A gentleman thief hides a stolen 50,000 yen, and two poor roommates fall to decoding a cryptic note of dots and dashes made from a copper coin's secret message. When one of them thinks he has cracked it and fetches the loot, the other reveals the whole thing was his elaborate prank.
Books mentioned in The Two-Sen Copper Coin (2)
The Adventure of the Dancing Men by Arthur Conan Doyle: “I have studied ciphers a bit before. I may not be Sherlock Holmes, but even I know a hundred and sixty or so ways of writing in code. (See The Adventure of the Dancing Men) [auto-translated]”
The Gold-Bug by Edgar Allan Poe: “If this were English, French or German, it would be easy enough just to look for the letter e, as in Poe's The Gold-Bug, but unfortunately this is surely Japanese. Just to be safe I tried a bit of Poe-style deciphering, but it solved nothing. [auto-translated]”