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was originally serialized in Shinseinen (March 1949 to March 1950) and Hôseki (1950 to 1951), but the story would not be published in book form until 1971.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.