The Sinister Mansion

Four rōnin sit over the wreckage of a meal in an Asakusa eating-house and settle the terms of an abduction: it has to be tonight, there is a deadline, and killing is a trade they know. Fifty ryō changes hands. At the same hour, in a mansion on the edge of Edo, a samurai stands alone in a room with no lamp in it and argues aloud with his dead wife.

Yūki Hatajirō is a gokenin — a direct retainer of the shōgun — with a good sword, an empty purse and a taste for gallantry. He breaks up an assault on a girl outside a gate, and then discovers the gate is her own. Inside, the master of the house — Sanzō Takuma, thirty-five, a scholar of Western learning who says he is the twenty-year-old girl's father — thanks him, remarks that twenty and twenty-three are very fine proportions, and settles without asking that Hatajirō will stay the night, exert his valor if the house is attacked, and pay no attention to anything peculiar he may see.

What follows is one night in a garden: an artificial hill, a carp pond, white peonies, three men who spring out of the dark to thank Hatajirō for the flat of his blade and then vanish, six masked swordsmen coming over the earthen wall, and Hatajirō's first killing. Across the pond, in a study fitted out in the Western manner with felt floor and oil painting and a foreign pendulum clock — in the Bunsei era, on the outskirts of Edo — Takuma stands sweating in front of a woman named Shimako, counting the minutes down to midnight aloud while she counts them down with her body. Pasted to the wall beneath the clock is a sheet of paper with four clauses on it, and every one of them is a way of losing a fortune.

First English translation, complete and unabridged, with endnotes on the Edo terms and the four clauses of the will.

English-language digital edition. Translated by Valentin Sarić.

You receive: a 52-page PDF and an EPUB edition.

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