Burning Down the House (Part I)

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.

The Devil May Care

Observing the similarities between four unlikely, disparate works of crime fiction—Edogawa Rampo's Nisen doka (Two-Sen Copper Coin, 1923) and Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) on one hand and Rampo's Inju (The Devil in the Shadow, 1928) and Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1930) on the other—Sari Kawana states that these commonalities "question the myth of direct influence in that occasionally what appears to be the result of direct influence is in fact the consequence of the permutation of similar generic rules." She goes on to say, " ... the sequence of events suggests that Rampo and Christie detected the same generic convention and decided to permute it in the same way, making a conscious choice to exploit the naivete of such an assumption and using it to entertain readers" and that " ... the case of Rampo and Christie calls for a new way of looking at various formalist literatures and cross-cultural literary inspiration and encourages the willingness to go beyond the existent hierarchy of influence and de-emphasize originality and priority."

Concerning Rampo and Hammett, Kawana states the following: " ... the striking similarity between Hammett's and Rampo's works should be viewed as evidence potentially pointing to at least two theories. From the standpoint of social history, it can serve as another piece of evidence potentially what critics Yoshimi Shun'ya and Harry D. Harootunian have called sekai dojisei (global simultaneity), the emergence of a global culture to which the United States, Europe, and Japan belonged.

Another more formalist explanation would be that Hammett and Rampo, both students of the formulas and techniques of detective fiction, arrived at the same conclusion via different paths. ... "

The truth, when it comes to the evolution of Japanese crime fiction, perhaps lies somewhere in between. While the theory of global simultaneity holds firm, especially during the Inter-War period, there's also no denying that Japanese crime-fiction authors did, unabashedly, look to the West for influence and even inspiration after World War II. Seishi Yokomizo, long considered a doyen of crime fiction in the Japanese literary world, perfectly illustrates this in The Honjin Murders, where the unnamed narrator tries to think of any western counterparts to the case he is about to introduce to the readers—John Dickson Carr's The Plague Court Murders, Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Chamber, S. S. Van Dine's Canary Murder Case and Kennel Murder Case, Royal Scarlett's Murder among the Angells, among others. But, he then concludes that this case is not at all similar to these illustrious works—an admission that suggests that The Honjin Murders is not a plagiarised work. Yokomizo then presents a work that is uniquely Japanese in essence, but which curiously enough "neither declares nor refutes its uniqueness"—an observation made evident by the narrator's comment that the culprit may have read the aforementioned books and used their elements to their advantage. 

The fact that Yokomizo openly admits to his inspirations (the narrator, in the end, says that they learnt to deceive the readers by taking hints from Agatha Christie's works) hints at a new way of dealing with the originality/unoriginality debate that rages on even today in the world of crime fiction. In the book, Yokomizo merely uses some tricks (they would have been common and popular knowledge among crime-fiction aficionados at that time) to explore new avenues and to further develop his own plot. It is a stratagem fraught with risks (especially when it comes to the degree to which you can 'borrow' and 'be inspired' in such a way), but for a self-respecting, clever writer, such an approach can be useful.

For the observant reader, on the other hand, pinpointing these unconventional points of intersection between works separated by space and time can be instructive. Moreover, with the benefit of hindsight and a retrospective lens, one is likely to come across more instances of twinning in detective fiction, many of which can be completely accidental. For instance, one wouldn't usually speak of Carr's The Crooked Hinge (1938) and Yokomizo's Akuma ga Kitarite Fue wo Fuku (The Devil Comes Playing His Flute, 1951–1953) in the same breath. And yet, the 'similarities' between the two definitely deserve a closer look.

Automatons, Satanism, The Tichborne Claimant, The Titanic, Witchcraft

At the core of the devilish proceedings in Carr's The Crooked Hinge lies an impersonation inspired by the infamous Tichborne case in the 1870s, where an Australian butcher by the name of Arthur Orton unsuccessfully tried to lay claim to the Tichborne baronetcy impersonating the deceased Roger Tichborne, after the other heir (Alfred Tichborne) had passed away. In Carr's work, the peace and quiet of a Kentish village is broken with the arrival of a certain Patrick Gore, who claims to be the true inheritor of Farnleigh Close, an ancient mansion currently occupied by Sir John Farleigh (a title Gore also lays claim to), his wife Molly, their butler Knowles and a small housekeeping stuff.

As was the case with Arthur Orton and Roger Tichborne, the intriguing bit is that Gore and Farnleigh do not resemble each other at all in their facial looks. However, during the inquest to determine the legimitacy of the real Sir Farnleigh, it transpires that both 'claimants' are privy to facts that only the real deal would know. And really wild facts they are: turns out there was a 'role-reversal' on the sinking Titanic that was carried out so successfully that no party on either side of the Atlantic was able to notice the deception—'Patrick Gore' landed in a circus troupe in America after being rescued from the Titanic while 'Sir John Farnleigh' inherited the mansion and married his childhood sweetheart. It is in the midst of a break in these proceedings that the current occupant of the mansion, Sir John Farnleigh, has his throat slashed and is found floating in a pool surrounded on all sides by a five-feet border of sand and thick hedges that block its view. It is witnessed by three separate people all of whom claim to have seen no one in Farnleigh's vicinity. At the same time, a thumbograph recording the fingerprints of both Farnleigh and Gore is stolen from the library.

At this point, in comes Dr Fell after being apprised of the developments. Things start moving at a feverish pace henceforth, and Carr lays it very thick, especially with the atmosphere which is menacing, infernal and has a touch of Death Watch (an earlier Dr Fell novel) to it. An automaton suddenly brought to life, the Golden Hag (modelled after Maelzel's Chess Player), scares the living hell out of a housekeeper and then tumbles down the stairs from the topmost floor almost killing Dr Fell. Rumours of satanism and witchcraft start making the rounds, and the damaged automaton later reappears at the doorstep of a neighbour, also managing to 'orchestrate' the unsuccessful shooting of a bullet at one of the characters. Dr Fell, however, plays his own game, managing to unravel the truth and also present a false, exaggerated solution to lure the weak link (surprise, surprise, it's the butler!) into making a confession of what really happened and his role in it all.

Probably, only an imagination as fertile as Carr's could have come up with a plot that manages to tie together elements as far removed from each other as automatons, the Titanic, the Tichborne Claimant, witchcraft and Satanism.  Regretfully, though, this is one of those efforts where the individual components outshine the sum and combined effect of all of the parts. There are many incredibly attractive plot threads that end on disappointing notes. The fake Patrick Gore's (and in turn, Carr's) explanation of the operation of the automaton, for instance, has often been considered to be dodgy and suspect, especially as it seems to echo Edgar Allan Poe's mistaken ideas on how the Maelzel Chess Player actually functioned. More importantly, the conclusion makes the very addition of the automaton feel cheap, almost like a cop-out—especially as it only exists to scare a character from accidentally making a discovery the significance of which they may not even realise, while the automaton's second appearance feels worse than an afterthought, and is incredibly childish and damning for the perpetrators given their 'satanic' credentials. The digressions on witchcraft, illusionist practices, Satanism sometimes feel too contrived and overwhelm the central narrative too much in the name of atmosphere—all of which are effectively rendered null and void by the killer's epistolary admission to Dr Fell. 

I am equally torn about the solution to the murder of Sir John Farnleigh. I absolutely love the completely-bonkers, didn't-see-it-coming aspect to it, especially as it plays upon our perceptions of height and how one can 'disguise' themselves taking advantage of these perceptions. At the same time, it comes across as a convenient deus ex machina without sufficient clueing prior to its revelation—and even with the clues observed by Dr Fell, it will be quite the stretch for you to identify the exact contraption used (or not) to make the illusion possible. And even though I find the reason to how three witnesses were cheated satisfactory (if not a bit too dependent on luck), there's one major problem with the solution. It fails to help me envision how the culprit escaped from the pond without leaving any print whatsoever on the five-feet border of sand surrounding it on all sides. That must have been a miraculous achievement, given what the killer suffered from. And as they say, in crime fiction, even miracles need to have a rational basis. Sadly, I could find none in this case in which these prints could have been a dead giveaway and a major setback for the culprit early on.

Japanese Nobility, Seances, The Devil, The Teigin Incident, Three-Fingered Clues

Much like The Crooked Hinge, Yokomizo's Akuma ga Kitarite Fue o Fuku has a real-life incident in its backdrop—the 1948 Teigin case, in which a person masquerading as a public health official poisoned 16 employees of the Imperial Bank in Toshima, Tokyo by telling them that he was inoculating them against an outbreak of dysentery. Twelve people died as a result, while the killer made off with 16,000 yen.

As with The Crooked Hinge, impersonation plays a critical role in this work as well—here, in the form of a strong facial resemblance between two important characters. Apparently, Yokomizo was inspired to write the novel when a fellow writer confessed that his face closely resembled that of the alleged culprit, going by the killer's composite picture released by the police. For his part, Yokomizo kept most of this setting intact, only replacing the bank with a jewellery store called Tengindo.

To read the novel though, one needs to have a thorough grasp of Japanese as it hasn't been translated yet. The best you can probably do, if you are unable to read the book, is to watch a 2018 adaptation (a TV special) by NHK, a Japanese broadcasting agency (this shoddy print exists on YouTube). Side note: this is only one of the several adaptations over the decades; I personally prefer the late 1970s episodes (with Ikko Furuya in the lead), a subbed version of which once used to come up on  YouTube, but alas, that's gone.

Hidetaka Yoshioka as Kindaichi

Anyway... Master sleuth Kosuke Kindaichi receives a most unusual request from one Mineko Tsubaki: to investigate the death of her father, Viscount Tsubaki, and to find out if he is actually deceased or not. As it turns out, a few months ago, acting on an anonymous tip-off, the police took the Viscount into their custody on suspicion of having committed murders and an enormous robbery at the Tengindo jewellery store in Tokyo. He is eventually released; strangely enough, he soon commits suicide, but not before cryptically warning his daughter (both verbally and in a note) that 'the shame is too much for him to bear', that 'in the Tsubaki mansion, the devil resides', and that 'the devil comes, playing his flute'. He spends his last few days playing the eerie tunes of his last composition on his flute. The spark for Mineko's visit to Kindaichi, however, is the fact that a few days ago, the mistress of the mansion (Mineko's mother, Akiko) and a servant (Mishima Totaro) both claimed to have seen the deceased viscount in a packed theatre. Kindaichi thus finds himself invited to a seance (to be conducted at the behest of Akiko) at the Tsubaki mansion, where the participants will try to communicate with the deceased patriarch.

If this foreboding atmosphere reeks of the devil (in essence, almost reminiscent of the inquest scene at Farnleigh Close in The Crooked Hinge), it's a fitting one. For, the seance, aided by two blackouts, literally summons the symbol of the devil on the table where it is being conducted! At the same time, the sinister tones of Viscount Tsubaki's float into the seance room, sending everyone into a frenzy. And all this is only the beginning of an extremely complicated case, as, the very next morning, Mineko's uncle (Count Tamamushi) is found murdered inside the locked seance room.

At the scene of the seance

Both in The Crooked Hinge and in Akuma ga Kitarite Fue wo Fuku, readers and viewers are assailed by the sense that most of the characters are floundering in fathomless darkness, in the sense that they are unable to truly get a grip on whatever's happening around them. But, in the latter's case, the real 'heart of darkness' concealed by layers and years of deception and depravity is sufficient to drive any sane person truly insane. This dark, depressing potential is supposedly never fully realised in the novel (which ends on a hopeful note), but the 2018 adaptation is more than happy to emphasise these elements in the extreme, especially with the wholesale changes it makes in the long concluding stretch, and will you leave you feeling absolutely hollow at the end of it all (for a comprehensive list of the differences between the novel and this adaptation, head over here).

Things happen in this TV special, and a lot of them too—more murders, including one far from Tokyo that has a direct bearing on the case, a lot of past history for which Kindaichi has to travel elsewhere, a disappearing flute case, a part of the Tengindo loot suddenly reappearing, words disappearing from a stone lantern (the equivalent to the automaton incident in The Crooked Hinge, in my opinion), among others. But this is not an action movie by any stretch of the imagination—on the contrary, most of it consists of Kindaichi striking up conversations with people that later provide valuable insights into the case.

Still, the clues are littered throughout the episode in a way that never leaves you bored. For example,  linguistic differences—the subtle difference in the way common words are pronounced in different regional dialects (facts Kindaichi gleans while conversing with people)—help the ace detective figure out whodunnit. It is also a great example of how a single word and its correct interpretation can completely turn a mystery on its head. Above all, rarely will one come across such a glaring, in-your-face dying message that remains so cunningly hidden till the end—Viscount Tsubaki's last musical score that Kindaichi comes to understand, at the very end, would have helped him realise who the perpetrator was at the very beginning and thereby prevent all the murders. Tragic indeed.

Unlike The Crooked Hinge, none of these diverse elements are irrelevant to the central mysteries. There's a synergy between all the events (something that is lacking somewhat in The Crooked Hinge) that makes for a linear, intense storyline. And this adaptation focuses most on the motive aspect, with a nearly hour-long conclusion. The locked room is explained in a matter of minutes (not counting the false solution proposed in the opening stretch), demonstrated in a comic, matter-of-fact way, and so is the explanation of how the devil's symbol appeared on the seance table (a clever switching identical-looking, 'twin' statues at an opportune moment). Kindaichi himself points out that he would not be able to come to the truth as long as he thought about 'how' or 'why', he needed to know 'what': what really happened in Count Tamamushi's villa in Kobe during the summer of that year long ago?

Kindaichi visits the stone lantern at the site of Count Tamamushi's ruined summer palace in Kobe. The devil was born here

The incident (or incidents) at the heart of the affair is truly horrific (nauseating would be an understatement) and, aided by complicated happenings later on, adequately explains why the relations between nearly all of the characters are so insanely complicated, frankly unbelievable (in this aspect, it resembles Victorian-era novels with long, intricate family trees). There are two aspects to this that I particularly like. One is that the motive directly ties in with the themes Yokomizo explores in his work: namely, the sheer depravity of the Japanese nobility, the bottomless depths of this depravity, the nobility's fraught relations with the lower classes and the detrimental effects of this relation, as well as the ways in which World War II acted as the great leveller that erased Japanese aristocracy and brought them to the level of commoners.   

The second aspect I admire is that not even the culprit is aware of the exact 'what' that motivates and guides his revenge against the Tsubaki family and its full implications. It is the misguided nature of his life and his actions that adds a tragic edge to the already overwhelming darkness (as if that alone wasn't enough). One will find it within themselves to sympathise with this devilish criminal drowning in the blood of people for the longest time without respite. This outburst of sympathy is also due, in large part, to the superb portrayal of Kindaichi who comes across as this pathos-inducing, gentle detective who hesitates and tries his best to conceal the devastating truth to those who would be affected by it the most, only to reveal it which then precipitates the last tragedy, denying the detective any form of solace. 

As Kindaichi remarks several times during his deduction, "In a person's quest to know everything, he tends to lose sight of the truth." It is a fitting epithet, indeed, for this adaptation.

***

This has turned into quite the long rant on what I essentially started on a whim and some surface-level thinking on two works I encountered a few months ago. It also probably explains why it reads quite disjointed and on rereading it, I am no longer sure that I have adequately achieved what I set out to. However, this is an exercise I am willing to continue. So, expect more of such comparative studies of 'detective twins'—hopefully, with better and well-thought out selections.