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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Vertigo
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Japan's greatest classic murder mystery, translated into English for the first time In the winter of 1937, the village of Okamura is abuzz with excitement over the forthcoming wedding of a son of the grand Ichiyanagi family. But amid the gossip over the approaching festivities, there is also a worrying rumour – it seems a sinister masked man has been asking questions about the Ichiyanagis around the village. Then, on the night of the wedding, the Ichiyanagi family are woken by a terrible scream, followed by the sound of eerie music – death has come to Okamura, leaving no trace but a bloody samurai sword, thrust into the pristine snow outside the house. The murder seems impossible, but amateur detective Kosuke Kindaichi is determined to get to the bottom of it. 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.
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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
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
ISBN 13: 978–1–78227–501–5
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press
www.pushkinpress.com
CONTENTS
CHARACTER LIST
THE ICHIYANAGI FAMILY
THE KUBO FAMILY
SERVANTS
POLICE OFFICERS
Detective Inspector Isokawa
Detective Sergeant Kimura
Chief Inspector
PRIVATE DETECTIVE
Kosuke Kindaichi
Various police officers, farmworkers and other minor characters
CHAPTER 1
The Three-Fingered Man
Before recording the strange history that follows, I felt I ought to take a look at the house where such a gruesome murder was committed. Accordingly, one afternoon in early spring, I set off, walking stick in hand, for a stroll around that infamous residence.
I was evacuated to this rural farming village in Okayama Prefecture in May of last year, at the height of the bombing raids. And since that day, everyone I’ve met has talked to me at least once of what some call “the Koto Murder Case” and others “the Honjin Murder Case” at the home of the Ichiyanagi family.
Generally, as soon as people hear that I’m a writer of detective stories, they feel compelled to tell me of any murder case with which they have the slightest personal connection. I suppose rumours of my profession had reached the ears of the villagers, so every single one managed to bring up the topic of the Honjin Murder Case at some point. For the people of this village there could hardly be a more memorable case, and yet most of them were not aware of the full horror of this crime.
Usually when people tell me these kinds of tales, they never turn out to be as interesting to me as they are to the teller, much less potential material for a book. But this case was different. From the moment I heard the first whispers about the case, I was fascinated. Then, when I finally got to hear the account from the lips of F—, the man most directly connected to the case, I was at once seized with a great excitement. This was no ordinary murder. The perpetrator had scrupulously planned the whole ghastly deed. What’s more, it was worthy of the label “Locked Room Murder Mystery”.
The locked room murder mystery—a genre that any self-respecting detective novelist will attempt at some point in his or her career. The murder takes place in a room with no apparent way for the killer to enter or exit. Constructing a solution is an appealing challenge to the author. As my esteemed friend Eizo Inoue wrote, all of the works of the great John Dickson Carr are some variation on the locked room murder theme. As a writer of detective novels myself, I intended one day to try my hand at one of these, and now I’ve been unexpectedly blessed—one has fallen right into my lap. I know it’s shocking but I feel I owe a debt of gratitude to the killer for devising such a fiendish method to stab this man and woman.
When I first heard the story, I immediately racked my brain to think of any similar cases among all the novels I’ve read. The first that came to mind were Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room and Maurice Leblanc’s The Teeth of the Tiger; then there’s The Canary Murder Case and The Kennel Murder Case, both by S.S. Van Dine; and finally, Dickson Carr’s The Plague Court Murders. I even considered that variation on the locked room murder theme of Roger Scarlett’s Murder Among the Angells. But this real-life case wasn’t quite like any of the above-mentioned. Maybe, just maybe, the killer had read a selection of stories like these, dissected all of the different devices used, then picked out the elements that he needed, constructing his own device… At least that’s one theory.
Out of all of those books, it’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room that bears the closest resemblance, at least as regards setting and atmosphere; less so, the facts of the case. In that story, the crime scene was a room with yellow wallpaper; in the Honjin Murder Case, the columns and beams, ceiling and rain shutters were all painted in red ochre. Red ochre wasn’t an unusual hue for houses in this region—in fact, the house I was living in had also been painted that colour. The difference was that my house was extremely old, and the red lustre had faded to a dark brownish sheen. On the other hand, the room where the murder took place had just been repainted, and must have been gleaming with its fresh coat of red. The tatami mat flooring and the fusuma sliding doors that divided the two main rooms were brand new too, and there was a byobu folding screen decorated with gold leaf. The only unpleasant sight must have been the couple lying there, soaked in the crimson of their own blood.
To me, the most captivating element of this case was the way in which the traditional Japanese string instrument known as the koto was connected from beginning to end. At all the critical moments, its eerie music could be heard. I, who have never quite escaped the influences of romanticism, still find that incredibly alluring. A locked room murder, a red-ochre-painted room and the sound of the koto… all of these elements are so perfect—too perfect—like drugs that work a little too well. If I don’t hurry to get it all down in writing, I fear their effects may start to wear off.
Now I seem to have got a little bit ahead of myself…
From my house to the grounds of the Ichiyanagi residence takes roughly fifteen minutes on foot. It’s in the small hamlet of Yamanoya, just outside the larger village of O—. A hill lies to the north of Yamanoya, made up of three gentle ridges, reminding me somehow of the legs of a starfish. At the very tip of one of those legs sits the grand residence of the Ichiyanagi family.
A small stream runs along the west side of the starfish hill, and on the east there is a narrow road coming from the village of H—. Shortly after the stream and the road round the foot of the hill, the two meet. The Ichiyanagi home occupies the roughly triangular acre and a half of land in between. In other words, the property is enclosed by the hill to the north, the stream to the west and the H—village road to the east. The main entrance faces the road on the east side.
I began by walking by that side with its grand black gate embellished with studs. An imposing wall stretched to both left and right, running for a total of about 350 feet. When I looked in through the gate, I saw that there was another inner fence, indicating that the property was as impressive as rumour had suggested. However, I couldn’t see beyond this inner fence.
I tried walking around the south end of the premises to the west side, and then followed the stream in a northerly direction. At the very northern corner of the outer wall, I came across a broken-down waterwheel and a simple wooden bridge. I crossed the bridge and clambered up the steep side of the hill, ducking down to push my way through the thick bamboo that grew there. From up here on the hillside that formed the northern boundary of the Ichiyanagi property, I had almost a perfect bird’s-eye view over the grounds.
The closest roof to me was that of the annexe house, the scene of that terrible murder. From what I’d heard in the village, this building had originally been constructed for the retired head of the Ichiyanagi family, and was much smaller than the main house, comprising only two rooms: one eight and the other six tatami mats in size. Yet typical of this type of structure, although the building itself was small, the garden was extensive, stretching both to the south and the west sides, and crammed with trees, bushes and ornamental rocks.
I’ll write about this annexe house in more detail later. Looking beyond the annexe, further to the south, I could see the main building—the magnificent single-storey Ichiyanagi home, which faced in an easterly direction. And beyond that, the quarters occupied by the branch family. Next to this were the storehouse and several other small buildings dotted about, seemingly at random.
The main house and the annexe had been divided by a high fence and were connected by a means of a simple garden gate made of twigs and branches. Right now, the fence and gate were damaged almost beyond recognition, but at the time of the murder they were still in good shape, solid enough to slow down the people who came running at the sound of the screams.
This completed my survey of the Ichiyanagi residence, and I took a little while to scramble my way out of the bamboo thicket. Next, I headed back to O—local government office, right at the far south end of the village. There were few houses around that area, and further south again, nothing but rice fields until the next small town, K—. Running through those rice fields was a fairly major two-lane road. If you walked for about forty minutes total, you would come to N—train station. In other words, if you were travelling by train, there was no other way to enter O—village than by this road. You were forced to pass in front of the government building on your way in.
Right across the street from it was a tavern with an earthen floor and a simple window in the front. It was a place where wagon drivers and other tradesmen would stop by for a quick drink and something to eat. But more significantly, the character who would go on to play a central role in what I’m calling the Honjin Murder Case made his first appearance at this very tavern. This was the first sighting of the three-fingered man…
The incident took place around sunset on 23rd November 1937, or the twelfth year of the reign of the Showa Emperor. In other words, two days before the murder.
The okamisan, proprietress of this tavern, was sitting on one of the wooden stools out front, gossiping with a couple of her regulars—a wagon driver and an official from the government office—as the figure of a man came hobbling down the road from the direction of K—town. When he reached the tavern, the man came to an abrupt halt.
“Could you tell me the way to the Ichiyanagi residence?”
The okamisan, the village official and the wagon driver stopped talking to look the man over. This wasn’t the kind of person one would expect to visit the Ichiyanagi family. He wore a crumpled felt hat pulled low over his eyes and a large mask covered his nose and mouth. Matted hair poked out from under his hat, and there was stubble covering his face from cheek to jowl. All in all, he was a shady-looking character. He wasn’t wearing a coat; the collar of his jacket was turned up against the cold, but that jacket and his trousers were smeared with grime and dust and worn away to a shine at the elbows and knees. His shoes were caked in grey dust and both soles were hanging off. Everything about the man looked run-down. It was hard to tell, but he was perhaps around thirty years old.
“The Ichiyanagi residence? It’s that way. But what business do you have with the Ichiyanagi family?”
The village official glared at the man, who blinked repeatedly while mumbling something unintelligible behind his mask.
Just at that moment, on the same road from the very same direction that the man had come, a rickshaw appeared. The okamisan glanced at it, and turned back to the visitor.
“Hey, you! Look. Here’s the very man you want to see, the master of the Ichiyanagi house.”
The passenger in the rickshaw was a man of forty or so with a dark complexion and a severe expression on his face. He wore dark Western-style clothing, and sat stiffly upright in his seat. He never once glanced to the side, or took in his surroundings, but kept his eyes fixed on the road ahead. With his sharp cheekbones and prominent nose, there was something austere and unapproachable about him.
This was Kenzo, the current master of the house of Ichiyanagi. The rickshaw passed by in front of the group of onlookers and quickly disappeared around a bend in the road. The wagon driver waited until it was completely out of sight before turning to the okamisan.
“Rumour has it the master of the house has found himself a bride. Is that right?”
“Looks like it. The wedding’s the day after tomorrow.”
“Eh? Already? Now that’s what I call quick.”
“Well, if he wastes any more time, then someone might come up with new objections to the marriage. Now that it’s been decided he’s in a rush to get it done. He’s quite a force of nature, that one, when he puts his mind to something.”
“Well, I s’pose that’ll be how he got to be such a big-shot scholar,” said the village official. “Mind you, he did well to get the consent of the old matriarch.”
“Well, of course she doesn’t approve. But I heard she had to give in eventually. The more she opposed it, the more stubborn the young master became.”
“How old is he now? About forty?” asked the wagon driver.
“Forty on the nose,” replied the official. “And this is his first marriage.”
“A middle-aged man in love. More passionate than a youngster, that’s for sure.”
“And the bride’s only twenty-five or -six too,” said the okamisan. “Rin-san’s daughter, I heard. Landed herself a big fish. Now that’s what I call marrying up!”
The official turned back to the okamisan. “Is she a stunner, then, the bride?”
“They say she’s not all that good-looking. But she’s a teacher at some girls’ school, so she’s and clever and capable—I guess that makes her a good match for the master.” The okamisan sighed. “Looks like all the young girls’ll need an education from now on…”
“Okamisan, don’t tell me you’re planning to go to school to land yourself a rich husband?”
“Oh, you can bet I am.”
The three of them burst out laughing. It was at that moment the strange visitor opened his mouth again.
“Okamisan,” he said hesitantly, “could I possibly have a drink of water? My throat is so dry…”
Startled, the three friends turned. Truth be told, they’d completely forgotten that he was there. The okamisan scowled at him for a few moments, but eventually filled a glass with water and handed it to him. The man thanked her, and shifted his mask so as to be able to drink. The three villagers exchanged a look.
There was a long gash on the man’s right cheek that appeared to have been stitched up after an injury. It was a deep scar that ran from the right corner of his lip up his cheek, as if the side of his face had been slashed open. The reason the man was wearing a mask wasn’t to protect him from dust or disease; it was to hide that scar. And there was one more gruesome detail that caught their eye. As he reached for the glass, they saw that he only had three fingers on his right hand. The ring finger and little finger were both cut in half; only the thumb and first two fingers were whole.
The three-fingered man finished his water, thanked the okamisan and hobbled off in the same direction the rickshaw had gone. The three locals were left staring after him.
“What the hell?…”
“What does he want with the Ichiyanagis?”
“Ugh, he gave me the creeps! Did you see that mouth? I’m never using that glass again!”
The okamisan placed the used glass on the very far end of the shelf, a decision which would prove to be helpful in the following days.
Incidentally, if you are the kind of reader who enjoys reading between the lines of a story, and recall the particulars of the crime, you may already be able to guess what I am about to write next. Namely, that you only need three fingers to play the koto. Its strings are traditionally plucked by the thumb, index and middle fingers.
CHAPTER 2
The Descendants of the Honjin
According to the village elders, the wealthy Ichiyanagi family wasn’t originally from O—village at all, but from the neighbouring town of K—. This automatically made them unpopular among the narrow-minded villagers.
K—used to lie along on the old Chugokukaido, a section of the main route linking east and west Japan. In the Edo Period it was a rest station for travellers, and the Ichiyanagi home was a honjin, or an inn where Edo Period nobility would stay. However, when the shogun was overthrown, and the imperial system was reinstated in the late 1860s, the family head realized that he was about to lose the honjin. He had the foresight to act before the old feudal system collapsed completely and moved his family to their current location. He was able to take advantage of the turmoil of the time and acquire farmland dirt cheap, instantly becoming a rich landowner. That was why the local folk liked to call the Ichiyanagi family a bunch of upstart kappa, mythical water goblins. This word was a local term of abuse for people who moved from K—town to O—village.
Anyway, at the time of the gruesome murder, the occupants of the Ichiyanagi family compound were as follows:
First and foremost, there was the widow of the previous head of the family, and mistress of the house, Itoko. She was at the time fifty-seven years old. She always wore her hair in a meticulously coiled chignon, and never once let her mask of dignity drop. Itoko was immensely proud of being a descendant of a honjin family. When the villagers spoke of the “old matriarch”, this was to whom they referred.
The dowager Itoko had five children, but only three of them were living with her at the time. The oldest of these was her son Kenzo, a graduate of philosophy at a certain private university in Kyoto. He’d taught for a few years at his alma mater after graduation, but had fallen prey to a respiratory disorder and returned home, shutting himself away from the world. Nevertheless, he was a great scholar and being confined to the house didn’t prevent him from dedicating himself to his studies. He wrote books, from time to time contributed articles to journals, and had become a well-known academic. Apparently it wasn’t his poor health that had prevented him from marrying—he was just too busy with his studies to think about such matters.
After Kenzo came Itoko’s elder daughter, Taeko. She had married a businessman and was living in Shanghai at the time, so had no direct connection to the events of that night. Itoko’s second son, Ryuji, was thirty-five and a doctor, employed by a major hospital in Osaka. He had not been at the family home that night either. He rushed home right after hearing of the tragedy, and so had some involvement in the immediate aftermath.
For many years after giving birth to Ryuji, Itoko and her husband hadn’t had any more children. Everyone thought there wouldn’t be further additions to the family, but after a gap of almost ten years, she had another son, and then a full eight years after that, a daughter. The boy was called Saburo, and the girl Suzuko. At the time of the murder, Saburo was twenty-five, and Suzuko seventeen.
Saburo was definitely the black sheep of the family. He’d been expelled from middle school, and sent instead to a private vocational school in Kobe. He was expelled from that school too, and at the time of the murder had no occupation of any kind. He used to hang around the house all day. The consensus was that he was intelligent enough, but never applied himself to any kind of work. There was also a certain slyness to his nature. Down in the village he was pretty much universally despised.
As for the youngest child, Suzuko, well… I can’t help feeling sorry for her. Perhaps it was because her parents were already quite old when they had her that she was rather delicate, like a flower that had to bloom in the shade. In addition to her poor physical health, she was a bit slow. She wasn’t exactly mentally disabled—in some ways she was very gifted; in fact, when it came to playing the koto, one would go so far as to call her a musical genius. From time to time, she would show flashes of incredible insight, but in most everyday matters she behaved like a child of seven or eight.
These were the members of the main Ichiyanagi family, but there was another branch of the family living on the same property. The head of this branch family was Ryosuke, a cousin of Kenzo and his siblings. He was thirty-eight years old at the time, and he lived there with his wife, Akiko, and three young children. Obviously, these children had nothing to do with the murder case, and so I’ll leave them off this list.
Ryosuke was completely different in temperament from his cousin Kenzo and the others. He’d only finished primary school, but being good at mathematics and a worldly type, he was the perfect person to manage the Ichiyanagi family’s affairs. As far as Itoko was concerned, more than her eccentric oldest son, the absent second son and the untrustworthy third son, Ryosuke proved to be the closest to a confidant that she had in her life. As for his wife, Akiko, there was nothing particularly distinctive about her; she was just an ordinary woman, obedient to her husband.
And so these were the six inhabitants of the Ichiyanagi residence: Itoko the family matriarch, Kenzo, Saburo, Suzuko, Ryosuke and Akiko. Together they lived a conservative, traditional lifestyle, peaceful until the moment that Kenzo announced his engagement. Then it was if a large pebble had been dropped into a still pond. The ripples spread wider and further, building into waves of anger. The woman Kenzo wanted to marry was Katsuko Kubo, a teacher at a girls’ school in Okayama City. The Ichiyanagi family was united in their opposition to this marriage, not because they had any kind of problem with Katsuko personally, but because they objected to her lineage.
Gentle reader, the word “lineage”, which has all but fallen out of usage in the city, is even today alive and well in rural villages like this one. You might even say it rules every aspect of people’s lives. We are now in a period of upheaval following the Second World War, and farmers and peasants are increasingly no longer obliged to kowtow to the upper classes, or to show the same level of respect for those with high social standing, fortune or property. Those values have come crashing down in the wake of Japan’s defeat.
However, what is still intact is lineage. The reverence, respect and pride associated with being born into a family with distinguished ancestry are still alive and well in rural communities. And lineage has nothing whatsoever to do with genetics or eugenics. For example, if the family of an established community leader, such as someone who’d been a village headman in the days of the shogunate, started producing male children who suffered from physical disabilities or epilepsy or lunacy, each would still be permitted to serve as headman when his time came because his family line was good. This is still true now, and even more so in 1937, when this story takes place. As far as the Ichiyanagi family was concerned, there was nothing in the world more important than being the descendants of the owners of a honjin. It was everything to them.
Katsuko Kubo’s father had once been a tenant farmer in O—village. But he’d been rather more ambitious than the average peasant. He had left the village, along with his younger brother, and set sail for America. There the brothers had found work on fruit farms until they had saved enough money to return to Japan and establish their own orchard about twenty-five miles from their home village. Both brothers married, but the elder died shortly after his wife had given birth to their daughter, Katsuko. Upon the death of her husband, the young widow had returned to her home village, leaving Katsuko to be raised by her uncle. She turned out to be a very studious child, and her uncle spared no expense in paying her school tuition. After graduating from a teacher-training school in Tokyo, she took a job in a girls’ school in Okayama City, not too far from her home.
The fruit farm established by Katsuko’s father and uncle was hugely successful. Katsuko’s uncle was scrupulously honest when it came to putting his niece’s share aside for her, so that she worked as a schoolteacher not because it was necessary to make a living, but because it was what she wanted to do. She was a woman in possession of both her own fortune and a career.
Despite this, in the eyes of the Ichiyanagi family, it didn’t matter how educated she was, how wise or intelligent, or how large a fortune she possessed—the daughter of a tenant farmer would always be just that: the daughter of a tenant farmer. She had no family name, no pedigree, and they thought of her as no more than the child of Rinkichi Kubo, poor peasant farmer.
Kenzo had met Katsuko when he’d been invited to speak at a students’ group in Kurashiki City. Katsuko was a member of the group. After this initial meeting, Katsuko used to visit Kenzo to ask him for help with the foreign-language books she liked to read. This relationship continued for about a year, until suddenly one day Kenzo proposed marriage.
I’ve already mentioned how the Ichiyanagi family opposed this marriage, led by Itoko and Kenzo’s cousin Ryosuke. Out of Kenzo’s own siblings, it was his sister Taeko who felt the most strongly about the engagement; she even wrote a vehement letter to her older brother on the subject. On the other hand, the middle brother, Ryuji, supported Kenzo and privately sent a letter to Itoko saying that she should let her eldest son do as he liked. However, he never said a word about this directly to his older brother.
And what was Kenzo’s reaction to all this criticism? His approach was to stay completely silent. He made no move whatsoever to respond to any of it. And of course, water eventually wins over fire. One by one, the opponents ran out of heat, their voices faded, their steps faltered and finally, with a wry smile and a shoulder shrug, they were forced to admit defeat.
The wedding ceremony was held on 25th November 1937. And that very night, the heinous crime was committed. However, before I can get to the gory details of the murder, I must mention a few apparently trivial incidents that seem to have been some kind of prelude to what finally transpired.
