned from abroad in September of the year before last his stubborn depravity turned on to his beloved bride Shizuko and the savage fury began, for I detected the unpleasant scar on the nape of her neck at our first meeting in October last year.

  Once one has become accustomed to this type of depravity, the illness progresses with frightening rapidity, just as with morphine addiction.

  A new, more intense stimulation becomes necessary. What yielded satisfaction yesterday does not serve today and you come to think that today’s measures will not be sufficient tomorrow. I think you will agree that it is easy to conceive that in a similar fashion Oyamada found he was no longer able to achieve satisfaction just from whipping his wife Shizuko. In a frenzy, he had to pursue a new stimulus. Right about that time he somehow became aware of a work of fiction called ‘Games in the Attic’ written by Ōe Shundei, and perhaps after the first reading he decided that he would like to enact the bizarre content. At any rate, he seems to have discovered a strange sense of affinity. He had found someone else who suffered from the same odd malady. The well-worn spine of the book suggests the fervour with which he read Shundei’s short story collection. In this fiction, Shundei repeatedly describes the peculiar pleasure of peeping through a crack at someone alone (in particular, a woman) while remaining completely undetected. How easy it is to imagine the sympathy Oyamada must have felt when he discovered this, for him, new pastime. Quickly he copied the hero of Shundei’s fiction, becoming himself the one playing in the attic. He dreamed up the scheme of sneaking into the space above the ceiling of his own home to peep at his wife when she was alone.

  As there is a considerable distance from the gate of the Oyamada house to the entrance hall, it would require no artifice whatsoever when coming home to slip around the side of the entrance hall and into the storeroom unbeknownst to the servants and from there to pass along over the ceiling to the space above Shizuko’s parlour. I suspect that Rokurō’s frequent evening trips to play go with Koume may have been a way of accounting for the time when he was actually amusing himself in the attic.

  Meanwhile, this devoted reader of ‘Games in the Attic’ probably discovered that the real name of the author was Hirata Ichirō, and began to suspect that this was almost certainly the same person who had been jilted by Shizuko and who bore a deep-seated grudge against her for it. He would then have screened all sorts of articles and gossip related to Ōe Shundei to learn that Shundei was the same person who had formerly been Shizuko’s lover, that he had a very misanthropic lifestyle, and that by this stage he had already stopped writing and even disappeared leaving no trace. Thus at one and the same time Oyamada had discovered through the one volume of �
�Games in the Attic’ someone who shared his malady and who was also an arch-rival of his love who ought to be hated. Based on all this knowledge, he came up with a truly alarming piece of mischief.

  Of course, prying through a chink at Shizuko by herself would certainly have piqued his inordinate curiosity, but it is unlikely that his sadomasochistic character would have been satisfied by such a mild pastime alone. The preternaturally sharp creative abilities of this sick man would have sought for a new, crueller approach to substitute for the crack of the whip. Finally, he hit upon the unprecedented drama of Hirata Ichirō’s threatening letters. He had already obtained the photo print at the start of issue twelve of volume six of Shin Seinen to use as an example. To increase the interest and plausibility of his drama, he began to carefully practice Shundei’s handwriting using this sample. The pencil traces on the original are testimony to this.

  After Oyamada had created Hirata’s hate mail, he sent the envelopes from different post offices one by one, with a suitable number of days intervening between each. It was not for nothing that he would stop at the nearest post box while motoring about on business. As to the content of the letters, he would have found out about Shundei’s past through articles in the newspapers and magazines. The details of Shizuko’s activities he could have spied from above the ceiling and what he could not tell from there he would have been able to describe because he was after all her husband. He would have memorized Shizuko’s phrasing and gestures from the pillow talk they exchanged when beside each other in bed and put these down on paper to suggest they had been observed by a peeping Shundei. What a fiend! By concealing himself and using someone else’s name in the threatening letters, he was able to experience the crime-tinged frisson of sending the documents to his wife and the devilish pleasure of spying on her from the attic with excitement while she read and shuddered in fear. Furthermore, there is cause to believe that during the intervals he continued with the whip lashings because it was after his death that the scar on the nape of Shizuko’s neck first disappeared. While he tortured his wife Shizuko thus, he perpetrated such cruelty precisely because of his idolization of her and not from any sense of hatred. You will of course be well aware of the psychology of this type of sexual deviant.