Tales of the Exploits of Jūnishin Kaijūrō

A cold rain falls on the road at Inaribori, and a young woman walks up and down in front of the Tanuma mansion crying "Come, let's play house one more time." Five strangers watch her from under the eaves — a samurai, a travelling priest, a rokubu, a gambler, a fortune-teller. A sixth man watches the five of them the way a man watches game. That is Jūnishin Kaijūrō, a yoriki of the Edo city magistracy, and he decides to look into it.

The age is that of Tanuma Okitsugu, when a post as Nagasaki magistrate has a going rate of two thousand ryō and gifts arrive by the roomful. What is being given this season is the "playing-house set," and Kaijūrō follows the orders back through a Kanda joinery to Matsumoto Izu-no-Kami's house steward, to a tea-stall girl called Oshina who has the misfortune to resemble a concubine, and finally over a wall into Tanuma's garden, where a room walled and ceilinged in mirrors was built by Hiraga Gennai and where the pages carry a chastity belt and a donkey mask and say that by tomorrow she will be a madwoman.

Four more cases follow. A merchant's daughter is shown her own likeness stabbed by a magician inside a great mirror, and bleeds. A half-mad smuggler in a salt house sings a ballad that hides his buried fortune in its first and last syllables, and dies before the last verse. In Kiso a girl is rescued from ruffians three days running, always with a servant arriving conveniently late. At a bathing beach on the Ise shore a beautiful girl picks the swimmers' pockets while her master plans something far larger. Behind them stand the Six Men of Meiwa — Onna-Kansuke, who lives as a woman and is loved as one; Yashamaru the Pillar of Fire; Nezumi-Kozō Gaiden — and behind those, the lord of Tatebayashi, whose treasonous scheme turns out to be a proposal of Ogyū Sorai's for settling masterless samurai on the land.

Kaijūrō solves nothing by the sword. He plants a suggestion in a frightened girl through a quack-medicine hawker's patter, sends his officers deliberately the wrong way, and breaks a conspiracy by hiring a woman who can throw six voices through a paper screen. First English translation, complete and unabridged, all five cases in the order Bungei Kurabu printed them.

English-language digital edition. Translated by Valentin Sarić.

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