This is another by Seishi Yokomizo (1902-81), who wrote The Village of Eight Graves. It was initially published in 1946; I read the German version (which was translated by Ursula Graefe, and published in 2022). It's the German version that inserts the word "mysterious" into the title. In Japanese (so I gather), it's just The Honjin Murder Case; the English version goes for The Honjin Murders.

I think "mysterious" is a good element to highlight, though, because this is a classic "locked-room murder mystery". It's set in the winter of 1937. On the night of their wedding, the bridal pair are heard to scream, and soon afterwards are found bloodily dead in their bedchamber, having succumbed to wounds from the sword that now stands in a virgin snowdrift outside... There is no-one else in the (locked) room; and the blanket of snow that surrounds the building is utterly devoid of footprints...

Our narrator (a writer of crime stories) was evacuated to the countryside during the war to escape the bombing raids. There he heard about these famous murders, and was fascinated by their classic nature. They are just the sort of thing, he tells us, that you encounter in a whole series of famous locked-room murder mysteries (he cites Gaston Leroux's The Secret of the Yellow Room; Maurice Leblanc's The Tooth of the Tiger; S.S. Dine's The Canary Murder Case; John Dickson Carr's The Plague Court Murders; Roger Scarlett's Murder Among the Angells...).

I must admit I do love a book that comes with its own reading list... (We had this recently with Dorothy L. Sayers, you may remember.) In this case, Yokomizo's grandson, On Nomoto, tells Caroline Crampton that the extensive citing of authors was a deliberate attempt on the author's part to open Japanese people's minds to the international world of crime fiction.


Fukuoka, 2023

As Crampton explains, however, the Japanese had their own take on these mysteries. These were what were known as "honkaku". They emerged in the 1920s, and the label (which means "orthodox") refers to the scrupulous emphasis on logical deduction: "Honkaku stories have more in common with a game of chess than some modern thrillers, which can be filled with surprise twists and sudden reveals. In honkaku, everything is transparent: no villains suddenly appear in the last chapter, no key clues are withheld until the final page. Honkaku writers were scrupulous about 'playing fair', so clues and suspects were woven through the plot, giving the reader a fair chance of solving the mystery before the detective does."

And, indeed, at the end, having revealed all the mysteries, our narrator is at pains to point out that he never led the reader astray (although some of his formulations were a little tricksy, it has to be said...): "I have written my story in the style of classic crime novels," he tells us, "of which I would particularly like to mention Agatha Christie's Alibi [the title of the film and theatre version of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd]".



But there's more to honkaku than this. Crampton again: "What makes honkaku so distinctly Japanese are the cultures, traditions and politics on display in the plots."

And, indeed, there's a lot of social commentary in The Mysterious Honjin Murders, beginning with the question: What's a "honjin"? We're told it's a traditional guesthouse, used exclusively by the nobility of the Edo period (1603-1868), and the Ichiyanagi family (to which our bride-and-groom corpses belong) used to run one in a neighbouring town. With the advent of the Meiji period, the family moved to their current location "before the old feudal system completely broke down". In their new neighbourhood they're regarded as outsiders, and are not loved. Itoko, the widowed matriarch, is inordinately proud to come from a family that once ran a honjin, and no doubt this irked the villagers.

Kenzo, the heir and bridegroom, faced much opposition from his family when he announced his intention to marry Katsuko, an educated young woman then working as a teacher. As the daughter of a tenant farmer, what she's lacking, in the eyes of the Ichiyanagis at least, is "lineage". This is a word not used much in the cities any more, says Yokomizo. But it was still important in country areas. Indeed, it affected your whole life: "After the Second World War, we found ourselves in a period of upheaval, in which the peasants were under less and less pressure to bow to the upper classes or the rich. With Japan's defeat, such social constraints collapsed with great fanfare. Nevertheless, origins still mattered." Birth mattered more than capacity. "That is still valid today, and in 1937, the year our story takes place, it was even more valid." The novel also treats us to a shocking demonstration of antiquated attitudes to women... At the close, Kindaichi testifies: "Everything that was so puzzling about this case is basically due to the conceit of these Honjin heirs. Ultimately, this is a family tragedy."

The fates of many of the characters are locked into Japanese history, too. Saburo, Kenzo's youngest brother, and the black sheep of the family, is drafted into the army, and dies in Hanko, China. Taeko, one of the daughters, has to flee from Shanghai with nothing but the clothes on her back. A member of the side-branch of the family gets killed by the atom bomb in Hiroshima. The family members left on the estate squabble a lot: "According to the villagers, the wealth tax and agrarian reforms affected the Ichiyanagi family to such an extent that its decline could not be averted."



This novel is the first in the Kosuke Kindaichi series, and so it fills in the backstory of the unlikely detective who became so popular with the public. In his mid-twenties, small, scruffy, wild-haired, and plagued with a speech disability, Kindaichi didn't last long at his university in Tokyo, but instead made his way to the US, where he experimented with drugs, and developed an addiction. "If he had gone on that way," the narrator tells us, "he would have ended up as one of those drug-dependent Japanese immigrants." But he helps to solve a crime in San Francisco, and becomes a celebrity. Ginzo Kubo, the murdered Katsuko's uncle, is living in San Fran at that point of new-found fame, and he takes Kindaichi under his wing, paying for him to study for three years in the US. When his protege arrives back in Japan, and announces his intention to become a private detective, Ginzo is a bit surprised, but then thinks: "Why not actually? The lad was in any case not the type for a respectable career."

It is Ginzo who summons Kindaichi to come and help solve this crime (and, of course, crime novels of this era all assume that the police will be happy to cooperate with the famous outsider). The narrator says the villagers still regard Kindaichi as a puzzle, but they recognize his reputation. For his part, he likens him to A.A. Milne's Antony Gillingham in The Red House Mystery... He's likeable, that's for sure, and you enjoy following him around from inspiration to inspiration.



Whereas The Village of Eight Graves was steeped in Gothic accoutrements, this book uses those tones in a rather more sophisticated manner. There is talk, for example, of a curse hanging over the Ichiyanagi family. Sakue, Kenzo's late father, died after a sword-fight (in which he killed another man). The head of the side-branch of the family committed ritual suicide in Hiroshima (an act that wasn't particularly admired, interestingly enough, but was rather seen as an exaggeration, a manifestation of neurotic behaviour). "All in all," we're told, "it can be said that the Ichiyanagi family has been ruled for generations by headstrong, impetuous men without any tolerance." That certainly carries through into Kenzo's generation too, and it's not so much Gothic as genetic.

Early on, as well, we're introduced to a mysterious man with a scar, a mask, and only three fingers on his right hand. The sound of the kotu (a traditional Japanese stringed instrument) punctuates the violent moments in an eerie way. There's an apparent death threat, and an apparent attempt to blot out some records from the past. There's a cat's grave, and a sleep-walker. Certainly, all this creates a pleasingly spooky atmosphere.



But there's a self-referential quality to this book that wasn't present in the only other one I've read to date.

Significantly, Saburo is a crime fiction aficionado, with an impressive book collection. This is what rivets Kindaichi's attention. Was it just a coincidence that a locked-room murder takes place in a house where so many such things are described? The whole case reminded him of a crime novel: "There was the murder in the locked room, the man with the three fingers, the sounds of the koto, the photo in the album and the burned diary pages. All these elements could have come from a novel. If it had only been two points, I might have thought it was a coincidence, but behind all these carefully placed tracks there could only be a conscious intention... Such sophisticated evidence can only be devised by someone with a mania for crime novels."

I won't include any further spoilers, but it was certainly an ingenious little scenario that Yokomizo's murderer thought out. There was, to be sure, lots of happenstance. As always, whether all this could really be translated into action in real life remains a moot point -- but, again as always, this is not really what matters.

For sure, I'll be back for more...