Have you ever seen a basin full of eels? Just the sound of them slithering over one another makes you shiver. But you have to ignore it; grab one next to the head and pluck it out. It’s as thick as undersea telegraph cable and it thrashes as you slap it down on the board. Before it knows a thing you whack the knife down and through, an inch below the eye. Do this hard enough to still the thrashing body but not so hard that you sever it. Next you nail it through its eye to the wooden block. It’s still flicking back and forth, so press it down. Now slice it through the middle from tip of tail to gaping neck. Lay the two lengths side by side; with flat of blade nuzzle out bones and innards. Then slice into segments just the right size that Yamato can thread his lattice of skewers in and out the flesh. You can get onto the next one, while he will daub them in soy as black as ink, and pop them in the oil bubbling in the pan above the charcoal. Five minutes crackling and sizzling then they’re ready for his loyal customers. Maximum freshness is part of his pitch. He thinks when people stop to watch it’s to make sure the eels are as freshly killed as advertised. This may be so. Or it may be they can’t resist the act of killing: as Horney says, the public are bloodthirsty bastards. 

I remember the moment when I told the artists I planned to become a writer. We were at one of the teahouses on the coast road towards Honmoku, sitting at a table outside under the canopy.  A waitress poured green tea. Horse-drawn carriages passed on the road in front of the ocean. Crickets screeched their song. It must have been late August or early September, 1893. My sixteenth year. Hornel, always the most financially astute of the three, gave one of his taurine snorts:

‘If you want to write, crime is the thing, and if you don’t know which to choose you ought to go straight for murder.’

Omitting to tell him I did not need to be told any of this, I enquired why it was so.

‘Because’ – I can still hear his mocking baritone – ‘the public are bloodthirsty bastards, aren’t they!’

Henry, less abrasive, more ironic, and the hardest even for my English skill to follow, questioned whether it was ‘not a tad cynical to deploy a fellow’s demise as narrative device?’

‘Any more cynical than painting coos, KG?’ Horney retorted.

Henry was nicknamed KG, short for King George. Half-mocking respect for his age – he was thirty six, they were both thirty. They used to joke about his claim to be next in line for leadership of The Boys – that’s what they called the group of artists they belonged to. They were from Scotland – did they ever stop mentioning it? – and only in Japan for a year, all reasonable expenses paid by their dealer, who stood to make part of the profits from their work. Henry and Hornel (Horney, they called him) were always trying to outdo each other. But Nith tended to exist on a different page altogether.

‘The problem with crime stories is they peddle this myth of innate evil,’ Nith spoke up. ‘Most criminals are just ordinary people pushed to their limit.’ This was a favourite Nithian theme and he would have carried on, but Horney cut him off with a pun:

‘Call him Conan Doyle or Conman Doyle, you still have his stories by your bedside don’t you!’

But it was not Horney’s advice that made me want to write a detective story. The blame for that lay with what happened a month or so prior to the conversation I have just described. I was still working then near the waterfront, and all it took was the wake from a departing launch, churning the shallow waters of the harbour, and up she came. Her navy blue and red flower-patterned yukata clung to her body, but her face was already turning to a grey pallour when the salvager pulled her from the water. Sunlight glittered on the wet muscles of the man’s back as he climbed the ladder. He reached up to grip the rail with one hand and the girl’s head flopped over his shoulder. My mouth dried up when I saw the two freckles on her neck just below the ear, and the way her eyes still stared but now with a dreadful emptiness of comprehension. In that first moment of recognition, I made the parallel with my father, who had drowned while attempting a misguided swim when I was too young to remember. So I assumed the girl too must have died an accidental death, and when I looked up at Yamato, my boss and mentor, it was not at all with suspicion, but to seek some explanation from him as to why she would take such a foolish risk. I remember he was staring, transfixed, at the corpse, and muttering words under his breath. It sounded like a prayer, like the one he had recited when he took me to the temple, and an absurd thought occurred to me: could she have been another acolyte of the Dragon King, Ryuo, who had taken her worship too far and met her end searching for his palace on the seabed?

The salvager passed the girl up to two other men, who guided her gently down onto her back on the quayside, by that time in the morning already warmed by the sun. One of the two fellows rose to his feet and turned to face the semicircle of gawkers that had assembled. He was Japanese but like many officials wore western clothes.

‘Does anyone here know who she is?’ he barked in a fair approximation of English, before repeating the question in Japanese. He must have been one of the ones who had been sent abroad to study, and come back full of Western ideas, in his case of how you conducted police work. Again I looked at Yamato, expecting him to speak up, but he said nothing, only clamped his hand more tightly to my shoulder.

‘Does anyone have any information?’

’Looks like she drowned,’ some local Sherlock piped.

The policeman ignored that and went on.

‘If you hear anything come to the police station tomorrow. For now we need to do our job and you need to do yours. So if you would be so kind, shift your arses.’

‘Shouldn’t we tell him,’ I hissed at Yamato, but he only swore at me and dug his fingers even more tightly into my shoulder. We dispersed along with the others: a few sailors, dockworkers and seafront strollers, a typical Settlement mix. When I asked Yamato if we would go to the police station later he growled at me:
‘Shut up, bakayarou. Do you want us to be suspected of murdering her?’

I was stunned into silence and my own feverish thoughts. As we returned to the stall to start the day’s work, another Japanese clattered past us in the opposite direction. His arms were loaded with equipment that I would come to recognise as tripod, camera and flashbulb. From behind the stall I stole glances between chops of eel: a risky business for reasons I will explain. However I had already made up my mind at that point that I would carry out my own investigation into her death, and for the short time remaining until she was covered and taken away, I had to fix what she looked like at the end in my mind as sharply as if I possessed the image myself.