What on earth? thought Sasaki, wiping the condensation from the window pane to get a better look. He peered out into the night and as he did so he noticed that over towards the west corner of the house, only vaguely visible through the whirling snowflakes, there was a second stake. Because of the distance it was hard to be certain but it seemed as if this too was another thin branch of firewood, protruding about a metre from the snow. As far as he could tell, there were no other stakes visible—at least from the salon window. Just these two.
Sasaki wanted to call Togai over and ask him what he thought they might be, but he was deep in conversation with Eiko. Yoshihiko was in the circle of older guests including Kozaburo, Kikuoka and Kanai, and Sasaki didn’t want to disturb their conversation, although whether it was business talk or idle chat wasn’t clear. Kajiwara and the Hayakawas were nowhere to be seen—probably back in the kitchen.
Suddenly Kozaburo raised his voice above the chit-chat.
“All you youngsters, haven’t you had enough of listening to old people prattling on? Come on, let’s hear something amusing.”
Sasaki took this cue to sit back down at the table, and with that, the mysterious stakes in the snow were forgotten.
To tell the truth, Kozaburo Hamamoto was fed up with listening to the empty flattery from tonight’s guests. In fact, his mood was turning sour. The very reason he had built this eccentric home up here in the far north was to escape the clutches of suck-ups like this.
And yet, like a herd of wild animals they came stampeding after him across hundreds of kilometres. However weird the sloping floor, however eccentric his collection of antiques, they just blindly praised everything in sight. As long as he still had the scent of money, they would hunt him down to the ends of the earth.
His hopes were with the younger generation, and he addressed them now.
“All right, do you like mysteries? I’m very fond of them myself. I’m going to set you a puzzle to solve. Everyone here is attending, or has attended, a top university, so I’m sure you have some of the smartest minds in the country.
“How about this one? In the gold-panning region of Mexico, right by the US border, there was a young boy who piled up bags of sand on his bicycle and crossed the border from Mexico into the United States every single day. The US customs officials assumed that he was a smuggler and would open and search the suspicious sandbags. However, all they ever found inside was plain old sand, and not a single nugget of gold. So what was the boy up to? Here is your quiz: What was he smuggling, and how was he doing it? How about it, Mr Kikuoka? Can you solve it?”
“Let’s see… No, I can’t.”
Kanai immediately echoed his boss.
“I can’t get it either.”
Neither man looked as if he were giving the problem any thought whatsoever.
“Yoshihiko, how about you?”
The boy silently shook his head.
“Do you all give up? This one wasn’t difficult at all. The boy was smuggling bicycles.”
The loudest laughter came from Kikuoka. Kanai also offered his own fawning reaction,
“It was bicycles! I see. Very good.”
“Now that puzzle was one thought up by Perry Mason’s friend Drake and his secretary, Della. Pretty good, wasn’t it? If you want to smuggle bicycles, the way to do it is to base your operation right in a gold-panning region.
“Okay, let’s think of another one… This time I’m not going to give you the answer. Let’s see… What would be a good one…? All right, here we go. This one is a true story—something that a friend of mine used to boast about long ago. I’ve told it many times in my speech to the new recruits at the company. The story is set in the 1950s.
“These days, all the railway companies in Japan, both public and private, have what look like little burners on the rails to prevent a thick layer of snow from building up on the tracks or the rails freezing. But back in the fifties, Japan was still a poor country, and no railway companies had anything like that.
“One winter, maybe 1955, Tokyo had a very heavy snowfall. Fifty centimetres fell in one night. Of course, all the private and public railway companies were forced to suspend operations. I’m not sure what would happen these days, but in Tokyo where they weren’t used to so much snow, they didn’t have snow ploughs. Back then, all the railway company employees used to be put to work shovelling the snow by hand. It was a terrible task and took hours. It was impossible to get the tracks clear by the morning rush hour.
“However, Hamakyu Railways, whose current president is that good friend I mentioned at the start, managed to get their trains running after only the shortest of delays. And by rush hour, all their trains were running on time. So how do you think they did it?
“My friend used a method; I suppose we could call it a trick. However, I must stress that he wasn’t the president back then, and was in no position to mobilize a whole army of employees to help deal with the snow. Nor did he have access to any specialized equipment. He had to rely on his own brilliance. He rose to fame overnight within the company.”
“That really happened? Sounds like a miracle,” said Kikuoka.
Kanai had to chime in too.
“Yes, you’re right. A true miracle…”
“Yes, I know it was a miracle! But I’d like to hear the answer,” said Kozaburo, a little frustrated.
“Yes, yes, of course. I’m going to say that the first train of the day had a snow plough attached to the front.”
“No, they didn’t have anything like that back then. Besides it would have been impossible—the snow was too deep. And if that kind of equipment had been available, then for sure all the other train companies would have owned the same thing. No, he used nothing like that. Just what was already available.”
“Mr Hamamoto, all of your friends are really amazing people.”
Kozaburo paid no attention to Kanai’s gratuitous flattery.
“I’ve got it.”
It was Sasaki who spoke. Next to him, Togai’s expression was inscrutable.
“They kept the empty trains running all through the night.”
“Well done! You got it. As soon as it began to snow and looked like it was going to stick, my friend got the trains to run at ten-minute intervals throughout the night. And back then it took a lot of determination on his part to get something like that done. There are hard-headed bosses who resist new ideas everywhere. But thanks to that level of resolve, he now sits in the president’s chair. What do you think? Are you ready to try another one?”
Togai, eager to recover from his slow start, nodded energetically.
Unfortunately for him, all of the puzzles that Kozaburo came up with were successfully solved by Shun Sasaki. Every time Sasaki opened his mouth and came out with the next impressive correct answer, Togai’s face would turn steadily more crimson, until it matched the lights on the Christmas tree.
Kozaburo glanced at the young man’s expression. He realized what his eccentric quiz had become. A chance to win the ultimate prize.
Both young men, or Togai at least, were treating this quiz as a way to win Eiko’s favour. If he succeeded in coming first, Togai believed that his prize would be a ticket for that most romantic trip around the world—a honeymoon. And then on his return, the rest of his prize money would be the legacy of a lifetime in this mansion.
Kozaburo had predicted this might happen, and with a level of cynicism that had been perfected over many years, he had prepared these puzzles purposely to get this reaction.
“Mr Sasaki, you seem very good at this. Would you like a more challenging problem?”