Prologue

For several years, I have, with his permission, presented in The Strand Magazine accounts of the several cases of Sherlock Holmes. These accounts of his many adventures have gained an ardent readership from all around Kyoto; it is no exaggeration to say that the name "Sherlock Holmes" is celebrated across the land.

Yes, to observe Sherlock Holmes is to observe genius at work. Yet it was not the efforts of Mr. Holmes alone which have won his current renown.

Who was it, who tinged his arid, colourless notes with thrill and romance? Who was it, who played the thankless role of the bumbling assistant to inveigle sympathy from the reader? Who was it, who spent the countless hours in the wee hours of the night bound to his desk in order to satisfy the laborious demands of an exacting magazine editor?

The answer, of course, is I: John H. Watson, M.D.

"Without Watson, there would be no Holmes."

I bid you, good readers, repeat it once more.

"Without Watson, there would be no Holmes."

I should be much obliged if you, dear readers, would etch this undeniable truth unto your breasts, and bestow at last upon this humble yet indispensable author the respect he so meekly desires and so richly deserves.

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Following the serialization of Holmes’s first adventure in its pages, the Strand Magazine began to sell like hot cakes. As its readers increased and Holmes’s reputation grew, a veritable mob of would-be clients from all around the capital came flocking to the door of 221B, Teramachi Street. The line stretched from the doorstep all the way to the corner of Teramachi Nijō, and soon enough a flock of rapacious costermongers sprang up alongside it, hawking sweets and drinks to the impatient crowd. It was like the Gion Festival come early, and for us it was a giddy time.

Holmes was a busy man indeed―no sooner had one case been unravelled than another appeared to take its place. As for me, I had wed the former Miss Mary Morstan and was in the process of setting up the private practice which I had so long dreamed of near Shimogamo Shrine. Everything was going so swimmingly that we all forgot one simple thing: that the entirety of our prosperity was built upon the genius of Sherlock Holmes. A most curious bedrock upon which to build a house, and, as it turned out, one made entirely of sand.

"Strange. Where can have my God-given talent have gone?"

That murmured lamentation by Holmes was the first sign that our period of joy had come to an end.

It is difficult to pinpoint precisely when Holmes’s slump began. He had been wading deeper and deeper into a bog, and by the time he had realized that there was no bottom it was too late to extricate his feet from the mire. The colossal failure of the case of the Red-headed League was the death knell in the downfall of Sherlock Holmes.

Following the case, Holmes shut himself up in his room at 221B Teramachi Street.

It is little surprise that Holmes’s downward spiral brought all of us who had been buoyed by the high tide of his success along with it. The serialization of his adventures in The Strand were forced into an indefinite hiatus, and sales of the magazine declined considerably. My practice, whose finances were leveraged upon the fees I had anticipated for my writing, became strained. The rosy future which had seemed so close at hand now suddenly seemed a much less certain thing.

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Even the most seasoned will meet failure, frustration and misfortune at some point in their career. He may withdraw from the public eye and pout, despair, squeak and sob. And the renowned detective Sherlock Holmes was no different.

For a time, Holmes wandered the confines of an inescapable labyrinth. This dossier presents those heretofore unknown facts for the first time to the public. Behind the gilded curtain, we found ourselves in terra incognita, thrust into a scenario quite unlike the usual detective novel adventures the reader may be accustomed to. At the nadir of his slump, Holmes may as well have been dead to the world, and so too was John H. Watson.

For the silence of Sherlock Holmes was also my own.