Soji Shimada
MURDER IN THE CROOKED HOUSE
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Kozaburo Hamamoto (68) — owner of the Ice Floe Mansion and President of Hama Diesel
Eiko Hamamoto (23) — Kozaburo’s daughter
Kohei Hayakawa (50) — live-in butler and chauffeur
Chikako Hayakawa (44) — Kohei’s wife, live-in housekeeper
Haruo Kajiwara (27) — live-in chef
Eikichi Kikuoka (65) — President of Kikuoka Bearings
Kumi Aikura (22) — Mr Kikuoka’s secretary and mistress
Kazuya Ueda (30) — Mr Kikuoka’s chauffeur
Michio Kanai (47) — executive at Kikuoka Bearings
Hatsue Kanai (38) — Michio’s wife
Shun Sasaki (26) — student at Jikei University School of Medicine
Masaki Togai (24) — Tokyo University student
Yoshihiko Hamamoto (19) — Keio University student, grandson of Kozaburo Hamamoto’s brother
Saburo Ushikoshi — Detective Chief Inspector, Sapporo City Police Headquarters
Ozaki — Detective Sergeant, Sapporo City Police Headquarters
Okuma — Detective Inspector, Wakkanai Police Station
Anan — Constable, Wakkanai Police Station
Kiyoshi Mitarai — fortune teller, psychic and self-styled detective
Kazumi Ishioka — Mitarai’s friend
PROLOGUE
In the village of Hauterives in the south of France, there’s a curious building known as Cheval’s Palais Idéal. For thirty-three years, a humble postman by the name of Ferdinand Cheval laboured completely alone to create his dream palace, finally completing his task in 1912.
The structure is part Arabian palace, part Hindu temple; its entrance is like the gateway to a medieval European castle, with a Swiss-style shepherd’s hut sitting next to it. The whole effect lacks unity, but there is no doubt that this is a perfect rendition of a child’s fantasy castle. Here in Tokyo people worry too much about style, economy, or how they will be judged by others, and that is how they end up with characterless rows of rabbit hutches crammed in together.
Cheval was barely literate. The notes he left behind were full of spelling mistakes. But they were also alight with his burning belief that it was his life’s mission to build this unique place of worship.
According to these notes, he embarked on his project while delivering the mail. He began by picking up any interesting or unusually shaped rocks or pebbles he found while out on his rounds, and putting them in his pockets. He was already forty-three years old at this point. After a while, along with his postbag he began to carry a large basket over his shoulder for the rocks. And then it wasn’t long before he was taking a wheelbarrow out on his rounds.
One can only imagine how this eccentric postman was treated in his dull country village. Every day he took his collection of rocks and worked on building the foundation for his palace.
Twenty-six metres long, fourteen metres wide and twelve metres high—the construction of the palace building itself took three years. And then, slowly and steadily, all kinds of cement statues were added to its walls: cranes, leopards, ostriches, elephants, crocodiles. They would eventually cover all the surfaces of the building. Next, Cheval made a waterfall and three giant statues for the front wall.
He was seventy-six when he finally completed his great oeuvre. He enshrined his number one assistant—his trusty wheelbarrow—in the place of honour inside the palace, and built himself a modest house by the front entrance. After retiring from his job at the post office, he took up residence in the house with its excellent view of his palace. Apparently he had never intended the palace to be lived in.
In photos of Cheval’s palace, the materials used to construct it seem to have the soft texture of rubber. The ornamental statues that adorn its whole surface are more intricate than those of Angkor Wat, but the overall form and appearance of the walls are not fixed or uniform. There seems to be no order or balance—everything seems to be in a kind of warped confusion. If you weren’t interested in this kind of thing, you might just see the work of art to which Cheval dedicated the latter half of his life as a worthless antique or maybe even the equivalent of a pile of scrap metal.
It was easy for his fellow villagers to call Cheval a madman, but there was a clear commonality between the concept behind his palace and the work of the celebrated Spanish architect Antonio Gaudí. Cheval’s Palais Idéal is to this day the only tourist attraction in the otherwise unremarkable village of Hauterives.
If we’re talking oddballs with a mania for architecture, then there is one character who cannot be ignored: King Ludwig II of Bavaria. He is also famous for being the patron of the composer Richard Wagner. His two lifelong passions seem to have been the reverence he had for Wagner, and the construction of his castles.
The Linderhof Palace was one of his architectural masterpieces. Many complained that it was a blatant rip-off of the style of the French House of Bourbon, but after pushing open the revolving stone door in the hill behind the castle and entering the high-roofed tunnel, you realize that the space you find yourself in is one of a kind.
The tunnel leads into a magnificent man-made cave with a wide, dark lake. In the middle of the lake sits a boat fashioned in the shape of a pearl oyster. The multicoloured lighting flickers, and at the water’s edge there is a table made from branches of imitation coral. The cave walls are painted with fantastic scenes of angels and cherubs. There is no human being who wouldn’t look at this scene and find their imagination piqued.
It is said that when his beloved Wagner passed away, King Ludwig II buried himself away in this gloomy underground burrow, and took all his meals at that fake coral table while reminiscing about his dear friend.
In the West, there are all kinds of buildings with surprises built in: sliding walls, secret tunnels, hidden passageways. By comparison, Japan has relatively few.
There are a few ninja houses with their secret entrances and exits, but everything in those is designed with a practical purpose.
But there is one, the Nijotei, a strange residence built in Fukagawa in Tokyo after the Great Kanto Earthquake. It seems to have been fairly well known. There were ladders that went right up to the ceiling, glass peepholes in the doors, a pentagon-shaped window in the entrance way.
Maybe the equivalent of Cheval’s Palais Idéal exists somewhere in Japan, but I’ve never heard of one. There is, however, one place I ought to tell you about—the Crooked House in Hokkaido.
At the top of Japan’s northernmost island, Hokkaido, on the very tip of Cape Soya, there’s a high plain that overlooks the Okhotsk Sea. On this plain stands a peculiar-looking structure known by the locals as “The Crooked House”.