Saburo Koga is an unknown name among the people of the West .
Some might argue that many Japanese authors are, and that in general, before their works began to be translated in the West, even the most well-known authors, such as Keigo Higashino, Shimada Soji, and Yokomizo Seishi, were also unknown. Absolutely true! However, it's undeniable that some authors are more well-known than others. And Saburo Koga is one of them.
His real name was Haruta Yoshitame (1893–1945). He was a contemporary of the other great Japanese writer known as Edogawa Rampo (a pseudonym created after Edgar Allan Poe), whose real name was Taro Hirai, who published his first major novel in 1923: "The Two-Sen Copper Coin." Taking Rampo as a starting point, Saburo Koga also began writing stories, including the one presented here, which is very popular in Japan.
Koga Saburo's main achievement, however, is having coined the term Honkaku, meaning "orthodox," to refer to stories from the Japanese Golden Age, the same year Berkeley founded the Detection Club in London. It is no coincidence that the Honkaku Mystery Writers of Japan, modeled after the London-based Honkaku Mystery Writers Club in 1970, continues to exist and produce fiction.
"The Spider" dates back to 1930 and is no ordinary "whodunit," but rather a delightful fusion of elements from macabre fiction and the classic detective puzzle. The translation presented here was undertaken by Ho-Ling Wong and edited by John Pugmire.
Professor Tsujikawa was a renowned physical chemist, widely admired for his science. His decision to leave his university professorship to devote himself to researching spiders caused a stir and a stir. To do so, he had a bizarre laboratory built for himself, perched on a nine-meter-high pillar. It was shaped like a cylinder, approximately 4.5 meters wide and 2.7 meters high, with a round ceiling and windows, all the same size, spaced at regular intervals.
He then searched for a large number of spiders of all species, including venomous ones, sealed them in numerous containers, and began studying them.
About six months had passed, and the world had forgotten about Professor Tsujikawa and his strange laboratory; but the death of a friend of the professor, Professor Shiomi, seemed to rekindle the media's interest.
The narrator of the story is the one who was present that day: he is a zoology student, very knowledgeable in the study and classification of arthropods. It was therefore natural that Professor Tsujikawa would turn to him for clarification; He, too, was very curious about the scientist's reasons for abandoning his successful branch of research to study spiders, and I had asked him, but to no avail.
It was said that both Professor Shiomi and Professor Tsujikawa were on bad terms, due to constant gossip and even caustic jokes uttered by Shiomi. But when the narrator, an assistant in the zoology lab, goes to Professor Tsujikawa's lab, he realizes from the tone of the comments and jokes, and from the conversational tone between the two, that it's all a joke: as soon as he opens the door, he finds Professor Tsujikawa sitting at the desk facing the door, while Shiomi is also sitting across from him, with his back to the door.
A conversation develops between the three, although at a certain point it's he and Shiomi who are conversing, while Professor Tsujikawa begins to chat. Tragedy strikes shortly thereafter: a trapdoor spider, whose colors could easily be mistaken for a poisonous spider, approaches Shiomi's shoes. Terrified, he leaps toward the door to escape, but slips on the small landing and falls down the steep concrete staircase, dying.
The young man tries to help him, but Professor Tsujikawa, heartbroken by what has happened, stops him instantly, warning the young man that the steep staircase, in the excitement of the moment, could cause another accident: better to stop for a while and let the excitement cool down. Anyway... Shiomi is dead.
The news of his death brings the laboratory back into the spotlight, prompting a police investigation and general curiosity. But the investigation can only confirm Professor Tsujikawa's complete innocence, especially since an eyewitness testifies to it. So, an accident.
Time passes, and the professor becomes increasingly occupied with his studies on spiders. One fine day, something happens that brings the lab back into the spotlight: the Professor is bitten by a poisonous spider, and after an uncertain hospital stay... he dies.
What remains is the lab and its spiders.
The professor's family, also for reasons of public safety, accepts the young man's proposal to take care of him, especially since some of the containers, not properly sealed, have allowed their guests to escape and build webs on the ceiling.
The young man thus encounters spiders of a wide variety of species. "I had visited the place several times when the professor was alive, and I was also a student of zoology, especially arthropods, so I should have been quite used to the sight; nevertheless it still gave me the shivers and I was rooted for a moment to the spot. Inside hundreds of bottles lining the walls, eight-legged monsters were running around and spinning their webs. Big Oni-gumo and Jorō spiders, yellow with blue stripes; Harvestmen with legs ten times longer than theirs bodies; Cellar spiders with yellow spots on their backs. The grotesque Kimura spider and trapdoor spiders, Ji-gumo, Ha-gumo, Hirata-gumo, Kogane-gumo: all these different kinds of spiders had not been fed for about a month and, having lost most of their flesh, were looking around with shiny, hungry eyes for food of the ghastly creatures were crawling around on the walls and ceiling."
However, no poisonous spider has escaped. So the one that bit the Professor must be dead. However, while searching for it, the young man makes a strange discovery: behind the desk, on one of the back legs of the piece of furniture, he finds a switch. Except that when he turns it on, the lights don't go off, nor do any others come on. Minutes pass, he smokes I don't know how many cigarettes, and meanwhile he remembers that pleasant discussion that ended in drama. He decides to leave, opens the door (which opens inward) and just has time to grab onto the door frame, to avoid falling down and suffering the same fate as Shiomi: someone has destroyed the ladder, which is no longer there.
He will be able to get out of it and understand who or what could have killed him as it had killed Shiomi, after he finds a little book in which the killer conceived his criminal plan.
And the killer? In the meantime, he too will be dead.
A small masterpiece of impossible crime, Koga Saburo's story betrays its origins: the murder of the murderous room. And therefore, essentially, Phillpotts. But the trick is truly original: I haven't mentioned a single detail so as not to deprive the reader of the pleasure of imagining it. And to think it was 1930: the Japanese truly have boundless imaginations!
There are two stories reminiscent of this one, but both are from after 1930: Carr's The Door to Doom (1935) and Woolrich's Murder in Room 913 (1937).
Saburo (in the premeditation of the crime, written in a book that the narrator later discovers) alludes to a story from which he drew inspiration, which instead unfolds across various floors of a building, a solution that recalls and anticipates Sladek, Innes, and Carr; A story that, if it actually existed, would have been prior to 1930 and completely unknown. Preceding Carr's work in two absolutely identical settings is Leblanc's novel, which was likely the basis for Ellery Queen and Carr: The Mysterious House. But we're still talking about two identical but distant settings, not something set in the same building. Unless he made it all up (and then he would be the first to have thought of such a solution), or he borrowed from a story written by another Japanese writer, and then...
However, it's strangely noteworthy how both Carr and Saburo, in their two stories, besides inventing a simply perfect solution to Impossible Crime, introduce supernatural elements: even in the Japanese story, in fact, there's a ghost, which in our case is Shiomi, who has taken control of a spider.
In the construction of this impossible crime, the chairs play a particularly important role: because if Shiomi had been facing the door, he certainly wouldn't have died. He dies, his back to the door, and therefore to the windows, because he didn't notice that... the staircase is no longer there but elsewhere. How is this possible?
It's only possible if you consider a possibility that's somewhat opposite to what any of us would think of: that it's the answer to the impossible task of moving and repositioning a reinforced concrete staircase.
Pietro De Palma
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