Nothing is more difficult for a crime detective to solve than a closed room murder.

The American writer John Dickson Carr is considered the master of these mysteries, so it is not surprising that the investigators in Seishi Yokomizo's "The Mysterious Honjin Murders" keep coming back to Carr, since they have a case of a very similar nature before them: In the winter of 1937, a double murder shook a small village in Okayama Prefecture.

Maria Wiesner

Style Coordinator.

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On the wedding night, the son of a rich family and his bride were killed with a sword.

There are traces of blood on the walls, but the room was completely locked, and yet the alleged murder weapon is outside in the courtyard, in the middle of the snow, which also covered all the traces.

The family members who were in the neighboring building tell of the eerie sounds of a traditional stringed instrument that could be heard at night along with the screams of the victims.

The police find numerous clues, all of which do not want to fit together.

What was a mysterious tramp with only three fingers doing on the property on the wedding night?

Why did the groom burn old diaries before the ceremony?

Did the murdered man's little sister actually hear the strings being played the night before, or did she only imagine it after the fact with her vivid imagination?

The uncle of the murdered bride quickly sees that the police are in the dark and asks private detective Kosuke Kindaichi for help.

This young man with the messy haircut and unorthodox methods sees connections that have so far escaped the others.

Detective Kindaichi could be described as the Japanese version of Sherlock Holmes, because he also likes to solve his cases with strict logic and follows it consistently even to the most impossible conclusions.

Yokomizo also instilled in his character a penchant for crime fiction, which made the detective more relatable to readers and gave the author the opportunity to intersperse references to his own favorite books in the genre.

Born in 1902, Seishi Yokomizo was originally supposed to run his family's pharmacy in Kobe, but after studying pharmacy he decided to move to Tokyo and try his hand at writing.

Neither the poverty during World War II, when nobody wanted his books, nor tuberculosis could stop him from writing.

And so in 1946 he published The Mysterious Honjin Murders and invented the private detective Kosuke Kindaichi.

Many volumes with this character followed.

In Japan, Kindaichi is part of pop culture;

one can find the detective or homages to him in numerous films, manga and anime.

The English-speaking world only discovered Yokomizo in recent years, in 2019 the case of the Honjin murders in America was published.

For the German translation that is now available, Ursula Gräfe does an exemplary job of cultural transfer, leaving vocabulary in the original, which is elegantly explained by context or half-sentences after the first use.

A glossary is also attached to the novel, which explains and classifies references from items of clothing to the symbolic meaning of the mandarin duck.

When you read it, you immediately believe that this book is considered one of the best detective novels in Japan.

The puzzle is constructed in such a way that the reader is not deprived of any facts and still lures as many wrong leads astray so that the solution remains exciting.

Yokomizo also makes entertaining references to Western crime canon with his allusions to the western crime canon, putting his inventiveness in constructing an impossible case in direct competition with John Dickson Carr, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, and proving he belongs in their ranks.

Seishi Yokomizo: "The Mysterious Honjin Murders".

crime novel.

Translated from the Japanese by Ursula Graefe.

Blumenbar Verlag, Berlin 2022. 206 p., hard copy, €20.