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).

The Devil's Flute Murders (1951/53) by Seishi Yokomizo

Pushkin Vertigo has since 2015 been publishing translations of crime-and detective classics from all around the world, Argentina, France, Italy and Switzerland, but in recent years, they have been particular dedicated to the traditionally-styled, Japanese detective novel – starting with the 2019 translation of Soji Shimada's Naname yashiki no hanzai (Murder in the Crooked House, 1982). Since then, Pushkin Vertigo has been rapidly expanding their catalog of Japanese translations and reprints.

A second, long-awaited translation from Yukito Ayatsuji, Suishakan no satsujin (The Mill House Murders, 1988), appeared last March and Futaro Yamada's Meiji dantoudai (The Meiji Guillotine Murders, 1979) is scheduled for publication in early December. Akimitsu Takagi's Noumen satsujin jiken (The Noh Mask Murder, 1949) and Seishi Yokomizo's Akuma no temari uta (The Little Sparrow Murders, 1957/59) are the first two titles announced for 2024. Curiously, those two titles will be published only a month apart, April and May, which hopefully means we'll be getting two more translation for July and December. So fingers crossed for Tsumao Awasaka's 11 mai no trump (The Eleven Cards, 1976) and Ayatsuji's Meirokan no satsujin (The Labyrinth House Murders, 1988). So much to look forward to in the near future, but a few months ago, Pushkin Vertigo released their fifth translation in Seishi Yokomizo's Kosuke Kindaichi series.

Yokomizo's Akuma ga kitarite fue o fuku (The Devil's Flute Murders, 1951/53) originally appeared as a serial in Hôseki, beginning in November 1951 and concluding in November 1953, published as a book in 1954 and 1973 – which is the copyright date given in the translation. I don't know why Pushkin Vertigo always goes with the copyright dates from the Yokomizo Boom of the '70s, because it gives the impression Yokomizo wrote historical mysteries. Yokomizo very much wrote contemporary detective novels with some taking place in the then recent past. Usually no more than a handful of years.

The Devil's Flute Murder takes place in 1947, post-war Japan, two years after the US Air Force razed central Tokyo to the ground and the consequences are ever present throughout the story. There are massive food shortages, scheduled blackouts to relieve the strained power supply, black market shenanigans everywhere and a housing crisis giving rise to shanty towns among the burned out ruins of the city. Naturally, there were enormous changes and social upheavals ("...Japan's new constitution abolished the peerage..."). So the country's nobility became a so-called "Sunset Clan," or "Sunset Class," overnight and struggled to keep from falling to ruin ("we have to sell our things just to eat"). Yokomizo, already skilled at creating atmosphere and conjuring devils, fiendishly weaved the realities of post-war Tokyo into a lavish, elaborately-plotted detective story worthy of his Golden Age contemporaries in the West.

Tsubaki family belongs to one of the most prominent, old aristocratic lines in the country and the estate of the head of the clan, Viscount Hidesuke Tsubaki, miraculously survived the firebombing. The mansion now stands, "strangely untouched," among the scorched ruins, but it survival brought its impoverished master nothing except misery. After the war, several homeless members and branches of the family moved into the Tsubaki house, but this new situation was "simply too much for the sensitive viscount's nerves" – even stranger things started to happen. Viscount Tsubaki, "a gentle, somewhat delicate and polite gentle," unexpectedly became the prime suspect in a horrendous murder-and-robbery case, known as the Tengindo Incident, which left ten employees of Ginza jewelry store dead. The three survivors and several witnesses helped to police to create a photo composite of suspect, which "triggered a flood of letters and anonymous tip-offs to police," but one very detailed anonymous letter directly implicating the Viscount. And he very much resembles the composite. Only saving his neck by unwillingly giving his alibi.

After proving his alibi, Viscount Tsubaki is released and disappears shortly thereafter. More than a month passes before his body in the woods covering Mount Kirigamine in Nagano Prefecture. Apparently, Viscount Tsubaki had gone there right after leaving his house and taken poison, but "the body had barely begun to decompose." Viscount Tsubaki, composer and flutist, created and recorded a haunting flute solo, "The Devil Comes and Plays His Flute" ("it is a melody of bitter hatred, as if it were drenched in foul blood"). That eerie flute melody becomes a prelude for several tragedies as it haunts the characters throughout the story. Several family members begin to see the dead viscount. A public sighting at the Togeki theater makes the family decide to hold a divination in order to find out if the viscount is truly alive or dead. Kosuke Kindaichi is invited to attend the raising of Viscount Tsubaki's ghost.

The divination in The Devil's Flute Murders is not the kind of séance so often found in Western detective stories in which people sit around a table, holding hands, in a darkened room. The medium in this case is a plate covered with sand and a metal cone, "just touching the sand," suspended above it to draw messages upon the surface of the sand. However, the message left in the sand is a symbol they call the devil's mark. And then they hear that terrible melody.

This is only "the first bloody act of the tragedy of the Tsubaki family" and really begins when the divination room becomes "the scene of a bloody locked-room murder."

Kimimaru Tamamushi, a former count, powerful political force in the shadows and head of his branch of the family, is found dead inside the divination room with obvious signs of a struggle ("two or three wounds on the back of his head before a massive, final blow") and murderous intent (“on top of that, he was strangled with his own scarf”), but the door and windows were all locked and barred from the inside – only opening being a ranma, or ventilation window, above the door. The window is only six inches high. So nobody could wriggle through it. Fortunately, Kosuke Kindaichi is on hand to help Chief Inspector Todoroki. After all, the murderer must have used a trick to either escape or leave behind a locked room, but the story shifts gears shortly after the murder.

Ho-Ling Wong reviewed The Devil's Flute Murders all the way back in 2010 and commented that the story is divided in three parts with the opening and closing parts taking place in post-war Tokyo, but the middle portion brings Kindaichi to Hyogo Prefecture. Ho-Ling liked the excursion to Hyogo more than the Tokyo parts, because Yokomizo got showcase his gift for creating atmosphere and depicting the difference between rural and urban post-war Japan. I think some of the regional charm and flavor got lost in translation, where the local dialects are concerned, but Kindaichi acts as a pleasantly active and involved detective (while constantly scratching and tugging at his wild mop of hair). Kindaichi heads towards Hyogo to go over the viscount's alibi for the Tengindo Incident, but pretty soon he's trying to track down and identify people from the family's past. There's always the ever-present problem of motive, "whoever the murderer might be, the motive for all this is nothing as simple as money," buried deep in the messy, tangled web of family affairs and guarded secrets of the various branches. So, purely as a detective story, it remains engaging throughout and rarely drags in its 350 some pages. Just an odd turn to go from a locked room mystery evoking the supernatural to a Christopher Bush-style detective story tracking down alibis and questionable identities.

Yokomizo has been called the John Dickson Carr of Japan. You're always on treacherous grounds when comparing a mystery writer to one of the genre's greats, but anyone who debuts with an impossible crime novel like Honjin satsujin jiken (The Honjin Murders, 1946) has earned that comparison. Having now read five Kosuke Kindaichi novels, Yokomizo's locked rooms and impossible crimes feel closer in spirit to Hake Talbot than Carr. The opening and closing parts of The Devil's Flute Murders, concerning the impossible murder and its solution, is a perfect example with a dead man rising from the grave and an eerie séance – recalling the fantastic opening of Talbot's Rim of the Pit. Even the locked room-trick is more in line with Talbot and to some extend Clayton Rawson than the Chestertonian miracles of Carr. Kindaichi even warns ahead of time, "just like how every magician's trick turns out to be as simple as child's play," the explanation to the locked room murder is going to be "quite underwhelming." Not true. The locked room-trick is not the greatest the Japanese detective story has produced, but something that works well enough within the story and everything but routine or unoriginal.

But where The Devil's Flute Murders unmistakably differs from its contemporaries in the West is the driving force behind all the murders. A motive and backstory you'll never find a Western detective story from '40s or '50s. Something unsettling enough to still pack a punch today. A human tragedy presented as a detective story in which a devastating truth extracts a heavy toll on a lot of people. While the country and social order largely lays in ruin around them. I don't know what else to say about this rich and elaborate detective story except (to echo Ho-Ling) that it could have been even better and richer had it included sheet music and floor plans. Only thing you can hold against the plot is that certain key-elements have a certain quality best served in a visual medium. Such as the potentially brilliant tell-tale clue that could only be used here for a tragic after note to the case, but other than that, this run of Yokomizo translation has opened a new vein of Golden Age detective fiction for English readers and I want more Yokomizo and Kosuke Kindaichi. Much more!

Death on Gokumon Island (1947/48) by Seishi Yokomizo

Pushkin Vertigo finally released the eagerly anticipated, English translation of Seishi Yokomizo's celebrated detective novel, Gokumontou (Death on Gokumon Island, 1947/48), which has been on my wishlist to be translated since reading the Stone Bridge edition of Inugamike no ichizoku (The Inugami Clan, 1951) – translated and published all the way back in 2007. Ho-Ling Wong called Death on Gokumon Island the "most respected Japanese mystery novel" with "one of the best hints" as the central clue. Death on Gokumon Island is together with Yatsuhakamura (The Village of Eight Graves, 1949/50) and The Inugami Clan three of Yokomizo's most famous and parodied novels. So it left a sizable footprint on the Japanese detective genre that even non-mystery fans recognize.

Death on Gokumon Island was originally serialized in Hôseki from January 1947 to October 1948 and only published as a book in 1971. So not a historical mystery, as some reviewers believe, but an authentic, post-WWII Japanese mystery set in 1946 when demobilized soldiers were still returning to a completely uprooted country.

One of these demobilized soldiers journeying back to Japan is the well-known private detective, Kosuke Kindaichi, whose division suffered a crushing defeat in 1943, retreated and met up with other divisions – ending up in Newak, New Guinea. There they found themselves cut-off from their main army and ignored by the Americans who "paid no heed to the little battalion that had been left there" as they were "making great strides elsewhere." During his time stranded in New Guinea, Kosuke Kindaichi befriended Chimata Kito and was tending to him when Chimata had caught a severe kind of malaria. A disease that eventually caught up with him when he was traveling with Kindaichi back to Japan on board of a repatriation vessel. A dying Chimata asks Kindaichi to go to, "please go to Gokumon Island in my place... save my sisters... my three sisters will be murdered." Kindaichi goes with a letter of introduction to that strange, out-of-time island in the middle of the Seto Inland Sea.

Gokumon-to, or Gokumon Island, means Hell's Gate Island and has a history as long as its colorful with as many interpretations of its name. From the Nara Period of the eighth century to the seventeenth century of the Edo Period, the Seto Inland Sea was infested with “daredevil pirates” and Gokumon Island was their northern stronghold. There are remnants of an old pirate fortress on the highest point of the island, which had been put to use during the war for aircraft surveillance and anti-aircraft guns. During the Edo Period, the "isolated island of granite, thick with red pine trees," sparsely populated with fishermen who descended from the pirates of the past, became a place of exile. Every criminal in the district who had their death sentence commuted were imprisoned on this island. And they intermarried with the locals.

So the small, insular and close-minded population with "pirate and prisoner blood running in their veins" became an isolated community where the "bonds of feudalism" between the fishing chief and the fishing folk in the village remain strong – even "stronger than between landowners and tenant farmers" in an old-world village. The most powerful fishing boss and patriarch of the Kito family, Kaemon, passed away as his two beloved grandsons, Chimata and Hitoshi, were drafted to fight abroad. So the Kito household was left in the hands of Chimata's cousin, Sanae, but the household can be described as a troubled one. Yosamatsu is Chimata's father and should have succeeded Kaemon as head of the Kito family, but his mind became unhinged and now lives locked up in "a kind of caged cell they made specially for him" in the house. Chimata has three half-sisters, Tsukiyo, Yukie and Hanako, who at best are incredibly immature and at worst slightly unhinged themselves. Kaemon's former mistress, Okatsu, still lives with the family, but there's also a branch Kito family headed the second most powerful fishing boss on the island and his wife, Gihei and Oshiho. They have been extending their hospitality with a handsome-looking ex-soldier, Shozo Ukai, who had been stationed on the island during the war. And not without setting the village aflame with rumors.

Kosuke Kindaichi arrives on the island with a letter of introduction addressed to "the three elders of the island," Ryonen the priest, Mayor Araki and Doctor Koan Murase, who can also be seen as the three administrator. It doesn't take very long before Kindaichi "felt a wave of foreboding wash over him" and realizes how difficult his mission is going to be.

It's not until an official communiqué arrives informing them of Chimata's death that things begin to kick off. A formal funeral ceremony is going to be held the next day and a funeral wake to be held that very night, but, during the wake, Hanako simply disappears. Hanako's body is found after a brief search "hanging head down from the branches of the plum tree" on the temple grounds. A "crazy, utterly insane" murder, but Kindaichi suspects "the island's peculiar ways must have had some profound effect on both the murderer's motive and method." Hanako is not the last person to be murdered under strange and bizarre circumstances, of which the second and third murder present the reader with two impossibilities. However, I can't say anything about the circumstances qualifying them as (minor) impossible crimes, because they have a very different function here than your normal, traditional locked room mystery – namely (SPOILER/ROT13) cebivqvat gur zheqrere jvgu ebpx fbyvq nyvovf. One of those murders is going to be contentious as (MORE ROT13) gurer'f ab pbafrafhf ba jung dhnyvsvrf nf na vzcbffvoyr nyvov, but the phrase (ROT13) “culfvpnyyl vzcbffvoyr” was used. So I think it's save to say Yokomizo agreed with my point of view. 

There is, however, more to the plot of Death on Gokumon Island than the well-hidden impossible angles to two of the murders than can openly be discussed without spoiling the story.

First of all, I've now read four of the best-known Kosuke Kindaichi mysteries and while I've no idea how representative they're of the seventy-two other novels in the series, Yokomizo is beginning to emerge in these translations as a regionalist mystery writer. Just like S.H. Courtier, Todd Downing, Elsepth Huxley and Arthur W. Upfield, Yokomizo's fiction drips with local color, culture and history in addition to creating a murder mystery that feels exclusive to the setting. The murders in Death on Gokumon Island genuinely feel like they're indigenous to the titular island and could not have taken place anywhere else on the planet. That greatly benefited the who-and why, which under different circumstances circumstances would have come across as contrived and slightly unbelievable. But here, it worked like a charm! Secondly, there's that all-time great clue Ho-Ling mentioned. If I'm thinking of the right clue, Louise Heal Kawai delivered an inspired piece of translation deserving of some praise. Ho-Ling has written on his blog before about how important language is in the Japanese detective story and how difficult it can be to translate certain linguistic elements in languages like Dutch or English. But is it one of the all-time greatest clues? It certainly is a good clue, perhaps even a great clue, but undoubtedly worked even better in Japanese. Regardless, it's a good clue and not the only one to be found in this well-clued detective story. Lastly, I loved the fitting ending to the story. After the case is tied-up, the island braces itself to face a new tomorrow ("if Japan is revolutionized, then Gokumon Island will be too") as a departing Kindaichi "placed his hands together in a posture of prayer as he bade farewell to Gokumon Island" ("bless you") as he sailed out of sight of the island. Almost as if the traditionally-dressed Kindaichi had to be present to close a chapter of history. I can see why the series struck a chord of nostalgia during the Yokomizo Boom of the 1970s.

So, all in all, Death on Gokumon Island is a beautiful, intricately-plotted detective novel full with unbalanced characters, bizarre murders, strange clues and local color with my review only touching on a fraction of the plot. An first-class translation of a giant landmark of the Japanese detective story that had been long overdue. Highly recommended! 

A note for the curious: I hastily crammed this review in between scheduled blog-posts and came at the expense of the previous post, "Curiosity is Killing the Cat," in which I dumped my personal wishlist of rare, out-of-print detective novels that sound too good not to reprint. So you might find something on there for your own wishlist.

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."

The Honjin Murders (1946) by Seishi Yokomizo

Nearly a year ago, the eagerly anticipated translation of the second locked room novel by the doyen of the Japanese shin honkaku (neo-orthodox) movement, Soji Shimada, was finally released by Pushkin Vertigo and comments on my review of Naname yashiki no hanzai (Murder in the Crooked House, 1982) mentioned another, long-overdue translation was in the work – a translation of the award-winning debut of the giant of honkaku era, Seishi Yokomizo. Louise Heal Kawai is the translator of the Murder in the Crooked House and turned up in the comments to tell us we could expect Yokomizo's Honjin satsujin jiken (The Honjin Murders, 1946) by the end of 2019. Yes, the book was published early last month!

Unfortunately, my blogging schedule had already been filled up for December and had to queue my review until January. Now we're finally here and can tell you the book was well worth the wait!

The Honjin Murders was originally serialized in Houseki magazine from April to December, 1946, before being published as a novel in 1947 (?) and netting the first-ever Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 1948. And to cement its reputation as a landmark of the Japanese mystery novel, the story marked the debut of Yokomizo's iconic series-detective, Kosuke Kindaichi! So let's break open this classic locked room novel that can be called the Japanese equivalent of John Dickson Carr's The Plague Court Murders (1934) and The Three Coffins (1935). Don't worry, that's not a spoiler. Just an acknowledgment Yokomizo succeeded in creating an imposing monument of the locked room mystery.

The facts in the case of The Honjin Murders are related a decade after "the whole ghastly deed" took place, back in 1937, by a nameless mystery novelist (Yokomizo?) who had been evacuated to a rural village in Okayama Prefecture at the height of the bombing raids – where the locals keep telling him about, what they call, "The Koto Murder Case" or "The Honjin Murder Case." The narrator immediately recognized that "this was no ordinary murder." A killer who concocted "a fiendish method" to strike at the heart of the Ichiyanagi family and vanished like a wisp of winter fog.

During the Edo Period, the Ichiyanagi home was a honjin, or a high-class inn, where "ordinary members of the public were not permitted to say" and were reserved as rest stations for traveling daimyo (nobility). But during the late 1800s, the head of the family anticipated the collapse of the feudal system and purchased farmland "dirt cheap," which made the family rich landowners in their new home village. Locals considered them outsiders, upstarts and kappa (water goblins), but there was still "honour associated" with being descendants of a honjin family in rural Japan of 1937. Over the years, the family slipped quietly into "a conservative, traditional lifestyle" until the oldest son of the family announced his engagement.

Kenzo is a quiet, studious man who fell prey to a respiratory disorder and had to give up his teaching position and return home where he shut himself away from the world to write books and articles, which made him "a well-known academic" and an unlikely husband – until he met a young schoolteacher, Katsuko Kubo. A decision that didn't go down with the family, who were united in their opposition, because pride in "distinguished ancestry" was still important in rural communities. And his bride-to-be was only the daughter of a fruit farmer. Eventually, the family had to admit defeat and a wedding date was picked.

Several days before the wedding, a strange looking, worn-down man arrived in the village. A three-fingered man with a crumpled hat, old shoes caked with dirt and a face-mask covering his mouth, nose and cheek scar – asking the way to the Ichiyanagi residence. A man whose phantom-like presence would loom largely over the tragedies that are about to unfold.

a.k.a The Inugami Clan

On the night of the wedding ceremony, the (drinking) party went on until two in the morning before the newly-weds retired to the annex building, but two hours later the household was roused by a blood-curdling scream followed by "the eerie strains" of "a koto being plucked with wild abandon." The koto is a Japanese string instrument and its strings are "traditionally plucked" by the thumb, index and middle fingers!

The annex was separated from the main house by a sprawling garden, a tall fence and a garden gate, bolted on the annex-side, which had to be hacked open and all the while they heard the eerie sound of a koto coming from the annex. What they found upon entering the garden is that "the cotton-wool snow was completely untouched" except for a katana sword stuck blade-first into snow near the base of a stone lantern. The doors and shutters were all closely secured and locked from the inside. So they had to force an entry and discovered the slashed bodies of the newly-weds. A closer investigation by the police uncovered how the murderer entered the annex and movement inside the annex, but how the murderer managed to procure an escape from a locked house encircled by unbroken snow and family members rattling the garden gate has them completely stumped. So the uncle of the bride, Ginzo, asks a brilliant young acquaintance of him, Kosuke Kindaichi, to come down to sort out the mess.

This is all merely a glimpse of the premise of this classic locked room novel, which doesn't take into account the various characters and myriad of clues found in-and around the annex house, but, in spite of its monumental appearance, the plot is surprisingly compact when compared to Yokomizo's masterpiece, Inugamike no ichizoku (The Inugami Clan, 1951) – focusing almost entirely on the murders in the annex house. The Honjin Murders is also a much shorter novel than The Inugami Clan. So the story, appropriately, has a more intimate feel to it. Since this is the first in the series, the reader is treated to fascinating mini-biography of the Kindaichi.

Kosuke Kindaichi entered popular Japanese culture as scruffy-looking youth of twenty-five garbed in an old, wrinkled hoari jacket, a faded kimono with a splash-pattern dye and worn-out geta clogs under a hakana skirt of wilted pleat. Kindaichi has the tendency to stammer and vigorously scratches his tousle-haired head when thinking, but despite his shocking indifference to his appearance, Kindaichi has the "relaxed, easy-going demeanour" of A.A. Milne's Anthony Gilbert (The Red House Mystery, 1922) that tended to disarm people. So non-Japanese readers who remember him from The Inugami Clan might be surprise to learn Kindaichi lived in San Francisco as a student, where he became "one of those lost, drug-addicted Japanese immigrants," but "a famous and quite bizarre murder" in the Japanese community proved to be his salvation. Kindaichi used nothing except reasoning and logic in "a focused attack on the case." And this is how he tackled the locked room slayings here.

Japanese edition

A joyful highlight of Kindaichi's investigation is his delight at discovering a bookcase in the main house is crammed with detective novels, which not only have a part to play in the story, but the novels referred to by title shows whose footsteps Yokomizo wanted to follow. You have the previously mentioned The Plague Court Murders, Gaston Leroux's Le mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1907), Maurice Leblanc's Les dents du tigre (The Teeth of the Tiger, 1921) Roger Scarlett's Murder Among the Angells (1932) and S.S. van Dine's The Kennel Murder Case (1933). But the promising titled chapter, "A Conversation about Detective Novels," failed to live up to it. So don't expect a Carr-style locked room lecture. However, these bookcase clues, or references, are always a joy to find in any kind of detective story.

The locked room-trick and overarching plot is delightfully tricky and complex, but still easy to visual imagine without the need for diagrams and floor plans. The kind of explanation you expect from a locked room mystery with a Grand Stature like The Honjin Murders. One element of the whole solution was a little too convenient to coincide with the murders, but, when it's as effectively used as it was here, it much more easily accepted. What really impressed me here was Yokomizo's unusual approach to the clueing.

Ho-Ling Wong noted in his 2011 review how The Honjin Murders feels "very much as meta-fiction." This is very much the case, but not merely for the references to other detective novels or the author gloating over his carefully chosen words. Yokomizo gave the readers all of the clues, red herrings and information in big chunks (clue-strewn crime scene) and expects the seasoned mystery reader to logically put all the parts together. You can compare it to an exam in which you have to understand the subject, instead of memorizing information, in order to answer all the questions correctly. For example, the locked room novels mentioned in the story function as a clue, of sorts, but knowing the answers to those mysteries will get you absolutely nowhere. You have to understand what makes their plot tick to extricate the relevant clue or hint. One of the novels mentioned is a particular good example of this.

Sadly, I either failed my exam or barely passed it. I had an idea how the locked room-trick could have been worked and who could have been behind it, but didn't reach the end with all the answers and had no idea how the three-fingered man fitted into the picture – which turned out to have a typical Japanese solution. So the conclusion, as the whole picture emerged, was immensely satisfying.

The Honjin Murders is the prodigious debut of a promising mystery writer that ushered in the honkaku era of traditional detective stories and deserving of its status as a classic of the Japanese locked room mystery. A highly recommend mystery novel that makes you wish more of Yokomiza was available in English.

Luckily, the translator, Louise Heal Kawai, left several comments on my review of Shimada's Murder in the Crooked House and a comment from early December confirmed Vertigo has plans to translate more from Yokomizo in the future! I'm keeping my fingers crossed for Gokumontou (Prison Gate Island, 1948), which Ho-Ling has called "the most respected Japanese mystery novel."

The Inugami Clan (1951) by Seishi Yokomizo

Seishi Yokomizo was one of Japan's most celebrated mystery novelists and his series-detective, Kosuke Kindaichi, is as iconic a figure in the East as Sherlock Holmes is in the West.

Kosuke Kindaichi is described as a less-than-impressive character in his mid-thirties with an unruly mop of hair and wearing an unfashionable serge kimono and wide-legged, pleated hakama trousers – which are both very wrinkled and worn. He has "a slight tendency to stutter" and a habit "to scratch his tousle-haired head with frightful vigor," but also possesses a remarkable "faculty for reasoning and deduction." A talent he puts to use as an unassuming private investigator.

Kindaichi first appeared on the scene in Honjin satsujin jiken (The Daimyou's Inn Murder Case, 1946), "a locked room tale about a bride and bridegroom found brutally slain in a snow-bound annex," which was praised by Edogawa Rampo as "the first novel of reasoning in the Anglo-American style in the world of Japanese detective fiction." This is not very surprising since Yokomizo was heavily influenced by John Dickson Carr and Roger Scarlett's Murder Among the Angells (1932). A mystery novel known in Japan as Enjeruke no satsujin (The Murder of the Angell Clan).

Frustratingly, The Daimyou's Inn Murder Case has yet to be translated into English and there are, as of now, no concrete plans to remedy this gross oversight. Even John Pugmire, of Locked Room International, hasn't glanced in the direction of this reputed classic of the impossible crime story.

There is, however, one of Yokomizo's most famed detective novels that did made it to our shores, namely Inugamike no ichizoku (The Inugami Clan, 1951), which is "a Gothic tale of murder" with a status and prestige in Japan akin to that of Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939) in the West – a well-deserved reputation. The Inugami Clan is a monumental novel revolving around the warring branches of the titular clan over the inheritance of the dead family patriarch, which brims with long-held family secrets, resentment and a series of grotesque murders steeped in symbolism.

I read The Inugami Clan all the way back in 2006 or 2007 and wanted to see if this landmark novel of Japanese detective story held up to re-reading. Well, it absolutely did.

First of all, I need to point out something I overlooked on my first read, or failed to remember, which is that the story (especially the opening) has hints of the HIBK (Had-I-But-Known) school of detective fiction. The omniscient narrator ends the first chapter by telling the reader that, in hindsight, the death of the head of the family "set in motion the blood-soaked series of events that later befell the Inugami clan" or, when Kindaichi rescues one of the principal characters from a sinking boat, that this was "the first event that disrupted his investigation" – effectively preventing him from solving "the case much earlier than he did." This style is closely associated with female mystery and suspense writers, like Mary Roberts Rinehart, Dorothy Cameron Disney and Anita Blackmon, but you sometimes see it crop up in the work of male writers (e.g. Baynard Kendrick's Blood on Lake Louisa, 1934).

The tragedy begins with the passing of "the so-called Silk King of Japan," Sahei Inugami, whose life story was a rags-to-riches and began when, as a 17-year-old pauper, he arrived at the Nasu Shrine on the shores of Lake Nasu. Sahei would have certainly starved or frozen to death had it not been for the generosity of the priest, Daini Nonomiya, which is when fortune finally began to smile on Sahei and he felt he owed the priest a lifelong debt. However, as the omniscient narrator reminds us, everything, even gratitude, has a limit that should not be exceeded and Sahei's excessive gratitude towards the Nonomiya family would "embroil his own kin in a series of bloody murders after his death."

Kosuke Kindaichi Action Figure

During his long, successful life, Sahei sired three daughters, Matsuko, Takeko and Umeko, by three different mistresses, but never married any of them and never showed any affection to his daughters – which he reserved for the granddaughter of the Nasu Shrine priest, Tamayo Nonomiya. A beautiful, 26-year-old woman who had been brought up in the Inugami household and would come to play a principle role in the murders. A role given to her by a devilishly worded will.

Several weeks pass before the will can be read, because Sahei instructed to wait until one of his grandsons, Kiyo, returned home from the front in Burma, South-East Asia, but was disfigured in battle and has to wear a rubber mask. Something else that obviously will come to play a role in the subsequent events at the lakeside villa of the Inugami clan. But when the will is finally read, it hits the entire family like a bombshell.

Sahei bequeathed the three heirlooms of the family, the ax, zither and chrysanthemum, which "signify the right to inherit," to the granddaughter of the priest, Tamayo. One of the many conditions in the will is that Tamayo has to marry one of Sahei's three grandsons, Kiyo, Také or Tomo, within three months of the date of the reading of the will. She is only released from this condition if all three grandsons refuse to marry her or die before the three months are up. There are more conditions attached to the will and one of these conditions would give an apparent illegitimate son, Shizuma Aonuma, a slice of the estate. And this does not sit very well with the family. Particularly with the three daughters of Sahei.

So here you have a household as troubled, and strained, as that of Henry VIII of England and we all know how that story played out after the king passed away. This story is no different.

Toyoichiro Wakabayashi of the Furudate Law Office in Nasu can see the writing on the wall and summons a private detective, Kosuke Kindaichi, but, before he can tell his story, he's poisoned in Kindaichi's hotel room when the detective was out on the lake saving Tamayo from drowning – one of the most recent attempts on her live. All of this is still only the prelude to what's about to happen at the lakeside villa.

After a hundred pages, Kindaichi is summoned to the village and ushered into a chrysanthemum garden, tucked away within a European and Japanese style gardens, where a row of handmade chrysanthemum dolls stood that represented a scene from a well-known kabuki play about a legendary hero of medieval Japan. The heads of one those dolls was replaced with the severed head of Také! A scene as gruesome as it is memorable and an obvious reference to one of the family heirlooms. So there are more murders to be expected and the last one is particular memorable as the victim is found, upside down, with his legs sticking out of the frozen lake. I believe this scene is still regularly parodied in Japanese detective stories, but our resident expert, Ho-Ling Wong, could probably tell more about that.

The Inugami Clan is an intricately structured, richly detailed detective story with a plot succeeding admirably in being incredibly complex and deadly simple at the same time.

You can probably deduce the identity of the murderer and what possessed this character to commit a series of horrific murders, but the cussedness of all things general and the cross-purposes of several closely connected characters do their damnedest obscuring the truth – every move, or countermove, undertaken by these characters are properly motivated and believable. This actually reminded me very strongly of Christianna Brand's splendid London Particular (1952).

So these characters and their very human, understandable motives gave the plot of The Inugami Clan a warm, human and, above all, a tragic touch that makes it so much more than a mere game of chess. Throw in a truly iconic detective character, bizarre clues and a string of grotesque murders, dripping with blood and symbolism, and you get one for the ages. A classic mystery that will not fail to satisfy the most fervent readers of the traditional, plot-oriented detective story, but the numerous references to the, as of yet, untranslated cases of Kosuke Kindaichi can be experienced as frustrating. I pray this will be remedied in the coming years, but, until then, read (or re-read) this richly plotted, well-characterized and beautifully written gem from the land of the rising sun.

On a final, semi-related note, I wanted to return to Christopher Bush for my next read, but might slip in a review of a detective manga with a link to Yokomizo's Kosuke Kindaichi.