Vol 2 Chapter 5 Part 6

We headed north. There was a tense atmosphere in the car…or so I thought.

“Man, he went for a Moriarty reference? That’s so funny.” Akihito was clapping his hands and laughing in the back seat. I couldn’t tell if he was being tactless on purpose or not. In a way, he was the strongest of us all.

“Come to think of it, you said you were a Sherlock fan, right, Akihito?” I asked. “Have you read all of the books?” He’d said he was a fan when we first met. That’s why he was annoyed by Holmes’s nickname and picked fights with him. He must be a pretty hardcore fan. I feel bad saying this, but it’s hard to believe that he likes to read.

“Nah, I haven’t read ’em. I became a fan because of the anime.”

“Anime?” Holmes and I asked in unison.

“Yeah, you haven’t seen it? There’s a Holmes anime with anthropomorphized dogs. It was really cool! Thanks to that, I ended up watching all of the movies and puppet shows too. It’s always been my dream to be Holmes in a play or a movie.”

“Wh-What about the original novels?”

“Haven’t read a single word,” Akihito answered with a straight face.

Holmes and I looked at each other. Then, Holmes burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” Holmes said, chuckling. “Your silliness helped me cool my head a bit. Thank you.”

“Uh, okay? Well, you’d better cool off, yeah.”

“R-Right, Holmes. I think that Ensho called himself Moria to get a rise out of you,” I said, peering closely at him.

Holmes paused before calmly replying, “You’re right. Apparently, the blood rushes to my head when Ensho’s involved. Thank you, Aoi.”

Phew, he’s back to the usual Holmes.

“So, where are we going?” I asked again.

Holmes had a distant look in his eyes. “We’ve…already arrived,” he said, parking the car.

Since the parking lot was covered in gravel, crunching sounds rang out as the tires ran over it. I saw a white wall with a tiled roof. Is this…a temple? We’d reached this building after going north almost all the way to the end of Senbon Street.

“This is Takagamine in Kita-ku, right?” Akihito asked, getting out of the car.

“Yes,” Holmes replied as he and I got out as well.

So this is Kita-ku… Come to think of it, Akihito said before that his family used to live in the Kinugasa district of Kita-ku.

We’d come up quite a high slope to get here, and it felt like we were right at the foot of a mountain. I tend to go everywhere by bike, so I’d probably regret it if I tried to bike here.

“This way,” Holmes said and started walking towards the temple.

It was already past 4:00 p.m., so there were barely any cars in the parking lot. Most temples close at five.

We walked down a narrow path until we reached a small, old wooden gate. A sign saying “Genko-an Zen Meditation” hung from one of the posts.

“Genko-an…” I felt like I’d heard the name before.

Holmes stared fixedly at the gate. “Yes, this is where Ensho called me to: Genko-an Temple,” he said in a quiet but firm tone. He passed through the small gate, and we followed right behind him.

The garden on the other side was certainly not large, but it was well-maintained and refreshingly beautiful. The information desk was on a porch. We paid the entrance fee and went inside the temple.

Despite being an old, remote temple, it had a dignified aura, as if the building itself were standing tall. The floor and tatami mats were polished to a shine, and flowers were placed on tables and in hallway recesses. Upon entering the main building, we were greeted by two windows next to each other, one square and one circular. The windows displayed the bright red foliage outside as if they were beautiful paintings.

I knew what these two windows were—perhaps I’d seen them on TV before. They were the Window of Confusion and the Window of Enlightenment. There were short wooden fences, about ankle height, preventing us from getting close to them. Past the windows was the Buddha. No one else was inside the room.

“H-Huh? No one’s here,” said Akihito.

“Y-Yeah.” I was a bit disappointed.

“For now, let’s pay our respects,” Holmes said with a smile. He stood in front of the Buddha, tossed a coin in the offering box, and pressed his hands together in prayer.

“Oh, okay.”

“S-Sure.”

Akihito and I hurried to give our offerings and pray too.

When I opened my eyes, I froze, noticing that someone else was in the room with us. He was probably in his late twenties or early thirties. He was bald like a monk and he wore a dark gray kimono. He looked at us with a warm smile. If I hadn’t known better, I would’ve assumed he was one of this temple’s priests.

“Fancy meeting you here,” he said, narrowing his eyes at Holmes in an amused smile.

This has to be Ensho.

“You were the one who called me here.” Holmes smiled back and walked towards him. Akihito and I stood stock still, holding our breath as we watched them.

“I enjoyed the time spent waiting for you. I didn’t know if I wanted you to come or not.” He opened his folding fan and hid his mouth behind it as he cackled.

“And how do you feel now?” Holmes asked quietly.

Ensho stopped laughing. “You did well to see through that forgery. What was the clincher?”

Holmes paused before answering, “Light.”

“I see. Painting light on shadows is ever so hard.” Ensho chuckled and then looked up. “I assume you figured out this location immediately, right?”

“Yes. Strayed Sheep and a round mirror. The strayed or confused sheep were in a rectangular painting. The mirror represented the window to the soul. These windows at Genko-an immediately came to mind. The square window is the Window of Confusion, which represents the suffering humans go through in life. The circular one beside it is the Window of Enlightenment, which represents Zen maturity and the universe. The round mirror that reflects its holder also represents one’s inner ‘universe’… It was a rather sophisticated arrangement.” Holmes smiled.

“Why thank you.” Ensho smiled back.

Even though both of them were smiling warmly, the air was tense, as if they could cross swords at any moment. It was hard to breathe.

From where I was standing, I could see the two windows beyond them as they faced off. Outside, bright red leaves fluttered in the wind. The scene was terrifyingly beautiful, more so than anything I could ever imagine. I was speechless.

“As I said before, I truly enjoyed waiting here for you. Would you come, or would you not? Did I want you to, or did I not? I felt like I was waiting for a lover who’d left me.”

“Now that’s an unpleasant thought.”

“You’re not wrong.” Ensho smiled with only his eyes, then sighed. “Most counterfeiters eventually find themselves wanting people to see their work as their own. They want to leave their mark on the world, and that’s how they end up getting exposed. But me, I could never understand why they’d do that,” he murmured to himself as he gazed through the Window of Confusion. “I grew up in Amagasaki. Had no mom, and my dad was a painter. He was pretty good, but he was an alcoholic, so even when he did manage to get work, he’d spend the advance payment on booze and usually fail to meet the deadline. I couldn’t just sit there and watch, so I did his work for him, copying his style. That made Dad real happy. He always treated me like a burden before, but this made him think I was a genius. He praised me and got me to copy other paintings, and that’s how my life as a counterfeiter began.”

Listening to him, I gulped. So he was making forgeries from the very start. It began with him copying his father’s work… His story matches Holmes’s profiling exactly.

“By copying them perfectly without leaving a trace of my own presence, I could be praised by the one person I wanted to impress the most. I was happy with that. But eventually he drank himself to death… After that, I continued accepting forgery requests out of habit, but it all felt boring. I didn’t know what I was doing with my life, so I went into the priesthood. Then, when you—someone younger than me—saw through my forgery when no one else could, I got excited. I wanted you to find me hiding in the shadows. Today was exciting, too. I wanted you to see through it, but at the same time, I didn’t. I kept going back and forth. For the first time, I felt like I understood all of those people who wanted to leave their own mark on their counterfeits. So, I really had no idea whether I wanted you to come or not.” Ensho looked at Holmes. “But when you asked me ‘How do you feel?’ just now, it all became clear.”

He closed the folding fan and thrust it at Holmes’s throat.

Holmes gasped and immediately caught it between his hands. “That was dangerous. Were you trying to stab me in the throat?”

“Of course not. This is just payback for last time.” Ensho grinned.

The tension was too much. Akihito and I were both shocked speechless. We covered our mouths with our hands, our faces pale.

“It became clear that I really can’t stand you. Everyone likes you because you act all prim and proper, but no one can tell what you’re thinking, and it turns out you’re pure black on the inside. You’re like the personification of Kyoto itself. Ugh, no wonder I hate this place.”

Holmes strengthened his grip on the fan and snapped it in two. “Why thank you. It’s an honor to be likened to Kyoto,” he said in a Kyoto accent with a fearless smile.

“Oh, there it is—your true self. That dark face gives it away.”

“As you said, Kyoto men are wicked.”

“I can’t stand you, but I do like that side of you.”

“Meanwhile, I hate everything about you.”

“Yep, this is good. I can’t retire yet—not ’til I’ve given you the humiliation of the century.”

“Unfortunately, I have no intention of being humiliated. Why don’t you go ahead and retire now?”

“You never know. I guess I want to have pride in what I’ve done.”

“Counterfeiters don’t need pride.”

“Ouch.” Ensho let go of the folding fan and chuckled. “Hey, didja know? This temple’s ceiling has bloodstains on it.” He looked up at the ceiling.

Holmes nodded. “Of course I know.”

Akihito and I looked up too. There were black stains and even a footprint on the ceiling. Chills ran down my spine.

“Wh-Whoa, why’s there a footprint up there?! Is that from a ninja?!” Akihito exclaimed.

Holmes’s smile was strained. “There was no battle here at Genko-an. Instead, the ceiling was built with wood that came from the floor of Momoyama Castle in Fushimi. Many people were killed in the battle there between Ieyasu Tokugawa’s loyal force and Mitsunari Ishida’s troops. In order to bring happiness to them in the afterlife and honor their sacrifices, the bloodstained floorboards were sent to five temples, and Genko-an was one of them.”

“O-Oh, that makes sense.” I nodded and looked back down. Ensho had already disappeared. Akihito and I gasped in surprise, while Holmes simply sighed.

After a moment of silence, Holmes said, “I see. He really is like a ninja.” He opened the broken fan that was still in his hands and grimaced at it. “Ugh, what an utter nuisance.”

“Huh? What happened?” I asked.

“This fan was originally mine. He wrote ‘I win’ all over it.”

Okay, that’s pretty annoying. “B-But in the end, it was you who won, right?”

“Yeah, you saw through his forgery again. There’s nothing to be mad about.”

Holmes frowned. “Wrong.”

“Huh?”

“I only identified that painting as a forgery because I knew that ‘it was the best of Hunt’s ‘natural light’ paintings and won a Birmingham Award.’ If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t have figured it out. When I said that ‘light’ was the deciding factor, he smiled as if he knew he’d won. Even though I saw through his forgery, he considered it a victory for himself—because it was his victory and my loss.” Holmes clenched the folding fan, his shoulders trembling. I could tell how frustrated he was, and it hurt.

What am I supposed to say at a time like this? “But in the end, you still did it. Your knowledge; your victory!” …As if. I doubt he wants to hear forced encouragement like that.

I clenched my fists and looked straight at him. “I-In that case, the next time Ensho comes at you with something, make sure you expose him for real!” I declared.

Holmes looked at me in surprise. “Aoi…”

Akihito gaped at me too.

“Please don’t lose next time, no matter what,” I continued.

Holmes’s eyes widened for a moment before his expression relaxed. “All right. Next time, I swear I’ll give him a thorough beating.” He smiled brightly.

I felt like I was going to cry. “Holmes…” I looked down at the floor, my eyes hot.

“Forgive me,” he said, reverting to his Kyoto accent. “I put you through a scary experience.” He gently stroked my head with his large hand.

“I’m okay,” I said, shaking my head.

“Sorry, but it’s closing time,” came a voice from behind us. Startled, we looked up.

“Shall we get going, then?” Holmes said. Akihito and I nodded.