Murder at the Black Cat Cafe (1946/47) by Seishi Yokomizo

Ever since the publication of Seishi Yokomizo's Honjin satsujin jiken (The Honjin Murders, 1946) in 2019, Pushkin Vertigo has put out a new translation from Yokomizo's celebrated Kosuke Kindaichi series every year and have likened it to opening a cache of previously inaccessible Golden Age detective fiction – a veritable treasure trove of vintage murder. The newest title in the series of Kosuke Kindaichi translations is a twofer comprising of two shortish novels, Kuronekotei jiken (Murder at the Black Cat Cafe, 1946/47) and Kurumaido wa naze kishiru (Why Did the Well Wheel Creak?, 1949?). Their original publication dates are a bit sketchy, because the Pushkin Vertigo editions give the 1970s publication dates from the "Yokomizo Boom," but most of them were first serialized. Sometimes not published as a complete book until years or decades later and finding the correct dates can be a puzzle with Yokomizo. I'm too much of an internet autist to ignore it and go with post-GAD, 1970s dates. So hope I got then right.

I was thinking of reviewing Murder at the Black Cat Cafe and Why Did the Well Wheel Creak? separately, but why make a needless, confusing mess of things?

Murder at the Black Cat Cafe uncharacteristically begins with subtle, winking "Challenge to the Reader," packaged as an prologue, explaining how "dear Mr. Y" (Yokomizo) became Kosuke Kindaichi's official biographer when working on a serialization of the murders in the old honjin – based on what the locals told him. This serialization attracted the attention of the Great Detective himself and offers Yokomizo to provide him with his personal case notes for future novels ("...write a little more about what a handsome devil I am"). Yokomizo not only accepts, but even has something of a wishlist and hopes Kindaichi encounters a so-called "Faceless Corpse" case. This trope is the Japanese variation on the "Birlstone Gambit" in which the murderer swapped identities with the victim whose identifiable features were destroyed to create a least-likely-suspect scenario. A trope that has been done to dead over the past hundred years to the point where, aside from a few exceptions, it "has been the solution offered in most detective novels that have dealt with this theme until now." Yokomizo received a package of papers from Kindaichi detailing a faceless corpse case deviating from the normal formula.

This is only the prologue and Yokomizo already demonstrates why I rank him alongside Golden Age luminaries like Anthony Berkeley, Christianna Brand and John Dickson Carr. Your normal, everyday mystery writer who hit upon a clever, brand new variation on the Birlstone Gambit would not trumpet that fact before the story even begins and use the readers familiarity/expectations as a smokescreen hiding the actual solution and real clues. And we would have praised it. Yokomizo here warns the reader ahead Murder at the Black Cat Cafe is a faceless corpse puzzle "in which the victim and the culprit haven't switched places." A mystery writer giving themselves a handicap at the start is taking fair play to the next level! So on to the story itself.

If it weren't for the challenging prologue, the backdrop, bloody crimes and characters populating Yokomizo's Murder at the Back Cat Cafe do not suggest a traditional detective story playing on one of its oldest tropes – something more noir-ish and hardboiled. The mise-en-scène is a place in a far flung place only referred to as G—Town where behind the High Street lay a rabbit warren of backstreets, alleyways and passages commonly known as "the pink labyrinth" and "the alleys of temptation." These narrow, maze-like streets and passages were lined with red and violet lanterns to differentiate between bars and brothels. Curiously, this shady place sprung up around, and took over, a traditional neighborhood. So you have thatched cottages and farm houses next to brothels or cafes with old temples, shrines or a graveyard in their back yard adding "an even more complex and bizarre colour to the local scenery." Black Cat Cafe can be found, somewhat isolated from the other cafes and brothels, along a backstreet known as the Back Cut.

Behind the Black Cat Cafe stands an ancient Buddhist temple and neglected, overpopulated cemetery. That's where a police constable doing his rounds finds Nitcho, a young monk, apparently digging a hole, but what he's really doing is digging up a body. Nitcho explains he had spotted a leg sticking out of the ground at the back of the cafe and uncovered the partially decomposed, maggot infested body of a murdered woman, especially her facial features have become unrecognizable ("...eyes and nose were completely gone"). Detective Inspector Murai not only has a faceless, unidentified murder victim on his hands, but the owners of the cafe recently packed up their belongings and sold the place. And, with them, the girls who worked there scattered. So it's Murai who spends most of the story trying to piece this sordid puzzle together in a procedural way, while "wrestling with a nagging sense that something was not quite right" about this faceless corpse case.

Kosuke Kindaichi appears on the scene near the end to solve the case and promises to show them a phantom, "lots of phantoms around after the war nowadays," but this phantom is "the culprit in the murder case at the Black Cat." It's almost impressive Kindaichi's explanation feels almost as lengthy as what preceded it without becoming tedious. So the prologue was not so much Yokomizo giving himself a handicap, but a gallant attempt to level the playing ground more fairly for the reader. Considering the story's relatively short length with an intricate, complicated solution, the question can be raised how fair the plot really is, but what made it work for me is the cheeky epilogue. Just pointing out something I had already forgotten and never took into consideration. I thought it was proverbial cherry on top!

So that brings us to the second, shorter bonus novel, Why Did the Well Wheel Creak?, which is technically part of the Kosuke Kindaichi series, but Kindaichi is only mentioned by name. Surprisingly, Why Did the Well Wheel Creak? is a roughly thirty pages shorter than Murder at the Black Cat Cafe, but feels and reads like it's twice as long. And not because it's a drag to read.

Why Did the Well Wheel Creak? is one of those elaborately written, baroquely-plotted Japanese family murders, akin to Yokomizo's own Inugamike no ichizoku (The Inugami Clan, 1951) and Taku Ashibe's more recent Oomarike satsujin jiken (Murder in the House of Omari, 2021), but on a much smaller scale – like a pocket sized honkaku mystery. So the story begins with a family history going over the struggles of the Honiden family, from "the village of K––," over the decades from the early 1900s to the end of the Second World War. I'll be skipping those details with the story really picking up with a series of letter from the sickly, seventeen year old Tsuruyo written to her brother, Shinkichi, who's convalescing at a tuberculosis sanatorium. She writes to him how things have taken a turn for the worst back at home when their older brother and head of the family, Daisuke, returns home from the war. Daisuke returned with scarred, disfigured face and lost both of his eyes now replaced with glass, lifeless prosthetic eyes. Yes, the character with the disfigured, sometimes masked face often turn up in Japanese detective fiction and is something of a stock character. I again refer to Yokomizo's The Inugami Clan or Yukito Ayatsuji's Suishakan no satsujin (The Mill House Murders, 1988). This becomes a problem as not everyone is entirely sure the scarred man who returned from war is actually Daisuke. And causes an ever increasing strain on the family, until people begin to die. Starting with an apparent tragic accident, but soon culminates in a couple of bloody, gruesome murders told in a series of news paper clippings.

When the murders appear to have resolved themselves, Tsuruyo becomes one of the most tragic one-shot detective when she realizes the shattering truth behind the family murders. What she realizes certainly can be called a vintage, first-rate Golden Age plot, but the most striking is the grim, dark nature of the whole story. Not a spark of hope or an upbeat note to be found. A good, solid detective story nonetheless. A genuine bonus!

So, yes, I very much enjoyed Yokomizo's Murder at the Black Cat Cafe and Why Did the Well Wheel Creak? They're a bit more offbeat and different, compared to the previous translations, but that has more to do with their shorter length and the diminished role of Kosuke Kindaichi than the quality of the plots. A welcome addition to my increasingly crammed shelve of Japanese detective fiction. I look forward to the next Yokomizo translation, Yoru aruku (She Walks at Night, 1948), coming next year.