Solution Not Included

Mr. Hirano sells a wooden puzzle box that requires 54 steps to open. He would demonstrate, but he'd have to brush up on the moves. The 27-step box, however, he handles like an artist -- fluidly turning, twisting, pulling, rotating and sliding panels -- until the secret drawer finally opens. He then shakes the box to show there is still a rattle. One more secret move is needed to open that double-trick box to get the lucky 5-yen coin inside.

On the international puzzle scene, Yoshiaki Hirano is something of a star. He has been written up in puzzle magazines from Moscow to New York. Puzzle lovers make the pilgrimage to Hirano-san's open-air stand outside Akihabara station, where he has been selling puzzles for 26 years, because they know it's the best place in Japan to buy puzzles.

A quarter century ago, Hirano-san, an innately cheerful man, decided Akihabara, with its labyrinthine back streets, passageways, alleys and nooks, crammed with showrooms stacked sub-basement to top floor with gizmos, gadgets, and everything electrical, would be a location assured of a steady flow of potential puzzle fanciers. Thousands per day pass his stand with cash in their pockets, and Hirano knows how to work the crowd.

Smiling in short sleeves, a necktie despite the summer heat, and a blue denim apron, Hirano-san lifts a large, empty brown-glass bottle of sake. A stout arrow, carved from a single piece of cedar wood, pierces the bottle through two small holes on each side. The tip of the arrow and the fletches are much too large to have passed through those small holes, yet pass through they did. Hirano raps the arrow back and forth against the bottle producing a bell-like racket that attracts passersby. His husky voice calls out "Omoshiroi yo!" Very interesting! "Irrashai!" Welcome!

Once a few people have gathered, he sets the arrow bottle aside like an unanswered question, takes up the puzzle box, and starts his demonstration. He laughs, cajoles, and entertains the small crowd. With impeccable timing, he picks up another prop -- a narrow-mouthed milk bottle with a golf ball impossibly inside. The ball is clearly too large to have passed through the opening, yet there it is rolling around inside. He shakes the bottle saying he has puzzles designed by a blind man, by an elementary school girl, by an 80-year-old man. "Omoshiroi yo!"

The crowd then moves in closer to look over the 100 or so different puzzles that fill his stand -- take-apart puzzles, put-together puzzles, disentanglement puzzles, sequential movement puzzles, arranging puzzles, and impossible object puzzles.

Hirano, whose "nom de puzzle" is Cosmo, also sells his own original puzzle, a hefty wooden cube with a steel ball bearing inside. The cube has a hole on one side and you must rotate the cube in various ways to free the ball from the unseen interior maze. After Hirano smoothly manipulates his cube this way and that for a few seconds, the heavy steel ball mysteriously drops out.

In the past, only men were interested in puzzles, says Hirano, but nowadays even young women buy puzzles. A young man who has been eyeing a cast-metal disentanglement puzzle decides to make the purchase. Hirano asks him if he needs the solution. The young man declines. Young people, says Hirano, like challenges. But he might be back. Eventually, some people give up and want to know the solution, so Hirano has printed up hand-illustrated solutions for every puzzle he sells. Once though, he says, a determined elderly gentleman spent two-and-half years working out the solution to the arrow-through-the-bottle trick.

The president of the cast-metal puzzle company drops by to deliver a new disentanglement puzzle, a design from 1892, -- a miniature cricket bat-based puzzle. Hirano takes a minute to step away and turn his back to practice the solution. He'll start selling the puzzle tomorrow.

It's not surprising to learn that Hirano constantly thinks about puzzles. The button-hole puzzle, a large flat needle with a short loop of rope threaded through the eye, he explains, has been a perennial seller. But in summer, no one wears jackets and the needle was too long for summer clothing. So Hirano came up with a smaller version for polo shirt button holes. In an instant, he threads the metal needle through my button hole looping the cord to my shirt. I find the cord too short and the needle too long to undo what he just did. After a minute, he removes it for me. The solution was absurdly simple, but required thinking outside the puzzle box.

Hirano again picks up one of the wooden puzzle boxes. It's a stunning example of marqueterie: the inlaid pattern is a typical Edo-period design of interlocking grids. These boxes, he says, are called Hakone zaiku and are made by only three men in their 70s living in the mountains of Hakone. Once these craftsmen pass on, so will the secret art of these boxes.

Hirano is a man who clearly loves his work. He'd have to, to stand outside for most of 26 years. He doesn't mind the winter cold. It's Tokyo's summer heat that's the worst. He once measured the radiating concrete in front of his stand -- 50 degrees. His stand and puzzles are shaded by a tent-like cover, but frequent breaks into the air-conditioned station department store are a must.

A quarter century of selling puzzles is not the only career Hirano-san has successfully put his hands to. Before taking up puzzles, he sold fishing equipment for a few years. The two occupations are not dissimilar. But fishing is now a hobby and on his rare days off, Hirano heads to the beach to cast for sea bass. The secret, he says, is to know where to drop the hook in.

It's fitting that Hirano sells puzzles in Akihabara, a bewildering neighborhood in a convoluted city. For Tokyo itself is a puzzle-box -- a city that does not easily reveal its charms. The pleasures of some cities, say Paris, are discovered with less effort: The architecture, parks, fountains, bistros and boulevards are laid out with welcoming openness. But for those unfamiliar with Tokyo, the city can be confounding and frustrating to figure out. You know from the rattle that the lucky 5-yen coin is somewhere inside, but you can't get it out. Maybe it's a zen koan where you can only find the solution if you don't seek it, or maybe it's a question of trial and error, patience and practice. Or perhaps we can take a clue from Hirano-san -- the pleasure's in the challenge.

-- michael kleindl