Hello, everyone. Today I begin my translation of the thirteenth volume of Asakihara Shinobu's こちら秘封探偵事務所 or 'This is the Hifuu Detective Agency.' Like all of its predecessors, this story is available in the original Japanese on the author's website, along with a wealth of other novels (mostly touhou-related, all in Japanese) background info on characters and the world, illustrations, promotional material and all sorts of other interesting stuff. Even if you don't read Japanese, I encourage you to check it out.
This volume is the story of Touhou Kishinjou ~ Double Dealing Character, the second-to-last volume in the collection and in many ways a return to tradition. This novel is primarily an action story interspersed with comedy, with a tone similar to many of the earlier stories like Imperishable Night. That's not to say that there's no mystery to solve here, of course, but the complexities and convolutions of the previous two stories are mainly absent here. It's straightforward and fast-moving (in my own estimation.) Toward the end, however, it starts laying the groundwork for the series finale pretty heavily. In fact I would say that you should probably consider this book to be part one of a two-part grand finale for the whole series. As usual, you'll be able to read this or the series conclusion without having read any other books in the series, but you'll get a lot more out of both if you've read the whole affair.
I don't have any warnings about objectionable content to impart this time, but due to the nature of the story we will be getting pretty political this time around. Being as these stories are written from Merry's PoV, you're going to be getting the occasional diatribe about how societies should be organized according to Merry or Renko. This offers interesting insight into their characters, but neither girl should be read as a mouthpiece for the author's views or any sort of omniscient authority.
This story also has several characters in it that reference objects and legends that are not widely known outside of Japan. There's nothing here that will prevent you from understanding the events of the story, but the following information might help to provide some context.
Three musical instruments feature heavily in this story: a biwa, a koto and a taiko. A biwa is a short-necked stringed instrument that is very similar to a lute both in terms of its construction and its sound. In western musical traditions, however, a lute is usually strummed in a manner similar to a guitar, whereas a biwa is plucked, producing distinct tones. This sort of playing has long been a part of various Japanese narrative traditions with particular tones accompanying various emotional beats in a spoken piece. Biwa-playing has long been associated with tragic stories and especially the tale of Heike. In anime if you've ever watched anything set in the warring states period or that has a flashback to samurai times or even just has some serious, heavy narration, chances are good you heard a biwa during that segment.
A koto is another plucked string instrument similar to a zither or a standing harp (though it is played laying horizontally on the ground or a table.) Koto were once so ubiquitous that the kanji character for 'stringed instrument' in Japanese is simply read as 'koto.' If you've ever heard traditional Japanese music, a koto was almost certainly part of it, as the instrument produces a very distinctly Japanese sound. Just as the biwa is usually associated with tragedies, the koto is usually associated with romantic classical pieces, most notably the Tale of Genji in which it both features in the plot and is often used to accompany retellings of the story. Interestingly, the koto was specifically created to be played by the blind and for many years it was considered to have too sensual a sound for it to be played by women. Modern koto are of course played by all sorts of people and often have more strings and greater range than the traditional ones.
A taiko is a set of one or more traditional Japanese drums of several different sorts ranging from smaller bowl-like drums to large free-standing drums. A wide variety of construction methods and materials have been used for taiko over the years, but what makes taiko taiko and not any other sort of drum is the way they're played -often by an ensemble, with each member of a group manning a single drum, energetically, with performers using their whole body to wind up, strike and measure rhythm and frenetically, with rhythms that turn continual, frequent beats into tonal rumbles that reverberate through the audience. Taiko is really amazing to see performed live and if you've ever witnessed a performance you'll understand why the instrument is traditionally associated with stories of war or adventure and has even been used on battlefields to signal and direct troops.
The other element featured heavily in this story are a specific type of mythological Japanese creature: the amanojaku. Traditionally, amanojaku are small horned youkai generally thought to be related to oni, but much less powerful. Unlike the lie-hating oni, amanojaku are known to lie, cheat, deceive and swindle humans. Colloquially, the word is used in modern speech to describe someone who is disagreeable and needlessly contrary since the contrary nature of an amanojaku extends as far as their name which is written as 天邪鬼 using the characters for 'heaven' 'demon' and 'apparition.' Typically the word is used nowadays to describe a delinquent or punk or occasionally a disobedient child. The most common depiction of an amanojaku that people might be familiar with are statues which are often found in front of temples which often depict Bishamonten standing on top of a defeated amanojaku.
With all of that information dispensed, I will now step back and leave the rest of the storytelling up to our narrator. I hope that you enjoy the tale to come.