Published in 1982, this is by Soji Shimada, a prolific and bestselling Japanese writer of mystery stories. The English translation, by Louise Heal Kawai, came out in 2019.

It was a bit of a random pick. Another book by this author (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, his 1981 debut) has been sitting on my To Read list for a while. But the one available in the Oxfam shop in Oxford was this one... So here we are.



A "locked-room mystery" is a story that lays out an apparently impossible crime. In this novel, we appear to have three such crimes. And Shimada, born 1948, has played quite a role in reinventing the genre. Adrian McKinty explains: "The golden age of the locked-room mystery in Anglo-American detective fiction has largely passed, but in France Paul Halter has been churning out original impossible murder novels since the mid-1980s and in Japan the great Soji Shimada virtually invented the 'logic problem' sub-genre which is still extremely popular."

When Shimada first started writing, he says in an interview, it was the social realism of authors like Seicho Matsumoto (Inspector Imanishi Investigates, Tokyo Express, The Girl From Kyushu...) that dominated the Japanese literary scene, and honkaku mysteries (centred around a puzzle, and the process of solving it through logic and deduction), had fallen out of favour. "It was a type of village mentality," Shimada says, "with insular rules governing tastes, not the quality of what was being written, and books just weren’t appraised or reviewed."

Interestingly, the Seicho Matsumoto school was itself a reaction to previous work that had been labelled "erotic-grotesque". Mystery writers were lumped in with this genre, and found themselves regarded with disdain by literary critics. Matsumoto's realistic crime fiction offered something very different, and met with acclaim. But the critics then left no room for mystery writers to do something different.

The turning-point, Shimada argues, came through a young and female demographic, who focused on the relationships between famous detectives and their assistants, and created parodies and manga pieces. Shimada's sleuth character, Kiyoshi Mitarai, ended up achieving considerable resonance with young people.


Soji Shimada

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The action of Murder in the Crooked House is set at Christmas 1983. The formal name of the house is Ice Floe Mansion, because it stands on the tip of Cape Soya, in northernmost Hokkaido, overlooking the Okhotsk Sea (definitely a place to explore one day...). Its nickname derives from the fact that it is literally crooked. Neither the house nor the detached tower (where owner and businessman Kozaburo Hamamoto sleeps) is plumb. They both lean.

It's a weird house altogether, with staircases that access only certain floors, curious gaps and vents, and a room full of masks and dolls and automata that tend to creep people out.



Hamamoto invites an array of guests to this architectural oddity to celebrate Christmas 1983. And, of course, they start to die. In inexplicable circumstances. Local police officers are drafted in, but they can make neither head nor tail of it all.

Eventually, intuitive and zany investigator Kiyoshi Mitarai (who figured, apparently, in the Zodiac story) is invited to help out. And, of course, he cracks it. I won't say how...

The book reminded me of a couple of other stories. The Mysterious Honjin Murders, by Seishi Yokomizo, also has puzzling fresh snow that is devoid of footprints. And The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson, also features a slightly wonky house. At one point, one of the detectives says: "I'm beginning to believe there's some sort of evil demon living in this place. Or this house itself is the demon. It's like the place has a mind of its own and has decided to start murdering people." Very Hill House-esque...

Actually, this is totally in line with the Japanese yakata-mono (mansion story) tradition, described by mystery-story translator Ho-Ling Wong as very much darker than the classic Western country-house mystery, and generally featuring a building that does indeed take on elements of personality, either through its odd architecture or by the "distinctly evil vibe" it exudes.

Shimada is clearly interested in buildings. Very early on, the narrator tells us about Joseph Ferdinand Cheval (1836-1924), a postman from Hauterives, who, over the course of 33 years, built a "palace" from the small stones he gathered during his mail round. Its style is eclectic, drawing on what Cheval saw in nature, on picture postcards, and in the illustrated magazines he distributed. It can still be visited today.

The rarity of idiosyncratic architecture in the Japanese environment is also pointed out: "Here in Tokyo people worry too much about style, economy, or how they will be judged by others, and that is how they end up with characterless rows of rabbit hutches crammed in together."


The house, as portrayed on the cover of a Japanese edition

Murder in the Crooked House was undoubtedly fun to read, but I wasn't totally a fan. Why?

1. I think the highly abstract qualities of the pure locked-room mystery are not quite to my taste. I like a little social background, or a bit of character development. Failing that, maybe some extravagant Gothic staging... This one was a tad too clinical to me. There are a few contemporary details. A salaryman, for example, reminds his accompanying spouse, who is complaining about his sycophancy: "There are wives all over Japan stuck in public housing, never able to go out anywhere, go travelling." And it's interesting that behind the polite exterior, many of the characters are at odds with each other (masks are a bit of a theme, one way and another). But I would have liked a bit more in this vein.

2. SOOO many characters... Nineteen altogether: Five residents of Ice Floe Mansion;
eight guests; and six investigators... I was constantly flicking back to the list of dramatis personae (and the house plan).

3. I know these things are just puzzles. They're intellectual exercises, with the requirement not to be realistic, but to present all the information fairly to the reader. (And at one point, having presented us with all that we -- in theory -- need to know, the author inserts a page asking the reader point-blank whether s/he has solved the puzzle... I so hadn't...) But the solution to this puzzle was so outrageously wacky that it left me cold, my frame of belief suspended somewhere above the stars...

4. I also found the switch of narrative persons a little disconcerting. We have an unidentified I-narrator for the Prologue. Then we're distanced by 3rd-person narration for a sizeable tract of the novel. Then in Act 3, we're back with the I, who turns out to be Kazumi Ishioka, a friend of Mitarai's.

So... Not entirely convinced.

I note, though, that many reviewers prefer The Tokyo Zodiac Murders to this one. So I'll definitely keep that on the list for future reading.