2/23/22

The Village of Eight Graves (1949/50) by Seishi Yokomizo

Two years ago, Pushkin Vertigo published an eagerly anticipated, second translated novel by one of the giants of the classical, Japanese detective story, Seishi Yokomizo, whose Honjin satsujin jiken (The Honjin Murders, 1946) introduced his famous series-detective, Kosuke Kindaichi, as well as creating an authentic Japanese locked room mystery – ushering in the original, Golden Age-style honkaku era. Pushkin Vertigo reprinted Inugamike no ichizoku (The Inugami Clan, 1951) next under a slightly different title, The Inugami Curse, which was first published in English in the early 2000s. And, as of this writing, the well-known, promising-sounding Gokumontō (Gokumon Island, 1947/48) is scheduled to be released in March or June. 

Late last year, Pushkin Vertigo released another, brand new translation of an iconic Yokomizo's novel, Yatsuhakamura (The Village of Eight Graves, 1949/50). My review is going to be a little more upbeat than some of the rather disappointing reviews I've read and that needs an explanation. 

The Village of Eight Graves was originally serialized in Shinseinen (March 1949 to March 1950) and Hôseki (1950 to 1951), but the story would not be published in book form until 1971. A period known today as "The Yokomizo Boom" that ended with 40 million copies of the series sold by the end of the decade and presaged what was to come in the 1980s. Ho-Ling Wong described The Village of Eight Graves as the Japanese counterpart to Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934) as it's "the one that is parodied most often" and thus "best known to the general public." For example, I reviewed The Headless Samurai from The Kindaichi Case Files series in 2018 that borrowed the historical backstory of The Village of Eight Graves.

So I have probed the Japanese detective genre a little deeper than most people who follow this blog, which helped manage my expectations of this third Yokomizo translation. What you should not expect is another The Honjin Murders or The Inugami Clan. Ho-Ling likened the book to The Murder on the Orient Express, but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) is probably a better comparison as The Village of Eight Graves feels like a throwback to those turn-of-the-century crime-and suspense mysteries – both of which pushed their famous detectives to the background. Kosuke Kindaichi is largely a background character in the story that, sort of, unravels itself and he admits at the end that "the criminal would have been exposed even in my absence." I can see why readers unprepared of what to expect end up somewhat underwhelmed or even disappointed. So my advise is to read it on autopilot and enjoy it for what it is. Let's dig in!

The village of Eight Graves is "perched amid the desolate mountains on the border of Tottori and Okayama prefecture," which has a long, tragic and eerie history that drenched its soil in blood.

In 1566, the great daimyo Yoshihisa Amago surrendered Tsukiyama Castle to his enemies, but one samurai refused to give up and fled the castle with seven faithful retainers and rumoredly packed three horses with 3000 tael of stolen gold. They hoped to continue their fight another day and "after enduring many hardships, fording rivers and crossing mountains" arrived at the village. The villagers received the eight warriors "hospitably enough," but the efforts to find the fugitives, the glittering reward and the reputed gold made the village rethink their hospitality. So they not only betrayed the warriors, but outright hacked them to death and beheaded the corpses. The leader of the samurais cursed the whole village with his dying breath, "vowing to visit his vengeance upon it for seven generations to come," which apparently came true when the villagers were "plunged into an abyss of terror." A terror that began with several deadly accidents and exploded when the ringleader of the attack on the warriors lost his mind, picked up a sword and went on a murderous rampage. Cutting down several members of his household and felling every villager who crossed his path in the streets.

So the villagers dug up the dead warriors, "whom they had buried like dogs," to reinter them with all due ceremony, erecting eight graves, "where they were venerated as divinities." But how long can you appease homemade Gods you have wronged? Eight Graves only managed to do it for a few centuries.

There two important families in Eight Graves: the Tajime family ("The House of the East") and the Nomura family ("The House of the West"). During the 1920s, the head of the House of the East was 36-year-old Yozo who, despite having a wife and two children, became obsessed with the young daughter of a local cattle-trader named Tsuruko. Yozo was "a man of violent inclinations" who, one day, simply abducted the 19-year-old girl, imprisoned her in a storehouse and subjected her to "the unremitting torments of his crazed desires" – until she and her family consented to Tsuruko becoming Yozo's mistress. Tsuruko eventually gave birth to a son, Tatsuya, but Yozo's abuse continued. Yozo went as far as branded Tatsuya's thighs, back and buttocks with fire tongs in a fit of rage. Tsuruko fled with Tatsuya to hide with relatives in Himeji and she refused to return. Yozo's "madness finally exploded" and went on a midnight killing spree with a rifle and sword that left thirty-two dead, before disappearing into the mountains never to be seen or heard of ever again. Tsuruko never returned to Eight Graves and moved to Kobe where she married and raised a son completely unaware of his family or tragic origin in that remote mountain village.

After the end of the Second World War, the now 28-year-old, demobbed Tatsuya is contacted by a lawyer on behalf of his long-lost family. His estranged family wants him to return to his ancestral village to accept his inheritance as the rightful head of the family, but the first of many tragedies strikes when he meets with his grandfather for the first time Kobe. When they have been introduced to each other by the lawyer, Tatsuya's grandfather begins to cough blood and dies mere moments later. This is not the last time is too close for comfort when someone is poisoned or strangled, which brings him not only in trouble with the police, but also places him on the wrong side of the community. The villagers are "terrified that another tragedy is about to occur" and were naturally less than thrilled he had come back to Eight Graves. And the murders continue as soon as Tatsuya entered the village.

The murders is not the only problem this voluminous novel has to offer. Firstly, there's the historical mystery of the stolen gold, which was never located and the secrets Tatsuya's mother carried with her to the grave. Some of which was rather predictable, but (ROT13) gur vqragvgl bs Gngfhln'f erny sngure was something I completely missed. There's also the peculiar behavior of some of his relatives, like his elderly, twin aunts, but there was also two very slight, quasi-impossible problems. Tatsuya gets a room, or annex, in the house where items were moved around when it had been securely locked up. So a local who was fond of a drink was asked to spend a few nights in the room in exchange for some sake, but he fled the room in the middle of the night claiming a figure depicted on the folding screen had come to life. Apparently, this figure was "so startled that he turned away and vanished in an instant." Tatsuya gets to witness this ghostly apparition himself. Secondly, there's a discovery of a very old, almost miraculously well preserved corpse clad in the decaying armor of a samurai. However, these were so marginal as a locked room mystery/impossible problem, I decided not to tag this review as one. But they added to the atmosphere of the story.

Admittedly, there are some very hoary, even by 1949, timeworn genre clichés at the heart of the plot replete with secret passages, coded treasure maps and a hunt for the gold with lovers meetings (past and present), murders and life-or-death chases through labyrinth of dark caverns and passages – which stretch out beneath the village. However, they were all put to good use as it made the second-half the most memorable and striking part of the whole story. Not exactly groundbreaking or particular original, but effectively utilized to tell a brooding story fraught with danger and dripping with history. This story comes to a rapid conclusion when everything around Tatsuya seems to come crashing down, but, as said previously, this is the point where the story kind of sorts itself out. Kosuke Kindaichi spend most of the time on the sideline, scratching his head and warning Tatsuya to be honest with the authorities or he will find himself in a difficult position. And at the end, he comes around to explain and tidy up all the loose ends.

So, yeah, The Village of Eight Graves is not another The Honjin Murders or The Inugami Clam. Fortunately, I didn't expect it to be and that allowed me to enjoy it as a well-down, moody throwback to the time of Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles. I'm just glad to finally have gotten an opportunity to read this famous novel that left such an indelible mark on the Japanese detective genre. However, it's undeniably the weakest of the three Yokomizo novels currently available in English and one of the weaker Japanese detective novels that made it across the language barrier. So try to manage your expectations.

That being said, I can't wait for the publication of Gokumon Island, which has been described as "the most respected Japanese mystery novel."

11 comments:

  1. The Hound of the Baskervilles comparison is a good one. It stands to reason this wouldn't have been the same sort of novel as Honjin or Inugami -- not least because those are very different books -- and it's lovely to see a looser side to Yokomizo's construction...but I, too, came away from this slightly deflated.

    The impossible element is very minor, as you say, the string of murders ends up rather pedestrian, and the treasure hunt gets solve by simple combinatorics...the equivalent of going out with a metal detector and just digging a hole every three paces. There's no real rigour anywhere. But, hey. the guy wrote over 50 books, right? Gotta have an off one here and there.

    I think this also does a good job of preparing us for Death on Gokumon Island (as the translation now seems to be called): calming us down a bit so we can remain cool and logical when that arrives...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. As has been commented elsewhere, this translation sorely needed an introduction to place the story in a historical context and manage expectations. The Village of Eight Graves is not only handicapped by being vastly different from The Inugami Clan and The Honjin Murders, but vastly different from the every other Japanese mysteries translated over the past seven or eight years. I think even a simple "JAPAN'S HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES" printed on the cover would have done the trick. But still very glad I got to read this historical landmark.

      I hate the altered title of Gokumon Island. Are they afraid readers might assume it's some kind of weird fan fiction mashing Dragon Ball Z and Pokémon together? Just Gokumon Island is fine as a title.

      Delete
    2. I wonder if the change of title is partly a marketing thing here in the UK. Bookshops here seem to be moving towards a (hopefully short-lived) tendency not to separate out crime fiction into its own section any more -- it just gets lumped in with all the other Fiction (except SFF, which is kept weirdly apart still).

      So calling a book The _____ Murders or The Death of/on _______ makes it clearer to the casual browser who doesn't know the genre ahead of time. Hell, some people are probably even putting 'Death' and 'Murders' into their book titles, just to be super-obvious...

      Delete
    3. You mean crime fiction in the UK is finally considered proper literature and now they need genre specific titles to standout, because bland cover designs and phrases like "a novel" are not going to do that trick? Hilarious!

      Delete
    4. Well, considering crime fiction "proper" literature might be a bit of a reach, but I do wonder if that's the intent -- to get casual readers, or people who might not otherwise pick it up, to try something they might otherwise feel was "beneath" them.

      I can't see any other reason for rearranging of every Waterstones I've been into -- it doesn't save shelf space, and it makes it far harder for people like me who know what they like...so it must be to help those damn prevaricators!

      Delete
  2. It's a book that is so important for the field of Japanese mystery fiction, but it's not a book I'd immediately recommend to people because as a book, I think it works better as a suspense thriller than a true mystery novel ^_^' The famous 1977 film adaptation, which was arguably even more influential on pop culture than the original novel, even goes deep into that, ignoring large parts of the mystery to lean even harder on the horror part.

    ROT13: Zvjnxb vf erirnyrq gb or n qrfpraqrag bs bar bs gur fynva fnzhenv, naq onfvpnyyl orpbzrf cbffrffrq ol na rivy fcvevg ng gur pyvznk. Va gur irel svany fprar, gur jubyr znabe oheaf qbja, naq sne bss ba n zbhagnva, jr npghnyyl frr gur fcvevgf bs gur rvtug fynva fnzhenv ynhtuvat, xabjvat gurl svanyyl unq gurve eriratr :C

    Gokumon Island is really excellent, though a lot of its more brilliant moments are very steeped into japanese culture, so i wonder how readers w/o knowledge of the culture will look at those aspects.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. One part of that ending would actually not be out of place in the book (gur fcvevgf bs gur fnzhenvf ynhtuvat ba n sne bss zbhagnvagbc) as an epilogue, but I'm glad I resisted the urge to dive into movies now that Vertigo has begun to translate Yokomizo in earnest. I really, really look forward to Gokumon Island! And who knows what translation from your hand will be published this year.

      Delete
  3. I agree with you, it's not the best Yokomizo novel that has been translated. But I quite enjoy its adventurous style, which IMO is a tribute to Doyle more than GAD authors, and even some logical aspects of the solution (the deduction based on the Koicha nun's murder). What I found underwhelming is the detective himself, who doesn't do too much even if he knows important things that could have stopped the series of murders. I found the book nearer to a cozy mystery than to a traditional detective novel (both for the sentimental parts, too many for my tastes, and the omissions of some aspects, beginning with the poison's technical name).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's why I compared it to Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (style and a largely absent detective), but, reading back some reviews and comments, I begin to believe The Village of Eight Graves might have been better suited as a standalone. Kindaichi admitted himself his presence wasn't really needed.

      Delete
    2. Exactly my though as well. This more of a standalone than a Kindaichi mystery. It's an enjoyable story but I was disappointed because I was hoping for something along the lines of The Honjin Murders or The Inugami Curse. Still, I really appreciate Pushkin publishing these translations and look forward to the next.

      This is the second review of this book I've read that uses ROT13 to encrypt spoilers. I don't think I've encountered ROT13 in decades. Twice in one night, fun coincidence. Now I have to find an opportunity to use it.

      Delete
    3. Kindaichi not being much of a help in his own books is kind of a running gag among mystery fans (and it also applies to his grandson Hajime). Both Kosuke and Hajime are pretty awful at preventing more murders from happeninga and are better at explaining things only after everyone's dead already :P

      Delete