Neil was still shaking as he stepped off the helicopter and back onto the huge outdoor courtyard of the Palace. He’d been so rattled he’d almost asked the pilot to drop him off at the hotel. Luckily, he’d caught himself in time and had remembered that Nakamura was going to meet him in the park. It was near a metro station, and Nakamura had promised he’d escort Neil on any more trains.
As the helicopter took off, Neil caught a familiar scent on the air. He’d smelled it before, on the dock, the last time he’d been dropped off by the copter. Was it something in the exhaust? That would be totally strange because it had more of a floral smell. He’d have to ask Isabella if she knew of any perfume scents that were added to jet fuel.
Neil looked around. Crowds of people were staring at him. It wasn’t every day that a redhead in a chef’s outfit was dropped off in a public square by a jet-black helicopter. Neil gave a sheepish wave and walked toward a bench underneath one of the park’s many cherry trees.
“Nice job staying inconspicuous,” said a voice from behind the tree.
“Yes, well, it wasn’t really my choice. I was hoping they’d drop me off in a car. You and the ‘secret ingredient’ have any luck with the ‘recipe’ book?”
Nakamura sat next to Neil. “We’ve finished working out all the recipes. The pictures are next. But nothing yet.”
Neil nodded. “Well, I just had a horrible day. I’m getting sick of this whole affair.”
“Losing is no fun, eh, boss?”
“It wasn’t that. Well, okay, it wasn’t all that. Those people are crazy. It’s like they want to die. I just don’t understand it.”
Nakamura rubbed his chin. “I can’t explain the world to you, Neil. All I can say is that the older you get, the stranger and more complicated everything seems . . . and that includes people.”
Neil stood up. “Let’s go check that recipe book and end this thing. I don’t want to have to lose again.”
“Okay. The trains are that way.” Nakamura pointed at a glass building a short distance away.
They started walking. Neil thought he felt a breeze in the nearby cherry trees, and he smelled the same floral smell he’d smelled on the dock. He looked up but the leaves were perfectly still.
“Hachiko,” Neil said in a low whisper, using Nakamura’s code name. “I think we’re being followed.”
Nakamura nodded but kept walking. “We have been since we arrived in Japan. I’ll fill you in later. Now, let’s get home.”
* * *
Larry sat on the floor of his room, the glass windows sending circle-shaped lights onto the walls. Each circle seemed to illuminate a different illustrated page of the scroll.
“Are you nuts?” Neil said as they walked in. “You cut up the scroll and put it on the wall?”
“Wall, nuts, walnuts! Hey, not bad,” Larry said. “But no, I’m not nuts. Isabella took some high-def photos of the prints with her camera, and Jones went out and bought a photo printer. I said he could charge it to the restaurant.”
Neil smacked his forehead. “Sure. Yes. Great, because we’re just rolling in dough. Oh, wait, we might have been rolling in dough except that I had to lose today.”
“You sound like you’re losing it right now,” Larry said, still staring intently at the pictures. “I put the pictures up to see if there’s some kind of pattern. I figured we might want to write on them or cut them or something, so better to do that with copies.”
“And . . . see anything yet?”
“So far, nothing. There are no maps, no images of treasure that I can see. But we think we know what the treasure is now. The text talks about it.”
“And?” Neil said.
“Turns out Hiro’s family used to be real bigwigs in the Japanese nobility. They fought for centuries for all sorts of emperors. But then they ticked off some shogun. He sent ninja assassins to ‘take care of them.’”
“Is that a direct translation?” Neil joked.
“Just about. But someone tipped off the Takoyakis. They hid their family’s gold and jewels before they were attacked. The ninjas wiped out a lot of them and the rest of the family were sent into exile. They lived on an island somewhere for a while. Doesn’t say which one.”
Nakamura walked into the room. “Speaking of attacks, where are Jones and Isabella? I thought you were supposed to have someone with you at all times.”
“I ran out of coffee. I figured that was important enough to bend the rules. Anyway, I knew you were coming back soon and I’ve been working on my jujitsu. I can take care of myself . . . for a few minutes anyway.”
“You can barely take care of making a side salad,” Neil said.
“Ha, ha.”
“You know jujitsu?” Nakamura asked.
“Koko was showing me some great moves. She’s quite an athlete, actually. I can’t wait until we find Hiro and the treasure. I can just imagine the hug she’ll give me then!” Larry pretended to attack Nakamura, who deftly flipped him over with just a flick of his wrist.
“Ouch!” Larry said, landing with a thud on the floor. “Where’d you learn that move? I dare you to try it again!”
“You got it.”
Neil ignored the repeated thuds and walked up to the wall to take a closer look at the pictures. The artwork was beautiful. There were images of ancient warriors, cats patrolling around a house with a volcano in the background, and a giant wave about to swallow a fleet of fishing boats. Each was done in a slightly different style.
“These are just woodcut prints?” Neil asked.
“Yup.” Larry nodded, lying flat on the floor. “It’s amazing how much detail they could get into those with just a few inks and lots of patience.”
“How old are they?”
“Nakamura and I think they are about a hundred and fifty years old. The scroll says they were made by the great artist Tomisa, right before his death. The Takoyaki family commissioned a series of prints to celebrate what it calls their “impending glory.” Of course, that was right around the time they were exiled, so . . . their glory was not so impending, really.”
Neil was impressed. “The images are amazing. They look like watercolor paintings. Look how realistic everything is, from the waves to Mount Fuji, to the food they’re eat—” Neil paused. Something about the pictures was strange.
“Neil, you okay?” Larry said, getting to his feet.
Neil peered closely at the picture of an elaborately dressed medieval warrior, sitting on the floor of his dining room. Neil stared at the table. Then he went to the next picture and the next and the next.
“Neil, what are you looking at, exactly?” Larry asked, as he walked next to Neil and stared at the pictures.
“The code name we use for this is the ‘recipe book,’ right?”
Larry nodded. “So?”
“Well, maybe it is a recipe book, sort of. Every one of these pictures has a table of food. Some of them are in the foreground, some in the background.”
Larry looked at the pictures. “You’re right. How the heck did I miss that?”
“I’ve been solving a lot of food clues lately. You’d have figured it out after the coffee arrived.”
“Can’t disagree with that.” Larry smiled.
“But something is weird,” Neil said, moving from picture to picture again.
“What?” Larry and Nakamura asked.
“This picture of the guy in the crazy helmet is the first in the series. What year is he from?”
Nakamura walked over and pulled out his notebook. “Well, it illustrates a story about the Takoyaki family from about five hundred years ago. They rose to power in an area around Edo, the ancient name for Tokyo. The general in that picture was a samurai warrior who helped Empress Okiko suppress a rebellion. He was given land and title in exchange for his help.”
Neil walked down to the last picture in the series. It showed a samurai standing in front of a cherry tree. “What year is this guy from?”
Nakamura checked his notes. “That’s the last Takoyaki samurai, so about a hundred and fifty years ago.”
Larry nodded. “He was the guy they sent the ninjas to whack.”
Neil pointed at the table in the picture. “Then why is someone from five hundred years ago eating exactly the same fish and rice as this guy from one hundred years ago?”
“Well, the prints were done around the same time,” Nakamura said. “Maybe the artist just plopped in some standard food bits, kind of like woodcut clip art?”
Neil shook his head. “Larry told us the artist was patient and careful. There’s a reason for the food to be the same and it’s not laziness.”
Larry nodded. “Neil’s right. The other stuff in each print, like the swords and the style of the houses, is consistent with the time period it’s showing. Like, look at the rooftop in the first print and compare it to the one in the last print. They’re totally different styles. One is clearly Muromachi period and the other is Meiji.”
Neil and Nakamura stared at Larry, waiting for an explanation.
“Jennifer Honda, expert in Japanese architecture at Emily Carr Art School and cutie. Wasn’t she at my funeral? She has a big tattoo of Mount Fuji on her back?”
“Moving on,” Neil said. “So if everything else is different, then why is the food the same?”
Nakamura closed his notebook and stared at the prints. “Are you sure they’re eating the same food?”
“Is that a serious question?” Neil sounded annoyed. “Look, I’ll explain it for you. As we’ve discussed, the detail is amazing. The general style of all the pictures is different, but the rice and fish are exactly the same in all the pictures.”
Larry peered closely. “Cool. But rice and fish seem like pretty basic staples of Japanese cuisine.”
“If you’re going to write a manga about a chef who’s based on me, you need to do way more research into food. Look at how white the rice is, and look at the size of the grains. That’s not just any rice, it’s koshihikari rice, I’m sure of it. It’s probably from Uonuma, on the west coast. It’s the best rice in the world.”
“So? These guys were loaded. They could afford the best of the best,” Larry said.
“Could they buy a time machine? The rice has only been around since 1956. It was developed as a hybrid.”
“You know, Neil, for a guy who never does his homework, you actually know a lot of stuff.”
“Only if it’s about food. And don’t you find it strange that a one-hundred-and-fifty-year old series of woodcuts has a picture of fifty-year-old rice?”
“Yeah. But as a clue it seems pretty straightforward. The treasure is hidden in Uonuma. Let’s go get it and then use it to get Hiro back!”
Nakamura looked at Neil. “Let me guess. The fish in the pictures isn’t from the west coast?”
Neil shook his head. “No. It’s red snapper. That’s fished mostly on the east coast. The best comes from Choshi, and I assume if the artist is showing the country’s best rice, he’s going to show the best fish, too.”
Larry pulled out a road map and put a finger on Uonuma and another on Choshi. “Great, so we’ve got four hundred kilometers of land to cover. If we start digging we should be able to find the treasure by the thirty-first century!”
“Or else the type of rice and the type of fish are important for some other reason,” Neil said. “It seems pretty clear the rice and fish are the secret. It’s too weird that they’d be there by accident. But a four hundred kilometer window doesn’t seem like a very good clue. It’s got to be something else.”
“Yeah, but what?”
The three of them went from picture to picture to picture. The rice and fish appeared in each—painted in exactly the same way but in slightly different positions.
“I wonder if the food was painted on later, over something else. Maybe it’s covering up something?” Nakamura suggested.
“I’ll get the original,” Larry said.
Larry spread the original across the tabletop. He peered closely at the rice and fish. The only thing he could see underneath them was the texture of the paper.
“No. The rice bowl and fish weren’t added later. They are both part of the original prints. But that’s impossible.”
Neil closed his eyes and leaned in close to the paper, taking a deep sniff. He stood up and frowned. “It’s a fake,” he said.
“What?” Larry and Nakamura said.
“The paper is rice paper, but it’s not old. It’s just made to look that way. The stains around the edges are made with tea, but not Japanese tea. It’s Darjeeling, better for making things look old but not even grown in India until the 1870s. It certainly wasn’t imported here before the 1920s. This has a slight metal overtone, which makes me think it’s modern, machine-processed tea.”
“So what does THAT tell us?” Larry said. “I could have saved the money on the printer and cut this thing up.”
Their conversation was interrupted by the return of Jones and Isabella. Jones walked in carrying a fresh supply of coffee beans and a pile of what appeared to be doughnuts wrapped in plastic. “It’s amazing what the Japanese sell in vending machines,” Isabella said. “Jones was like—how do you say?—a kid in a candy store.”
Neil looked at Jones who bore absolutely no resemblance to a kid or anyone who might find himself in a candy store unless he was planning to blow it up.
Larry immediately grabbed the coffee beans and snacks and disappeared into the kitchenette. The sound of grinding and brewing was instantaneous.
“This must be a very meticulous copy of the original, surely. The prints are so beautiful,” Isabella said after Neil filled her in on his discovery.
“But why add the modern food to all the images? And if this is a copy, where is the original?”
Larry emerged from the kitchenette holding a huge mug of coffee and some kind of sweet bun.
“Hey, I have a great idea. What? Why does everyone always look so skeptical when I say that?”
“Tell us the idea and you’ll probably find out,” Jones grunted from the door.
“We should find some way to ask Koko if she knows anything. Don’t let her know why, but just ask her what she knows about the scroll, the family history. Waddya think?”
“It’s worth a shot,” Nakamura said.
“I’ve talked to her before,” Neil said. “I can try to find a way to bring it up. But how do I just happen to run into her and ask her about the scroll?”
“Maybe you could ask her out on a date,” Jones suggested, the slightest trace of a grin on his lips. He was always hoping Isabella would see the light and dump the cocky boy chef.
Isabella gave a loud humph. “Or maybe it’s a stupid plan. I thought you wanted to keep her out of all this. We don’t want someone else we have to hide, do we?”
“Well, I already texted her from Neil’s phone,” Larry said, sipping his coffee. “She should be here any minute.”
“What?” Neil shot up, searching his pocket for his phone. “What did you do that for?”
Larry lost his goofy grin for a second. “It was a risk, but we don’t have any time to waste. She wants to save her brother and she’s the only one we know who might have a sense of where the real scroll is or what might have been in the original pics.” The smile returned. “Besides, with those big dark eyes, she’s gotta be trustworthy.”
Nakamura didn’t seem happy. “Please let us know when you plan on inviting a girlfriend over for tea, okay?”
“Coffee,” Larry smiled and he took a bite of his sweet roll. He immediately began choking and gagging.
“Larry! Are you poisoned?” Neil rushed frantically over. Had parts of the dangerous fungi leaked onto his phone and been passed onto Larry?
Larry spat out the sweet bun onto the floor and took a long drink of his coffee. “I don’t believe it . . . a doughnut that tastes like shrimp!”
Jones gave a little cough that sounded a lot like a chuckle.