The Little Sparrow Murders (1957/59) by Seishi Yokomizo

In my review of Akimitsu Takagi's Nomen satsujin jiken (The Noh Mask Murder, 1949), I likened Pushkin Vertigo's current run of honkaku translations to opening King Tut's tomb or the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, first emperor of China, to find a treasure trove inside – a hoard of previously inaccessible Golden Age detective fiction. Although the discovery of the Rosetta Stone is probably a better comparison.

Either way, Seishi Yokomizo's Akuma no temari uta (The Little Sparrow Murders, 1957/59), originally serialized in Hôseki from August 1957 to January 1959, continues this excellent run of translations. The Little Sparrow Murders is a little different from what most have come to expect by now from honkaku or shin honkaku translations, which until now have mainly shown how much Japanese writers love to indulge in the plot heavy tropes of the detective story. However, The Little Sparrow Murders features no corpse puzzles, dying messages, impossible crimes or narrative trickery. The book a straight up whodunit with a sprawling cast of characters, village setting and a succession of bizarre murders patterned after the lyrics of a temari song (nursery rhyme). Pushkin Vertigo seems to be diversifying their output of Japanese mysteries with translations of Tetsuya Ayukawa's non-impossible crime novel Kuroi hakuchou (The Black Swan Mystery, 1960) coming later this year and Hen na e (Strange Pictures, 2022) from mystery/horror Youtuber "Uketsu" in January, 2025.

The Little Sparrow Murders brings Kosuke Kindaichi to the small, remote mountain village of Onikobe, nestled in a valley on the border between Hyogo and Okayama prefectures, where he plans to have rest. Inspector Tsunejiro Isokawa recommended the village to Kindaichi and provided him with a letter of introduction. Not without reason!

Onikobe is only a small, rural community, but, geographically and historically, it has always caused troubles for authorities, because geographically it should have been part of Hyogo Prefecture – historical links ties it to Okayama Prefecture. So the Okayama police "treat the village as an unwanted stepchild," while the Hyogo police turned a blind eye to everything going on there ("...it is outside their jurisdiction"). There's an unsolved murder hanging like a black cloud over the inhabitants of the village. More than twenty years ago, Inspector Isokawa came to the village as a young policeman to help investigate the murder of a local who recently returned to the village, Genjiro Aoike. Genjiro had began to become suspicious of a traveling salesman, Ikuzo Onda, who has been leasing machines to the struggling, impoverished farmers to make Christmas tinsel to be exported to the US. It was all a con game and Onda and ended up killing Genjiro, before "absconding and plunging the whole village into turmoil." Inspector Isokawa always had his doubts as the victim's facial features were burned beyond recognition and had a feeling the victim might have been Onda. And had a feeling, if his suspicions are correct, Genjiro might one day return to the village. Kindaichi assures his friend he's only looking for a place to rest. Not more murders to solve.

During his first weeks in the village, Kindaichi holed himself up in his room at the Turtle Spring to read books, organize his case notes and dozing the rest of the day ("...there were few things he enjoyed more than lazing around idly like a cat"). Kindaichi eventually starts to become interested in the long, complicated history and feuds of the local families ("...sounds a lot like the situation with the Americans and the Soviets these days") and the old murder case as new troubles begin to develop.

Firstly, there's the disappearance of the village chieftain, Hoan Tatara, whose title is nothing more than an honorary one as his family house fallen into ruin and lives in a shack, but still quite the character – who had, all told, eight wives during his lifetime. Tatara disappeared at the same time as he had called back his fifth wife, O-Rin. Kindaichi has a strange encounter on a mountain path with an old woman, calling herself O-Rin, going down to the village to see the chieftain. She's nowhere to be found, either, while Tatara's shack has clear evidence that a murder has taken place. So what happened? Secondly, a young girl from one of the leading families goes missing, reportedly taken away by an old woman, but her body is found the following morning under utterly bizarre circumstances in a waterfall basin. So begins a series of macabre murders patterned after a barely remembered temari song.

Like I said, The Little Sparrow Murders has not a single impossible crime or any of the other plot-oriented tropes, which makes The Little Sparrow Murders read more like a Western-style, Golden Age mystery than what most have come to expect from these translations. Without having to pick apart a locked room problem or piecing together a corpse-puzzle, Kindaichi and Isokawa have their hands free to move around the village, talk with people and probe their complicated history and hidden secrets. It brings to mind and sometimes feels like an Agatha Christie mystery, especially those that were published several years earlier, e.g. A Pocketful of Rye (1953) and After the Funeral (1953). However, I poked around the language barrier a bit and discovered Yokomizo got the idea to write a nursery rhyme-themed mystery not from A Pocketful of Rye, but from S.S. van Dine's The Bishop Murder Case (1928). Yokomizo initially decided against the idea as he feared it would be criticized as a rehash, but Christie's And Then There Were None (1939) made him change his mind.

Yokomizo also said of The Little Sparrow Murders is "the least unpleasant of my work and the best written." I agree. The Little Sparrow Murders is the most accessible Japanese mystery novel for Western reader who sometimes find the honkaku-style overwhelming with its eccentric architecture, multiple impossibilities and bodies cut to pieces. Not to mention that this more leisurely, Agatha Christie-style storytelling benefited this lavish detective story about old sins casting long shadows and the consequences of leaving the evil of past events unresolved. Yokomizo's fiction is full of local color, culture, history and it gets all the room it needed to shine here. Just like the many characters who populate the village. I mentioned only a few of them, but there, all together, more than thirty names on the "List of Characters" – divided over five families and a handful of additional characters. So the story is pleasantly reminiscent of Christie and her Golden Age contemporaries, but is it as good or nearly as good? For the most part, yes.

The Little Sparrow Murders is not as diabolically, densely plotted or original as some of the previous novels that have been translated, but solidly put together with a splendid, fairly-clued twist linking the past murder to the nursery rhyme killings. Something that would make the ghost of Brian Flynn rattle the kitchen cabinet's in sheer appreciation. I do think the motive for the present-day murders could have been clued a little stronger and the nursery rhyme should have featured more prominently in the investigation. The reader is told about the nursery rhyme in the first chapter, but two-thirds of the story elapses before Kindaichi is told of the existence of the temari song. So, technically it's a nursery rhyme mystery, but not the most striking or even best use of the murderer following a nursery rhyme motif. Regardless of those little smudges, The Little Sparrow Murders is a solidly-plotted, lavish-spun whodunit that can stand comparison with its Western counterparts. A good, old-fashioned that comes particularly recommended to readers who would like read a Japanese mystery without butchered corpses left behind in hermetically sealed rooms. I'm curious and looking forward to next year's translations. Here's hoping for a translation of Yoru aruku (It Walks by Night, 1948).