“Anyway, I just had to show him. I made up my mind to demonstrate my locked room murder trick one more time. I took the hand I’d dug up the night before, dipped it in my own blood and made more fingerprints on the folding screen. Then I took it and reburied it in the cat’s grave. After that, I put on the performance for him. Obviously, I didn’t mean to cut myself so deeply. I intended just to graze myself lightly with the sword. I performed the same steps that my brother did, then stuck the sword into the folding screen and tried to cut myself from behind, but I miscalculated somehow and I gave myself a deep gash instead. If you take a look at the camphor tree in the garden, you’ll find the razor I used instead of a sickle.”
The long and short of it is that this young man, Saburo, was something of a psychopath. To him, flirting with death was an amusing game. To the very end, he insisted that he had never had the slightest idea that Kenzo planned to murder Katsuko. This may well have been the truth. But who’s to say even if he had known, he wouldn’t have done exactly the same thing? Would it have made him hesitate at all?
Saburo was of course charged, but while he was waiting for judgement to be handed down, the political situation in Japan worsened. He was called up to fight in China, where he eventually died in battle. Sweet young Suzuko also passed away the following year. But perhaps it was a blessing that she did. Last year, their cousin Ryosuke went on a trip to Hiroshima, and was unlucky enough to be there when the atomic bomb was dropped. The village elders noted that this was also the city in which his father had died. They wondered aloud if this wasn’t some sort of fate. War, having taken the father, had finally taken the son as well.
Ryuji stuck out the war in Osaka. He refused to be evacuated to his home village. He’d never liked village life, and ever since the murder case, he’d had enough of the old way, the life of a family of the honjin. These days, that grand Ichiyanagi residence is occupied by the dowager Itoko, along with her elder daughter Taeko, who recently made it back from Shanghai with no more than the clothes on her back. The branch family house is still home to Ryosuke’s widow, Akiko, and their three children, but the gossip in the village is that no one sees eye to eye about anything, and that the arguments are never-ending.
And those are the facts of the Honjin Murder Case. I must confess that I never intended to mislead my readers. I explained from the outset the location of the waterwheel. Moreover, right in the opening chapter of this book, I wrote the following:
I feel I owe a debt of gratitude to the killer for devising such a fiendish method to stab this man and woman.
Of course, the man and woman I was referring to were the three-fingered man, Kyokichi Shimizu, and the bride, Katsuko. Katsuko was of course stabbed to death, whereas Kyokichi was merely stabbed. I purposely refrained from writing, “who brutally killed a man and a woman”. If you, dear reader, assumed that I was referring to Kenzo and Katsuko, then that is entirely your responsibility.
In the same chapter when describing the crime scene, I wrote:
…the couple lying there, soaked in the crimson of their own blood
I wrote “soaked in their own blood”, but never did I specify that they had both been murdered. I learned these devices from my own reading of detective novels, specifically Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
And so in closing: as I was completing this manuscript, I paid one last visit to the Ichiyanagi residence.
On my earlier visit, there had still been the chill of early spring in the air, and not a single shoot of green in sight anywhere. The ridges of earth in the rice fields had been bare. But now it was autumn, and as far as the eye could see, there were golden waves of ripening rice. I passed once again by the broken waterwheel, and climbed the cliff that marked the northern border of the property. I scrambled my way through the thick bamboo, and finally had a southerly view over the residence.
According to my sources, the property taxes, along with the new agrarian reforms, had affected even the Ichiyanagi family, and they had been unable to ward off financial ruin. Perhaps it was a stretch of my imagination, but as I looked out over that once-grand home sitting in the shadow of the honjin, I fancied I smelled the odour of decay.
I turned my eyes slightly to look at the spot on the northeastern edge of the property where, ten years earlier, Suzuko had buried her beloved pet kitten. The ground was carpeted in those deep red spider lilies sometimes known as equinox flowers. I couldn’t help imagining they were soaked in the blood of poor, sweet Suzuko.
Jonathan Ames
You Were Never Really Here
Augusto De Angelis
The Murdered Banker
The Mystery of the Three Orchids
The Hotel of the Three Roses
Olivier Barde-Cabuçon
Casanova and the Faceless Woman
María Angélica Bosco
Death Going Down
Piero Chiara
The Disappearance of Signora Giulia
Frédéric Dard
Bird in a Cage
The Wicked Go to Hell
Crush
The Executioner Weeps
The King of Fools
The Gravediggers’ Bread
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
The Pledge
The Execution of Justice
Suspicion
The Judge and His Hangman
Martin Holmén
Clinch
Down for the Count
Slugger
Alexander Lernet-Holenia
I Was Jack Mortimer
Margaret Millar
Vanish in an Instant
A Stranger in My Grave
The Listening Walls
Boileau-Narcejac
Vertigo
She Who Was No More
Baroness Orczy
The Old Man in the Corner
The Case of Miss Elliott
Unravelled Knots
Leo Perutz
Master of the Day of Judgment
Little Apple
St Peter’s Snow
Edgar Allan Poe
The Paris Mysteries
Soji Shimada
The Tokyo Zodiac Murders
Murder in the Crooked House
Masako Togawa
The Master Key
The Lady Killer
Emma Viskic
Resurrection Bay
And Fire Came Down
Darkness for Light
Seishi Yokomizo
The Honjin Murders
The Inugami Curse
About the Authors
SEISHI YOKOMIZO (1902–81) was one of Japan’s most famous and best-loved mystery writers. He was born in Kobe and spent his childhood reading detective stories, before beginning to write stories of his own, the first of which was published in 1921. He went on to become an extremely prolific and popular author, best known for his Kosuke Kindaichi series, which ran to 77 books, many of which were adapted for stage and television in Japan. The Honjin Murders is the first Kosuke Kindaichi story, and regarded as one of Japan’s great mystery novels. It won the first Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 1948 but has never been translated into English, until now.
LOUISE HEAL KAWAI grew up in Manchester, UK but Japan has been her home since 1990. She previously translated Soji Shimada’s Murder in the Crooked House and Mieko Kawakami’s Ms Ice Sandwich for Pushkin Press. Her other translations include Seventeen by Hideo Yokoyama and Seicho Matsumoto’s A Quiet Place.
Copyright
Pushkin Press
71–75 Shelton Street
London WC2H 9JQ
HONJIN SATSUJIN JIKEN
© Seishi YOKOMIZO 1973
First published in Japan in 1973 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.
English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo through JAPAN UNI AGENCY, INC., Tokyo.
English translation © Louise Heal Kawai 2019
First published by Pushkin Press in 2019
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ISBN 13: 978–1–78227–501–5
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