Queen Bee

The next YOKOMIZO Seishi (横溝正史) for review is 女王蜂 (jooubachi, Queen Bee, 1952), first published in serial form between 1951 and 1952, following The Inugami Clan. It's not quite as famous a work as that, but it's still one of the better known KINDAICHI Kousuke mysteries, filmed twice, in 1958 and again in 1978, this time by ICHIKAWA Kon (市川 崑), whose films of several of the more famous mysteries are the standard against which others tend to be judged. There have also been five television versions. I think it deserves its place among the better known works. It's a solidly constructed mystery, that holds the readers' interest well, although it perhaps isn't quite so skillful as some of the others at creating an atmosphere of alarm and confusion to give readers' speculative tendencies something to work on.

Gekkin player, A. Farsari (from Wikimedia commons)

Gekkintou (Gekkin Island) is a little island off the Izu Peninsular. It is named after the Gekkin (or Yueqin), a Chinese stringed instrument that (according to Yokomizo) had some popularity in nineteenth century Japan, then fell out of fashion. The Daidouji (大道寺) family is the richest family on the island, but their fortunes have long been in decline. The daughter of the house, Tomoko (智子), has just turned eighteen. She is living with her grandmother, and her devoted former tutor, a woman who had also been her mother's tutor. Now, at eighteen, she is supposed to go to her father's house in Tokyo, accompanied by her grandmother and tutor. Her father is not her real father. He had been one of two students who visited the island when Tomoko's mother was sixteen. Tomoko is the daughter of the other student, who, apparently, fell from a cliff on the island and died. In his place, his friend married Tomoko's mother and took on the family name; but it was a marriage only in name and since then he has lived separately in Tokyo as a very successful businessman. In the house on Gekkin Island there is a building gaudily decorated in Chinese style; and in that building there is a "room that cannot be opened". By a strange coincidence Tomoko has found the key. On the day before her departure she sneaks into the room and discovers, in the dust on a table in the middle, a bloodstained gekkin.

Meanwhile detective KINDAICHI Kousuke (金田一耕介) is one of the people sent to accompany Tomoko and family to Tokyo. An unknown client has asked his lawyer to engage him, because he and others have received anonymous letters threatening a series of deaths if Tomoko leaves the island. The girl, says the letter, is a queen bee, destined to bring death to the males drawn to her, like her mother nineteen years ago. Kindaichi warns that he is no bodyguard, but he starts investigating the earlier case. Soon however, at a hotel on the Izu peninsular where the family are resting on the journey, the first of Tomoko's suitors is murdered. He is soon followed by other victims, most of them men who had been pursuing Tomoko. Will Kindaichi catch the murderer before it is too late? (Of course he won't. Kindaichi only ever solves a case when pretty much every possible victim has already died.)

Most Kindaichi stories are set in one region, generally rural and isolated. In this book, as in a couple of others we change scene several times, first to the hotel on the mainland, then to Tokyo, finally back to Gekkin Island. This gives the story a slightly more modern feeling; but we are still in a fairly traditional environment (e. g. murder at a Kabuki performance). Much of the mystery concerns what happened nineteen years ago. We get a lot of hints throughout the story; but it is only towards the end that we learn what exactly was supposed to have happened then. There is a little locked room mystery for readers to solve. The first Kindaichi novel is one of Japan's most famous locked room mysteries (The Honjin Murder Case), and Yokomizo has quite a few locked room mysteries in the other books in the series; but the three I have come across are much less ambitious affairs than that first one. I did think this one was a good use of special conditions, though. Like Ho Ling (here), I thought that the whole story was in some senses undersupplied with clues. Most readers will probably spot the killer. There is one good reason (beyond conjectural joining the dots) to suspect them; but most of the details of the various murders turn out to be basically irrelevant. Still, the story kept me reading, and the explanation did not leave me feeling cheated at the end.

The Inugami Clan

As I like to review children's books and detective stories alternately here, the next review should have been a children's book; but I'm almost at the end of my stock of Japanese children's books, so the gaps between posts on those will have to be a little longer for the moment.

I had planned to make my next YOKOMIZO Seishi (横溝正史) review 女王蜂 (Queen Bee); but then I noticed that I still haven't written anything about the book that comes before it in the series, 犬神家の一族 (inugamike no ichizoku, The Inugami Clan, 1951). It's a couple of years since I read it and I don't feel like rereading it just now. So this post doesn't count as a review, just a couple of notes on my impressions when I read it.

When millionaire businessman INUGAMI Sahee (犬神 佐兵衛) died at 81 at his residence in Nasu Lakeside, he leaves a family squabbling over his fortune as they wait for the will to be opened. His three daughters by different mothers have each of them one son. In addition there is a girl, NONOMIYA Tamayo (野々宮 珠世), whose grandfather had been Sahee's patron at the start of his career. Sahee had in return taken her under his protection. KINDAICHI Kousuke is staying by the lake, invited by a letter from a man in the law office handling Sahee's yet unopened will. Before he can learn the details, the man is murdered; and it also looks as if someone is also targeting Tamayo, who has to be rescued from drowning. When the will is read out, we find that Sahee expects Tamayo to marry one of his three grandsons, who will then inherit the company. The various provisions depending on what she and they decide, seem calculated to set the family against each other, almost an invitation to murder. And then there is an uneasy suspicion in the house that one of the grandsons is not who he says he is. The story is set not long after the war and the son of Sahee's eldest daughter has only just got back to Japan. Because of war wounds, his head is covered by a close fitting mask. The other sisters suspect that the real son never returned and that this could be an impostor brought in to give his mother access to the fortune.

The return of soldiers, and their character in the peacetime world, is a theme of almost all the Yokomizo Seishi stories of this period. In particular, the novella 車井戸なぜ軋る (Kurumaido naze kishiru, Why did the well pulley creak?), which likewise features suspicions over the identity of a disfigured returning veteran, clearly laid the groundwork for The Inugami Clan, as I commented when I reviewed it. The other book which makes the most of the return of soldiers, Gokumontou, proves to be similar in another direction as well. In Gokumontou the three daughters of a rich Japanese house are targeted, and the murderer seems to be arranging the victims' bodies for emblematic purposes. The same seems to be happening to the grandsons of the Inugami family, with the deaths arranged to recall the family emblems of axe, chrysanthemum and koto.

I'm pretty much alone on this, I think; but I don't rate The Inugami Clan as one of Yokomizo's best mysteries. At least, there must be four or five books I'd put ahead of it. His usual strengths are all here. Complexity of plotting seems to have come easily to Yokomizo. Most of his books have a very complicated plot, which still makes sense (at least in its own world) and still allow a normally attentive reader to follow the story. The Inugami Clan is as complex as any; and it has a plot well made to set us speculating in various directions as we read (I was fairly strongly tempted by a red herring for the first third of the book). I've seen Yokomizo's narrative style described as pulpy. It's certainly not aiming for sophisticated restraint, but a better comparison would be the nineteenth century sensation novel. As in EDOGAWA Rampo's juvenile mysteries, we have a very present narrator, who asks rhetorical questions, exclaims with horror at the events he describes and does all he can to involve the readers. The local setting is well done. As often in the Kindaichi stories, we are in a relatively unpopulated part of Japan, but this time it is a mountain area trying to adapt to the times with tourism. (Incidentally I've seen a review which thinks this is set in the Nasu in Tochigi prefecture; but if I've got it right, it's a fictional Nasu in what is now Nagano prefecture.) The world of the Inugami family, all revolving around the dead Sahee, make for an involving story, both before and after the denouement.

My slight reservations are that the story is probably in one sense over-hinted (many of the mysteries had an obvious answer, that I would expect readers to spot) in another under-clued (the actual murderer became more and more obvious from the middle of the book, but there was no compelling reason why it had to be them). The result was that there were parts of the explanation at the end where I thought, 'Well okay, but there was no way we would be able to work any of that out.' 

There is an English translation, which I haven't read, by Yumiko Yamazaki (The Inugami Clan, Stone Bridge Press, 2007). You can read a review of that at the blog Pretty Sinister Books, and of the original book and both ICHIKAWA Kon films (from 1976 and 2006) at Boku no jikenbo.

Sleepwalker

夜歩く (Yoru aruku, Sleepwalker 1949) is the third KINDAICHI Kousuke (金田一耕助) novel by YOKOMIZO Seishi (横溝正史). It's a lot less famous than either Gokumontou or The Village of Eight Graves, which it comes between. 

The book is narrated in the first person, like in The Village of Eight Graves; but this time the narrator comes across more as an outside observer. He's an unsuccessful detective story writer, which provides the opportunity for a lot of metaliterary observations on the conventions of detective stories. In this respect, the book recalls the first Kindaichi novel, The Honjin Murder Case and also the long short story 黒猫亭事件 ("The Black Cat Café Case" 1947), which is published in the same volume. As I said in my discussion of the book, the most interesting thing in "The Black Cat Café Case" is probably the discussion of the genre convention of the disfigured corpse; and the ideas expressed there could be taken to be a warm up for this book, which takes the concept to the point of absurdity.

The book is much more concentrated than the longer Kindaichi novels; and the shape of the story as it's presented to us is more like a John Dickson Carr book, except for the absence of a locked room. There is something like an impossible crime, though; but it's deliberately left a little loose round the edges. The narrator's friend tells him that he fears his father might drunkenly attack someone with the Japanese sword in the house. His father has this habit when drunk. The narrator's first sight on reaching the house is of the father pursuing a guest, sword in hand. The sword is said to have been made by Muramasa, a legendary sword maker, whose weapons were said to thirst for blood; and the thought plays on their minds. For some reason the friend wants the narrator's help so that even he cannot get at the sword alone. He locks the sword in the house safe with the key and lets the narrator set the code, so that both of them are needed to open the safe. But in the night they see the daughter of the house sleepwalking from the pavilion in the grounds. Investigating later, they find a decapitated victim there; and when they open the safe the sword is still there, but now covered in blood.

The victim is a hunchbacked man, with a bullet wound in his leg. Normally that would be enough to identify him; but there were two hunchbacked men staying in the house that night. Which is really the victim? And did one kill the other or was someone else the killer? This is the start of a series of games with identity, which continues through further murders.

As a puzzle, on the one hand I have to agree with those who say that it is not really fair play. Still, it's too late for me to join the mob of torch and pitchfork carrying readers that doubtless assembled outside Yokomizo's house when the book was first published. Nowadays, it might be celebrated for overturning the forms of the detective story; and I must admit I am half appalled, half admiring. I can imagine Yokomizo laughing to himself at the thought of readers crying out, 'Have you no honour, sir?' Fair play or not, it has one really good trick in it (which in retrospect should have been obvious, because it involves the kind of detail that normally didn't interest Yokomizo). And solving that trick does lead to the solution of the mystery; but the other hurdles only get removed in the last paragraphs before the answer.

The characters and their behaviour are unusually repulsive in this book. Except for Kindaichi and the police, there are no really sympathetic characters. I think I need to give Yokomizo books a rest for a while and read something a little gentler.

Eight Graves Village

I wanted to write one post about each of the KINDAICHI Kousuke (金田一耕介) novels by YOKOMIZO Seishi (横溝正史) in chronological order. That would have meant that 夜歩く would be next. But I just left my copy on the train. I was about two thirds through, at the point where Kindaichi is pursuing a sleepwalking women through a forest in a violent thunderstorm and has just caught view of a sword brandishing man up ahead. So I'm going to be a bit on edge until I either get the book back or give up and order a new copy from Japan.

In the meantime, I'll skip one ahead and talk a bit about the next in the series, 八つ墓村 (Yatsu haka mura, The Village of Eight Graves, 1951).

Although there's a recognisable style to all the novels I've read in the series, Yokomizo also tries out several different approaches to the narration. In The Honjin Murder Case, he narrates in the third person without letting us see inside Kindaichi's head. In Gokumontou, he again narrates in the third person, but we see things from Kindaichi's perspective (the great detective is pretty much at a loss for most of the narrative). The Village of Eight Graves (like 夜歩く) is narrated in the first person, and Kindaichi is seen only from the outside. (My experience is that when we don't see inside Kindaichi's head, he often knows things that he isn't telling us; and that's particularly true here. His comment that doubtless Inspector Isokawa often thinks of murdering him is only too justified.) But before we get to the first person narrative, there is a prologue by Yokomizo, as in Gokumontou and some later books, in which he describes the background history from which the present case arises.

The first part of the village's history is the murder of eight samurai who had been hiding out there after being on the losing side in the civil wars of the sixteenth century. The villagers both feared the winner's anger and hoped to get hold of the money that the samurai had with them. But the gold was never found; and eight villagers died soon after, apparently from the curse of the murdered samurai. Hoping to assuage them, the villagers buried them properly in the eight graves that give the village its name and honoured them with a shrine. But in the twentieth century another massacre occurred, this time claiming 32 victims (closely modeled on a real mass killing, the Tsuyama massacre). The murderer is TAJIMI Youzou (多治見要蔵), the son of one of the two powerful families in the village, an always violent man, who had previously kidnapped and imprisoned a girl from the village.

Twenty-six years later, the novel's narrator, TERATA Tatsuya (寺田辰弥), the son of this woman, is contacted by a lawyer. The Tajimi family is looking for Tatsuya, as Youzou's son, to continue the family. Unaware of his own family's history, Tatsuya sets off for the isolated Okayama village, despite a mysterious warning letter and the death by poisoning of the grandfather who had come to accompany him back.

What follows is an atmospheric story with secret passages, labyrinthine cave systems, mysterious family secrets, hidden treasure, angry mobs, rival families, a not quite trustworthy love interest, an embittered war veteran, and so on. I've seen more than one reaction that this isn't much of a detective story at all (here, for instance), more of a horror story perhaps. To me, except for the horrific and repulsive background story, it more resembles the kind of book that Sir Walter Scott made popular. You might call it the male version of the gothic romance story that has been a staple of popular fiction (and occasionally high literature) for hundreds of years: an innocent visitor to a strange house is thrown into the midst of conspiracies and secrets and must decide whom they can trust. Christianna Brand did a very effective detective story version of the more normal women's gothic romance in Cat and Mouse (1950); so it's perfectly possible to combine the two. 

Considered as a puzzle, like  Gokumontou, it's a "serial murder with a pattern" story. There are no  special tricks from the murderer, only straightforward misdirection as to motive, which we suspect anyway. There's really only one clue; but accepting Kindaichi's view of what is going on with the serial murders, it points very clearly to one person. (It's actually a Yokomizo favourite, recurring slightly changed in at least two other novels.) But as often in the Kindaichi books, there are many side complications, so that although I made the necessary deduction, I was left feeling a little unsure and suspicious of other characters until the end.

There are three films based on the book. Since only one is available in Europe, that's the one that I've seen. It's the 1977 version by NOMURA Yoshitarou (野村 芳太郎), also known for several films based on  mysteries by MATSUMOTO Seichou (松本清張), which I haven't seen. This one was a commercial success in its day, but it didn't appeal much to me. The story of course has to be simplified for the film, but when I hear for instance that the doctor is the only one in the village, a little warning bell goes off in my head and I start thinking, "Hang on. In that case, what happens to the whole plot?" In fact Tatsuya's experiences and adventures and the background history remain much the same, but every single element of the detective story plot except for the identity of the killer has been removed. In its place, there's some tedious rigmarole involving the families that killed the original eight samurai, which gives the viewer no chance to work out who the killer is; it's simply announced by Kindaichi as the result of his researches at the end (and since its intercut with the killer's attempt to murder Tatsuya, the audience is probably not paying much attention anyway).

Since the story works well as an adventure story, one could hope that the film would get by with this; but a first person narrative doesn't translate well. And then Tatsuya's great aunts, Koume and Kotake, who are so effective (scary, funny and sad at the same time) in the book, just look wrong to me in the film: the characters are supposed to be very old, but they look like relatively young actresses, who have been unsuccessfully made up as old women, which gives the film a real feel of bad amateur drama. Following the links from the Japanese wikipedia page on the film, I see that the actress who played Kotake (市原悦子) was forty-one in 1977.

There is no English translation; but if you can read French, there's apparently a translation by René de Ceccatty and Ryôji Nakamura, Le village aux huit tombes (1999).

Gokumontou

The first of YOKOMIZO Seishi's KINDAICHI Kousuke books, The Honjin Murder Case, was a kind of recent past historical detective story, written immediately after the second world war, but set before the war. 獄門島 (Gokumontou, Prison Gate Island, 1947) brings Kindaichi into the present. It has some other differences from The Honjin Murder Case, that makes it similar to most of the other Kindaichi books that I've read. The style is a little less playful and the literary self consciousness that made the first book a detective story about detective stories is here reined in. Like many later novels, Gokumontou starts with a historical preface, which provides the backstory of the setting Yokomizo has chosen. In this case he approaches it with a discussion of the possible etymology of the name, Gokumontou, a little island in the Seto Inland Sea, a corruption of Hokumon as the most northerly base of pirates operating in the region, or of the famous thief Goemon. In either case the corruption would be due to the island's use as a prison colony in the days of the shogunate. The descendants of these prisoners now make up the island's population, finding their poor livelihood by fishing and distrustful of outsiders.

Kindaichi has been enlisted and serving in the war. A fellow soldier and friend, KITOU Chimata (鬼頭千万太), is returning with Kindaichi to Japan, but dies on route, leaving Kindaichi with an entreaty.

I don't want to die .... I .... I .... don't want to die. If I don't get home, my three sisters will be killed. .... But .... I'm done for. Kindaichi .... in my place .....  in my place, go to Gokumontou for me.

The Kitou family is the richest family on the little island. Normally they would be controlling the island's business; but the head of the family is recently deceased and Chimata's father is insane, kept in a locked part of the house. There is a branch family, too, still on speaking and visiting terms, but regarded as secretly hostile and plotting against the main family. The sisters that Kindaichi has come to save are strangely childish and lacking in empathy. And is the figure seen lurking around the house the cousin reported to be on his way back from the war? Or one of a group of discharged soldiers who had been practising piracy in the area? Or perhaps both? Soon one of the sisters has been killed, the first of a series of murders, each bizarrely staged, particularly the second one, where the victim is beneath a giant bell. (The bell was being returned to the island's temple after narrowly escaping being melted down for metal during the war).

The atmosphere, both of Japan immediately after the war and of the isolated island, is well managed. Fantastic elements seem to become more prominent than in The Honjin Murder Case, as they are in the later books.

Considered as a puzzle mystery, it's difficult to know how to judge it. There are sufficient clues to know roughly what was going on for at least two of the murders (the first is probably too obvious); but the larger story of what was going on would probably be hard to work out. On the other hand the larger story makes an impressive answer to the puzzle when you read it. Some Yokomizo stories, including some regarded as classics, turn out to have a vast amount of pointless complexity in the solution. Here there is a surprising and horrifying simplicity, to which everything goes back.

Gokumontou has been filmed and televised many times, most famously as part of the series of Kindaichi films by ICHIKAWA Kon (市川 崑) in 1977. I haven't seen it, from this discussion, it seems to have been similar to the original, with slight changes.

Incidentally, my discussion here is written from memory, and I no longer have my notes on the readings of the kanji for the names of the various characters. But if you want to prepare yourself, the book's Japanese Wikipedia page lists the characters with their readings. (The description of the story there currently tries to avoid spoilers, but you might still be better off skipping it and the descriptions of the various adaptations.)

The Honjin Murder Case

EDOGAWA Rampo is doubtless the most famous crime writer in Japan; but the most famous detective is probably YOKOMIZO Seishi's (横溝 正史 1902-1981) KINDAICHI Kousuke. ICHIKAWA Kon made several very successful films of the Kindaichi books; and the manga series Shounen Kindaichi no Jikenbo ("The Case Files of Young Kindaichi") are written to suggest that the teenage hero is the great detective's grandson. Kindaichi is an eccentric private detective, shabbily dressed in traditional Japanese clothing (at a time when men more or less always wore western clothing), stuttering or scratching through his untidy hair when excited, accustomed to make an odd impression on those he meets, for which he typically gives an amused half apology. Most of the stories featuring him are set in the aftermath of the Second World War, when they were written, but 本陣殺人事件　(Honjin satsujinjiken, The Honjin Murder Case), though published in 1946, is set before the war.

In the Edo period, the Ichiyanagi family ran a honjin, an official guesthouse for travelling representatives of the shogunate; and they are still a family of tradition and influence in the Okayama country where they live. (Yokomizo came from this area, and many of the books are set there or in the neighbouring Inland Sea.) On the night of the wedding of the elder son of the family to the daughter of a new rich businessman, the couple are found stabbed with a sword in a house which is completely locked from the inside. The koto that had been played on the wedding night rang out again at the murder; and a search of the red walled room in which the couple died finds the fingerprints of a three fingered man.

Most Kindaichi books are very long, but this is short (200 pages in my edition, which adds two novellas). Oddly while the long novels seem to need room to build up atmosphere and character, "The Honjin Murder Case", to my taste, does as good a job in what would be a short novel even by western standards.  The puzzle  elements are more prominent than in some of the other books; and there are some good tricks in there.  I don't think I'd rank the locked room particularly high; but there my taste in impossible crimes seems to be the same as victim's brother, an enthusiast for locked rooms.

You can read other bloggers' reactions to the book here and here.

The two novellas both have a postwar setting: 黒猫亭事件 (Kuronekotei jiken, The Black Cat Café Case) is much more modern than "The Honjin Murder Case". As a puzzle, I can't have much enthusiasm for it. It reads like one of those pieces where the writer started with a trick and then tried doing the carpentry to provide a reason to use it, but gave up half way.  A humorous metaliterary introduction, in which Yokomoizo and Kindaichi discuss detective story conventions like the disfigured corpse is more interesting than the actual story. The other, 車井戸なぜ軋る (Kurumaido naze kishiru, Why did the well pulley creak?), is actually my favourite.  Kousuke Kindachi only appears in the prologue and epilogue, and apparently was added after the original publication. The core story is a series of letters from a young woman to her brother, who is in a nearby sanatorium, describing the events in the house since their elder brother has returned from the war, blind and with face injuries. Returning veterans crop up in several Kindaichi books; and if you've read or seen "The Inugami Clan", you'll recognise the similarity (you could see this story as a rehearsal for the other). There's the same question whether the returning soldier really is the brother. But written from the viewpoint of the sister, the question is more directly felt; and the experience of civilians alienated from a family member, who seem to have come back from war a different person, adds to the atmosphere. Yokomizo doesn't try to dot the i's and cross the t's of the puzzle; but I don't think that anyone would complain about the mystery.