The translations of classic Japanese crime fiction works which Pushkin Vertigo has been publishing in recent years is a veritable goldmine for aficionados and scholars to dig into. If not anything else, these works provide a glimpse into how a genre originating (allegedly) in the West came, first, to be adopted in the Far East, and then developed its own identity in myriad ways, informed primarily by the contemporary social and cultural realities in the eras they are placed in. I find myself particularly fascinated by the novels of Akimitsu Takagi and Seishi Yokomizo, two doyens of the mystery genre in Japan, whose novels often openly acknowledge influences from classic Western works but then go on to transcreate the essence of their inspirations, by moulding highly original stories boasting of a unique Japanese identity. Interestingly enough, the early works of Yokomizo and Takagi, both written in the post-World War II era, seem to take on similar themes, the treatments of which circle around, but never quite intersect with, each other.
The demise of entire families or lineages—often in the most violent and abnormal ways imaginable—is one of the themes the aforesaid writers seem to be preoccupied with. There are a number of reasons that may account for this fixation on part of the authors. The American Occupation of Japan between 1945 and 1952 irrevocably changed the social, cultural, political, and economic fabric of the country. The army was disarmed and demobilised, wartime public officials were excluded ('purged') from public offices, wartime criminals were put on trial at the Tokyo War Crimes tribunal, while the Emperor himself denounced his divine status. It is no wonder then that the works of Yokomizo, in order to portray the intense turmoil and churn of the times, use the figure of the disfigured, disembodied, demobbed soldier (having served in the colonies) returning home, only to roam aimlessly in search of their families or a place to belong to. Furthermore, the 1947 Constitution of Japan abolished the erstwhile kazoku (a system of hereditary peerage under the Empire of Japan), as a result of which the nobles, princes, dukes, viscounts, barons and marquesses were all stripped of their titles and the privileges that came along with it. The decade between 1945–1955 was, therefore, marked as much by decadence, futility and a loss of purpose, as it was by a fierce clash between newly emerging and traditional world orders—something that both Takagi and Yokomizo use, often to varying degrees and effects.
Yokomizo's Akuma ga kitarite fue o fuku (serialised between 1951 and 1953, translated as The Devil's Flute Murders, and published by Pushkin Vertigo in 2023) chronicles the tragic downfall of the once-proud and noble Tsubaki family:
The Tsubaki family was a noble one, and one of the most prominent of the old aristocratic lines, but it had produced no notable members since the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and although the family had received titles from the Imperial family, their yearly stipend had dwindled. In Hidesuke’s youth they had been reduced to poverty, and he himself had struggled to maintain the basic appearance necessary for a man of his station. He had been saved by his marriage to a member of the Shingu family.
What saved the Tsubakis from complete ruin is the Viscount Hidesuke Tsubaki's 'marriage of convinience' to Akiko Shingu—the Shingus being "peers of the old feudal daimyo lineage" who were "famous for their wealth". The marriage was a strange, mismatched one, and inexplicable to the Viscount himself who had often wondered why Akiko's maternal uncle, the Count Tamamushi, "would assent to letting his darling niece marry a man such as him". After all, Hidesuke "had apparently lacked the vitality necessary to deal with all the changes and turmoil rocking Japanese society at the time", instead spending time on extending his mastery over the flute, while Count Tamamushi "had always remained a powerful political force in the shadows", despite not being a minister himself. The firebombing of Tokyo spares the Tsubakis' mansion, but brings together a lot of combustible elements from branch families of the Shingus under one roof—the Count Tamamushi and his mistress Kikue, and the entire Shingu household, consisting of Toshihiko Shingu (Akiko's brother, "who filled his life with liquor, women and golf" and was regarded by Count Tamamushi as "a true figure of [the] nobility), his wife and son.
The fuse to this powder-keg of a situation is lit, seemingly, not through the internal machinations of this disjointed household, but from an unexpected external source. Yokomizo relies on a real-life case—the robbery-cum-mass-murder at a branch of the Imperial Bank (Teikoku Ginkō, aka Teigin), Tokyo, in 1948—to set in motion the chain of events in The Devil's Flute Murders (which are, however, set in 1947). Acting on an anonymous tip, the police summon Viscount Hidesuke due to his strong resemblance with a montage photo (or a composite photo) of the culprit which they had released. The viscount is later set free due to lack of evidence, but he disappears, nearly two months after the events of the Teigin Case. A month-and-half later, Hidesuke's body is discovered in the faraway Nagano Prefecture. It is established that he had committed suicide, but not all is as it seems as Hidesuke's presence is seen and felt by Akiko during a visit to the theatre, a few months after the former's death. And, thus it is that in the month of September 1947 that Hidesuke's daughter, Mineko, visits the private detective Kosuke Kindaichi to request his help in finding out whether her father is dead or alive. What Kindaichi finds, instead, over the course of the novel, is a whole lot of skeletons buried in the closets of the Tsubakis, Shingus and Tamamushis—miserable secrets that force the chronicler of Kindaichi's adventures to significantly postpone its publication:
In truth, I should have written about this case before two or three other Kindaichi adventures I have published in the last few years. The reason it comes so late is that Kindaichi was reluctant to reveal its secrets to me, and that was mostly likely because he was afraid that unveiling the unrelenting darkness, twisted human relationships and bottomless hatred and resentment within might discomfit readers.
The opening act of this 'tragedy in three acts' unfolds with two significant events. The first is the revelation of the two 'legacies' left behind by Viscount Hidesuke. One of them is an enigmatic letter to his daughter:
Dear Mineko,
Please, do not hold this act against me. I can bear no more humiliation and disgrace. If this story comes to light, the good name of the Tsubaki family will be cast into the mud. Oh, the devil will indeed come and play his flute. I cannot bear to live to see that day come.
My Mineko, forgive me.
The second piece of legacy is Hidesuke's last contribution to the world of music—a sinister composition titled "The Devil Comes and Plays His Flute", based on Doppler’s flute song “Fantaisie Pastorale Hongroise”, and which would play a vital role in the unravelling of whodunnit.
The second significant event is the divination ceremony held in the Tsubaki house the day after Mineko's visit to Kindaichi. The ceremony held is unlike seances in the West, instead sharing resemblances with Japan's "kokkuri-san" divination and sand divination, as noted by Kindaichi. Needless to say, a number of events happen in quick succession before, during, and after the ceremony—not unlike the opening stretches of Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit. The house is plunged into darkness, footsteps are heard from the unoccupied, former room of the Viscount, the ceremony goes sideways when the image of a kaendaiko (or flaming drum), eerily matching the birthmark on Toshihiko Shingu's shoulder (a later revelation), is found engraved on the sand in the divination apparatus, and the haunting notes of "The Devil Comes and Plays His Flute" are heard immediately after the end of the divination. As if this isn't enough, the Count Tamamushi is found dead the next morning in the locked "Western-styled" room with its "long ventilation window or ranma" where the divination had been held the previous night. Preliminary investigations by Kindaichi and his friend, Chief Inspector Todoroki, reveal that the count had been beaten with a statue and then strangled with a scarf. Some other incidents—a missing statue, a jewel stolen in the Teigin case ending up in Viscount Tsubaki's flute case, and a typewriter with a particular peculiarity—amp up the mystery quotient in this section to a fever pitch.
The commencement of the second act marks a tonal departure from the preceding section, as Kindaichi travels to the west to follow in the footsteps of Hidesuke's final days, and unravel the singular mystery behind why he took his own life and left the aforementioned, ambiguous letter to his daughter. Personally, I quite like this section as it unfolds in the form of a travel narrative where Kindaichi indulges in conversations with people from different stratas of society—from inn owners, domestic helps, craftspeople, temple priests and prostitutes, all the way up to former aristocrats. Also, the pictures Yokomizo paints of the countryside in these sections are tinted with a sense of nostalgia, of places, faces and figures lost to the vagaries of time and war:
The one saving grace, he found, was that the Three Spring Garden Inn was not one of the shady new-built inns, aimed at couples looking for some brief privacy, that had proliferated after the war—the ones with the fake onsen, hot spring signs. Rather, it was a grand old lodge with a long history—as well as wide gables to keep the rain off—and a calm atmosphere.
Kobe had been heavily bombed in the war, and the district of Suma itself was mostly burnt out, but the area around Sumadera temple had been largely spared. These few old, miraculously surviving buildings standing in that heavy autumn rain served as faint reminders of better days long gone. The Three Spring Garden Inn was itself a serene testament to those days, as well.
Or, take, for instance, the section where Kindaichi discovers the former villa of Count Tamamushi:
At this, Kindaichi shook his head and looked around like he was waking from a dream.
He saw a stretch of about two and a half acres of scorched land spread out in front of him. It looked like a brick wall or something similar had been up on the hillside where they stood, but it was completely burnt away, and now all that was left was bare land. No buildings, no trees; nothing was left. Nothing, except for the stone lamp that Okami-san had mentioned. It, too, had been scorched white by the flames, and now it stood forlorn in the autumn dusk.
[...]
At the bottom, they stepped out into an overgrown field piled with charred tiles and other rubble. The red heads of knotweed, damp from the rain, danced like waves in the breeze on their long stalks. Osumi and Kindaichi trudged through them, the hems of their kimonos soaking up the damp, heading towards the lantern.
Once, this garden must have been a wonderful place. The layout of the land, with the pond and hill, and the remaining garden stones, gave a hint of its past glory, though now it was nothing more than a dismal ruin.
Or, the description of Akashi Port:
The rain had lifted, but clouds still hung low and dark in the sky, and the waves on the leaden sea at Akashi Port were running high.
The port was shaped like a coin purse with its mouth facing south. At its back were two piers, each about thirty feet long and seemingly made of old ship parts, jutting out over the filthy, debris-covered seawater. The Bantan Line steamships bound for Iwaya used one pier, and the other was for Marusei Line ships sailing around the Awaji route.
Rain-battered fishing boats were clustered around the roots of the piers, rocking like cradles on the heavy swells. One rather elegant lighthouse still stood at the mouth of the port. Awaji Island rose beyond it like an ink painting.
The eastern half of Akashi and Kobe city had survived relatively untouched through the war and still had some old houses, but the western half looked to have been completely lost to the fires. Now it was covered with the same slapdash temporary buildings that had spread across most of Japan. None of the beauty that the Suma and Akashi districts had once been famous for was left to be seen.
This is not to say that Kindaichi completely abandons the investigation to indulge in melancholic reflections over the lost Japanese countryside. Rather, the investigation Kindaichi and the young police detective Degawa conduct is of a more intense, intimate and sensitive nature. That is because The Devil's Flute Murders, from the reader's perspective, is not a story where one can employ principles of logic and fair-play to solve it. The core question of "what really happened in the past?" requires one to go along for the ride the author wants the audience to embark upon. On the one hand, in this act, Kindaichi peels layer after layer of the depraved and senses-numbing history of the Tsubakis, Shingus and the Tamamushis, by interacting with a whole host of people, spread across myriad locations, who were connected with these families in the past, however remote that connection might have been. On the other, events unfold in a most thriller-like fashion in real time. A stone lantern with the mysterious but important inscription, "Here, the devil's birthplace", is found defaced the next day. Furthermore, on an island away from the mainland, a hitherto-unintroduced nun called Myokai is murdered before Kindaichi can meet her. As it would later transpire, Myokai, the last person Hidesuke Tsubaki spoke to, was possibly the one living person who could have seen and predicted the plot of a majority of the novel, plain as a map.
Things pick up in the third and concluding act of the story as Kindaichi races back to Tokyo, on being informed about Toshihiko's murder in the hothouse, with his head split open, at a time the culprit, in a premeditated manner, arranged for Toshihiko to be at the crime scene at the right time, away from the sight of others. At the same time, the missing statue makes its reappearance with its base sawn off. Two other murders—that of Toyasaburo Iio, one of the suspects in the Teigin case, and of Akiko Shingu, through poisoning—and a bit of sleuthing involving a confirmation of identity of a particular member of the Tsubaki household hastens the novel towards its conclusion. A very neat and inspired piece of clueing, focusing on the manner in which "The Devil Comes and Plays His Flute" is composed and played, ultimately points to the culprit. By the end of it all, the events of a single summer day in the faraway past lead to four households being effectively wiped out—the Tsubakis, the Shingus, the Tamamushis and the Kawamuras.
As with Death on Gokumon Island, The Devil's Flute Murders suffers from some characteristic, familiar flaws—most prominent of them being the inconsistent and extremely repulsive characterisation. In order to portray the depravity and perverted mindsets of Japanese nobility in its 'sunset years', the main characters in the tragedy—Toshihiko Shingu and Count Tamamushi—are portrayed in a most unpleasant manner, with no redeemable features. Indeed, while it is possible to sympathise, to a degree, with the fate of the Kawamuras, the actions of the elder members of the Shingus and the Tamamushis deserve no such consideration. On the other hand, the women (with the exception of Kikue, perhaps) are mostly relegated to secondary roles, with most of them coming across as victims with barely any agency of their own, whose plight ought to be pitied. Furthermore, a very casual strain of misogyny comes across in certain sections, as is evident in Kindaichi's first impressions of Akiko ("Akiko was certainly beautiful. However, it was the beauty of an artificial flower. She seemed as hollow as a woman in a painting. Akiko’s smile filled her whole face. It was a dazzling, beautiful smile. However, it was one that someone had taught her to make, not one of genuine feeling. Her eyes were pointed at Kindaichi, but they seemed to actually be looking somewhere else, somewhere far away."), or the description of Shino, Akiko's senior lady-in-waiting ("Next to her sat an old woman who was as ugly as any in the world. This must have been Shino, the senior lady-in-waiting who had accompanied Akiko here when she left the Shingu household. [...] Ugliness of such purity and extent is actually not unpleasant. Indeed, it becomes a kind of art at that point. The corrosion of age seemed to have washed all marks of shyness or vanity from her expression, and she stood unabashed in front of guests as if having forgotten her own ugliness, even putting it on display, making it an object of awe. In a way, this woman seemed to have left some elements of human weakness behind."). There is also a section that revolves around linguistics, and differences in local, regional dialects, that comes across as jarring and a bit too obvious in the translation. But perhaps, the most glaring of these shortcomings is a major plot point involving the science of birthmarks, which seems to be quite inaccurate and would require a significant suspension of disbelief for it to be convincing enough.
The strength of the novel is its treatment of its core theme: the decline and demise of the Japanese nobility and aristocracy in the post-World War II era—something Yokomizo was inspired to explore after reading Osamu Dazai's 1947 book, The Setting Sun, as he admits in the story ("This was all before Osamu Dazai wrote his work Setting Sun, about the decline of the aristocratic class after the war, so we did not yet have ready terms like 'the sunset clan' or 'sunset class' to describe these people, newly bereft of their noble privilege and falling into ruin. But, if we had, then I think it likely that this case would have been the first to see the term used."). Along with this, Kindaichi's 'travel journal' in the second act is a welcome addition. Replete with brief but illuminating interactions with numerous characters, these provide a rich study of the lives of people from different social classes, and how they evolved from the pre-War to post-War times. Nicely dovetailing with this are Yokomizo's descriptions of the landscape and activities in the countryside and harbours around Kobe and some islands, with their evocation of what they had lost with the passage of time and two World Wars.
I had briefly touched upon a 2018 adaptation (a TV special) of Akuma ga kitarite fue o fuku in a previous post of mine, where I had argued that a wonderful casting choice and some creative liberties to alter the plot of the book in subtle but major ways led to an incredibly sinister, foreboding and dramatic viewing experience. Having read the translated version of the book now, I would say that the plot-based alterations in the movie were a bit too over the top—the darkness and wickedness in the original novel is quite overwhelming and unpleasant, as it is.
In the second part of Burning Down the House, I hope to discuss Akimitsu Takagi's 1949 novel Nōmen Satsujin Jiken (translated as The Noh Mask Murder, published by Pushkin Vertigo in 2024) as an intriguing companion piece (in some respects) to Yokomizo's The Devil's Flute Murders. Takagi's novel too is not for the faint-hearted—the levels of perversion and evilness seen in The Noh Mask Murder far surpass what one encounters in The Devil's Flute Murders.
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