Hanshichi is set in two cities, Edo and Tokyo, occupying the same geographic space at different historical moments. The implicit contrast between past and present, accompanied by a palpable sense of nostalgia for what has been lost in the process of modernization and industrialization, is one of the series' defi ning features.
Some may conclude that Kido's use of a traditional Japanese setting represents a rejection of the West and a retreat into a familiar, safer time; but it might as validly be argued that Edo itself would have seemed more “foreign” to Kido's younger readers and was in fact more, not less, dangerous than the present. Kido does not paint a rosy picture of Edo as belonging to some idealized golden age: his stories are about crimes and the often sad and tragic lives of the people affected by them. He does not stint on depicting the social ills of that era and those who preyed on the weak: unscrupulous slave traders, lecherous monks, shady con men, murderous ronin (masterless samurai), greedy merchants, compulsive gamblers, to name but a few. Also described are the anonymous threats posed by fi res, earthquakes, epidemics, social unrest, and financial instability, not to mention foreign “barbarians,” faced by the denizens of Edo. In short, Kido took a calculated risk in writing stories that swam against the rising tide of modernization. He did not set them in Edo so as to appeal more to his readers. On the contrary, he turned to the detective genre as a way of bringing the past to life.
When Hanshichi was launched in 1917, very few of Kido's readers would have had firsthand knowledge of Edo in the 1840s to 1860s, the period when the adventures are set. As the series progressed and more and more of the old city vanished (most notably after the Great Earthquake of 1923), decreasing numbers of his readers could have recalled what Tokyo had been like in the time before Japan's overseas wars with China and Russia in 1894 and 1904, respectively. And by the time Hanshichi concluded in 1937, with the nation on the brink of world war, the majority of Hanshichi fans would have been born well after the death of the fictional sleuth.
Like the modern city that replaced it, Edo had consisted of two halves: the “high city” (yamanote) in the western foothills and the “low city” (shitamachi) in the flatlands near the bay and around the mouth of the Sumida River flowing into it from the north.
The high city consisted of the shogun's castle, set within extensive grounds and surrounded by inner (uchibori) and outer moats (sotobori). Between these moats lay the mansions of the hatamoto, the shogun's highest-ranking direct vassals, comprising the neighborhoods of Jimbocho and Bancho (home today to Yasukuni Shrine) to the north and northwest, respectively, and Kasumigaseki, Nagatacho, and Kojimachi to the south and southwest. The northern portion of the outer moat was formed by a man-made waterway known as the Edo River above where it flowed into the moat near Bancho from the north, and as the Kanda River from there until it emptied into the Sumida just above Ryogoku Bridge. Beyond the outer moat lay more samurai residences in (starting from the north and moving counterclockwise) the areas of Hongo, Koishikawa, Ushigome, Ichigaya, Yotsuya, Akasaka, and Shiba. More government buildings and warehouses lay along the waterfront, and samurai residences also occupied the prime real estate along the banks of the Sumida.
The low city comprised only the narrow strip of land (much of it reclaimed from the bay) between the waterfront and the cas-tle's outer moat, which was crisscrossed by a network of canals that spiraled outward from the castle toward the bay. Moving from south to north, it was home to the tightly packed plebian neighborhoods of Kyobashi, Nihonbashi, Kanda, and Shitaya.
Over time, the low city slowly sprawled along its north-south axis toward Shiba in the south and Asakusa in the north, as open land was filled in and the upper classes abandoned their low-city residences in favor of the more fashionable and less fl ood-and fire-prone western suburbs. It also spilled eastward across the Sumida into the extensive marshlands of Honjo and Fukagawa. The heart of the old city was Nihonbashi, the “Bridge of Japan,” spanning the busiest of Edo's canals, which served as the mercantile hub of the city and was home to large emporiums and wholesalers. But the bustling entertainment quarters of the city lay farther north, most notably around the three great public plazas known as hirokoji, or “broad alleyways.” These were located in Ryogoku, at the western approach to the bridge of the same name over the Sumida; in Asakusa, outside the Kaminarimon, or “Thunder Gate,” of Sensoji Temple; and in Shitaya, south of Shinobazu Pond (of these three, only the last retains the hirokoji designation today, though it is now called Ueno Hirokoji). Just north of Asakusa lay the licensed quarter of the Yoshiwara, a small island of debauchery amid the green paddy fields of Iriya, destined, too, one day to be swallowed up by the expanding city.
The basic unit of the old low city was the cho, usually translated as “block,” but in most cases a single main street lined by rows of one-story tenement houses (nagaya) to which access could be controlled at night by way of a gate at its entrance. It was commonly said that the low city was composed of “808 neighborhoods” (happyaku hachi cho), a term coined in the mid1600s. In fact, it is estimated that by 1843 there were actually more than 1,700 cho. In terms of population, it is estimated that nearly 600,000 commoners lived in Edo at that time, occupying just 20 percent of the available land. Together the samurai and clergy numbered about the same, or perhaps even more, yet controlled the remaining 80 percent of the city.
Kido's hero Hanshichi was the consummate child of Edo, or edokko, born in 1823 just a stone's throw from the arched wooden bridge of Nihonbashi, the center from which all distances throughout Japan were measured. His father, we are told, had been employed in the most quintessential of all Edo trades, cotton wholesaling, a sober occupation that the young, fun-loving Hanshichi eschewed. But fortunately, the wayward young man fell under the stern but steady guidance of Kichigoro, a detective who chose him as both his son-in-law and his successor in law enforcement, a career that afforded some measure of upward social mobility if not the promise of great wealth. After Kichigoro's untimely death, Hanshichi took over his residence in Mikawacho in Kanda, a street bordering the plebian and samurai neighborhoods in the north of the city near the foot of Kudan Hill. From there, Hanshichi was well positioned to roam throughout the city on cases, his most frequent haunts being Shitaya, an area north of the Kanda River and south of Ueno's Shinobazu Pond, where his sister lived on a street below the Myojin Shrine; Nihonbashi and Kyobashi to the south (in the heart of today's Ginza); and Hatchobori, east of Kyobashi, home to his boss, Chief Inspector Makihara, and other top officials. At the end of a long and storied career, Hanshichi, like many men of good status and modest means, retired to Akasaka in the southwestern suburbs beyond Edo castle. It is there that he is living a comfortable existence — a widower, alone but for an old housekeeper, and supported by his grown son, a dealer of imported goods in Yokohama — when he first encounters the young narrator of the series.
By contrast, Kido himself hailed from the high-city neighborhood of Kojimachi west of the castle. It is here that the fi rst story of the series, “The Ghost of Ofumi,” opens in the 1880s, with the narrator, a boy of ten, paying a visit to an “uncle's” house in Bancho, located on a gloomy street bordered by former samurai estates left vacant in the tumultuous aft ermath of the Meiji Restoration. The adventure the uncle recounts is set in 1864, when Hanshichi, aged forty-one, was in the prime of his career. The sleuth, however, does not make an appearance until halfway through the story, when he swoops down in true deus ex machina fashion to play Sherlock Holmes to the uncle's Watson. He quickly salvages the uncle's foundering investigation of a suspected ghost that has been haunting the wife and child of a high-ranking samurai, demonstrating his tact in negotiating all three realms of Edo society — samurai, townspeople, and clergy — in the process.
After this introductory adventure, the Hanshichi series settles into what would become a fairly predictable pattern: each installment consists of a brief prelude in which the young narrator visits old Hanshichi at his home in Akasaka (often on some special occasion such as a festival), whereupon the latter launches into a story of one of his past exploits; this is followed by a conclusion in which old Hanshichi sums things up and makes a brief pronouncement on how times have changed.
As with his kabuki plays, Kido was motivated as much by a desire to educate his readers as to entertain them. He does this by infusing his stories with information about feudal institutions, customs, festivals, geography, and historical events. Moreover, his detailed knowledge of Edo's layout was no mere fabrication — it was gleaned from detailed maps (kiriezu), such as the one old Hanshichi is depicted pouring over at the beginning of “The Haunted Sash Pond,” that were commonly available from the mid-1600s onward and labeled every street, building, and piece of land in Edo along with the name of its owner. The stories translated here run the gamut of geographic locales in the old city (one, “The Mountain Party,” is even set in the post town of Odawara on the bustling Tokaido road) and feature an eclectic parade of colorful characters from all walks of life: samurai, Buddhist priests, rich merchants, courtesans, acrobats, traveling salesmen, music teachers and dance instructors, teahouse waitresses, blind masseurs, sword makers, fishmongers, gamblers and petty criminals, not to mention the omnipresent and nondescript clerks, servants, and apprentices. Kido's keen observation of human nature is augmented with knowledgeable allusions to popular literature and kabuki. Above all, he never fails to tinge his stories with a wry sense of humor.
Hanshichi's Edo is populated not only by fl esh-and-blood men and women but also by ghosts, spirits, and monsters of various descriptions, whose existence, while never actually proven, is frequently hinted at. They take the form of human specters, fox spirits, shape-changing cats, and other mischief makers such as the goblin-like tengu and watery kappa that lurk in rivers and on desolate moors, liminal spaces where the relative safety aff orded by the city and the presence of other human beings gives way to the unfathomable and forbidding natural world. As the opening sentence of the very first adventure suggests, the Edo period was a time when the supernatural exerted a strong grip on the Japanese imagination. It was used to explain any strange and troubling event, and was as readily accepted by most samurai as by the less well-educated townspeople. Even Hanshichi, the wise and worldly expert on human nature, is never willing completely to rule out the supernatural as a plausible explanation. In recounting his adventures, he defers to his young interlocutor on all matters of modern science and empiricism, modestly professing that such things are beyond his ken. Above all, it is the mystery of the unknown and unknowable prevailing in Edo times, Kido seems to suggest, that is the greatest victim of Japan's modernization.
