The Honjin Murders can be satisfyingly read as a classic who-done-it, although through the lens of one of Japan’s most famous writers of the genre. The book’s narrator, who’s writing the novel years after the crime, is intrigued with the story in part because it seems to be a locked-room murder mystery, “a genre that any self-respecting detective novelist will attempt at some point in his or her career.” Instead of giving the reader the facts in the case up front, the narrator at first gushes about all the other existing mystery plots that might be similar to this one, name dropping the works of American John Dickson Carr and French Maurice Leblanc. All entrances locked, an ax is taken to a door, and the bride and groom are found dead, slashed and covered in blood, no murderer in sight. The family is woken up that evening by screams from the annex house that the newlyweds retired to earlier. On a snowy November day in 1937, Kenzo Ichiyanagi, the eldest son of a once-great family, marries Katsuko Kubo, a schoolteacher. Seishi Yokomizo’s The Honjin Murders, published in Japan in 1946 and now available in English for the first time, employs the plot tricks of early European and American mystery writers to tell the story of a rapidly changing Japanese society around the time of the Second World War.
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