The Puzzle Box: A Novel

by Danielle Trussoni

Deep down, he suspected that her interest in him wasn’t only because of his humor and good looks. He knew Rachel was curious about savant syndrome, and many of their conversations revolved around her theories on his cognitive abilities. She believed that his gifts were connected to certain strains of mystical experience in the ancient world, and although she’d never come out and said it, Brink was sure she wanted to write about him in some capacity.

“Maybe the brain injury explains how it happened,” Rachel said whenever Brink argued Dr. Trevers’s point. “But it doesn’t explain why you’re accessing information that you’ve never encountered before or where this information is coming from. You have access to stuff that you couldn’t have possibly learned. For centuries, philosophers have argued that the universe is filled with information and that certain people can access it. And somehow, through your injury, you can.”

What he left to posterity was his poetry, thousands of small waka verses. And while these poems hint at a rich inner life, they are mostly as opaque as a mirror, reflecting all curiosity back at the observer. What is in that box has become the most profound, the most enigmatic question in the history of the imperial family.”

“That was the Sakurada-mon, one of nine gates into the imperial grounds,” Sakura said. “And that is the Main Gate, the entrance to the imperial palace. There are, as you will see, security protocols that must be followed when coming in contact with the imperial family.”

“All of this was originally Edo Castle, home to the Tokugawa shogun. But when the shogun relinquished his power in 1868, the emperor Meiji moved the imperial residence from the ancient capital of Kyoto to here. Since then, Tokyo has grown dense, but this land has remained protected. It is one of the most valuable pieces of land in the world. During the economic bubble of the eighties, this stretch of land was worth more than all of California.”

“And this is the Fukiage Palace,” Sakura said, getting out of the car, gesturing for Brink to follow. “The residence of the imperial family. You’ll be staying here, in the east wing.”

Sakura had visited the Fukiage Palace many times, and every time she found the official residence of the emperor and his family to be at odds with itself. Designed by the Japanese architect Shōzō Uchii, it was a modern structure in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, the American master of modernism who had himself been influenced by traditional Japanese design. While the exterior was rather ugly, made as it was of dull reinforced concrete, the interiors were a play of warm, pale wood and traditional Japanese elements that conspired to create beautiful, modern, light-filled spaces.

Another contradiction of the Fukiage Palace: While it seemed tranquil, under its blanket of calm lay a frenetic system of surveillance and security.

“That is a copy of the Kojiki. It tells the history of the Japanese people through poems and songs and explains the origins of the kami, or gods, the myths and legends, and the origins of the imperial family.

There was a tradition among educated concubines of keeping random thoughts or jottings known as zuihitsu. Perhaps you’ve heard of the most famous of these, Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book, which documents court life in the Heian period, over one thousand years ago.

In any case, Meiji sat down with the puzzle constructor and watched as he opened the box, move by move. Yoshiko describes Ogawa manipulating hidden slots and levers, sliding and snapping open compartments like…” Sakura turned to a page in the pillow-book papers and read, “…a magician conjuring a universe from solid wood.”

Sakura read a passage below the diagram: “Constructing a puzzle box is like creating a magic trick—the illusion is everything. Success requires working with the illusion rather than against it.

“You’re inside the imperial bonsai garden,” Gupta said curtly. “According to the information on the Imperial Household Agency website, which I’m reading now, the oldest bonsai in their collection is eight hundred years old. Imagine that: You are walking among trees alive before the West began its wretched colonial hegemony in the Americas.”

Gupta rolled his eyes. “The cryptex, indeed! You know as well as I that the cryptex is a totally fictitious flight of fancy, Mr. Brink, the work of a clever writer, not a puzzle maker. Leonardo da Vinci never created such a device, didn’t draw it, probably never even imagined it. But there is someone who did imagine a real cryptographic box: the ingenious Lu Ban, who lived from 507 to 444 B.C. A carpenter and engineer, he was also an expert weapons designer. He called his boxes ‘defensive boxes.’ They were, in essence, one of the earliest attempts at securing privacy, a primitive ZK-rollup if you will, some two thousand years before Da Vinci. A Japanese puzzle maker in the nineteenth century would have surely used Chinese mechanical puzzles as his model, Lu Ban’s boxes most likely.”

Brink gazed out over the field of bonsai, listening to Gupta. He knew what to expect. His mentor could talk for hours about the cultural cross-pollination between East and West. He liked to argue that the European Renaissance was not a rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman knowledge but rather was incited by the arrival of texts from China and India to Italy in the fifteenth century.

Lu Ban’s boxes secreted bufotoxin through minuscule valves, smaller than capillaries, worked into the surface of the wood, ensuring that the poison could be carried for hundreds of years, only to be released with the lightest brush of a finger.”

A streak of solving unfolds. He’s flying through the moves when something odd happens. There is a grinding of gears and the top third of the box lifts, revealing a polished copper disk mounted on a platform of wood. The disk glistens in the moonlight, revealing a graffiti of minuscule designs carved into the surface, tiny as capillaries. The pattern is complex and alluring, so intriguing Brink can’t look away. It is like an ancient tablet filled with an uncoded language, a kind of Linear B waiting to be deciphered.

Labyrinths are often confused with mazes, but they are different in one essential way: Mazes have dead ends. Labyrinths do not. In a labyrinth, a solver can move through a path forever, in constant motion. While a maze will stop you cold if you take the wrong path, a labyrinth will trap you forever.

Brink never would have found the button if he relied on his eyes alone. It is tucked away, hidden, impossible to see. But that is exactly the point. Ogawa didn’t make it for Brink—or anyone else. He made it for himself. Brink feels an overwhelming respect for Ogawa, and the idea strikes him that this man, dead more than one hundred years, is communicating something important to Brink. The puzzle is a time capsule with a message: To solve the impossible, one must leave the self behind. One must transform.

But so is Mike Brink. As he surveys the pathways, his mind fills with hundreds of possible routes through the labyrinth, thousands of potential directions, all of them crossing and recrossing before his eyes. Then it happens: The mechanism of his gift takes hold. The moves appear to him like a vision, and he knows the correct pathway.

“The faction has existed for centuries. At one point in history, they were called alchemists—followers of John Dee, acolytes of the works of Neoplatonists. But they’ve gone by many names throughout the years. No matter what they were called, they were extraordinarily powerful, with connections to royalty, nobility, and—after these families were displaced by so-called democratic processes—the uberwealthy. Through history, the faction has had one mission: to find a collection of keys or codes that unlocks extraordinarily precious information.”

Brink thought he’d heard Rachel mention the Akashic Library during one of their discussions of her research. It was a comprehensive repository of ancient information. He hadn’t paid attention closely but now wished he had. “It’s a collection of esoteric teachings, right?”

“The old Tokaido Road. I knew we had to be close. I’ve never seen it other than in ukiyo-e prints. But I knew it was here somewhere.”

“It is an ancient road, one that was used for hundreds of years to travel between Kyoto and Edo. It was originally a dirt path, but the Tokugawa shogunate ordered that it be paved with stones, an expensive, laborious feat of engineering at the time. It made the road famous and”—she stepped on the mossy stones and began walking—“created a direct route to Hakone.”

“Fuji-san,” Sakura said, stepping to his side. “You can watch it for hours and see a hundred different mountains.”

“Hakone is busy in the summer,” Sakura said, as they walked past an empty bus station and a sign for an art museum. “It’s primarily a tourist destination. These mountains are full of onsen, bathhouses with hot sulfurous water, and people go there to relax in the pristine mountain air.

Brink examined the black eggs, curious. “And those are?” “Kuro-tamago. Eggs hard-boiled in the geothermal water of Mount Owakudani. They turn black from the mineralogy.” She lifted an egg with her chopsticks—a feat of dexterity that Brink admired—and placed it on his plate. “There’s a legend that eating one of these eggs,” Sakura said, placing an egg on her own plate and delicately breaking the shell, “will extend your life by seven years.”

“These are ancient sugi trees,” she said. “Some are more than four hundred years old. There are many legends about trees in Japan, stories of kami that reside inside.

“Yosegi-zaiku involves cutting a vertical shaft the size of a pencil of each variety of wood, sometimes as many as fifteen thin shafts, and positioning each color in a way that creates a pattern. The pieces are glued together and compressed until they form a solid, seamless block. Then, using a large, flat razor blade, a thin sheet is shaved from the top of the block. This paper-thin sheet, with its brilliant pattern, is glued to the surface of the box, giving the box a gorgeous, lustrous wrapping.

But everything faded as Brink saw a large, round pedestal table at the very center of the room. It was, quite simply, magnificent. The surface of the table was a large disk, perhaps three feet in diameter, inlaid with intricate geometric shapes that formed an Escher-like pattern. Brink could hardly move. The elaborate, intricate patterns entranced him. The table was an opulent marvel of nature—dovetailing like the reticulations of a ginkgo leaf or the microscopic arrangement of cells in a drop of water. The complexity and beauty overwhelmed him. A blast of anticipation hit him, sending adrenaline through his system. He was ready to solve this. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Sakura said, studying the intricate inlay of wood. “Nobody has,” Hiroshi said. “It’s an utterly unique piece. We haven’t been able to test it out, but from the intricate arrangement of pieces, it’s clear that the table was built to create patterns, like a kaleidoscope, and these patterns form the solution. It was found here after Ogawa’s death. It was immediately recognized as a masterpiece, one of his most beautiful puzzles, and perhaps his most unusual.”

Brink recognized the concept. “There’s an American puzzle-box constructor, Kagen Sound, who makes something similar, only it isn’t a table but a box. A pattern box. It opens when the solver creates a ‘key’ pattern—herringbone or interconnected squares or circles, or whatever pattern the constructor has designed into the puzzle. They’re monstrously complicated, brilliantly constructed, and extremely difficult to open.”

Hiroshi gave him a look of surprise. “Good eye,” he said, walking to the table and examining the pattern. “This was one of Ogawa’s recurring patterns. It’s called uroko. It is a wagara, a classic Japanese pattern often used in traditional textiles.

“That pattern is called seigaiha,” Sakura said. “The circles represent infinite waves.”

“Asanoha,” Hiroshi said. “A pattern that represents the hemp leaf. It is used on children’s kimono.”

Next came another pattern of interlocking hexagrams, or tortoiseshells, that Hiroshi called kikkou.

“From what I remember,” Rachel said, “there is a famous passage of The Tale of Genji, the eleventh-century account by Murasaki Shikibu, that occurs at Nonomiya Shrine. A princess comes to this shrine for ritual purification before she makes the journey to Ise Shrine to make an offering to Amaterasu.”

“A turtle is at the heart of the Lo Shu Square mythology,” Rachel said. “In ancient China, there was an incredible flood. In fact, flood narratives are nearly universal, all of them telling stories of massive changes to human civilization. Anyway, during this flood, people offered sacrifices to the Luo River, hoping to assuage the god causing the flooding. A turtle emerged from the water, and it had a strange pattern on its back.” “Circular dots,” Brink said, “that marked the nine sections of the turtle’s shell. Those dots formed a three-by-three grid that created a magic square.” “The Lo Shu Square was widely adopted and served as an important reference for planning cities and temples—informing rituals of geomancy and feng shui. Some people say that the Lo Shu Square is an invention that changed civilization, on par with fire or law or storytelling.”

“Alongside the references to an ancient system of knowledge, there are numerous references to a person as a key to unlocking sacred information. This person—sometimes called a culture hero—is essential to bringing progress, knowledge, and safety to the world. That person, according to Sakura and from what I’ve observed, is you.”

All we have to learn in this life is to be satisfied with what we are, with ourselves. We are enough. You are enough. Nothing you can solve, nothing you can do, will change that. It is the greatest challenge, but it also brings the greatest reward.”