The Collected Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in Japan (22 page)

‘We just decided to exercise a little discretion in stating the obvious, that’s all, in case we should unduly distress the victim’s son…’

‘I take it you are the local magistrate,’ returned the famous English detective.

‘Again, hardly a first-class test of your purported powers of deduction,’ returned the thin, waspish-looking individual. ‘But yes, I am. Sagari’s my name, and I have with me here my deputies.’

‘The ground around the body has been greatly disturbed by your feet,’ continued Holmes amiably, ‘thus making any examination of it somewhat fruitless – if you’ll pardon the pun.’

‘I’m very sorry, Holmes-
san
,’ declared Sagari tightly. ‘But with the body of a respected villager whom I knew well lying on the ground before me, and his young son grieving over the
murder
of his father, I don’t find myself in the most comical of moods!’   

‘Quite,’ said Holmes, and this time it was his turn to cough. ‘Only, you’re quite sure it’s murder…?’

‘Unless the assailant crept up behind Miguchi-
san
and then hit him as hard as he could upon the nape of his neck with some weapon
by accident
, Holmes-
san
?’ suggested Sagari caustically.

‘I’m sorry, Terumasa,’ said the magistrate then, as the young man again emitted a whimper.

‘The circumstances of this case are…?’ prompted Holmes.

‘I was working here, with my father, plucking the fruit from the trees,’ returned Terumasa readily, his expression remaining wide-eyed and frantic. ‘Just… just such a short time ago! You see his basket just there, half-filled. And mine, some distance over there… We worked sometimes together, sometimes separately. It was not even something we gave any mind to…        

‘But then I thought that it was surely time for lunch… Usually it was my father who told me when we should take a break – I was still learning so much from him…

‘I went to find him and… and…’

‘You found him here,’ said Holmes with quiet sympathy, patting the young man lightly on one shoulder. ‘I am sorry for your loss. Forgive me, but… do you know if…’

‘If my father had any enemies?’ snapped Terumasa in an instant, and now his eyes were filled with anger. ‘Sagari-
san
has already asked me the same question, though being a local man, he already knew the answer. Oh yes, my father had an enemy all right – that bastard up there…!’

Terumasa jabbed a finger way up the steep hillside, the base of which was only a few feet from where we were stood. I mean, this stepped hill covered with fruit trees – the beautiful blue sea just a little way beyond it – really was
steep
. Had we not watched our feet carefully on our way down from the top just now, frequently grabbing hold of branches and the like for the sake of maintaining balance, we might very well just have toppled downwards and broken our necks…   

‘I appreciate you are deeply grieved, Terumasa,’ (the use of this young man’s first name by the older magistrate – especially without the use of the honorific
san
– showed just how long they had known each other) ‘but I must warn you against making any wild accusations against a fellow villager…’

‘He’s always been jealous of my father – you know that as well as anyone else, Sagari-
san
,’ retorted Terumasa. ‘My father’s oranges were the biggest, the
juiciest
; and they always somehow ripened several weeks before Tashima’s…’

‘Tashima being the name of this… other orange farmer, I believe…’ interjected Holmes.

‘The farmer who owns a large orange orchard right at the top of this hill,’ declared the magistrate. ‘You’ll find out anyway, Holmes-
san
, so you may as well know that there’s always been competition between Tashima-
san
and… well… Miguchi-
san
.

‘The other orange growers didn’t object to Miguchi-
san
’s very effective but also rather
secretive
approach to producing his fruit; but Tashima-
san
thought him aloof and arrogant, and it caused several arguments between the two men…’

‘He was only jealous,’ stated Terumasa readily. ‘He’d not anything like the ability for growing oranges which my father possessed; all he wanted to do was steal my father’s ideas…’

‘Now, now, Terumasa,’ cautioned the magistrate; but as he spoke, Holmes started looking closely at some of the branches of the fruit trees all around us. And only now did I realize what was peculiar about them.

These branches had been
grafted
onto a number of main limbs of the trees, here and there. And they were, for the most part, bearing wonderful-looking fruit. It was extraordinary! But how in the world had such a feat been achieved?

‘I see what has caught your attention,’ said Terumasa, a certain tone of pride displacing some of the anger previously in his voice. ‘Well, this is what undoubtedly made my father the finest orange grower in the whole of Japan.

‘Fruit trees are like horses, you see. That may seem like a strange thing to say, but allow me to explain what my father realized. You can crossbreed the finest, the biggest, the most robust and
healthiest
, so creating an even more perfect specimen of tree – and fruit.

‘Perhaps my father had one tree that bore fruit which unaccountably ripened earlier than is usual (no bad thing, for the demand for oranges is always there), and another which had unusually large fruit, and yet one more whose oranges had no seeds – something greatly appreciated by many customers…

‘He would take cuttings from these various trees, and transplant them onto the main branches of others he selected – a cutting from a tree which produced seedless fruit being grafted onto a tree which produced larger than normal oranges, for example.

‘How did my father do this ‘grafting’? By making a small incision in the main branch, making a diagonal cut on the smaller cutting so that it would ‘splice’ in, and then tying it tightly in place with strips of cloth until nature took over and established a tighter bond.

‘This method did not always work. Despite my father’s skill, sometimes this cutting simply just withered and died. But, slowly, he grew better-and-better fruit, so that he was the number one producer for this area, though our orange grove is hardly the biggest here.

‘Most of the other orange farmers were happy for my father’s success, appreciating his hard work and not begrudging him his somewhat secretive ways – and even
I
, his only son, was only recently beginning to be taught them…

‘But Tashima, up there – he cursed my father, his own fruit often small, hard and green even as my father was able to begin selling his produce. He wanted my father to share his secrets – to just
tell
all he knew, as though this wasn’t the result of years of hard work, repeated failure, trial and error…’

‘Yes, yes, Terumasa,’ said Sagari the magistrate, in a voice he attempted to make soothing. ‘We understand. You have suffered a severe bereavement, and my advice to you now is to go home and rest. We will catch your father’s killer, have no doubt!’

With a mournful nod, Terumasa trudged off through the orange trees. Holmes stared after him for a few moments; and then, addressing the magistrate, said –

‘So you are certain Miguchi-
san
was murdered?’

Sagari made an elaborate pretence at restraining a sigh, but then still looked curiously at the famous foreign detective as he replied –

‘You have some other way of explaining that large bruise on the back of this fruit-farmer’s neck – the obvious cause of death?’

Working alongside Holmes these past several months – almost as long as he’d been in Japan – I’d learnt by now that a strike at this point was the death-blow favored by the
ninja
(on the occasions when they did not use those weapons such as
shuriken
or ‘throwing stars’). As I thought this, the sweet-smelling orange grove with its many trees and hanging fruit all around suddenly seemed a far more sinister place, and my eyes darted among the shadows created here and there by the spreading branches…

‘I do not,’ said Holmes at length; and this was one of those rare occasions when he seemed genuinely confused.

Sagari barely bothered to conceal a
harrumph
of satisfaction.

‘Fine, then,’ he said. ‘Well, if you’ll excuse me, I’d better see to it that poor Miguchi-
san
’s body is transferred to a more appropriate resting place, and then I’ll start investigating as to who was behind this foul crime.

‘There’s something in what the boy Terumasa says about certain other orange farmers and their jealousy – you mark my words…’

2

I followed Holmes back up the stepped hillside, the pair of us careful where we planted our feet and frequently taking hold of a branch to ensure our balance, as we had on the way down. Really, you needed to be as sure-footed as a mountain-goat to trudge up and down this hillside…

We passed a couple of middle-aged men working in their orange groves, and informed them of Miguchi-
san
’s death. These men seemed genuinely saddened to hear of his passing, although we were deliberately vague with the ‘details’, so as to avoid causing any undue alarm. They’d be hearing soon enough about the bruise on the back of the neck and all the rest of it, anyway.

I have said that this high, steep hillside was ‘stepped’. This was done in the typical Japanese manner, with walls made of rocks and stones piled one on top of the other, rising perhaps five or so feet in height and all held in place by a sort of wire netting. From these stretched out the various orange orchards, the majority small in size and leading rather sharply down to the next stone wall…

At last we reached the top of the hill – and it was considerably harder climbing up than it had been getting down. I had the utmost respect for the men and women who worked here, gathering the fruit and pruning the trees. It was undoubtedly a tough job, for all the idyllic scenery.      

I then realized that we were in the very orchard which Terumasa had earlier pointed out – the one belonging to the orange farmer named Tashima. It was obvious that Holmes had purposely led us up this way. And here was the man who was surely Tashima himself; a hard-eyed, turtle-faced fellow who was staring balefully at us, paused in the act of plucking a ripe orange, a large wooden bucket full of fruit by his feet.

‘Who are you? What do you mean, by coming into my orchard this way?’ he demanded.

‘I – forgive me. My name is Sherlock Holmes, and this is my friend, Yoshida-
sensei
. We are staying here – we were called to investigate the death of another fruit farmer called Miguchi-
san
.’

‘You are… that foreigner, Sherlock Holmes…? And Miguchi is…
dead
…?’ stammered Tashima, his left hand still unconsciously gripping the orange. His surprise seemed genuine – and he, like so many in Japan, had obviously heard of the Englishman…

‘It seems he was murdered, Tashima-
san
,’ stated Holmes, staring closely at the fruit-farmer.

‘I know nothing about this… But, wait – how do you know my name?’

‘Because the victim’s son has already mentioned you…’

Tashima gave a bitter laugh, but I noticed he had trouble meeting Holmes’s gaze.

‘I take it I’ve already been tried and convicted of killing Miguchi, then,’ he said harshly. ‘I climbed all the way down there, killed Miguchi without anyone spotting me, then quickly climbed all the way back up here like a sprightly young man of twenty, again without anyone observing me – is that the theory?’

With these words, his confidence seemed to grow, so that he now met Holmes’s eyes.

‘Who said Miguchi was killed down in his orchard?’ said Holmes quietly.

‘Because that’s the direction you’ve just come from, and it’s around noon on a weekday!’ retorted Tashima, his face growing red with anger. ‘Are you
really
this apparent ‘detective mastermind’, Holmes-
san
, or do you just hold us simple country-bumpkin folk in such obvious contempt?’

I could not help but concede that he had a point. 

‘I understand that there was some conflict between you and the deceased,’ said Holmes then, as I noticed that some of Tashima’s fruit had yet to ripen, and in any case was neither as large nor as generally appetizing in appearance as Miguchi’s produce. Truly, the dead man had been a master of his craft.

‘We’d exchanged a few words, that’s no secret,’ muttered Tashima tetchily.

‘You wanted him to share his secrets, so that you could produce a better crop – and, of course, earn more money…’

‘I suggested this to him, once or twice, yes,’ shrugged Tashima, as again his eyes darted to the ground. ‘Why shouldn’t simple folk like us help each other? But, oh no, he was too good for that!