Hint 1: You can use dictionaries or the Internet to look it up.
Hint 2: It isn’t the name of anything in the first aid kit.
Hint 3: Her family traditionally put the kanji nao or ‘esteem’ in their names.
Hint 4: You can use katakana for part of the culprit’s name.
Just to be thorough, we printed this out and made sure everyone had a copy. Two of these hints seemed specifically directed at me.
“I thought she’d be doling them out one at a time, but she sent a bunch.”
“Perhaps being mindful of how long we’re allowed to remain on school grounds. If we mulled these over one by one, we’d run out of time. Either way, we do have to work down the list, so perhaps she just couldn’t be bothered sending so many e-mails.”
Once our two main thinkers had exchanged views, Koizumi got the ball rolling.
“Let us begin by stating all information gleaned from these clues.”
“Shouko’s name is definitely written like Naoko, with the family’s favorite kanji read as shou instead. The ko might be the character for ‘lake’ or ‘fox’ instead of ‘child,’ but that’s irrelevant, since what we need is the culprit’s name.”
“The tricky bit here is the reading of this ‘esteem’ kanji. The girl gets the on-reading, which gives us Shouko, but there’s no guarantee the card guy’s the same. Even if his name is written with the kanji for ‘esteem’ and ‘one,’ it could be read either as Naokazu or Shouichi. And that would change the joke.”
Maybe his joke was simply about how to read it? Or it could be wordplay that only required the kanji. Business cards usually have just kanji on them.
“Good point,” Koizumi said.
He rose to his feet, dragged the whiteboard out of the corner, and wrote the kanji for “esteem” in the center, and the two readings, shou and nao, on either side.
“That said, hint four tells us part of the name could be written in katakana instead, so we can deduce the joke is less about the kanji themselves than the reading. And in Episode Three, it says, ‘Each time the girl’s relative handed over a business card, he said something that got a huge laugh’ (P176). Based on this, just seeing the name alone is insufficient; he needs to take a specific action to complete the gag.”
A joke involving a word with nao or shou in it, and a phrase short enough to be expressed in a name?
Maybe if I did a search for it, I’d get something.
“Hint number one.” Haruhi grabbed a mouse. “But does that mean we’re free to look as much as we like because we won’t find squat? I’m also puzzled by her bringing up dictionaries.”
Perhaps this was time for Nagato’s stockpile of weird dictionaries to shine.
“That’s the thing, Kyon,” Haruhi snapped. “Why a dictionary, and not an encyclopedia?”
Those two words had different kanji but were both read jiten, so I’d need a dictionary to remind me of the difference.
Koizumi helpfully wrote both words on the board.
“Generally speaking, encyclopedias are multivolume sets with entries explaining things in great depth, while dictionaries, whether mono- or bilingual, give definitions and examples of usages. Encyclopedias are more specialized, but students like ourselves more commonly reference dictionaries.”
So understanding the card joke didn’t require the advanced level of detail present in a specialized encyclopedia?
“I bet you can get it with common knowledge, but it’s also just tricky enough that Tsuruya thinks we might need a dictionary to figure it out.”
Whose intelligence level was Tsuruya basing that assumption on?
I glanced at Nagato, but she was in default impassive-reading mode. Still wasn’t sure if she’d solved everything and was simply staying out of it or if this was an indication that there wasn’t enough information to bother thinking it through.
Outsider T was still analyzing Tsuruya’s writing on a textual level and had roped Asahina in as her kanji instructor.
An adorable maid working as a home tutor for a blond exchange student was a painting that would look great on any wall. The fact that all she was actually doing was telling her how to read kanji just made it cuter.
“Each of the four hints contains something of value,” Koizumi said, adding more words to the board. “The second clue, ‘It isn’t the name of anything in the first aid kit,’ is the only negative phrase, but perhaps the most significant of all.”
He wrote first aid kit and put an X on it.
“So what is in a first aid kit?”
Medicine, bandages, Band-Aids. That level of first aid kit could be found anywhere, but if we really wanted to know the exact contents, we’d have to phone the hotel.
“We can’t and don’t need to,” Haruhi said, swirling her mouse around her pad. “What’s key here isn’t the contents of the kit but the kit itself. The victim is a doctor, so why was he so oddly fixated on a first aid kit as his consciousness faded? This must be a vital clue to the culprit’s name.”
“And this doctor was not just a doctor, but a researcher. If we examine this from a medical perspective, perhaps we can glean something more from the significance of this first aid kit.”
I was not a doctor, or a medical student. Not even a prospective one.
“Nor am I.”
Koizumi erased the X-ed out first aid kit and wrote the words again.
“I feel completely ignoring the contents would be premature.”
The phrase you used for premature has shousou in it, and that includes our kanji of the day. Any chance it could be read naohaya here?
“None,” Haruhi said, dismissively. “Yeah, this ‘It isn’t the name of anything in the first aid kit’ doesn’t mean it isn’t something in the kit at all. It’s probably a word connected to something that is.”
“If it’s not a brand name, then perhaps it’s the generic name everyone uses? Like aspirin?”
“I think we can rule out ingredient names. Aspirin and acetaminophen both broadly qualify as the names of things in a first aid kit.”
“Even if not the specific names of those items?”
Then Koizumi got a flash of inspiration.
“What if it’s not a noun?”
“That’s it!” Haruhi dropped the mouse and locked her fingers behind her head, glaring at the ceiling. “But I have no idea what that leaves us with, specifically.”
I did a quick image search for first aid kits.
They were mostly square wooden boxes with crosses on the top. I think we even had one at home. The contents were just standard over-the-counter drugs, bandages, gauze, compresses, and ointments.
“Kyon, do some free association on first aid kits!”
I dunno about that, but looking at these had reminded me of one thing.
“Oh? What?”
“This was when I was younger than my sister is now.”
I was a curious kid and was rummaging around in the first aid kit. The bottles of medicine were particularly interesting. I was checking each out in turn. One of them was a brown bottle with a liquid inside. It was pretty old, and the label too worn to read. I figured the fastest way to figure out what it was would be to open the lid, bring it up to my nose, and take a sniff.
“And what happened?”
Agony. I was writhing all over the floor.
“What was in it?”
Ammonia. I think it was for beestings or something, but I’ve yet to encounter another odor anywhere near that strong. Just remembering it makes the back of my nose hurt.
“Later, I’d find out the way to check the smell of bottled medicine was to place your hand over the opening and tip it.”
Sepia-toned memories came flooding up.
“I also learned the importance of warning labels. If I’d known it was ammonia and known what ammonia was, I’d never have tried to smell it.”
Koizumi was rubbing his eyes just imagining it.
“Ammonia is used as a form of smelling salts. You see it sometimes in Western…mystery…”
He trailed off midsentence, so I looked up to find him frozen to the spot, mouth still open. His eyes unfocused, like he was looking at a hologram I couldn’t see. And this pseudopetrification effect had spread to Haruhi, as well.
Her jaw was hanging wide-open, and her eyes were every bit as wide.
After a minute, she blinked slowly.
“Er, huh? But then…,” she rasped. “So that’s why ‘Don’t swallow’? Not because you can’t drink it, just…literally. ‘It isn’t the name of anything in the first aid kit’ means…this?”
“I believe so.” Koizumi nodded. “If the doctor’s dying message relates to the first aid kit, not to the contents or the medicine, but the words written there…”
Haruhi and Koizumi moved like they were twins, both reading Episode Three from the top. They stopped on the same page, looked up, and spoke in unison.
““Aha!””
“Dammit,” I said.
What have you two figured out? Is it that weird that the first aid kit back home had ammonia in it?
“Kyon,” Haruhi said, with a smile that—creepily—could only be described as meek. “Your exploits were a portent of disaster. I want to travel back in time to officially thank little Kyon. Do you even realize how important what you just said is?”
I averted my eyes from her smile and got smacked with another.
“The importance of warning labels,” Koizumi explained. “Your words! That is the key to unraveling the dying message.”
“Not all the medicine in a first aid kit is consumable! There’s medicine for beestings and ointments for itches. And what do you think is written on those labels?”
Don’t swallow or Do not ingest?
“I dunno if they slap that on every medicine around. And they’re probably a bit less direct about it. I mean, not that many people would be tempted to swallow ointments. But there’s definitely something like that on bottles of ammonia.”
So the doctor’s mind went to the first aid kit, to medicine in it, to the warning label, and then to connecting the writing on that warning label to the culprit’s name, and after saying that warning aloud, he passed out? What the hell? That doesn’t even make sense.
“It’s not just a warning. Naturally, it’s also the culprit’s name.”
“That’s what’s on the culprit’s business card! Although, naturally, not word-for-word the same as the doctor’s dying message.”
Don T’Swallow, or Du Notin Gest?
Where was this dude from?
Haruhi and Koizumi glanced at each other, their smiles matching.
“That’s where the dictionaries and Internet come in.”
“The key is that Tsuruya said, ‘That’s what I thought I heard anyway’ (P181).”
Just as this mystery was feeling increasingly pointless…
“You’ve got mail!”
The instant she clicked on it, Haruhi’s smile got even brighter.
She read the one-sentence e-mail in Tsuruya’s voice.