Seishi Yokomizo is, at least according to Amazon, one of Japan’s most popular mystery writers. His series of novels featuring amateur detective Kosuke Kindaichi have only recently started being published in English translations, and The Honjin Murders is the first of the series.
Kenzo Ichiyanagi is a the scholarly head of his influential family, who live in a mansion in a rural village, with a separate “annexe house” on the property. Some of the family have gathered at the estate for Kenzo’s wedding to a young schoolteacher named Katsuko. Initially, the family was opposed to the betrothal due to the bride’s supposed lower social status, but Kenzo insisted and eventually wore them down. However, on the very night of the wedding, the couple are brutally murdered in their bedroom in the annexe house. The crime scene is bizarre. The doors are all locked, and there are no footprints leading away from the house, despite a freshly fallen covering of snow. A Japenese koto with a broken string is in the room with the bodies, which explains why the surviving family heard one playing shortly before the murders must have occurred, but not why a murderer would take the time to play it. The sword used to hack the couple to death is also found at a considerable distance from the house, with no explanation as to how it could have got there.
With the police stumped, the bride’s Uncle, her only living relative, calls on his friend Kindaichi to come at once. Kindaichi is a detective in the mold of Sherlock Holmes, both in his use of deductive reasoning to solve the case and in his lack of care for appearance and deportment.
Yokomizo was clearly quite heavily influenced by Golden Age mystery writers like Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr. They, and several others, are mentioned frequently by the nameless narrator of The Honjin Murders, who purports to be writing about the murders roughly a decade after they happened. The book is a classic “locked room” mystery, and both the narrator and the detective proclaim themselves students of the genre.
Regrettably, The Honjin Murders is not a shining exemplar of the genre. Though the strangeness of the crime intrigues the reader, Yokomizo’s solution seems preposterous and inexplicable, at least to the Western reader, and in any case is a very clear-cut example of the unimpressive “mechanical” solutions to locked room mysteries that the character himself decried early in the text.
I hesitate to cast too much judgment on Yokomizo for three reasons. The first is cultural differences. The motive for the murders here is so steeped in Japanese custom and social mores that I feel like I shouldn’t criticize it too strongly, even though I find it impossible to fathom. The second is translation. While I found the prose here stilted and awkward, especially in the conversations between Kindaichi and the police detectives, it’s not possible for me to say if those issues stem from Yokomizo himself or the translation. Thirdly, this is a Golden Age novel written in a much different time. Even the best Golden Age writers weren’t read for their prose, so it’s hard to fault The Honjim Murders for not being beautifully written. Still, even trying to allow for all these factors, I would have to qualify the novel as a disappointment. I purchased a few entrants in the series, but I find myself reluctant to continue based on what I just read.