This was another Five Books recommendation, from the Classic Japanese Mysteries list. This time the advice was offered by On Nomoto, the grandson of Japanese mystery writer Seishi Yokomizo (1902-81), who wrote the book I'm talking about now.

I've enjoyed a number of Japanese detective novels: Three by Keigo Higashino, for example, and two by Seicho Matsumoto (the latter, Points and Lines -- or Tokyo Express as it was in my translation -- is also recommended by Nomoto).

The Village of Eight Graves is actually not the Yokomizo volume that Nomoto specifically cites. But at the time that article was written (2020), only two of the more than 70 books featuring Yokomizo's star detective, Kosuke Kindaichi, had been translated into English, and this wasn't one of them.

Let's just pause to consider how bizarre that is... A noted exponent of the honkaku mystery (this is the type of story that involves "the crafting of fiendishly clever and complex puzzle scenarios -- such as a murder in a locked bedroom -- that can only be solved through logical deduction"), Yokomizo was the first to create "a pop culture icon" in the shape of Kindaichi, his small, dishevelled, stuttering hero (curiously Colombo-reminiscent, I think...); by the time he died, he had sold more than 55 million books, and he is still widely read... What is more, as Nomoto points out, he "always put some flavour or component of Japanese history and culture into his books, to give a feel for what life looked like during and after the war, for example".

At least two more of his books (including this one) have since become available in English. But other languages got there first, and so I read the French version (entitled Le village aux Huit Tombes, and translated by Rene de Ceccatty and Ryoji Nakamura in 2014).

Various dates are given for the original publication, possibly because it was originally serialized (in Shinseinen, from 1949 to 1950, and in Hoseki, from 1950 to 1951), and not published in book form until 1971.

I gather that The Village of Eight Graves is not a very typical Kosuke Kindaichi mystery, so it would be good to take on some others by way of comparison. But it's a cracking read...

Geographically, we're somewhere between Kyoto and Hiroshima.


Himeji, 2015

Temporally, we start in the mid-16th century, when eight fleeing samurai warriors arrive in the village with their three horseloads of gold... Initially welcomed, they are subsequently killed by the villagers who have grown anxious about reprisals. The gold goes missing, apparently irretrievably hidden, and the village is cursed... To appease the spirits of the murdered warriors, the villagers erect eight tombs, where they venerate the samurai like divinities.



Then we're on to the 1920s, when there's another terrible catastrophe, involving Yozo, the 36-year-old head of one of the two richest households. He sexually enslaves a young woman, and ends up running amok, and shooting up half the village. The villagers superstitiously await another manifestation of the curse.

By now we've reached the year 1950, and the era we're going to focus on.

Tatsuya is the son of the enslaved woman, who died when he was seven. He was brought up in Kobe by his stepfather and (later) his new stepmother. He's drafted into the army in 1943 and sent to the "southern islands", but "a year after the defeat", he comes back from the war to find Kobe in ruins, and no trace of his step-family remaining. He's on his own in the world, when he finds out that his family back in the village are looking for him, because he's heir to their property...

The family want him back (maybe), but the villagers, remembering the crimes of his father, really don't. There's a mounting climate of hostility, driven by superstition, family rivalries, and desire for revenge, which contributes to an increasingly doom-laden atmosphere.

This is nothing if not exuberant Japanese Gothic... We have ancient, wizened twin great-aunts making secret visits to subterranean shrines; hidden treasure; coded maps; underground cave systems full of stalactites, echoes, phosphorescent moss, and labyrinthine passages; secret passages where so many people seem to pop up that you really feel they can't be called secret at all; a body in Samurai armour preserved by means of saponification (seriously, that's a thing); manhunts in the caves...

Plus a gazillion red herrings, and a positive hecatomb of bodies... Mostly victims of poisoning, they drop like flies.



Kosuke Kindaichi works very much in the background in this novel, but "the strange little detective" produces a wrap for us at the end (which I won't go into -- suffice it to say that my suspicions did fall, quite early in the piece, on the correct target).

A number of little post-war details emerge in the course of the narrative. If the author is to be credited, we can note that:

-- The postal service is still slow
-- Many people have gone back to their native villages because their homes in the cities have been destroyed; in some circles this causes social disruption (the displaced doctors, for example, tend to be more assiduous than the ones who have lived in the villages for ages, and take their patients for granted...)
-- People like Miyako have made a lot of money out of the war (once defeat looked likely, she began to buy diamonds and precious metals, via her brother-in-law's military connections)
-- Other people, conversely, can't even afford to buy rice regularly
-- In a little mountain village like this one, the police have limited power, but the priests in charge of the shrines hold considerable sway

And there's an interesting little self-deprecatory inclusion on the subject of whodunnits:

"Do you think Uncle Kuno is capable of these serial murders?"
"Certainly not," she replied with a sigh. "He's always liked detective novels, mind you."
"Detective novels?"
"Absolutely. Aunt never stops complaining about it. At his age, to be passionate about such literature, really, it's inappropriate. As for me, I've never read any."

Most definitely an author to revisit.