Netsuke Nation by Jonathan Magonet

Author:Jonathan Magonet [MAGONET, JONATHAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd

CHAPTER 8

We have had the privilege of meeting Nanakuma-san before, and it is sad to record here the details of his untimely death. Nevertheless it enables us to get a glimpse into the workings of the forces of law and order in the Netsuke Nation as they tackle one of their most puzzling and disturbing cases.

Detectives

The crime rate in the Nation is quite low for an advanced society. Of course the apparatus of law enforcement exists in full force, and must have some kind of deterrent effect. But closer to the truth is the sense of self-worth of the average netsuke, a sense that would be severely damaged by actions felt to be unworthy. Of course this preventative sense of shame has limitations, for example in really difficult financial circumstances when survival becomes the priority. While the above applies to the average netsuke, there are two other groups for whom crime is almost a normal part of behaviour. One is the result of post-war poverty and desperation which created a black market where anything and anyone could be bought or sold for the right price. This created in its turn a criminal class, still active and even flourishing in the more prosperous situation today. But the other source of problems, less predictable but no less an irritant, are the many ghosts and spirits, animate, and even occasionally inanimate, whose nature it is to disrupt netsuke society because of their own peculiar make-up or personal history. Ghosts of mothers who had died in childbirth are forever stealing babies from prams left unattended. Victims of violent death take their revenge, not on the actual murderer, but on any person unfortunate or unwise enough to take up residence under what was their former roof. If the aforementioned can be seriously nasty, there are any number of mischievous sprites and imps, mixed offspring of human-demon pairings, and displaced poltergeists who pass their time playing tricks on the rest of the population. Perhaps no crime, but nevertheless distressing for a society dependent on a degree of undisturbed, well-regulated existence.

But this case was far outside the usual run of petty crimes, for all the circumstances suggested that it was a murder. But a murder with a weapon that was not struck but extracted. To be more precise, the victim was none other than Nanakuma-san, the subject of a series of legal cases many years before about the large pin and ring embedded in his head. He had won the right to call himself a netsuke, despite this additional suspension system alongside his conventional himotoshi, and from being a controversial public figure he had rather disappeared from the limelight in recent times. Now he had turned up again in the small courtyard behind his house in circumstances even more newsworthy, the victim of the first netsuke murder in a decade; a murder apparently committed by yanking the pin and ring violently from his head, death following from the resultant brain damage.

On the scene, representing the police, was

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