If there are ten people in a house and nine die, who is to blame?

The answer is simple: it is the survivor, of course.” In The Aosawa Murders, the survivor is a 12-year-old blind girl named Hisako, daughter of a respected medical dynasty from the unidentified Japanese city of K.

At the end of a birthday party for three members of her family, where a courier delivers poisoned drinks, seventeen people are dead, including six children.

When shortly afterwards the sake supplier commits suicide and thus seems to admit his guilt, the case is closed.

But the two people who matter most are certain that Hisako is responsible for the murders: the investigating detective and housewife Makiko Saiga, who witnessed the tragedy as a child when she and her brothers were late to the party.

Decades later, she wrote a bestseller about it, the factual novel “The Forgotten Festival”.

game for the readership

There are two central currents in Japanese crime literature: Hard-boiled detective stories, trained in social realism and often spanning several volumes, are one recipe for success.

The other is called Honkaku, literally translated as Orthodox.

Inspired by the golden age of detective stories à la Agatha Christie, it sees itself less as high literature than as a game for the readership.

His highly artificial whodunits are constructed according to a strict principle of fair play: All clues are hidden in the text, so it is theoretically possible to solve the case while reading.

Riku Onda's "The Aosawa Murders", which received the Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 2006, is more likely to be attributed to the Shin-Honkaku, the New Orthodox.

Since the 1980s, authors have been freeing themselves from the rigid rules of the genre, playing with the form and adding meta levels to it.

In the English-speaking world, the British publisher Pushkin Press is currently causing a small Honkaku revival with its retro-look editions.

In Germany, "The Aosawa Murders" is the first translational foray into the subgenre - and in this respect the ideal figurehead.

The text is a play on truth, an intriguingly complex 3D puzzle;

on the one hand, with regard to the narrative style, which constantly changes the time levels and often also the perspectives unnoticed at first.

Years after Makiko Saiga published her book, someone is again asking questions about the Aosawa case.

The character's identity remains unclear for now, but the answers she receives, in the form of interview transcripts, form the beating heart of the text.

These sections alternate with passages from "The Forgotten Festival", with newspaper clippings, research notes, dialogues that seem to follow an enraptured dream logic.

In the classic Honkaku illustrated diagrams, maps, floor plans help to decipher the puzzles, often the plots are constructed around the peculiarities of strange buildings.

In Soji Shimada's "Murder in the Crooked House", for example, a businessman has a mansion built with all the floors sloping at a five-degree angle.

Riku Onda takes up this central motif in the form of the Aosawa Residence, a building that draws everyone's attention with its ship-like construction and round porthole windows.

Inside: a mysterious room that appears in many of the fantasies of those involved.

Painted in cold lapis lazuli blue, it forms the recolored black box of the story.

Onda is a master at constructing such edifices from fragments, more cantilever framework than solid masonry.

It frees the genre from the pressure of having to present the right solution for every puzzle, and usually only offers further possible connecting lines.

A glossary of Japanese foreign words helps you keep track of things.

"I think there are times when a series of triggers and coincidences intertwine to create something so terrifying that it surpasses anything humanly imaginable," reflects Makiko Saiga when asked about the Aosawa murders.

“Such events then present themselves to us in the form of a great calamity, as if to mock our puny human mind.

My gut tells me that this crime was something like that.”

Pretty tongue-in-cheek this sentence, for a genre whose origin lies in the imagining of catastrophes that are as sophisticated as possible.

At the same time, however, the opening of the Honkaku from a puzzle game that is completely fixed on its own mechanisms to an advanced self-image, a broader horizon, is also manifested in it.

As part of the Japanese literary scene, which is increasingly self-critical about the Shōwa era, imperialism and World War II, the post-war period and the economic miracle, Shin-Honkaku even proves to be the ideal form for casually analyzing social hierarchies and power structures - especially in one Culture in which many things are not clearly expressed, but can be shown all the more drastically in a protected artistic setting.

Onda's novel is occasionally reminiscent of the episodic concept of Columbo, who is immensely popular in Japan and whose captivating logic at first glance is also more appealing than the class conflicts that are being negotiated.

The crumpled inspector could also be the reason why Makiko Saiga explains her fascination with the Aosawa murders: "Don't take your eyes off something that is repulsive, but look at it coolly and admire it as a kind of beauty."

Riku Onda: "The Aosawa Murders".

Crime novel. From the Japanese by Nora Bartels. Atrium Verlag, Zurich 2022. 368 pages, hardcover, €22.