The Valley of Fear

"Everything takes ten times as long in the countryside: what takes one year to forget in the city takes ten years in that village. The memories stick, they take root—year after year, people stubbornly cling to them."

—Miyako Mori in The Village of Eight Graves 

The Village of Eight Graves is not your conventional detective story as it incorporates an unusual perspective that often relegates the detective/investigative elements to the sidelines. It is perhaps best read as a Gothic romance-thriller with distinct pulpish, horror and supernatural tropes scattered throughout. In that respect, The Village of Eight Graves' place in the Yokomizo canon and Japanese crime fiction is similar to that of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-1902) in the Holmesian world and British crime fiction.

In a February 2022 interview, however, Bryan Karetnyk, the translator of Seishi Yokomizo's Yatsuhakamura (1949-1951) (literally, The Village of Eight Gravestones/Tombs, published by Pushkin Vertigo in 2021 with the title of The Village of Eight Graves), mentions that Yokomizo, in one of his essays, acknowledged the influence of Agatha Christie's The A.B.C. Murders (1936) on this novel in particular. Having now read the book, I think it is an interesting comparison to make, but not without keeping your expectations in check from the outset. 

Can The A.B.C. Murders template really be applied to The Village of Eight Graves? The Alexander Bonaparte Cust figure in Yokomizo's work is Tatsuya Terada, a man of uncertain lineage living in Kobe in post-World War II Japan at the time he is introduced in the novel. A mysterious summons reveals to him, for the first time, that he has links to the ominous-sounding 'village of Eight Graves', which is "perched amid the desolate mountains on the border of Tottori and Okayama prefectures". But, before he can even begin his journey to the village, strange occurrences crop up around him. An unknown lawyer named Suwa gets in touch with him, along with Miyako Mori, a representative from the village's Nomura Family (or, "The House of the West"), both of whom bring him up to speed on his connections to the village, a lowdown on the village's residents and the current happenings that necessitate his presence there. He also meets, for the first time, his grandfather, Ushimatsu Ikawa, a cattle trader, who soon meets a horrific end in front of Tatsuya, due to poisoning. Tatsuya also finds out that a strange person has been making all of sorts of enquiries about him in the town. Around the same time, he becomes the recipient of a threatening letter warning him to stay away from the village of Eight Graves.

The breakneck pace of events established in the opening stretch is sustained after Tatsuya reaches the village. The village boasts of its own eclectic cast of characters: creepy elderly twins, thieving nuns, doctors dreaming up elaborate murder schemes, sneaky priests snooping on others, and disfigured war veterans no longer sure of their standing in society. The atmosphere is so rife with tension that you can literally cut it with a knife. Except, in this book, poisoning and strangulation seem to be the preferred modes for the culprit. Like the aforementioned Alexander Bonaparte Cust, Tatsuya finds himself embroiled in a large number of situations where he is potentially the most likely suspect, but not quite with the same 'directness' of being implicated and doomed that was the trademark in Cust's case. Add to this the Gothic ethos (the labyrinthine caves that go on endlessly, the seemingly bizarre disappearances of certain characters at key moments), and the strange, often threatening, ways of the villagers—and the reader, like Tatsuya, is stuck with this sense of dark foreboding, gloom and helplessness without any light at the end of the tunnel, despite the reassurances of Tatsuya's well-wishers and lovers.

The murders and their rationale is perhaps where this novel probably resembles The A.B.C. Murders most closely. Disregarding the bloody massacres that took place twice in the past, 11 people—priests, nuns, doctors and the narrator's family members included—die in the present time of the novel, most of them seemingly without rhyme or reason. It is the same stratagem that was used by Christie in her novel—create a deranged, serial-murder-like situation to hide the devilishly insidious real, singular motive in a most cunning fashion. However, The Village of Eight Graves wades further into deeper, murkier waters by throwing too many red herrings around for its own good. From the perspective of motive, the rapid developments lead the investigators to posit different theories focusing on different perpetrators, some of them more outlandish than the others, in an effort to explain it all. Even at the fag end of the novel, the mysterious, seemingly inexplicable, movements of certain characters from way before make it difficult to pinpoint whodunnit, which Kosuke Kindaichi does by finally gaining a correct understanding of the nature of the suspects involved. And yet, as Kindaichi reveals, despite the devilish plot behind it all, the miraculous thing is that it would have all naturally resolved itself at the end.

As a mystery, however, there are definite shortcomings in The Village of Eight Graves. For one, there's an abnormally high level of coincidence that places certain key characters at certain important locations at the most eventful moments, often without sound rationale. In fact, the entire chain of murders hinges upon the accidental discovery of a key item, which is, in turn, dependent on the fortuitous and favourable alignment of certain circumstances. It makes me suspect that Yokomizo may have been stringing things along to an extent, just to add, perhaps unnecessarily, to the mystery quotient of this hefty narrative. However, even more than that, it is, perhaps, the book's most intriguing aspect that is also its greatest weakness—its uncommon perspective. The events are narrated in manuscript form by Tatsuya, one of the book's suspects who could have ended up as one of its victims. He is, by his own admission, not a gifted and talented storyteller—something that becomes quite evident as the story progresses. Everything we see is through the lens of Tatsuya's tinted glasses, and they are not of the best kind. Furthermore, the problem is that we get to know of incidents and plot points only as they happen to Tatsuya and the people around him at that point of time. He cannot write about other events happening elsewhere (for instance, insights on what Kindaichi and inspector Isokawa may be thinking about and investigating at said moment), that too impartially, simply because he is not privy to those details. He has to rely on information furnished by others later to fill these gaps. These constraints and the perilous situations he is continuously faced with inevitably leads to his myopic treatment of a narrative over which he barely seems to have any control. Some characters (Noriko, for instance) often end up being one-note, treading over the same beats, while vital character traits and revealing hints are elicited very inconsistently, only when Tatsuya comes across them, often in his conversations and adventures in the village's caves and the countryside. Sometimes, these reveals come criminally late for the reader to make an informed guess based on them. It is this lack of an 'overall' view—rather, this constant, narrowed-down focus on the singular movements of Tatsuya in real time, without any knowledge of the whereabouts and activities of the rest of the cast—that hurts the novel the most.

Yokomizo's idea of stepping into a character's shoes and then having that character narrate the novel is certainly interesting. One other book where I encountered the same ploy is Boris Akunin's The Coronation (2000; English translation in 2009) where the chief steward of a Russian noble family does the bulk of the storytelling. In both cases, however, I have been severely put off by the excessively stilted and artificial nature of the voices of the authorial personas chosen by the real-life authors. Even worse, in The Village of Eight Graves, Tatsuya overreaches his authorial ambitions to weave elements of mystery-writing in his narrative. The result, I feel, is a work that is not sure of its own identity. Is it a work of Gothic horror? Is it a faithful diary recounting Tatsuya's experiences? Or, is it a somewhat fictional, exaggerated account of Tatsuya's emotionally taxing travails that somehow also manages to masquerade as crime/detective fiction? Yoshitarō Nomura's 1977 film, Yatsuhakamura, resolves this conundrum to a certain extent by amplifying the horror and supernatural elements to the extreme, resulting in a film that has some of the most beautifully shot scenes I have ever seen, which contrast well with the amped-up terror and horror quotients. The composition of the shots and the moderately paced nature of the film (in relative terms, that is) lends a certain expansiveness which is accentuated immensely by the sweeping orchestral soundtracks that composer Yasushi Akutagawa made for this film. These sensations are seemingly in direct contrast to those experienced on reading Tatsuya's constraints-ridden tale in the book. This is not to say that the book is disappointing throughout; in fact, it is wildly entertaining where events, twists and turns, blood and gore are your constant companions every few pages. It is just that despite all the wealth and treasures it has to offer, it could have been so much more—and the thought of what could have been can make one very regretful, indeed. Hence, the caution of not getting swayed by all the praise the book has received for decades, and moderating your expectations at the outset.

The armour-clad skeleton in a still from Yoshitarō Nomura's 1977 film, Yatsuhakamura

The most unfortunate conclusion, though, is that I don't think Yokomizo needed to enforce the perspective of Tatsuya onto the readers. The world-building of the village of Eight Graves (especially its foundations in a bloody samurai tale where cycles of massacre recur) is top-notch, and the socio-cultural, economic and religious undertones should be evident to those curious enough to explore these themes. There is a lot to unpack here: the real-life inspiration behind the book (the Tsuyama massacre), Yokomizo's depictions of and commentary on feudal communities in the rural, isolated Okayama countryside (an area Yokomizo himself had travelled through and resided in during the World War II years), their family values and structures, superstitions, the socio-economic, religious (especially with regards to Buddhism and Shintoism) intricacies of life here, and the disruptive effects that World War II wrought in the life of certain residents even in these faraway places, especially those who shifted from urban areas in the wake of the war. One wonders why Yokomizo chose to have Tatsuya then as the narrative voice unveiling these threads, when Yokomizo himself could have done the same in a far more polished and competent manner.

An observation that would, perhaps, better serve as a question in a university semester examination, concerns imagining how the book would have turned out had Yokomizo told it all himself as the omniscient narrator—just as he had done in The Honjin Murders. In fact, The Village of Eight Graves is at its self-assured best in the first chapter, where Yokomizo, speaking in his own voice, talks of the bloody samurai history of the village, its traditions, its tryst with subsequent violence and massacres, and the past events leading to the story Tatsuya will narrate in the rest of the book. But, had Yokomizo done the entire narration, would he have altered the order in which the events were presented to ensure a better flow in comparison to Tatsuya's jerky but strictly chronological attempt to do the same? Would he have increased the participation of Kindaichi and Isokawa in key moments by revealing where and how the investigators came across decisive clues and the lines of deduction they pursued? Would he have provided illustrations/maps for the labyrinthine cave to serve as a companion to the poems that point out the landmarks but do not illuminate much otherwise? Above all, would he have judiciously managed the flow of necessary information to the readers so that they would get a fair shot at cracking the mystery, instead of Tatsuya's approach that invites readers to share his sense of befuddlement at the ever-deepening mysteries, only for them to be naturally resolved at the end?

Of course, there's no conceivable way to know the answers now—just like the many victims and the mysteries of the village of Eight Graves and its caves, these have also been buried forever in the sands of time. 

Soji Shimada's Bloody Christmas Gifts

This post comes more than a month late—I had initially planned to put this up on Christmas day, 2021. But, being part of a travel-magazine team and some COVID-19-related complications ensured that things rarely happened according to plan over the past few months.

Anyway, in 2018 and 2019, I encountered what are widely considered to be seminal works for a new generation of Japanese crime-fiction authors (the shin honkaku school that has already been referenced earlier on this blog). Both of them—The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (originally published in 1981 as Senseijutsu Satsujin Jiken or The Astrology Murder Case) and Murder in the Crooked House (published as Naname Yashiki no Hanzai in 1982)—were written by Soji Shimada, and strangely enough, I finished reading both of them on the Christmas days of the respective years. Now, this was not my first stab at Japanese crime fiction, as I had already encountered the Kindaichi and Conan series and a few other titles before this, but it is safe to say that these books together sparked an almost academic interest in this field for me.

At the time I read it, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders ranked among the goriest and bloodiest novels I had the pleasure of reading. It wasn't sufficient that the body count was ridiculously high (seven—no, one may say, eight—victims); seven of these cases involved decapitation and dismemberments. However, it is not the number that is, personally speaking, a point of interest. Instead, it is the purpose of the clever, deliberate and intricate way in which these deeds are carried out that is most intriguing. Works such as Ellery Queen's The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932) and Takagi Akimitsu's The Tattoo Murder Case (1948) also feature sinister acts of a similar kind, but in these two titles, the aim is to obscure, misinform and befuddle investigators, and to make identification impossible which, in turn, ties into issues of alibi, and estimating and establishing the right time and scenes of the crimes. In The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, the dismemberments serve an altogether different, and far more outrageous goal: to create a 'homunculus' out of thin air—considered by many to be the ultimate alchemical achievement.

This, of course, ties into the introductory part of the story featuring the last will and testament of a certain Heikichi Umezawa, an eccentric painter and astrologer who had taken it upon himself to create Azoth, the 'perfect woman' according to alchemical standards. For this purpose, he intends to sacrifice his six nieces and daughters at astrologically determined, precise spots scattered all across Japan. And sure, soon enough, the women chosen by Umezawa are all slaughtered, and parts of their bodies are found at each of the places indicated by his testament. The problem? Even before these murders took place, the would-be culprit (Heikichi) was found murdered in a locked room surrounded by snow.

All of these incidents happened way back in 1936. Forty years later, at the time the book is set, the cases still remain unsolved and have attained a legendary status in Japan, with many books written and numerous theories advanced on the subject. A university professor-cum-astrologer Kiyoshi Mitarai and his friend Kazumi Ishioka come across Heikichi's Azoth manuscript. The details of the three separate cases—Heikichi's death, the murder of Heikichi's stepdaughter and the Azoth slayings—pique the interest of Kiyoshi, who also doubles as an amateur detective from time to time and who makes the bold declaration that he would arrive at the correct conclusion of this unsolved, baffling case within a week, based on the details laid out before him.

And arrive he does! There are some books whose importance cannot be overstated, not based on how likeable and dislikeable the constituent elements but simply because of what they achieve for a particular genre. In due time, such books become yardsticks to retrospectively measure the progress of the genre and often provide instructive threads, themes and tropes for future authors to replicate or develop in their own fashion. The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is one such book. No doubt, there are a number of inexcusable treatments in this book, especially in the manner in which it treats the characters, especially the female ones. You can even argue that there's a fair amount of 'character assassination' involved (both literally and figuratively) whereby the characters are fed as cannon fodder and treated as mere pieces in a larger puzzle game. In that respect, the book lacks a certain sense of humanity at its core, and the players, both old and new, all show their nastiest traits and rigid dogmatic views at different sections. Worst of all, the abysmal treatment of the cast only largely furthers the purpose of trying to make the culprit a more sympathetic figure. It is also a dig at the tropes and conventions of the social school of mystery writing which was all the rage and which Shimada was trying to overturn when he wrote this book. Be that as it may, there's no doubt that the pathetic portrayal of characters sticks out like a sore thumb.   

There's equally no denying that the execution of the core mystery plot is exemplary and excellent. There's an ingenious—one may say, even bombastic—false solution to the mystery of the locked-room conundrum in Heikichi's case. However, the real solution has an elegance comparable to those found in Tetsuya Ayukawa's short stories. When it comes to the six Azoth murders, it is unlikely that you will make the correct deduction, despite the two Challenges to the readers from the author. There's a mathematical complexity to Azoth's existence that may not be everyone's cup of tea. What you will experience, though, is the 'aha' moment when all the jigsaw pieces are fitted together to make perfect sense. It is a glorious vindication of Shimada's vision for the novel—it is his and his alone, and he owns it like a virtuoso. There are lessons to be learnt here for budding authors on how to craft a devious puzzle, and it is little wonder that The Tokyo Zodiac Murders paved the way for the birth of the shin honkaku school and its practitioners such as Yukito Ayatsuji and Alice Arisugawa, among many others, in a major way.

***

If The Tokyo Zodiac Murders was all about the excellence of execution of an intricate, complicated puzzle, it is the brilliant central premise of Murder in the Crooked House (Shimada's second novel) that I have the highest regard for.

Murder in the Crooked House is, in essence, a mansion mystery—one that makes use of architectural features and functions more prominently than in its Western counterparts. The Crooked Mansion (or the Ice Floe Mansion) lies somewhere on the edge of a desolate cliff overlooking the icy Okhotsk Sea— a setting and location not entirely unreminiscent of End House in Agatha Christie's Peril at End House. The mansion itself is mazy but with no special features such as hidden panels and secret passages. It however has a special feature. The windows to the north and south are what one normally finds, but those on the east and west have had their frames built to run parallel to the ground outside. And since the mansion is situated on an incline, the visitors feel like "a hard-boiled egg that has been dropped on the floor" and "is trying to roll uphill", much to the amusement of the mansion's owner, Kozaburo Hamamoto, the President of Hama Diesel. There is an adjoining tower built of glass—an exact replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa with the same tilt—that houses Hamamoto's room and is connected to the main mansion by a drawbridge. At the foot of the tower is a strangely shaped flower garden.

Hamamoto invites a select circle of friends consisting of fellow businesspeople, their wives and secretaries and a few college students to this property for Christmas and New Year. At the party, he also promises the hand of his daughter Eiko to the one who is able to unravel the meaning of the flower garden's layout and design. However, strange incidents start to plague the gathering. A guest sees a long wooden stake in an ice field in the middle of a snow blizzard when earlier there had been none. Another visitor is scared out of her wits by scraping metallic sounds on the ceiling of her room on the topmost floor and a grotesque, unearthly face appearing on one of the windows of the same room. The next day, Hamamoto and his company are shocked to find the corpse of one of the guests in a locked storeroom, his body twisted at an unnatural angle and one of his wrists tied to the foot of the bed. On the way to the room, they also encounter the damaged remains of a life-sized puppet-like doll, the Golem, which Hamamoto had purchased in erstwhile Czechoslovakia.

The police are called to the scene, but they prove to be none the wiser. Even worse, another mysterious death happens under their watch in a locked room. More attacks on the remaining guests happen. As a last resort, the police decide to call in Kiyoshi Mitarai, a man they deem fit to solve a case such as this.

Unlike The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, Murder in the Crooked House unfolds in real time. The result is a welcome urgency that allows one to witness Mitarai being forced to take sly steps to resolve the matter as soon as possible. This is much unlike The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, where all you see is Mitarai mostly talking to people about past events and then drawing his conclusions based on those conversations. Here though, Mitarai, omniscient and omnipotent though he is in both novels, is a far more active participant even though he appears pretty late in the picture.

Admittedly, the scale and scope of Mitarai's second adventure is far less stunning and impressive—no cut-up bodies or an Azoth-like apparition emerging out of nowhere. The circle of suspects is also very compact. And due to the mechanics of the murders, especially the second (one that reminds me, incidentally, of a Detective Conan episode involving scores of masks and a knife), the whodunnit aspect isn't really a draw. In fact, once you are aware of the central trick employed, the culprit becomes fairly obvious as no one else except that person could have committed it.

For me, three things stand out in Murder in the Crooked House: the way architecture plays an integral role in the events of the novel, the howdunnit aspect of the second murder and the absolutely-nuts central premise of the work. An expensive mansion and tower existing for the sole purpose of murdering a person to honour a promise made to a deceased friend speaks of a directness of thought and approach that is hard not to appreciate. This directness is also reflected in the straightforward path taken by the murder weapon, during the second case, from its source to the intended target. Interestingly enough, all the complexities in the mansion's layout and myriad features (including the wall of masks in the Tengu Room) are only present as accessories and tools to emphasise the singular directness of the aim and intent behind it all. It would seem as though Shimada built the entire novel around a single trick—but what an innovative, awe-inspiring trick that is.

***

Retrospective studies and analyses of Japanese crime fiction often cite these books as turning points in the genre's history in Japan. They may not have been popular when they were published, but the greatest vindication of their virtues has been the emergence of a new sub-genre (shin honkaku) and generations of writers who continue to take notes from or look to them for inspiration and guidance. Sure, both of Shimada's books are flawed reads, and critically so in many respects. However, there is no denying either that decades after they were published, the tenets laid down in these books still act as guideposts and beacons for readers and writers in a country well-known for its involvement and contributions to crime fiction—and for a global audience as well, now that they are in translation. One wishes for more works from Shimada's massive oeuvre to be introduced the world over.      

Hard Times

If there is one year I wouldn't want to relive in the future, it would probably be 2021. The deaths of dear friends and numerous casualties among my near and dear ones owing to COVID-19, some recurring health issues (both physical and mental)—this year, the losses have been too many to count and bear.

By November, I thought I had left all of these behind, but then came the calling of a new job and, with it, the shift to a new city that left me severely ill. Settling at a new place and figuring out the logistics of my new workplace also took up a fair amount of time, as a result of which I wasn't able to pay any attention, whatsoever, to this blog for a month-and-a-half.

Amidst all these hardships, I suppose I owe a debt of gratitude to one of the most hilarious parodic one-shot mystery manga I have had the pleasure of reading which brightened many a dull and dreary evening. Kumeta Kōji's Shitauke Tantei Nokori Kasuhiro (The Cases of Contract Detective Nokori Kasuhiro: Foreign Student in a Locked Room) was the first entry in a collaboration series between art magazines Mephisto and Magazine on the theme of 'locked rooms'. Kōji is well known for his work on Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, a manga series with a suicidal teacher as the protagonist (and his 'students' as the cast), known for its whimsical absurdism, running gags, dark humour, literary references as well as the eccentric analysis of Japanese society and culture.

Kōji's brand of morbid humour and his use of running gags are made evident in this one-shot manga at the very outset of Shitauke Tantei Nokori Kasuhiro. Kasuhiro Nokori is introduced as a contract detective who takes up cases that are simply too 'annoying' for other well-known detectives such as Conan, Kindaichi and Sherdock to solve. It is his assistant Shiyori Jigo who accepts the case the great Nokori will solve within 20-odd pages. From here on, Kōji pokes fun at crime fiction tropes and conventions in side-splitting fashion. To achieve this, Kōji 'elevates' the tropes and conventions to ridiculous, parodic extremes. For instance, in the narration of Kasuhiro's achievements, Shiyori mentions 'legendary' cases which Kasuhiro has solved by (i) making a hundred round trips of the same train route, (ii) adopting a De Niro-like approach and losing 20 kilograms of weight to solve an incident that happened via an opening too narrow for anyone to pass through, and (iii) diving into a barrel of grated yam that left the detective filling itchy for the following two months. Then, there's the introduction of the stock inspector character, who rules everything as a suicide and is thus named 'suicide officer' Shintarou Mizukara.

Perhaps, even more ludicrous is the setting of the locked room. Surely, it has to go into the annals of crime fiction as the largest locked room—a square, five-kilometre-by-five-kilometre room where the victim, the suspect, the witness and the murder weapon lying at each of the four corners of this gigantic room. At this point, Nokori starts to realise why the other detectives may have given up on this case (there's a hidden meaning to this, though, and things are not what they may seem at first glance), and indeed, it is possible for one to feel sorry for the detective having to travel to each corner and back, multiple times, to connect the threads of information gleaned from the respective corners. But Kōji never lets go of his sense of humour, and the way he portrays the deduction scenes, especially how a 'runner's high' helps solve the case, will more likely leave you doubling up in laughter than feeling sorry.

Ladies and gentlemen, the world's largest literary locked room, courtesy Kumeta Kōji and Shitauke Tantei Nokori Kasuhiro

But, laughs aside, Shitauke Tantei Nokori Kasuhiro is an extremely competent mystery with a killer ending, even though it may may seem to come slightly out of left field. Admittedly, the clueing and background information are a bit lacking, but there's only that much you can do within 20 pages. These shortcomings are more than compensated by the first-class deception and misdirection that leads directly into the devastating ending which hits the reader like a ton of bricks. What impresses me most about this one-shot is that nearly all the visual elements (the settings, the characters, the material evidences) that are so ruthlessly parodied also hide sinister meanings and implications behind their apparently ludicrous presence. One can sense Kōji's love and faithfulness towards the parody and crime genres, and it is to his immense credit that he is able to successfully merge the two in such a packed space. Ultimately, he pulls off a sensational and brilliant subversion of the locked room sub-genre using the duality of the synergistic elements he portrays—one where the mystery 'inside' the room matters little in comparison to what's happened 'outside' the room, even though the clues to realise the 'outside' events are all locked 'inside' the massive room.

In the last page, Kōji mentions that he would have loved to make this into a series, but this one-shot already seems to be the last chapter. A lost opportunity, I am sure, for us crime-fiction lovers, but I can sense a kind of resonance between my blog's plight and Kōji's unfulfilled manga series featuring the eccentric Kasuhiro Nokori. Moving forward, I am not sure how regular I will be with my writing on this blog, but as long as fulfilling reads such as Shitauke Tantei Nokori Kasuhiro come to my notice, there is always hope. Never say never, as they say.