Reading post: The Honjin Murders

I have finished my sixth book for the 2022 Classics Challenge: The Honjin Murders by Yokomizo Seishi (translated by Louise Heal Kawai), originally published in 1946. I chose it to fulfill category #6: Mystery/detective/crime classic.

We have now jumped forward in time to the modern era -- post World War II, in fact. Wikipedia says that Yokomizo "faced difficulties in getting his works published due to the wartime conditions," and then in 1946 he published both this book and its sequel, which suggests they might have been written earlier. The book describes a murder that took place in 1937, but the narrator is telling the story some years later, and at the end he mentions what happened to the surviving characters during and after the war. I could imagine that Yokomizo drafted it earlier and updated it after the war. But I don't know.

This book is one of the first I acquired for the Challenge -- it was the only book on my list that I found at the Bookworm. I've been eagerly waiting to read it for several months. After reading and learning more about Japanese literature, though, I began to wonder if I'd chosen the right book. Yokomizo was not the first Japanese crime writer. One of the most famous who preceded him was Hirai Taro, who used the pen name Edogawa Rampo (which sounds like Edgar Allan Poe pronounced with a heavy Japanese accent). Also, Tanizaki Junichiro, who wrote The Makioka Sisters (which will be my next book and which inspired this year of reading Japanese and Japanese-American literature) wrote some works that might be classified as mysteries. So I decided to read a couple of earlier works before reading The Honjin Murders.

First I read Devils in Daylight by Tanizaki (translated by J. Keith Vincent), which was originally published (serialized) in 1918. Tanizaki would have been about 32 at the time and had been publishing for about 7 years. This is considered part of his "early period." Classic English and American mystery stories were very popular in Japan (in translation) at the time, especially the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Devils in Daylight is inspired by "The Gold-Bug" by Poe, and in fact two of the characters write messages to each other using the cypher from "The Gold-Bug." The translator, in his "Afterword," argues that Devils is also inspired by The Tale of Genji -- which I am very glad I began this year by reading, since it has been referenced in some way in every other book I've read so far. I found this story to be mildly diverting, but maybe no more than that. The Poe connection must have been important back in 1918, but I was less excited about it in 2022. I'm not sorry I read this, but it was a minor amusement only.

Next I read a collection of short stories by Edogawa Rampo, Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination (translated by James B. Harris). The stories were originally published between 1924 and 1950, but most in the 1920s. This translation was published in 1956, and apparently Harris worked closely with Rampo, because Harris could not read Japanese and Rampo could not write or speak English (though he could read it, and both could understand each other's spoken languages). Edogawa Rampo was 8 years younger than Tanizaki Junichiro (they both died in 1965), so he would have been around 30 when he started publishing these stories. I should note that I'm writing his name in Western order, family name last, because as noted above, "Edogawa Rampo" is meant to sound like "Edgar Allan Poe," so it functions differently from a typical Japanese name.

Again, these are very Poe-like stories. They seemed -- how can I put this? -- out of date! Poe was writing in the 1830s and 40s. These stories were written (mostly) in the 1920s. I kept thinking, haven't we moved beyond this? But of course, Japan didn't encounter Poe until long after his death, and he was all new to them. There is just one story in the collection, "The Psychological Test," which features the detective character that Rampo used often, Dr. Akechi, and the story is unusual because we know who the murderer is before Dr. Akechi figures it out for himself. I didn't really like any of the stories very much, but if I had to choose a favorite it would be the last one, "The Traveler with the Pasted Rag Picture" (1929), which was agreeably spooky.

Finally it was time to read The Honjin Murders. The author, Yokomizo, was born in 1902, so he was 8 years younger than Rampo, but he would have been around 44 when this novel was published. I'm focusing on all these writers' ages because I think it's interesting that they aren't very different in age. Yokomizo published his first two novels in his mid-30s, before the war, but didn't really become popular until after the war, when he was in his 40s. According to Wikipedia, Yokomizo was a big fan of the mystery writer John Dickson Carr -- not Edgar Allan Poe, like the other two -- so The Honjin Murders is more of a classic mystery novel. A murder is committed, we don't know who did it, and a detective arrives to solve the crime.

OK, so it's not another Poe story. But even in 1946, Japanese writers were apparently still so enamored of Western mystery writers that they couldn't tell their own stories without referencing their models. One main character (and suspect) possesses every Western mystery that has been translated into Japanese at that point, and the detective asks him which novel he feels the current crime most resembles (it's The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux). Some reviews I read of the book praised this "breaking of the fourth wall," but I was less thrilled with it. I didn't want to read a book about how fun mysteries are, I wanted to read a mystery. This is a "locked-room" mystery, and much is made of that. But I've always hated locked-room mysteries. In the end, the solution is implausible and annoying, and like the solution to most locked-room mysteries I couldn't even follow it, it was so complicated. 

My favorite part of the book was actually the last few pages, where we learn what happened to everyone after the war. Kind of sweet and sad.

Would I read any of the sequels to The Honjin Murders? Possibly. Even though I didn't like the book very much, the writer's voice (as translated by Louise Heal Kawai) is intelligent and amusing. The Boulder Public Library has two of Yokomizo's other works. I might check them out. We'll see.

Post-Note: It's October 9th and today I finished one of the sequels, so I thought I should add a note about that. I read The Inugami Curse, originally published in 1950/51, and I thought it was much better than The Honjin Murders. It's apparently Yokomizo's sixth mystery novel and he must just have developed as a writer over the course of the six books. The Inugami Curse is not a locked-room mystery, so that's a plus right there. It takes place a few years after World War II, with important characters having served in the Japanese Army and one having been seriously wounded. I didn't quite guess the solution to the murder, although I was on the right track, and although it was implausible, it wasn't horribly implausible. It was a fun story to read. If you want to read a classic Japanese mystery, I'd recommend this one.