Tag: Seishi Yokomizo

Murder at the Black Cat Cafe by Seishi Yokomizo

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Translated by Bryan Karetnyk

Over the last few years, Pushkin Press have been publishing Seishi Yokomizo’s Kosuke Kindaichi mysteries in new English translations. This is the latest, but I found it different from the previous ones in several ways.

First, where the other books are full-length novels, Murder at the Black Cat Cafe is a novella (this edition also includes another short story, Why Did the Well Wheel Creak?, to make the book more substantial). Yokomizo’s detective, Kosuke Kindaichi, plays a prominent role in the first story, but a very small one in the second – in fact, I wouldn’t really call that one a Kindaichi mystery at all as he only appears right at the end. Both stories belong to the type Yokomizo refers to in the prologue as ‘faceless corpse’ mysteries – in other words, where the murder victim has had their face destroyed so they can’t be identified.

The other main difference is in the setting. Usually the Kindaichi mysteries are set in rural Japan – a small village, a country house, a remote island – but Murder at the Black Cat Cafe has a city setting: Tokyo’s red-light district, an area known as the Pink Labyrinth. First published in 1947, the story takes place just after the war and begins with a policeman on patrol discovering the faceless body of a woman in the garden of the Black Cat Cafe, an establishment owned until very recently by the Itojimas, who have just sold it and moved away. Beside the corpse is the body of a black cat, which has also been killed. It’s assumed that the cat is the famous mascot of the Cafe – until the Cafe’s black cat emerges alive and well. Where did the other cat come from and who is the dead woman?

I enjoyed the post-war urban setting, but with the second story, Why Did the Well Wheel Creak?, we are back on more familiar ground with a family living in a remote village. The patriarch, Daizaburo, has two sons – one legitimate and one illegitimate – who are almost identical apart from their eyes. When both young men go to war and only one returns alive, having lost both eyes, questions begin to be asked. Is this man who he says he is or could he be pretending to be his brother?

Both of these stories, then, feature mistaken or stolen identities and people who may or may not be impostors and both have enough twists and turns to keep the reader guessing until the truth is revealed. The first one was probably the stronger mystery, but I did enjoy the second one as well and liked the way the story unfolded through letters sent from a sister to her brother. I’m already looking forward to the next Kindaichi book, She Walks at Night, coming next year.

Thanks to Pushkin Vertigo for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 2 for RIP XX

The Little Sparrow Murders by Seishi Yokomizo

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Translated by Bryan Karetnyk

I’ve read all five of Seishi Yokomizo’s Kosuke Kindaichi mysteries that have previously been published by Pushkin Press in new English translations. This is the sixth, with another due later this year, and I decided to read it for the Japanese Literature Challenge being hosted this month and next by Dolce Bellezza.

The Little Sparrow Murders was originally published in Japanese in 1959 and is set a few years earlier in the village of Onikobe in Okayama Prefecture. Private detective Kosuke Kindaichi is taking a break from crime-solving and has decided to travel to Okayama to visit his old friend, Inspector Isokawa, at the prefectural police headquarters. Isokawa gives him the address of a nearby inn to stay at, run by Rika Aoike, a widowed friend. Although Kindaichi had been hoping to relax and avoid any mysteries for a while, he finds himself drawn into one when he learns that Rika’s husband, Genjiro, was murdered twenty years earlier – and the killer was never found.

As Kindaichi hears more about the events before and after Genjiro’s death and gets to know some of the people involved, another murder takes place, coinciding with the disappearance of the village chieftain and a sighting of a mysterious old woman on a mountain path. It seems that Kindaichi’s relaxing break is over before it even started. He and Isokawa begin to investigate, convinced that the key to the present day mystery lies in determining what really happened to Rika’s husband all those years ago.

Having read a lot of older Japanese crime novels over the last few years, thanks mainly to Pushkin who are doing a wonderful job with their new translations, I’ve found that many of them – most notably the ones I’ve read by Yukito Ayatsuji and Soji Shimada – are more concerned with solving seemingly impossible crimes and complex puzzles than with characters and motives. Yokomizo, I think, usually finds a better balance between the two; although his books still have intricate plots, the focus is often not so much on working out how the murders were committed, but rather on why they were committed and who could have had a reason for doing so. The impossible crime books can sometimes be fun as well, but I personally prefer the more character-driven ones. In this particular novel, the murders take place out in the open, not in locked rooms, and there’s almost no discussion of alibis, timings or similar things that can sometimes bog down a plot.

One thing I loved about The Little Sparrow Murders is that Yokomizo builds the story around a children’s rhyme – a device that Agatha Christie also often used. The killer in this novel is inspired by a temari song (a song sung by children in Japan while bouncing colourful embroidered temari balls). It begins “In the trees in the garden behind our house, Three little sparrows came to stay” and goes on to describe three young women from different families, who were “all of them sent away” – in other words, murdered. The deaths in the book correspond to the rhyme, which adds some extra interest to the mystery. I hadn’t heard of temari songs or balls before so, as always, a Yokomizo novel has contributed to my knowledge of Japanese culture.

This is one of my favourite Yokomizo novels so far, along with The Honjin Murders and The Inugami Curse, but I did have one problem with it – trying to keep track of the huge number of characters! There are five families in the book and it’s not easy to remember which family each character belongs to and how they’re connected to people in the other families. If you’re reading the ebook version (or maybe even if you’re not), I recommend taking the time to draw some family trees using the character list at the front of the book before you start, then you can easily refer to them as you read. I would have been lost otherwise, I think.

I’m now looking forward to the next Yokomizo book, Murder at the Black Cat Café, coming in September. Pushkin Vertigo also have another Ayatsuji novel, The Clock House Murders, on the way, as well as others by authors I haven’t tried yet, so 2025 should be a good year if you’re a fan of Japanese mysteries!

The Devil’s Flute Murders by Seishi Yokomizo (tr. Jim Rion)

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The Devil’s Flute Murders, first published in Japanese in 1953, is the fifth of Seishi Yokomizo’s detective novels to be made available in new English translations by Pushkin Press. I’ve now read all five of them and enjoyed some more than others; I think this is one of the best, along with The Inugami Curse and The Honjin Murders.

In this book, set in 1947, Yokomizo’s dishevelled, nervous, stammering detective, Kosuke Kindaichi, is approached by a young woman who wants him to investigate the disappearance of her father, Hidesuke Tsubaki. Tsubaki, who had been a viscount until the recent abolition of the Japanese aristocracy, was found dead in the woods several weeks after leaving his family home, but although his daughter Mineko was the one to identify the body, she now has reason to believe he isn’t dead at all. There have been sightings of a man closely resembling Tsubaki in the grounds of the family estate and sounds of the haunting flute playing for which he was famous in his lifetime.

That evening, Kindaichi is invited to a séance at the Tsubaki home, which has been arranged by the viscount’s widow in the hope of discovering whether her husband is alive or dead. At the end of the event, a recording of Tsubaki’s final composition, The Devil Comes and Plays His Flute, begins to play by itself – and next morning, Kindaichi hears the news that another family member has been found dead in a locked room during the night. Who is responsible for the murder? Is the viscount’s ghost really haunting the family estate? And what is the meaning of the strange symbol found at the scene of the crime?

Yokomizo’s plots are always clever and fascinating and don’t rely quite as heavily on complex puzzle-solving as some of the books I’ve read by other Japanese classic crime authors. Understanding the relationships between the characters, their family secrets and their personalities and motives is just as important as working out how the crimes were committed. I guessed who the culprit was but didn’t know why they did it – I’m not sure if it would have been possible to know until the backstory of each character was revealed, but maybe I missed some clues.

Something else I like about this series is the insight the books offer into life in Japan during the post-WWII years. In The Devil’s Flute Murders the shadow cast by the war is particularly strong. There are mentions of food shortages, problems with electricity supplies and overcrowded, unreliable public transport. The new constitution drafted by the Allies during the occupation of Japan is the reason why Tsubaki and other members of the nobility have lost their titles, while bombed out houses and damage from fire has led to Tsubaki’s extended family all coming to live on the former viscount’s estate, bringing them together in one place for the events of the novel to play out.

This is the first book in the series to be translated by Jim Rion (the others have been translated by Louise Heal Kawai, Bryan Karetnyk and Yumiko Yamazaki). I think all of the translators have done a good job and I haven’t noticed any real differences in quality or readability between the different translations. My only problem with this one came when Kindaichi’s investigations take him from the Tsubaki home in Tokyo to Awaji Island near Kobe in the west and I found the way Rion chooses to write the western accent slightly odd and jarring. Of course, I appreciate how difficult it must be to capture nuances of accent and dialect in a translation!

I’m already looking forward to the next Kindaichi mystery, The Little Sparrow Murders, which is due to be published next May and sounds just as intriguing as the others.

Thanks to Pushkin Vertigo for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Inugami Curse by Seishi Yokomizo

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Translated by Yumiko Yamazaki

My choice for this year’s Japanese Literature Challenge (hosted by Dolce Bellezza) was easy as I only had one unread Japanese novel on my TBR. The Inugami Curse is one of a series of detective novels by Yokomizo that I’ve been enjoying over the last few years since discovering that they were being released in English translations by Pushkin Vertigo. This book was originally published in 1951 and features the private detective Kosuke Kindaichi. It’s the fourth in the series that I’ve read and one of my favourites – it’s certainly stronger than Death on Gokumon Island and The Village of Eight Graves and maybe even better than The Honjin Murders.

The Inugami Curse is set in the 1940s in post-war Japan. Kosuke Kindaichi, our unassuming, stuttering, head-scratching detective, has been summoned to the lakeside town of Nasu by the lawyer of a wealthy businessman who has recently died. The will is about to be read and the lawyer is afraid that it will cause trouble amongst the heirs. Already one of the young women who is set to benefit has been the target of several suspicious ‘accidents’ and things seem likely to get worse once the full conditions of the will become clear.

The dead man, Sahei, was the head of the Inugami family and as his children, grandchildren and other members of the household gather at the family home for the reading of the will, Kindaichi discovers that Mr Wakabayashi, the lawyer who had requested his presence, has been found dead after smoking a poisoned cigarette. This is only the first of several murders because, as Wakabayashi had predicted, Sahei’s fiendishly clever will sets the family members against each other. But which of them is prepared to kill to get what they think they deserve? There is one obvious suspect – Sahei’s eldest grandson, Kiyo, was repatriated from Burma just a few days earlier and has returned to the Inugami home with his face hidden by a mask, having been severely wounded in the war. Is it really Kiyo behind the mask? Kindaichi is sure that if he can establish the identity of the masked man, he will hold the key to the mystery.

This is a very enjoyable novel and unlike some of the other Japanese mysteries I’ve read, which are excessively puzzle-orientated, this one focuses as much on characters, motives and family secrets as it does on the methods behind the crimes. However, those methods are still very clever. Yokomizo is quite fair with the reader – the clues are there and it’s possible to work out parts of the solution – but I doubt anybody would be able to deduce exactly how each of the murders were committed. I was happy to wait for Kosuke Kindaichi to explain everything at the end! The murders themselves are bizarre and often gruesome – this book is definitely more graphic and more macabre than most British detective novels from that period – but also dramatic and filled with symbolism.

As well as the entertaining plot, the book touches on various aspects of Japanese culture and history, portraying a country in the aftermath of war, with many families like the Inugamis awaiting the repatriation of the Japanese soldiers. There are also descriptions of koto (zither) music and displays of chrysanthemum dolls. With each book in this series I feel I’m learning a little bit more about Japan. I can’t wait to read The Devil’s Flute Murders, another Kindaichi mystery being published in English later this year.

Death on Gokumon Island by Seishi Yokomizo (Trans. Louise Heal Kawai)

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The second book I’ve read from my 20 Books of Summer list is this 1948 Japanese mystery novel, now available in an English translation. This is the fourth book in Yokomizo’s Kosuke Kindaichi series to be published in English by Pushkin Press, but actually the second in original publication order. It works as a standalone, with a few references to Kindaichi’s first case, The Honjin Murders, so you could easily start with this one if you wanted to.

Death on Gokumon Island is set in 1946, just after the end of the Second World War, and nearly ten years after the events of The Honjin Murders. Kosuke Kindaichi is on his way to the strangely named Gokumon – or ‘Hell’s Gate’ – Island to deliver the sad news of his army friend Chimata Kito’s death. Kindaichi knows this will be a difficult task, but what really worries him is a prediction made by the dying man that his three half-sisters, who all live on the island in the family home, are going to be murdered.

Arriving on Gokumon Island, Kindaichi gets to know the members of the Kito household, including Chimata’s father who is said to be mad and kept locked up behind bars, as well as another rival branch of the family who live nearby and would benefit from deaths in the main Kito family. The scene is set for a classic murder mystery – and it’s not long before the first murder does take place. Kindaichi begins to investigate, but the islanders are suspicious of newcomers and are reluctant to answer questions.

I struggled to get into this book at first; I felt that we were being introduced to a lot of characters all at once and it was difficult to distinguish between them. I’ve found that with all of the Japanese mysteries I’ve read the authors seem to be more concerned with puzzle-solving than with character development, although Yokomizo is better in that respect than some of the others. After a few chapters I had settled into the story and began to enjoy it. It was good to see more of Kosuke Kindaichi than we did in The Village of Eight Graves; he’s quite endearing with his nervous stammer and head-scratching and the way he makes mistakes and isn’t afraid to admit to them.

Louise Heal Kawai’s translation is clear and easy to read (she also did the translation for The Honjin Murders, although not Eight Graves, which was translated by Bryan Karetnyk). I’m sure Japanese must be a difficult language to translate into English and I do wonder if any nuance is lost along the way, but I was impressed by the way she managed to capture the meaning of the wordplay, poetry and haikus that form part of the plot. I felt I was learning quite a lot about Japanese culture, as well as post-war life in a country that had been on the losing side.

This book has been compared with Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, but I don’t think they have much in common other than that they are both mysteries set on islands. This is a very different sort of island, for a start – unlike Christie’s, it’s inhabited, with a fishing community, a mayor, doctors, priests and barbers (to name just some of the characters we meet) – and although there may be a few similarities in the way the murders are carried out, the solution is completely different. It’s a solution I didn’t manage to guess at all; I was convinced I had picked up on an important clue halfway through but it turned out to be a red herring!

Now I need to find time to read The Inugami Curse, the other Yokomizo book currently available in English.

Thanks to Pushkin Vertigo for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

This is book 2/20 from my 20 Books of Summer list.

The Village of Eight Graves by Seishi Yokomizo – trans. Bryan Karetnyk

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Over the last few years I have discovered several Japanese crime authors – including Soji Shimada and Yukito Ayatsuji – thanks to Pushkin Press making them available in English translations, but the one who has impressed me the most is Seishi Yokomizo. I really enjoyed The Honjin Murders, one of his many books to feature the detective Kosuke Kindaichi; I didn’t like The Village of Eight Graves, another from the same series, quite as much, but it’s still an entertaining read.

First published in 1950, the novel is set in the small Japanese village of Eight Graves where, centuries earlier, eight samurai were brutally murdered, bringing down a curse upon the village and giving it its sinister-sounding name. In the 1920s the curse struck again when a village leader went on a violent killing spree. Now, twenty-five years later, our narrator Tatsuya Terada, a young man who has been raised in Kobe by his mother and stepfather, is informed by a lawyer that his real father was the man responsible for those terrible murders. It seems that Tatsuya is now the heir to the family estate and must return to Eight Graves to claim his inheritance – but before he has even left Kobe he receives an anonymous letter warning him to stay away.

On his arrival in Eight Graves, Tatsuya finds that most of the other villagers are hostile and unwelcoming, believing that his presence will bring bad luck and tragedy to the village yet again. And so, when more murders begin to take place, suspicion immediately falls on Tatsuya – but as he is our narrator, we know that he is innocent. Or is he? Kosuke Kindaichi is called in to investigate, but at the same time Tatsuya is carrying out investigations of his own to find the real culprit and clear his own name.

Unlike in The Honjin Murders, where the untidy and unassuming Kindaichi plays a big role in the story, in this book we hardly see him at all. Almost as soon as he arrives in Eight Graves he disappears into the background again. We know that he is working on solving the mystery, but we don’t actually watch him doing it because we stick exclusively with Tatsuya’s narration and he and Kindaichi have very little interaction until nearer the end of the book. This makes this one less of a detective novel and more of a thriller or adventure novel, as Tatsuya explores the village alone looking for clues and stumbling into danger.

Yokomizo creates a wonderful atmosphere in this book with Tatsuya’s investigations leading him into networks of tunnels, caves with stalactites, and underground lakes and caverns. The legend of the eight murdered samurai is also incorporated into the story, along with a search for hidden treasure said to be buried somewhere within the village and a rivalry between two branches of Tatsuya’s family: the ‘House of the East’ and the ‘House of the West’. It’s an entertaining novel and there’s always something happening – but I did think the parts where Tatsuya is wandering around in the caves and tunnels became a little bit tedious. The absence of Kosuke Kindaichi for most of the book was also disappointing and I think I would have preferred a more conventional detective novel with the focus on solving the mystery rather than on treasure hunting.

Still, this book was fun to read and I loved the setting. Now I need to read the other Yokomizo novel currently available in English: The Inugami Curse.

Thanks to Pushkin Vertigo for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo

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A three-fingered man. A room painted all in red. The eerie music of a Japanese koto. A katana – a sword – standing blade-first in the snow. These all form part of this classic murder mystery, originally published in Japanese in 1946 and now available from Pushkin Press in an English translation by Louise Heal Kawai.

The Honjin Murders is set in November 1937 in the village of Okamura, home to the Ichiyanagi family, whose ancestors once ran a honjin – an inn where noble travellers would stay during the Edo period. Those times are long gone, but the Ichiyanagis are still proud of their illustrious lineage. At the beginning of the novel, the various members of the family are gathering for the wedding of the eldest son and heir, Kenzo, to a young schoolteacher, Katsuko. Kenzo’s family are not very happy about the bride’s humble origins, but the marriage goes ahead and everyone retires to bed for the night. A few hours later, screams are heard from the newlyweds’ room and the pair are found inside stabbed to death.

With the doors locked and no fresh footprints in the snow surrounding the building, it seems that the perfect locked room murder has been committed. Luckily, Katsuko’s uncle Ginzo knows just the man who will be able to solve it: his friend, the private detective Kosuke Kindaichi. Ginzo sends for Kindaichi who arrives in the village looking dishevelled, unassuming and unimpressive (it’s difficult not to make comparisons with that other famously untidy detective, Columbo, although this book was published decades earlier) but appearances can be deceptive and it quickly becomes clear that Kindaichi has the sort of sharp mind and powers of deduction that are necessary to solve such a complex crime.

I won’t say any more about the plot of the novel or the mystery itself. I didn’t work out how the murder was committed or who the culprit was and I was happy just to watch the solution unfold – although like another Japanese mystery novel I read last year, Murder in the Crooked House by Soji Shimada, I felt that there seemed to be more focus on puzzle solving and providing an ingenious technical explanation for the crime rather than on character and motivation. Maybe that is a common feature of Japanese crime fiction; I haven’t read enough of it yet to know.

What I particularly loved about this book was the style in which it was written, with the narrator (presumably meant to be Yokomizo himself) speaking directly to the reader and breaking off from the story now and then to discuss other classic mystery novels, especially of the locked room variety, and their similarities to the Honjin case:

The first that came to mind were Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room and Maurice Leblanc’s The Teeth of the Tiger; then there’s The Canary Murder Case and The Kennel Murder Case, both by S.S. Van Dine; and finally, Dickson Carr’s The Plague Court Murders…But this real-life case wasn’t quite like any of the above-mentioned. Maybe, just maybe, the killer had read a selection of stories like these, dissected all of the different devices used, then picked out the elements that he needed, constructing his own device. At least that’s one theory.

Yokomizo may have drawn inspiration from some of those earlier mysteries, but The Honjin Murders itself feels original and different, as well as being a very clever and entertaining novel. Although I hadn’t heard of Kosuke Kindaichi until I read this book, it seems that he appears in over seventy novels (one of which, The Inugami Curse, is also available in English from Pushkin Press). I will look forward to meeting him again!