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Selected Crime Fiction Reviews
Selected Crime Fiction Reviews
Seishi Yokomizo (1902 - 1981) was a fêted Japanese crime novelist that we can all now enjoy thanks to the excellent and sensitive 2019 translation by Louise Heal Kawai. It is the first time he has been published in English, but The Honjin Murders first saw the light of day in Japan as a serial published in Houseki magazine between April and December 1946.
After the second world war centuries-old Japanese customs began to change rapidly, but this story is set in rural Japan in 1937 when the only way of life known to all classes of society is ancient and feudal.
This was a time when lineage was all-important, far more so than wealth or your current rank. If your forebears were peasant farmers then, in the eyes of the upper-classes, you are too. For me, one of the pleasures of this novel, almost eclipsing the mystery itself, is the incidental detail of Japanese life and traditions. For example, at a family wedding it was expected that the bride would entertain the guests after the ceremony by playing the Koto, a fiendishly difficult instrument of thirteen strings and a similar number of moveable bridges.
It is plucked with three fingers (thumb, index and middle) so you might wonder if this has any connection to the disfigured and scruffy peasant who only possesses the same three fingers on his right hand, and is asking villagers where he can find the Ichiyanagi family wedding.
After the wedding party, during the night, wild Koto music is heard throughout the house so the family rush to the newly-married couple's bedroom to find them both brutally slaughtered. There is thick snow outside but no footprints, a japanese sword is later found thrust into the earth in the middle of the garden...a perfect locked room mystery begins, investigated by a private detective, Kosuke Kindaichi, hired by the family.
Seishi Yokomizo much admired John Dickson Carr, the American specialist in locked room mysteries and, as Yokomizo himself points out in the introduction, any mystery writer has to rise to the challenge and construct a story of this type at some point in his career. He does so brilliantly.
This is a thoroughly entertaining and gripping locked room mystery with a rare insight into traditional Japan and is available at Amazon in paperback for £8.99 or as a Kindle download for just £1.89.
By the way, the novel was filmed in 1976 as Death at an Old Mansion. Presumably in Japanese and also unlikely to be seen here even in the most eclectic film festival.