The Clock House Murders (1991) by Yukito Ayatsuji

Pushkin Vertigo has, as of 2025, published four novels in Yukito Ayatsuji's "Bizarre House Mysteries" series, translated by Ho-Ling Wong, but the most recent addition to the list, Tokeikan no satsujin (The Clock House Murders, 1991), is the fifth title in the series – not the fourth. Ningyōkan no satsujin (The Doll House Murders, 1989), fourth in the series, provides "a change from the formula up until now" and therefore skipped over The Clock House Murders. That and Ayatsuji was really keen on getting The Clock House Murders published in English. Ayatsuji even suggested to Ho-Ling translating it after Suishakan no satsujin (The Mill House Murders, 1988) and before Meirokan no satsujin (The Labyrinth House Murders, 1988). I don't think I would have minded either way, because The Clock House Murders always seemed like a potential personal favorite in the offing. I wasn't wrong!

You know you're in for a treat when the book opens to a pair of floor plans with all the elaborate intricacies and complexities of clockwork mechanics. Not to mention a dramatis personae of more than thirty characters and a list of chapter titles promising Ayatsuji's signature dueling narratives.

The Clock House, in Kamakura, is one of the bizarre, gimmicked buildings designed by that eccentric architect, Nakamura Seiji, who had an acquired taste when it came to designing private dwellings. A specialist in designing "out-of-the-ordinary buildings" and every building "has some kind of concealed novelty," which had seen "a number of bloody incidents" since his grisly death four years ago – written down in Jukkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987). That specialization attracted a special set of clientele with their own special, or peculiar, wishes and quirks. Clock House was commissioned by Koga Michinori, former chairman of Koga Clocks, who has a valuable collection of 108 antique clocks stored away in a place as strange as the underground maze of rooms from The Labyrinth House Murders. You need the floor plans to get a clear picture of the layout, but basically comprises of two sections, the New Wing and Old Wing, separated by two sets of double iron doors. The former is the most normal part of the house, outside of the clock tower locals call the "whimsical clock," but the latter is a Nakamura Seiji vintage creation. A semi-basement, quasi-circular webwork design of windowless rooms, twisted corridors and dead ends crammed with ticking clocks. And, most notably, a private living quarters semi-attached to the wing by a long hallway called the Pendulum.

So the building itself is already a puzzle box waiting to be explored and picked apart, but the Clock House became the scene of tragedy and mystery soon after the New Wing was completed. Koga Michinori died shortly after and "a lot of other people died at around the same time." Most tragically of all was the death of Koga's 14-year-old daughter, Towa, whose ghost now reputedly haunts the house and roaming the surrounding forest. The people currently in charge of the house always denied requests from spiritualists, ghost hunters and the media to poke around the place, until now.

Kawaminami Takaaki, previously appearing in The Decagon House Murders, is the rookie editor of Chaos ("The Magazine That Goes beyond Science") and working on a special feature, "Confronting the Ghost of the Kamakura Clock Mansion." Chaos and a famous psychic, Kōmyōji Mikoto, secured permission to lead an expedition into the abandoned Old Wing – where they'll locked themselves in for three days. This expedition comprises of the Kawaminami, his editor-in-chief, a photographer, the medium and six members students from the Mystery Club of W— University. Not a Mystery Club interested in detective fiction, but "the supernatural kind of mystery." Since the Clock House is a creation of that eccentric architect, Kawaminami tells his friend and amateur detective, Shimada Kiyoshi, about the ghost hunting expedition.

Ever since The Decagon House Murders, Shimada Kiyoshi has been researching Nakamura Seiji's work and traveled "across the country to examine the buildings he left" such as the Mill House in the mountains of Okayama Prefecture. Shimada arrives at the Clock House when Kawaminami's group had already locked themselves inside the Old Wing. So he's left prying into the mysteries surrounding the house from the New Wing without being aware of the wholesale slaughter going on inside the securely locked Old Wing. So there you have the dueling narrative between Shimada's outside perspective of the case and Kawaminami on-the-ground reporting. What ended in a small scale massacre started innocently enough: a séance with all the standard trickery of ghostly knocks and a candle suddenly going out "as if an invisible person had suddenly pinched the wick," but then Kōmyōji vanishes without a trace from the locked wing. And then the gruesome killing begins with no way out or way to contact the other wing ("this house was designed to keep people locked inside").

Some of those murders are, of course, of the seemingly impossible kind where the killer strikes down the victims inside locked and barricaded rooms. However, the locked room murders here are only small cogs in the larger machinery that's The Clock House Murders. Not at all the focus of the story and plot, nor what makes it the most impressive of the "Bizarre House Mysteries," so far. So don't expect grandiose, overly elaborate locked room-tricks, whatever the floor plans might suggest, but something more subtle and closer to Agatha Christie than S.S. van Dine or John Dickson Carr.

The Clock House Murders is ultimately a first-rate whodunit hinging on something entirely different than locked doors and inexplicable disappearances. Ayatsuji deserves praise for how fairly he played out everything, even if it threatened to reveal too much. One incident stands out that made me glance in the direction of the murderer, but it's always better to play fairly than withhold vital clues. Ayatsuji understands that. Not only when it comes to the who, but the motive and method as well. Leave it to a Japanese mystery writer to use a small massacre as a red herring! Just on that score alone, The Clock House Murders is practically an immaculate, classically-style detective novel taken to the extreme. That would have made for an impressive, plot-technical achievement and storytelling, but what made The Clock House Murders the stuff of classics is the secret of the house itself. And what made all those murders in the locked wing possible.

I have described certain stories from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. series as “puzzles-with-a-heart” and can be applied to The Clock House Murders, but for very different reasons as the stories from Q.E.D. are character-driven mysteries in which a person is the puzzle – while here we have a plot-oriented variant of puzzles-with-a-heart. I found that truly impressive. Most locked room fans prefer the Chesterton-Carr approach to the impossible crime problem over technical solutions involving strings or mechanical devices, because they tend to be the most satisfying (i.e. misdirection over mechanics). Successfully combining the two is a rare achievement indeed with the real horror of the story not being the haunting, or murders, but learning how all that came crashing down in tragedy, upon tragedy, culminating in wholesale bloodshed. The Clock House Murder is to Ayatsuji what The Three Coffins (1935) is to Carr or And Then There Were None (1939) to Christie. A 400 page gold brick of a detective novel and look forward to Kuronekokan no satsujin (The Black Cat House Murders, 1992) coming next year!