Seishi Yokomizo – The Honjin Murders (1946)

Preamble

If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here. Or you can take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; preorder now!

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Review (5 out of 5)

I am not always a great fan of the twentieth century; I’m mostly interested in the nineteenth! But listening to Death of the Reader has been really illuminating, following their ‘Murder Mystery World Tour’, much of which has been post-WW2 or later. Being an Aussie show, there is also a tilt towards East Asian literature (in translation), a particular reading blindspot for me. So, I try to read along (or back) whenever I can. They covered The Honjin Murders in 2020, but I didn’t read it until some time later, when Libby also recommended it to me after I read The Decagon House Murders. (Flex and Herds have covered this one too.)

The book is set in post-war Japan, and is the first in the series of 70+ stories featuring private detective Kosuke Kindaichi, but one of only a handful to be translated into English for Pushkin Vertigo. The translation is eminently readable, conveying well the atmosphere of mid-C20 rural Japanese culture for an English-language audience, and offering both humour and suspense, which can often be missing in translations. The family dynamics felt intelligible and comprehensible, which was important for understanding the key that “lineage” offers in this plot (as well as, incidentally, others in Yokomizo’s Kindaichi series).

Kindaichi has a chaotic air to him, with rumpled hair, a head-scratching tic, and he is a little irritating, as all great detectives are. The novel’s murder mystery focuses on a classic locked-room puzzle, set in a rural mansion during a snowy winter. The eldest son of the Ichiyanagi family, Kenzo, and his bride, Katsuko, have been murdered in their annex; a bloody sword is found outside in the snow, but the building appears entirely secure. A mysterious three-fingered man had appeared on the day of their wedding, delivering a letter to Kenzo, which he destroyed. When the youngest son of the family, Saburo, is also injured in the annex, doing his own sleuthing, he says he was attacked by this stranger. Could the three-fingered man be the killer? And how was the crime committed?

Kindaichi notes Saburo’s enthusiasm for reading detective fiction, and he and Saburo discuss the locked-room trope, rendering the novel’s resonances with detective stories by authors like John Dickson Carr an explicit plot point. This referentiality reminded me of The Decagon House Murders, and I really enjoyed reading these two back-to-back (although the latter is from 40 years later). The importance of reading detective stories is also another recurring feature, at least in the English translations of Yokomizo’s work that I’ve read so far. With such a prolific author featuring a single character, it’s really nice to get a sense of these character shorthands, and I’m really looking forward to reading however many more of the novels are translated in the future.

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The Honjin Murders was book number 23 in my 2022 reading list.

Take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; preorder now!