The Return Home
The novel opens with the aging Sherlock Holmes returning home after having been away on a leisure trip abroad. That this is not quite the Sherlock with which most people have become familiar does not take long for metaphor to help establish:
“the whole vacation—while filling him like a satisfying meal—felt unfathomable in hindsight, punctuated here and there by brief remembrances that soon became vague impressions and were invariably forgotten again.”
Hiroshima
In a visit to Hiroshima just a few years following the bomb—yes, Holmes has lived to see World War II in this tale—a scrapbook reveals what the city looked like in the immediacy following the devastation. And Holmes, rarely portrayed as having any emotions by John Watson, is pictured here as surmounted by them:
“Holmes was overcome by the weariness he had carried into the cottage. Something has gone amiss with the world, he found himself thinking. Something has changed in the marrow, and I'm at a loss to make sense of it.”
Meet the Real Kobe
A stroll through Kobe puts Holmes in a better mood than the Japan witnessed through the train windows. The Japan of devastation seemed gone and replaced almost by something that could be found in Victorian England. But the longer the stroll goes on, the more this is proven an illusion which masks a darker reality:
“Then it seemed to him that the flux of their daily lives masked a noiseless despair: Behind the smiles, the nods, the bows, the general politeness, there lurked something else that had grown malnourished.”
Mr. Keller
Thomas Keller is introduced with pure simile. He isn’t even really introduced per se since what is there is merely conjecture and supposition. Which, of course, is some both strange and completely expected in a novel about Sherlock Holmes.
“Mr. Thomas R. Keller looked like the sort of man who it would be tempting to bully for fun. His boyish manner was sheepish and his wavering, soft voice carried a slight lisp as he spoke.”
Holmes Tells the Story
Watson is long gone and Holmes is the narrator of his stories. Not technically in the sense of the book, but within the book in the sense of discourse and conversation. A strong metaphor conveys the sense that when Holmes tells his story, it is at least as gripping as when Watson would do so:
“Once his whispering concluded, they remained facing each other for a while, neither moving or saying a word— two indistinct forms sitting there like each other's obscure reflection, their heads hidden by shadow, the floor glowing beneath them.”
