S01E05: Satsujin da! Murder, the Japanese way.

Looking at murder mysteries beyond the English-speaking world.

The Malayalam movie Drishyam was released in 2013 and broke many records. It was not a traditional murder mystery but more a case of unbreakable alibis. While I was basking in the usual over-the-top Mallu pride, someone told me that Drishyam’s story was not original. Apparently, it was “inspired” by a 2005 Japanese novel called The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino.

Indignantly, I went in search of an English translation to discover the truth¹ for myself. That was my first taste of detective fiction wholly conceptualised and written outside of the UK, USA and India. I went in a skeptic and came back impressed.

In the post-WWII period, a clutch of Japanese authors who were fans of British whodunits, began writing murder mysteries of their own, giving rise to a Japanese golden age of detective fiction. While I have read almost everything written by Higashino, I haven’t read enough Japanese whodunits by other authors to form a point of view.

So I invited Manu Muraleedharan, fellow writer (check out his Substack) and lover of murder mysteries, to do the honours for episode² five of About Murder, She Wrote. Today’s lead essay is penned by Manu.

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The Japanese Art of Murder

Photo by my friend Ankan Pratik Roy, who’s been causing Insta-envy with stunning photos from his recent trip to Japan.

Honkaku (本格) is a sub-genre of Japanese mystery novels that focuses on intricate, puzzle-like plots with seemingly impossible crimes. The Japanese word honkaku translates to ‘orthodox’ or ‘standard.’ The term ‘honkaku mystery fiction’ on the other hand corresponds to ‘classic fair-play mystery’. It was mystery author Saburō Kōga who first coined the phrase in 1926.

If you love Golden Age mysteries (by the likes of Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen), and have not read the Japanese version of these, you are missing out.

Fair play is a must for these books. i.e. the reader has, at least in theory, all the clues and information at their disposal to be able to solve the mystery. Diagrams, maps and time tables of events are provided without any obfuscation. On one hand a reader may be discouraged by the sheer volume of information provided to them in these books, but on the other hand, if you love a good challenge of a puzzle you would love them. You could say the honkaku writers have to work harder than the other mystery writers to deceive the readers.

Photo by Ankan Pratik Roy

Honkaku stories feature fiendishly clever crimes and puzzles for the detective (and the reader) to solve. Many of the classics portray locked room murders, iron-clad alibis and unsolvable scenarios. They also mostly adhere to Van Dine's/Ronald Knox’s Rules for Writing Detective Stories and pay homage to classic mystery fiction. Sometimes the action will pause for a several pages, to allow for scholarly conversations about the genre of the book itself, and often, characters themselves are fans of old great writers and hold membership in their university mystery clubs.

A sampler of Japanese impossible crimes:

• A couple is found murdered in a locked house, surrounded by fresh snow, with no footprints on it, and a japanese ceremonial sword thrust into the snow bank. (The Honjin Murders)

• How could a dismembered body have been introduced into an autopsy room completely locked from the inside save for a small air vent? (The Red Locked Room)

• While a group of students are stuck in an island hotel during a zombie outbreak, a murder happens inside a locked room. A human could not have made the bite marks that killed the victim, but a zombie could not have got into the room to make them. (Death Among the Undead)

History of Honkaku

Photo by Ankan Pratik Roy

In the 1920s, translations of golden age detective stories from Britain reached Japan and started a new form of literature unseen before. But the second world war halted it in its tracks, when the imperial government banned detective stories as "injurious to public morals". After the war, when things changed, many writers began to write mysteries.

Seishi Yokomizo, a struggling novelist who used to pick up the second-hand detective books traded by western sailors in his port town of Kobe, wrote The Honjin Murders, which became immensely popular. This was the starting point of a series of seventy-seven mysteries featuring the amateur detective Kosuke Kindaichi. Wearing a shabby kimono, wooden clogs and worn socks, Kindaichi has since then appeared in books, movies, anime, and manga and is arguably the most beloved Japanese detective. In Yamanashi City, there is a museum dedicated to his creator Seishi Yokomizo, which is open to the public today.

Photo by Ankan Pratik Roy

The peculiar environment in post-war Japan, with a society starved of liberal entertainment, and the fall of historic novels in an era of shame about feudalism, brought about a renaissance in this genre. True to the nature of a newly liberated culture, some of these stories featured gratuitous gore and bizarre elements. All of them featured brilliant detectives solving fantastic crimes by pure logical deduction. Some other classics of this period are The Tattoo Murder Case (Akimitsu Takagi), The Tragedy of the Takagi Clan and The Petrov Case.

In the 1950s, readers grew more interested in the psychology of the criminal and the societal impact of crime. This dried up interest in honkaku stories, a winter that lasted until the 1980s when interest in classic puzzles began to revive again. A new group of writers started playing with the form and created a whole new genre. This era, which is still going on, is known as shin-honkaku or the "new-orthodox" era.

The shin-honkaku movement restored Golden Age style plotting and fair-play clues to the Japanese mystery scene. This is when the world at large began to take note of this sub-genre and the books started to get translated and published in English. Perhaps the best known of these new authors is Keigo Higashino, who has burst into the public consciousness worldwide. He is well-loved for his mix of honkaku mysteries with a modern realism and true-crime aesthetics. Soji Shimada (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders), Yukito Ayatsuji (The Decagon House Murders) and Alice Arisuwaga (The Moai Island Puzzle) are other pioneers of shin-honkaku.

Photo by Ankan Pratik Roy

This genre gives you a glimpse into the Japanese culture, with its office workers, bath houses, mansions and cultural motifs. Most honkaku detectives show a single-minded pursuit of truth and revel in the puzzle solving unlike the western counterparts who might have other hobbies, life problems and so on.

In the Decagon Murders, which can be called a Japanese And Then There Were None, a character exclaims in the very first chapter: “Enough gritty realism please! What mystery novels need are a great detective, a mansion, a shady cast of residents, bloody murders, impossible crimes and never-before-seen-tricks played by the murder.”

Honkaku books are not ashamed of what they are, in fact they are proud of it.

Today the popularity of honkaku has created a veritable deluge of these puzzle mysteries in all entertainment media. While many of these have not been translated to English, two publishers—Locked Room International and Pushkin Vertigo—have been making an effort to bring these to the world.

Sometimes the abundance of information the reader needs to keep track of discourages one, but the satisfying endings and meta-literary awareness more than make up for it. I would urge anyone who loves the golden age detective story to try out some of the honkaku classics.

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Show of the Week

A brilliant title, a bit of romance, a bit of adventure, and a bit of sleuthing—Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? is a fun romp. This early Agatha Christie usually falls through the cracks in best-of lists, possibly because it straddles many sub-genres. What I am recommending today isn’t the book but its near-perfect adaptation, a TV mini-series directed by Hugh Laurie in 2022. It’s true to the original but also brings alive the characters just the way Christie imagined. After watching this, I wanted to go and read the book again! Watch on SonyLiv.

Rating: 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸

P.S. Manu says WDTAE is his favourite Christie novel and that he has developed a crush on Frankie over multiple re-reads!

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Trivia of the Week

Did you know that A.A.Milne, famous as the creator of Winnie The Pooh, has also written a murder mystery ? And that it was a pretty big hit in its time?

Mark Ablett has been entertaining guests at his country house, but the festivities are rudely interrupted by the arrival of his wayward brother Robert, home from Australia. When Robert is found shot through the head, Mark nowhere to be found, and the local police scratching their heads, it is up to amateur detective Tony Gillingham and his pal Bill to investigate what happened. Can the pair of sleuths solve the Red House Mystery in time for their afternoon game of croquet?

The book was praised by no less than Raymond Chandler (he was notoriously difficult to please). In his essay The Simple Art of Murder, he wrote, “Let us glance at one of the glories of literature, and acknowledged masterpiece of the art of fooling the reader without cheating him. It is called The Red House Mystery, was written by A.A.Milne …The book was published in 1922 but it’s timeless, and might as easily have been published in July, 1939, or, with a few slight changes, last week. It ran 13 additions and seems to have been in print, and the original format, for about 16 years. That happens to few books of any kind. It is an agreeable book, light, amusing in the Punch style, written with a deceptive smoothness that is not as easy as it looks.”

He did go on to criticise aspects of the plot and he’s right, it’s not a perfect book. But it’s a really fun read. In spite of the great reviews and sales, A.A.Milne never wrote another whodunit again, so this one is a gem for multiple reasons. Read it for free on Project Gutenberg.

Rating: 🩸🩸🩸🩸💧

1. There are similarities between Drishyam and The Devotion of Suspect X in the sense that both deal with how a clever man covers up a murder by creating unbreakable alibis. But the setting, characters, story arcs and a key plot point are completely different. I’ll give Jeethu Joseph the benefit of the doubt.

2. I should probably call this an issue but I like the idea of naming my newsletters the way TV shows are named—with series and episode numbers. So, episode it is.