The Mill House Murders (1988) by Yukito Ayatsuji

Soji Shimada's Senseijutsu satsujinjiken (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 1981) and Naname yashiki no hanzai (Murder in the Crooked House, 1982) cracked the thick ice that covered the post-war detective story in Japan, "the winter of the age of honkaku," handing the next generation of mystery writers a blueprint to carry forward the traditional detective story into the new century – ending the dominance of Seicho Matsumoto's social school. Just not right away. Well, not until Yukito Ayatsuji debuted with Jukkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987). A novel seen as the first wave of the shin honkaku (neo-orthodox) movement and remembered in Japan, to quote Shimada, "as an epoch-making event which transformed the world of Japanese mystery fiction with revolutionary new ideas."

Fittingly, John Pugmire's Locked Room International and Ho-Ling Wong's 2015 translation of The Decagon House Murders ushered in a new phase of the reprint renaissance that had been slowly gathering steam during the 2000s and really began to pick up momentum over the next decade.

Locked Room International had been mainly publishing Paul Halter and some odds and ends like a translation of Jean-Paul Török's Carrian pastiche L'enigme du Monte Verita (The Riddle of Monte Verita, 2007) and The Derek Smith Omnibus (2014). The Decagon House Murders appears to have given the traditionally-grounded, non-English mysteries legitimize and opened the floodgates to, what Brian Skupin called, a translation wave – one that's getting progressively bigger every year. Locked Room International continued with translations of writers such as Takemaru Abiko, Alice Arisugawa, Tetsuya Ayukawa, Masahiro Imamura and Pushkin Vertigo followed suit with reprints and new translations of Soji Shimada, Akimitsu Takagi and Seishi Yokomizo. In addition to a smattering of publications from smaller publishers like Yamaguchi Masaya's Ikeru shikabane no shi (Death of the Living Dead, 1989), Hiroko Minagawa's Hirakasete itadaki kōei desu (The Resurrection Fireplace, 2011) and MORI Hiroshi's Seven Stories (2017). And this only touches upon the Japanese mysteries that were ferried across the language barrier since 2015!

More importantly, Yukito Ayatsuji might very well have done exactly what Shimada predicted in his introduction to the LRI edition of The Decagon House Murders. In his introduction, Shimada discussed the shin honkaku movement and stated, "it is my belief that if we can introduce this concept to the field of American and British detective fiction, the Golden Age pendulum will swing back, just as The Tokyo Zodiac Murders and The Decagon House Murders managed to accomplish in Japan." You can argue the translation wave is leaving it traces as can been seen in the recently published A. Carver's The Author is Dead (2022), Jim Noy's The Red Death Murders (2022) and the work of James Scott Byrnside. So it was about time Yukito Ayatsuji got another novel translated into English.

Back in 2020, Pushkin Vertigo acquired the publishing rights of The Decagon House Murders and reprinted the book in a brand new edition. Every reprint of a previously published Japanese author from Pushkin Vertigo eventually receives new translations. It happened to Shimada and Yokomizo and expected it to happen to Ayatsuji some time before it was announced.

Yukito Ayatsuji's Suishakan no satsujin (The Mill House Murders, 1988) is the second entry in the yakata (mansion) series. The strange mansions providing a backdrop for each novel is the creation of Nakamura Seiji, "a curious architect," who "would only work on curious houses, projects that happened to coincide with whatever theme interested him at the time" and "he'd always conceal childish tricks in those houses" – which appear to have began to attract horrific tragedies. Seiji had died in a house he himself had built called the Blue Mansion when it went up in flames. A series of murders took place in another strange house designed by Seiji, the Decagon House. There's always one person who seem to be connected to the mansion tragedies, Shimada Kiyoshi. So begins to travel around Japan "to see what more evil Nakamura Seiji's creations have led to." On his second outing, Shimada travels deep into the mountains north of Okayama Prefecture to visit the Mill House.

The Mill House is a European-style, castle-like building situated in an isolated valley and is named for the three large water wheels attached to the mansion to generate power. A very remote, sparsely populated area, but even there the Mill House got a nickname as some refer to it as Mask Manor. A reference "after its unusual-looking master," Fujinuma Kiichi, who's the son of the late, well-known visionary painter, Fujinuma Issei. Twelve years ago, Kiichi emerged from a car wreck with severely damaged limbs and a horrendously disfigured face. Now wears a white rubber mask to hide his "accursed features" and had the Mill House built to hide from the world. When he had settled into the Mill House, Kiichi began to buy back and hoard all of his father's paintings ("the art world had dubbed it the Fujinuma Collection"). The Mill House has guests only once a year, on 28th September, the day Fujinuma Issei passed away when only four men are allowed to view the collection. Ōishi Genzō, Mori Shigehiko, Mitamura Noriyuki and Furukawa Tsunehito. All four connected to the Fujinumas and the reason why they're allowed to view the collection once a year.

A year ago, the traditional viewing of the Fujinuma Collection became the scene of gruesome murder and the downright impossible. Firstly, the housekeeper, Negishi Fumie, fell to her death from the tower and her body was seen being carried away by the rushing water. Secondly, a painting disappeared from the wall of the Northern Gallery and Furukawa Tsunehito is assumed to have taken it. Thirdly, Furukawa impossibly disappeared from the first floor of the locked and watched annex. Lastly, Masaki Shingo, friend of Kiichi and one-time disciple of his father, is killed, cut up in pieces and burnt in the basement incinerator. The police is unable to find a satisfactory explanation outside of blaming the vanished man. So the case, more or less, remains unsolved.

There ends the prologue and becomes a bit tricky discuss as The Mill House Murders is one of the clearest examples of simplistic complexity I've ever come across! The prologue gives the reader a rough idea what happened a year ago and the narrative than switches back and forth between the past and present. The 1985 chapters is a detailed retelling what happened a year ago, while the 1986 chapters sees the surviving members of that tragic night returning to the secluded house, but this time there's an uninvited guest, Shimada Kiyoshi – who's a friend of the man who impossibly disappeared, Furukawa. Shimada asks Kiichi permission to stay and join the yearly gathering to have a look around the place. So the story alternates between chapters set in 1985 that go over the events of the previous year and chapters set a year later detailing Shimada's investigation. When a 1985 chapters shows one of the incidents, you get Shimada going over that part of the house or talking to the people who witnessed something. Shimada asks a question and the next chapters shows the incident he asked about. These alternating past/present chapters, especially the earlier ones, often mirror each other and gives a pleasing symmetric structure to the storytelling and plot. Brilliantly exploited to frame an ultimately simple, absolutely solvable detective story as a warped maze. I referred to this style of plotting as a simplistic complexity and the difficult thing about spinning a great deal of complexity out of an uncomplicated plot is to do it while playing fair and not obfuscate the plot with clutter. Ayatsuji succeeded admirably as there are no irrelevant, extraneous plot-threads needlessly complicating things with everything that has happened, and continues to unfold, at Mill House is relevant to Shimada's solution.

I was actually somewhat surprised how close some of my initial impressions and suspicions were to be to Shimada's solution. While never fully giving up on those first impressions and suspicions, I questioned and doubted all of them with every twist and turn along the way. Not until Shimada finally got an opportunity to take a look at the first floor annex and bedroom from which his friend inexplicably vanished that some of those suspicions began to look not so far fetched after all. The locked room mystery really is my wheelhouse. Even then, I failed to dot all the i's and cross all the t's. I particular liked what lay behind the secret of the locked study.

Well, I can go on rambling about the book, but you probably get the idea by now. I really enjoyed The Mill House Murders. A superbly written, intricately-plotted shin honkaku mystery weaving a seemingly complex patterns out of sheer simplicity. You can see how Soji Shimada and Yukito Ayatsuji's ideas revitalized a genre that had been dominated for decades by social crime novels, which in turn inspired a new generation who completely rejuvenated the traditional detective story. I don't believe the traditional detective story could have found better custodians when it got largely abandoned in the West and eagerly look forward to the translation of Ayatsuji's third yakata novel, Meirokan no satsujin (The Labyrinth House Murders, 1988).