Seishi Yokomizo – The Village of Eight Graves (1950)

Preamble

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Review (3 out of 5)

This is yet another post-War Japanese detective tale that I discovered thanks to the Death of the Reader podcast, having reviewed The Honjin Murders previously. (There are also several others that at some point I need to get around to reviewing!)

The book is set in post-war Japan, and is one of the early entries in the series of 70+ stories featuring private detective Kosuke Kindaichi. Like other of Yokomizo’s stories translated for Pushkin, the translation is very readable, but I found this story less compelling and interesting than some of the others I’ve read, as it has a certain ‘jumped the shark’ feel. The plot is predicated on a highly complex series of tunnels and caves running beneath the village, entailing both natural features and artificial levers opening and closing some paths. I found myself both lost in trying to follow these with any clarity and sceptical about their viability. Although technically a detective story, Kindaichi himself is sidelined, with the main character, Tatsuya, carrying out his own (only moderately effective) investigations.

So really this is a Gothic tale, with a gruesome legend underpinning the village’s foundations and family intrigue at once cruel and bewildering. The samurai whose eight graves give the village its (unimaginative) name had been betrayed by the villagers for the sake of the gold they were supposedly carrying; and yet, the treasure remains lost. Long-lost heir, Tatsuya, is traced in the city and invited back to the village. Having been traced by both sides of his family simultaneously, a tragic poisoning kills his maternal grandfather before they get a chance to really speak. And the poisonings only continue, following Tatsuya wherever he goes.

I found Tatsuya rather uncompelling as a character. Dragged from pillar to post, he seems more a convenient plot device than a well-rounded individual. The novel does contain a plethora of blind alleys, though, much like the caves beneath the village, and I could not guess the ‘who’ of the ‘whodunnit’ with any confidence. I’ve seen the novel compared to The Hound of the Baskervilles and The ABC Murders in other reviews and essays about this book, and both comparisons have merit, but I didn’t find this as memorable a tale as the Holmes or Poirot stories. In the context of an extensive series of its own, however, it is an interesting entry in the early Kindaichi canon, repeating some of the tropes from the preceding novels, in particular a suspect with a deep interest in detective fiction, Kindaichi’s thematic association with a drop of red on grey. In context, this is worth a read, although I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it over The Honjin Murders.

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