Eugenia

ユージニア (Eugenia, 2005) by ONDA Riku (恩田陸) won the Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 2006. The book describes a mass poisoning and its aftermath over several decades.

The family of a respected doctor in the Hokuriku town of K (which doubtless stands for Kanazawa) are celebrating a major family anniversary. A motorcycle delivery man brings alcohol and juice, saying that it is sent by an old friend of the doctor. When the family and visiting neighbours drink a toast together, all of them, including several children, die, leaving only a servant and the daughter of the family, blind middle school student Hisako.

Ten years later, one of the children who discovered the mass murder, Makiko, then in junior school, now a student, interviews those witnesses she can find about the crime. Her researches result in a book, The Forgotten Celebration, which becomes a bestseller. The book, though, has some oddities that might make you wonder what her aim in writing it was. Now, decades after that book, someone is interviewing the surviving witnesses again. Most of the chapters are a dialogue with one voice (the interviewer's) removed. A few chapters are internal monologues of characters from the present or the past, or told by an external narrator.

As the various narrators contribute, it becomes clear that most people suspect the blind Hisako of having engineered the massacre. The story becomes a kind of horror story, filling the reader with unease about what Hisako, Makiko, and the unseen interviewer are looking for. The story has 'clues' of a sort, marked bits of the narrative which are obviously going to be explained later; but the explanations when they came seemed fairly abritrary (that is I felt the writer could have spared us the clue).

In my case much of the unease was a suspicion that the story was not going to make any sense. And did it? I don't really know, to be honest. The book was something of a struggle to read; and I had lost interest long before the end. Neither the characters nor the narration were really vivid; most were dreamlike, half sedated. The format, in which we frequently switch between speakers, without an indication of the change, was probably more demanding for me, since as a language learner I miss a lot of the subtler clues that a Japanese speaker would pick up on.

Boy Science Detective: The Secret of the Skull

[You may want to check the warning on this blog's translations.] 

 Another translation: this is the third Boy Science Detective story by KOSAKAI Fuboku. Previously we had:

• Preface (and general introduction)
• 1. The Scarlet Diamond
• 2. A Fight in the Dark 
• 3. The Riddle of the Beard

I imagine most children's detective stories prefer to stay with less serious crimes. The Boy Science Detective stories start with an incident that is hardly a crime at all and move on to theft and then in the third story murder. This one goes even further. The murder of children is a crime that writers were a little shy of using in stories that were meant essentially for entertainment; but here we have the murder of a child as the fourth mystery in the series. The only respect in which this is a children's story is that it has a child as protagonist and (as always) the solution is a bit obvious. I hope you won't think that means it isn't worth your time. The answer is obvious, but you might well miss the clues; and the story is an interesting reflection of the state of forensic science at the time.

I've glossed most of the things that need explaining in the translation itself. So I think we can get away without footnotes this time.  I'll put a few links in advance. The Great Kantou earthquake took place on Sep. 1, 1923 and caused massive destruction in Tokyo. The most interesting part of the story is the forensic facial reconstruction which is central to the plot. The late nineteenth century reconstruction of Bach's face was performed by Wilhelm His and Carl Seffner. The detective called Williams that Kosakai mentions seems (from Google) to be Lieutenant Grant Williams, bureau of unidentified dead, Manhattan,  who in 1916 identified a skull found on a farm in Brooklyn as Dominick La Rosa leading to arrest of Giovanio Romano (Brooklyn Eagle Oct 10, 1916). Kosakai probably did not know of another more recent case where Williams had been called in by a former subordinate, Mary Hamilton to investigate a skull found  in Rockland County, N.Y. and had reconstructed the face as a missing girl, Lillian White. Hamilton's investigations lead to a suspect James Crawford, who was also missing at the time, but captured in 1925 after a different crime. 

One last thing: this is a bit spoilerish, but if you don't know how kimonos are worn, you might search out some photographs or prints on wikimedia commons or elsewhere on the internet to get an idea.

The story was first published in 子供の科学 (kodomo no kagaku, Children’s Science) between October and December 1925. It's in the public domain, so you can read the original Japanese on Aozora Bunko, here.

As always, the actual story is after the break. So click below to read it.

For Yoriko

I wrote about NORIZUKI Rintarou's first mystery, Snow Locked Room (雪密室, 1989), not long after I started this blog, and thought it was an impressive start. 頼子のために (Yoriko no tame ni, For Yoriko, 1990) is another well made mystery.

When Yoriko, the seventeen year old daughter of university professor NISHIMURA Yuuji (西村悠史), is murdered, her father writes an account of his determination to find the killer and take revenge. The diary ends where he has successfully hunted down the man he was looking for, a few moments before he himself commits suicide. The suicide attempt is unexpectedly interrupted, leaving Nishimura unconscious in hospital, while the story grows into a major scandal. Suspicions that the first murder had been covered up set local politicians in damage management mode, suggesting an investigation from detective story writer NORIZUKI Rintarou (法月綸太郎), who has a reputation as an amateur detective. Rintarou, reading the father's account, thinks that there really is something to investigate, and takes the case.

Snow Locked Room bore a strong resemblance in its central problem to the Carter Dickson classic, The White Priory Murders, which it referenced in the story. Reading the account above, a reader familiar with golden age mysteries will inevitably be reminded of Nicholas Blake's excellent The Beast Must Die. This time too, Norizuki mentions the book within the narrative. Blake's combination of a narrative of revenge and a detective story is one of his best books; but Chabrol certainly did well to replace Blake's too sprightly detective with a more straightforward policeman in his 1969 film of the book. The deliberate change of tone between the two parts is hard to take. Norizuki the character is a lot more sober than Nigel Strangeways; so this is less of a problem. The story does seem to lose focus a little, however. In particular the conspiracies of the rich and powerful subplot feels like a waste of the readers' time (and I think that after Snow Locked Room, another manipulative, dominating, sexually voracious older woman uses up Norizuki's lifetime allowance for this character type).

I understand Ho-Ling's not very enthusiastic view of the book. It's certainly true that the solid clues are  tenuous and the mystery does not really progress very well in the part between the initial revenge narrative and the explanation at the end. And both clues and deductions only go so far (indeed the better clues only point to something that readers will guess anyway). Many of the final revelations are more a story the author decided to tell than a necessary solution to the mystery. The shape of the story is a little like Ellery Queen's Wrightsville books, though the tragedy is a little more gothic than what Ellery Queen favoured at that time.

Journey in Black and White

黒白の旅路 (kokubyaku no tabiji, Journey in Black and White, 1977) by NATSUKI Shizuko (夏樹静子) is one of the few Japanese detective stories with an English translation. The translation, by Robert B. Rohmer, was published as Innocent Journey in 1989.

Shinjuu 心中 is Japanese for a suicide pact, normally between two lovers. I don't know how common they actually are in Japan, but they certainly feature more in literature than in Europe. Quite often, too, when you read a writer's biography on Wikipedia, you find a double suicide at the end - or even in the middle: DAZAI Osamu seems to have more or less made a hobby of it (the first time, his partner died and he survived, the second time both he and his wife survived, the last time both he and his partner died).

In Journey in Black and White, the student NOZOE Rikako (野添立夏子) works nights as a hostess in a bar. When her lover, failing company president TOMONAGA Takayuki (朝永敬之), asks her to join him in suicide, she agrees, and the two set off to a mountain region. They lie down together in the forest and take an overdose of sleeping pills; but Rikako does not die. She wakes up in the darkness after vomiting the pills and finds Tomonaga dead by her side, but not of an overdose: he has been stabbed.

This sounds very promising; but the book didn't really live up to its promise for me. The intriguing aspect of the initial situation is quickly forgotten; and neither Rikako (who suffers from depersonalization disorder) nor the reader feels much emotional involvement. Instead the story starts on a "fugitive pursuing the real criminal" story. Rikako runs away, then realises that the police will see her as the obvious suspect. She starts investigating to find the real killer before the body is discovered and the police work their way round to catching her. Her investigations soon lead her to Tomonaga's beautiful widow. Meanwhile a young architect is searching for his missing brother in law; and his search too leads him to Tomonaga's house.

This sounds promising in a different way, the start of a Hitchcock-style hectic action adventure, perhaps. But although there is action enough, it never feels very exciting, perhaps because Rikako is so consistently glum.

The other problem is that the mystery is for the most part very, very obvious. There are two major twists, and in both cases it's a safe bet that readers will be hundreds of pages ahead of the characters on them. In general, this is one of those books where the plot only just about survives because the main characters are consistently picking the stupidest choice of action. The book probably has some interest for attitudes to gender in Japan at that time; in some ways it is a little reminiscent of the kind of books Ruth Rendell and others were writing a decade earlier.

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.

The Reason

I need a new label for this. Most of the crime fiction I write about here can be categorised as detective stories. My own preference is fairly strongly for the more puzzle oriented books; but I don't expect that everything that I read should have Ellery Queen style formal proof of the culprit. 理由 (riyuu, The Reason, 1998) by MIYABE Miyuki (宮部 みゆき), which won the Naoki Prize (one of Japan's major prizes for popular literature), is not really written as a mystery. There are things we don't know at the start of the story that we learn as it goes on; but the narrative does not invite us to try and puzzle too much about what is going on. I've tagged this post as "crime novel". Of course most detective stories are crime novels too; but I'll reserve the label for posts about books which can't be read as mysteries.

I mentioned Miyabe's interesting approach to narration when I wrote about The Long Long Murder (長い長い殺人). The Reason is not so unusual; but it still shows an interest in how to tell a story. The crime that the book describes is the violent death of four people in an apartment high up in a luxury block of flats. It soon becomes clear that the victims are not the owners that the building's administration have on their books; and the police realise that they have no idea who has died or why. The story's narrator presents most of the book as if reporting a now solved actual crime, with the limited viewpoint that that entails. The narrator is not very present in the narrative, but gives a tapestry of second hand accounts of the various witnesses and incidentally involved characters. Occasionally we get a little more involved with a description of an interview with a major character. And then, in contrast to this documentary style, we also get a few chapters which are narrated (as if by an omniscient narrator) from the viewpoint of one or another character. These sections are more conventionally novelistic, though the reader might suppose that they too came from a non fiction writer, choosing to write in a more novelistic way. The documentary style majority of the book also implies a readership slightly different from the real readership. Living in the world in which the crime was a major media event, they presumably know more than we do about what happened. For us the crime is a mystery. Finding out exactly what happened and why is not so much a matter of investigating, as waiting for the narrator to get to that part of the account.

You'll often read descriptions of the history of Japanese detective fiction which implies a sort of war between puzzle detective stories and social detective stories, with MATSUMOTO Seichou driving out the puzzles in the fifties and sixties, until the "new orthodox" detective story brought back the puzzle under the leadership of AYATSUJI Yukito (綾辻 行人) in 1987. I haven't read enough to say this is complete nonsense; but I feel confident that it's fairly misleading. Matsumoto wrote so many books that he almost counts as a school in his own right; but those I've read, while clearly concerned with describing the way the world is now, also have a strong puzzle element. And what was the rest of the "social school"? "Society" is not the central interest of almost any of the other writers from the seventies and eighties that I have read, even if the puzzle was not central either. Traditional themes like the impossible crime have always been popular enough in Japan that it is no surprise when one meets such a trick in almost any crime novel. That said, The Reason lives up to the stereotype of the "social school", as far as a book can.

Towards the beginning, it looks like the theme of the book is going to be "real estate in the post bubble economy". Many of the early chapters and middle chapters are concerned with the dubious finance and not quite legal practices in the buying and selling of property in Japan's depressed economy. Gradually it becomes clear that this is part of a larger focus. As we meet with different groups of people concerned in the case, we realise that the theme is not so much "real estate" as "making a home"; most people who buy a house or flat, do so to raise a family. We meet various families and hear their stories. Some are getting along well , others are just managing to hold together, or breaking apart. And we also see people who have left their families for various reasons.

In the end the book seems to favour a particular view on the way society is going. It does so only through opinions expressed by the characters; but the narrator does not offer a divergent opinion either in their own voice or from another character. It's a view that I look at with some scepticism, as I feel it forgets that the world that young people are growing up in is changed by circumstances over which they had no choices. Some things are possible for them that were not possible for their parents. Other things that were easy for their parents are harder for them (here I am thinking particularly of their financial situation). This is obviously true in Europe. I know that Japan has not changed as much; but I think the same trends are there.

The book is one of the longer ones that I have read, over 670 pages. That would be a little shorter in a typical western paperback format (Japanese paperback pages are small, but densely printed); but it would still be a long book. If that doesn't discourage you, and if your interest in crime fiction goes beyond mysteries or suspense, then it is certainly worth trying. Despite the length, it had no trouble in holding my interest.