Night of the Living Dead

The tendency of Japanese mystery authors to fixate on apocalyptic, end-of-the-times themes has much to do with the country's own tryst with bloody conflicts, internecine strife and wars going back decades and centuries. This is visible in the settings and politics of works by prolific wartime authors such as Seishi Yokomizo (taking on the theme of the disfigured individual and society crippled by the Second World War in multiple novels) and Akimitsu Takagi (portraying the seedy underworld in the midst of bombed-out ruins in The Tattoo Murder Case). Images of the war continue to loom large in the works of authors writing a few decades later such as Natsuhiko Kyogoku (with a number of characters in the Kyōgokudō series suffering from post-war PTSD), and in manga series such as The Kindaichi Case Files and Detective School Q (both of which have stories with wartime biological experimentation in their backgrounds). And, if one includes historical crime fiction in the equation, the net has to be cast much wider, travelling further back in time — Honobu Yonezawa's The Samurai and the Prisoner takes place against the backdrop of the siege of the Arioka Castle (1578–1579), while the events of the Boshin Civil War (1868–1869) and the Meiji Restoration play an important role in Fūtarō Yamada's The Meiji Guillotine Murders.

When Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no Satsujin (translated as Death Among the Undead, Locked Room International, 2021) first came out in 2017, it was widely hailed as a much-needed shot in the arm for the shin honkaku sub-genre. As Soji Shimada points out in his insightful introduction to the book's translation, the genre had been showing tendencies similar to the preceding 'social school of mystery fiction'—namely that the sub-genre was restricting and limiting itself too much by sticking religiously to a select few 'golden rules', as a result of which originality was being stifled. Indeed, if one simply glances, at the surface level, the elements the novel introduces and the genres it blends, Shimada's observation is warranted. Yet, as has happened with so many works in the past, Death Among the Undead is also driven by bloody violence, albeit in a modern avatar—a bioterrorist attack.

Imamura clearly loves popular Japanese mystery tropes—a university setting, mystery clubs and an incredibly young cast. In fact, the opening stretches resemble, in essence, Yukito Ayatsuji's groundbreaking novel, The Decagon House Murders. The wry, self-deprecating humour ("It was up for debate whether his 'deductions' could be considered logical, but I did agree that humans do not act as predictably as they do in books.") punctuating sections (such as the one where Shinkō University's Mystery Society members Kyōsuke Akechi and Yuzuru Hamura make idle deductions on the food a girl may order at the cafeteria, or the one where Akechi strikes a 'deal' with real-life detective Hiruko Kenzaki to enter the Film Club's summer trip) makes for easy reading in the early going. All the ingredients indicate a classic, closed-circle setup: the Film Club receiving a threatening letter on who the next 'sacrifice' will be, and all the members of the Film Club going ahead with the trip and gathering at the Villa Violet close to Lake Sabea, with Akechi, Hamura and Kenzaki as the 'invited' guests.

It is here that another thread in the form of a bioterrorist attack at the Sabea Rock Festival nearby collides with this closed-circle setup with the force of a freight train, and transforms the section into a scene straight out of George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Even though the members could hear ambulance sirens since the afternoon and observe an unusual glow from the festival area, it is only during the evening-time Trial of Courage held between the Club members that things are thrown into disarray. By this time, there have been significant casualties, but it is during the main cast's encounter with wandering zombies that the novel acquires a personal touch. Both the Club members as well as Yuzura lose their friends to the horde of zombies wildly stumbling about. They are also forced to retreat into the confines of the Villa Violet, while closing, shuttering up all points of entry and egress, and barricading themselves. The book then purports to unfold as a zombie survival narrative. Or, does it?

The use of zombies to double down on the closed-circle and enforced isolationist aspects of the novel, besides positioning them as potential instruments and perpetrators of murders most foul, can indeed be considered to be revolutionary in textual or literary terms. However, in my view, Death Among the Dead can best be enjoyed as a cinematic experience*. Much of it has to do with how the novel transpires henceforth. First, Imamura carefully outlines the extent of the zombies' capabilities, laying out what they can and cannot do:

"[...] these zombies appeared to have badly-developed motor skills. Their speed of movement on the steps was much slower than on level ground, and they had trouble staying balanced. Any zombie that did somehow manage to make their way up found the barricades in their way, got their feet wrapped up in the sheets and tripped backwards, taking the zombies behind with them in their fall. The process kept repeating itself. [...]"

Despite all the precautions taken based on the collective observations of the gathered people, the following morning, one of the members is found dead in a closed room in a gross manner (with his face gnawed off), slowly transforming into a zombie before the witness' eyes. The victim is 'killed' a second time, before the observers find a note with the words 'let's eat'. This sets off a second wave of revised speculations and discourse on zombies, their abilities, and the process of zombiefication, with conversations on locked room mysteries and their applicability (in the current scenario) thrown in between. Some of the discourse has a surprising philosophical depth (which is, unfortunately, never really followed up on), despite being peppered with pop-cultural references to cult hits in the zombie fiction genre, such as Resident Evil and Shaun of the Dead:

"Zombies are not simply grotesque, horrifying monsters anymore. They are beings that can be used to cast a light on so many themes: the sin of man, economic class differences, the strong and the weak, or the tragedy of how friends and family can turn into enemies in the blink of an eye. Zombies are projections of our own egos and minds."

However, no amount of philosophising, theorising and notes-taking help the survivors prevent two other murders—one on the second night and the other on the morning of the third day. In the second case, the corpse is found with its head smashed to bits in a closed elevator stuck on the second floor of the building, while the third case involved the poisoning of a character in the room he had holed himself up in. In the meantime, the threat of the gathering multitudes of zombies breaking through the barriers put in place has increased exponentially.

So, these three incidents, featuring the involvement of zombies to varying degrees, form the crux of the narrative. The incidents are all explained in a rational manner—and to answer the question I had posed earlier, it is ironic to note that the way the novel unfolds after the introduction of the zombies makes it a celebration of logical and deductive reasoning, with the survival of characters against a zombie outbreak being presented as a consequential byproduct. In particular, I prefer the explanation of the first incident, which has a tragic and pathetic aspect to it, and merges the mystery and horror aspects very well.

Perhaps, it all unfolds a bit too logically and rationally for a reader invested in the setting of the work. The biggest failure here, in my opinion, is that Imamura sorely undersells the psychological impact of the zombie attack on the characters. The fact that they all display too much of a 'calmer heads should prevail, let's wait for help to arrive' attitude, accompanied by an almost placid acceptance of the situation, beggars belief and feels excessively unnatural, artificial and forced by the dictates of the author's plotting preferences and the need to conform to a particular brand of mystery fiction. There's no unpredictability or instinctiveness in the reactions of the characters holed up in Villa Violet in the face of a zombie invasion. Instead, even though the book had previously poked fun at the predictability of characters in fictional works, it all feels too premeditated, predictable and well-rehearsed, like a movie script. What's disappointing is that the zombies are almost peripheral in the central sections of the book, only serving as tools to advance the plot, and the sense of threat emanating from their presence is often severely underplayed. Paradoxically, therefore, the introduction of the zombie element that promised to add a new dimension to the dynamics of the shin honkaku sub-genre ends up restricting the narrative potential by imposing the dictates of a classically-constructed shin honkaku story on to the characters and their reactions that do not seem to be appropriate to the circumstances they face (except for the portion after the denouement leading to the rescue of the remaining characters). What's extremely lacking is a consistent level of panic and nervous/manic energy seen in, say, Frederic Brown's Night of the Jabberwock.

It begs the question: is the inspired use of zombies really essential to Imamura's debut work? Given the larger genre-wide implications it has wrought, the answer is a resounding yes. But, seen in the context of Death Among the Undead specifically, one cannot help but argue that Imamura fails to do justice to or explore the enormous potential of the zombies that he introduces in his fictional universe. Akechi indeed has the final say when he remarks, "... Things don't always go right."

*Thankfully, a 2019 movie version of Death Among the Undead, titled Murder at Shijinso, can be found online. In all respects, it is fairly faithful to the events in the book, but the use of dramatic tropes, some creative liberties and a stylised treatment focusing more on the action and survival elements, makes for a more entertaining, spectacle-filled view that could help one gloss over the identity-based issues one encounters when reading the book.

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 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 that used 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. 

(This post was published on the Scroll website with the following title: Not all Japanese crime fiction is superb, as Seishi Yokomizo’s ‘The Village of Eight Graves’ shows)