This Translation Tuesday, we bring you an intricate puzzle by master mystery-writer Edogawa Ranpo, translated from the Japanese by Erin Vastola. An admirer of Edgar Allan Poe (to whom his pen name was an homage), Edogawa is celebrated both in Japan and abroad for incorporating Japanese cultural elements into suspenseful narratives driven by rigorous logic, and “The Diary” is no exception. Following the death of his younger brother, the unnamed narrator of this peculiar short story mourns the fact that his sibling died too young to experience romantic love. But as he inspects his brother’s diary and letters, he begins to doubt his assumptions. What follows is an elaborate psychodrama of code-cracking, thwarted courtship, and the correspondence culture of early twentieth-century Japan. Read on!
It was the evening of my younger brother’s memorial service, exactly seven days after his passing. I entered his study and picked up the writings he had left behind. Alone with my thoughts, I sank into deep contemplation.
Though it was not particularly late, the household—still damp with tears—had fallen into complete silence. From afar came the plaintive echoes of street vendors’ cries, somehow imbuing the scene with the flavor of a modern play. Touched by the gravity of long-forgotten childhood emotions, I unconsciously opened the diary on my brother’s desk.
Gazing at the diary, I mournfully thought of my twenty-year-old brother, who, I feared, had left this world without ever knowing love or romance.
A shy boy with few friends, he naturally spent many hours secluded in this study. Only through this diary, meticulously recorded in fine pen, might I fully glean his personality. His writings were juvenile yet earnest, filled with skepticism about life and agonizing over faith—the so-called adolescent angst anyone his age might experience.
As I leafed through the diary, page by page, I felt as if I were gazing into my own past. From deep within the writings on those pages, my brother’s timid, dovelike eyes stared back at me.
When I reached the entry for the ninth of March, something caught my eye that made me—submerged in emotion as I was—let out a soft cry. For the first time in the innocent writings appeared the lovely name of a girl: “Kitagawa Yukie (Postcard)” was noted under “Letters Received.” I, too, was well-acquainted with Ms. Yukie; she was the fair young daughter of a distant relative.
A sudden thought struck me—could my brother have been in love with Ms. Yukie? A fleeting thrill ran through me as I eagerly read the rest of the entry. Yet, contrary to my expectations, there was no mention of her in the main entry. However, “Yukie Kitagawa (Postcard)” appeared again under the next day’s “Letters Received,” and from then on, her name reappeared every few days under both “Letters Received” and “Letters Sent.” The sent letters began on the ninth of March and continued until the twenty-first of May, while the received letters started at the same time and continued until the seventeenth of May. The whole correspondence lasted less than three months. After that, and up till the middle of October when my brother could no longer write due to his worsening illness, Ms. Yukie’s name did not appear again—not even on the final page of the diary, which could be considered my brother’s last writing.
Counting the correspondences, I found only eight letters from my brother and ten from Ms. Yukie. Moreover, seeing that each letter was marked “(Postcard),” I couldn’t imagine they contained any writings of a clandestine nature. Nor, judging from the diary’s overall style, did I imagine any events had taken place outside its pages and remained intentionally unrecorded.
I closed the diary, unsure whether I felt relief or disappointment. So, my brother had passed away without ever knowing love after all. My spirits fell at the thought.
After a moment, I raised my eyes and noticed my brother’s treasured little letterbox on the desk. He had stored his most important possessions in it before he died. Perhaps something hidden in that old-fashioned lacquer box could soothe my melancholy. Spurred by curiosity, I opened the letterbox and peered inside.
It contained sundry documents unrelated to the narrative at hand. But at the very bottom—ah! Could it be?—wrapped in white paper, as if of great importance, were eleven picture postcards from Ms. Yukie. Who would have hidden them so painstakingly at the bottom of a box if not sent by a beloved?
Feeling suddenly uneasy, I examined the postcards one by one. My hand trembled unnaturally as I held them, gripped by some passion.
Yet, how could this be? Even reading between the lines, I could detect no hint of romantic sentiment in the words on the postcards.
Perhaps, owing to his timidity, my brother could not express his innermost feelings. He had kept these otherwise trifling postcards like treasured charms simply because they were sent by his beloved—his sole, pitiful consolation. And, in the end, it seemed he had left this world still harboring unrequited feelings.
I put the postcards in front of me, pondering them this way and that. What could be the reason? After a while, it occurred to me: I had counted only ten correspondences from Ms. Yukie in my brother’s diary, yet here before me were eleven postcards. The eleventh postcard was dated May the twenty-fifth. Come to think of it, I didn’t recall seeing her name recorded under “Letters Received” on that day. I couldn’t help but pick up the diary again and open it to the twenty-fifth of May.
A grave oversight came to my attention—something I had missed before. While the “Letters Received” area was blank, the main entry read:
“I received a postcard from Y. in response to my last communication. Disappointed. I’m too cowardly. Ah, but now it cannot be undone.”
“Y” undoubtedly referred to Ms. Yukie, as we didn’t know anyone else with that initial. But what did the text mean? According to the diary, my brother had written nothing but postcards to her. Surely, he couldn’t have written a love letter on a postcard. Perhaps he had sent another letter—the “last communication” mentioned—but not recorded it in the diary? Maybe he had received only that meaningless postcard in response. Given their abrupt cessation of correspondence after May 25th, this seemed plausible.
Be that as it may, the message on Ms. Yukie’s final postcard was an odd rejection, if that was its intent. The message contained only get-well wishes written in beautiful handwriting (by then my brother was bedridden). Furthermore, if he had sent an additional letter, he would have recorded it, given his meticulous documentation. What could the message about disappointment mean? As I mulled over these questions, it struck me that there might be a secret hidden where the puzzle pieces didn’t fit. A secret that couldn’t be unraveled just by looking at the facts on the surface.
Perhaps this riddle left behind by my late brother was a matter best left undisturbed. However, for whatever reason, I can never resist my inclination to get to the bottom of things when I encounter something even slightly suspicious—like a detective investigating a crime.
Moreover, in this case, not only could the secret never be revealed by the person in question, but the truth of the matter was also of great personal significance to me. And so, my innate propensity for sleuthing took hold of me with an added dose of vigor.
So absorbed was I in solving the mystery that I seemed to forget the pain of my brother’s death. I read through the diary again. I ferreted out all his other writings and pored over everything. But I found nothing resembling a romantic account. My brother was, in addition to being extremely bashful, exceedingly cautious. Search as I might, I was unlikely to find any clues left behind.
I had forgotten the late hour by this point, engrossed in untangling a mystery that showed no sign of being solved. A long while went by.
Finally, after laboring in vain for some time, the dates my brother sent postcards aroused my suspicions. According to the diary, the sequence was as follows:
March…9th, 12th, 15th, 22nd
April…5th, 25th
May…17th, 21st
These dates seemed at odds with the behavior of a person in love. Even if no love letters were exchanged, was it not strange for someone to become more averse to writing to his sweetheart as their correspondence progressed? This anomaly was even more evident when I compared the dates with those on Ms. Yukie’s postcards:
March…10th, 13th, 17th, 23rd
April…6th, 14th, 18th, 26th
May…3rd, 17th, 25th
It was clear that in addition to responding to all my brother’s postcards—though writing nothing of substance—Ms. Yukie had sent at least three messages on her own initiative: April 14th, April 18th, and May 3rd. If my brother were in love with her, why had he neglected to respond to those three correspondences? It seemed unnatural considering what he had written in the diary; he hadn’t been traveling or too ill to write during that time. Another thing was the frequency of Ms. Yukie’s correspondences; even though their contents were trivial, nothing was inconceivable for an immodest mind given the recipient was a young man. And what could have made them abruptly end the correspondence after May 25th, as if by prearrangement?
I pondered these questions and looked at the dates my brother sent postcards. Could there be some hidden meaning? Perhaps he had written an enciphered love letter, with the posted dates forming a kind of code. Given his predilection for secrets, this idea was not altogether unthinkable.
Thereupon, I tried to see if the numbers on the posted dates represented any alphabetical sequences—the Iroha poem, the kana syllabary, the Roman alphabet, and so forth. For better or worse, I had some experience in deciphering codes.
Now, what would come of this? The ninth of March corresponded to the ninth letter of the alphabet, “I,” and the twelfth was “L.” Applying this method, I found—to my amazement—that the eight dates could be deciphered into “I LOVE YOU.” Ah! What a childish love letter! Yet, at the same time, how extremely persistent. My brother had squandered three months to write this simple sentence. It was almost unbelievable. But, knowing my brother’s peculiar disposition, I knew it could not be an accidental coincidence.
Assuming this conjecture to be true, everything became clear. I understood the meaning of “disappointed”: In response to “U,” the last letter my brother sent, he received just another meaningless picture postcard from Ms. Yukie by way of response. Moreover, this took place on precisely the same day the doctor diagnosed him with that deadly illness. Upon receiving this double blow, my poor brother could no longer be concerned with writing love letters. And so, he never disclosed his intentions to anyone—not even his sweetheart—though he made an abortive attempt to do so. He passed away still bearing the pain of those unexpressed feelings.
Overcome by an ineffable gloom, I sat there for some time with no mind to get up. For some reason, I kept staring vacantly at the postcards from Ms. Yukie before me—the postcards my brother had hidden at the bottom of the letterbox.
But, oh—what an astonishing truth! Curse my good-for-nothing curiosity! How much better everything would have been had I never known any of this. On each postcard, right next to where my brother’s name and address were written in a fair hand, the stamp was, without exception, applied at an angle. They were affixed so neatly and precisely that it seemed impossible unless done intentionally. There was no way it could be just a careless mistake.
I had seen it long ago—most likely during my elementary school days. A method of secret communication through stamp placement had been described in a literary magazine. It seems I already possessed a powerful curiosity as a boy, for I had read and memorized it. The magazine said that affixing stamps diagonally was the way to express love; I could never forget this because, in truth, I had put it into practice on one occasion. The practice came into vogue among young men and women at the time, enjoying considerable popularity. A young girl like Ms. Yukie should not have been aware of such an old trend, but—precisely during the time that Ms. Yukie and my brother were corresponding—a novel by Uno Kōji was released which described the practice in detail. This had even become a topic of conversation among us at the time, so I am certain that my brother and Ms. Yukie knew about it.
But how, then, with him knowing of this practice and Ms. Yukie repeating the same thing for three months, was my brother unable to discern her feelings—not even by the time the courtship finally ended in despair? I couldn’t wrap my head around this point. Was it because he had forgotten about the stamps? Or perhaps because he had opened the cards in such a rush that he hadn’t noticed how the stamps were affixed? At any rate, I was sure he hadn’t noticed because he had written “disappointed.”
Could such a classic star-crossed love story exist in this day and age? Assuming that my hypothesis was not mistaken, the two had been in love with each other—and even brought this to the other’s attention—but neither party had been the slightest bit aware of the other’s feelings. One had passed away having been dealt a painful blow, and the other would have to live a long life nursing tragic memories of having loved and lost.
Their love was too timid. Ms. Yukie was still a young girl, and this was to be expected, but my brother’s approach came closer to cowardice than timidity. That being said, I could hardly reproach my late brother for his actions. On the contrary, I felt a sharp pang of remorse at the thought of my brother’s eccentric disposition.
Despite his innate shyness and timid nature, my brother possessed a powerful sense of pride. Even in love, before anything else, he would have imagined the shame of rejection—that much was sure. That, to a boy with my brother’s temperament, would be a pain so bitter as to be unimaginable to ordinary people. As his older brother, I fully understood this.
How much my brother must have suffered to avoid the embarrassment of rejection. He simply had to profess his love, but if he confessed and was met with rejection, the shame and awkwardness would persist for as long as he and the other person lived in the same world. In this way, perhaps if he had been rejected, he could have denied having written a love letter as a means of evasion. I’m sure he was thinking along those lines.
In days gone by, courtiers had crafted ingenious love songs with equivocal significance in an attempt to soften the pain of straightforward rejection. My brother’s case was precisely the same: He had devised his secret code from the detective novels he habitually liked to read and put it into practice in service of this goal. Unfortunately, his overabundance of caution made the code too difficult to decipher.
Despite this, and in contrast to the intricacy of the code he devised himself, how had he been so obtuse when it came to cracking the other person’s code? While there are a great many examples in this world of crushing failures that played out due to overconfidence, this was a tragedy born out of a lack of confidence. What a tragic failure to go to plan.
Ah! Just by reading my brother’s diary, I’ve encountered truths that cannot be undone. What words can I use to describe the feelings I experienced then? How much better it would have been if my only pain had been mere pity for the wretched failure of these two young people? Yet I felt another, more selfish emotion. The feeling worked my heart into such a frenzy I felt as if I were going mad.
I slipped on a pair of garden clogs and staggered down to the garden, going to air my burning head in the freezing wind of the cold winter’s night. My heart in disarray, I paced aimlessly in circles through the groves.
Thinking all the while about my engagement to Ms. Yukie, which had been settled two months before my brother’s death. An arrangement that could not be undone.
Translated from the Japanese by Erin Vastola
Tarō Hirai (1894-1965), better known by his pen name, Edogawa Ranpo, was a pioneering author and critic of Japanese mystery and thriller fiction. Drawing inspiration from authors like Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe (to whom his pen name is an homage), Hirai’s series of mystery novels featuring fictional private detective Akechi Kogorō remain popular to this day. An anthology of his short stories, published in English as Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination, encapsulates the lurid, macabre, and bizarre themes that characterized the ero guro nansensu trend in early twentieth-century Japanese fiction. His work is celebrated both in Japan and abroad for incorporating Japanese cultural elements into suspenseful narratives driven by rigorous logic, and delving into the dark side of human nature with great psychological depth and detail.
Erin Vastola is a freelance editor and translator, working from Chinese to English and Japanese to English. She holds an M.A. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Washington University in St. Louis. Her translation of “半獸,” a short story by Taiwanese author Renny Chang, has been published in The Taipei Chinese PEN, a journal of contemporary Chinese literature from Taiwan. Her English translation of the poem “Su Dongpo on the Road,” by Chen I-Chih, was featured at the Taiwan Cultural-Creative Development Foundation’s annual Wordwave Festival in 2016. She currently lives in New York City.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: