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Seishi Yokomizo
‘Behind the story, it’s always connected to Japanese history’ … Seishi Yokomizo
‘Behind the story, it’s always connected to Japanese history’ … Seishi Yokomizo

How locked-room mystery king Seishi Yokomizo broke into English at last

This article is more than 4 years old

With a reputation in Japan to rival Agatha Christie’s, the master of ingenious plotting is finally on the case for anglophone readers

A Japanese village in 1937 is shocked by a gruesome murder – a newlywed couple found shut away in a room “soaked in the crimson of their own blood”, a bloody samurai sword thrust in the snow outside. Scruffy amateur sleuth Kosuke Kindaichi is called in: can he solve the locked-room mystery?

Kindaichi, the creation of the revered Japanese detective novelist Seishi Yokomizo, made his first appearance in 1946, solving, with typical flair, the fiendish conundrum of The Honjin Murders. That novel won Yokomizo the first Mystery Writers of Japan award in 1948. Kindaichi went on to star in another 76 novels, selling more than 55m books and appearing in numerous television and stage adaptations.

But Japan’s answer to Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr – writers Yokomizo greatly admired – never made it to the UK. The first English translation of The Honjin Murders was published 73 years after it first appeared in Japan, when Pushkin Vertigo released Louise Heal Kawai’s translation at the end of last year. Now the independent press is publishing Yumiko Yamazaki’s translation of Kindaichi’s second outing, The Inugami Curse, in which a series of disturbing murders begin after a wealthy man’s will is read to his family.

At Pushkin, Daniel Seton says editors were surprised to find that the Kindaichi mysteries had hardly been translated into English before (apart from one small-press US edition), putting it down to the “traditional reluctance of British and American publishers to take what they see as the risk of publishing books in translation”.

But The Honjin Murders “is one of the greatest murder mysteries in Japanese crime-writing history, starring and introducing the country’s most famous fictional detective,” he says. It “just seemed obvious” to publish it in English.

“It has all the ingredients that thrill fans of golden-age British and American mysteries,” Seton adds, “an old country house, a feuding family, mysterious noises in the night, a macabre murder and a brilliant sleuth with an ingenious solution. It’s also steeped in a distinctively Japanese atmosphere, and is packed full of playful references to the classics and traditions of crime writing.”

Pushkin is now planning further Yokomizo titles, to the delight of his grandson On Nomoto, who is in London to give a talk at the Japan Society about his grandfather, who died in 1981. Yokomizo’s fame was such that in 1980, a literary prize was established in his honour: the Seishi Yokomizo award for an unpublished mystery novel, the winners of which received 10m yen and a statuette of Kindaichi.

Nomoto says Yokomizo, born in Kobe in 1902, would devour English-language mysteries as a boy, picking up titles by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, and dreaming of writinghis own: “John Dickson Carr was his favourite. His career started when he was a kid, hopping around old bookstores, finding any kind of foreign-language book that could be a detective story. That’s how he began.”

Yokomizo worked in the family pharmaceutical business for a few years before editing the mystery magazine Shinsei nen (New Youth), where he introduced Japanese readers to a number of foreign detective stories. By 1932, he knew he wanted to write himself, but a lengthy bout of tuberculosis put paid to this for some years.

In 1939, he was back in Tokyo, but war had begun in Europe and he ran into censorship – the government “considered that detective stories came from western culture and they completely banned authors from writing these stories,” says Nomoto. “Right after the war ended he said, ‘I can write whatever I want.’ It was his joy to write these stories.”

The Honjin Murders was published in 1946. It quickly found a wide readership, with Yokomizo becoming known for his devilish twists, says Nomoto. His readers loved the books because they are not just a scary story. “There’s always salvation,” he says. “Kindaichi tries to find out not just how someone has been killed but why it happened. And behind the story, it’s always connected to Japanese history.”

Yokomizo died when Nomoto was 10, but he still has a clear memory of his grandfather at work, and the dragging sound of his slippers as he moved around the house. “When we visited his house, normally he did not come to the foyer, [it was] always Grandmother,” he recalls. “She needed to check [to see] if he was in the middle of serious brainstorming for a murder trick or not.”

When people discover who his grandfather was, says Nomoto, “they always ask, have you read everything?” Not quite, he admits. “That would be my life’s dream, my accomplishment. I hope I’m able to.”

  • The Honjin Murders and The Inugami Curse are published by Pushkin Vertigo

This article was amended on 11 February 2020. Based on information supplied by the publisher of The Inugami Curse, an earlier version misnamed the book’s translator, Yumiko Yamazaki, as Yumiko Yamakazi. This has been corrected.

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