The Labyrinth House Murders (1988) by Yukito Ayatsuji

Last year was great for fans of the Japanese honkaku and shin honkaku mysteries with new translations of Akimitsu Takagi's Noumen satsujin jiken (The Noh Mask Murder, 1949), Seishi Yokomizo's Akuma no temari uta (The Little Sparrow Murders, 1957/59) and MORI Hiroshi's Tsumetai mishitsu to hakase tachi (Doctors in the Isolated Room, 1996), but looked forward the most to Meirokan no satsujin (The Labyrinth House Murders, 1988) – written by Yukito Ayatsuji and translated by Ho-Ling Wong. From the occasional reviews over the years ("awesome meta-mystery") to the fascinating, labyrinthine floor plan of the titular house Ho-Ling blogged about in "The Quest of the Missing Map." Fast forward to today and this fabled detective novel is finally available in English courtesy of Pushkin Vertigo.

So immediately pounced on it the moment The Labyrinth House Murders became available for pre-order and only wish I had reread Ayatsuji's epoch-making debut first. The Labyrinth House Murders is a thematic sequel, of sorts, on the first two Shimada Kiyoshi novels, Jukkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987) and Suishakan no satsujin (The Mill House Murders, 1988), weaving compelling stories and plots around alternating narratives. The Decagon House Murders plays out in two different places, while The Mill House Murders has two narratives set a year apart. The Labyrinth House Murders has a very meta-ish story-within-a-story structure. So, basically, you're getting two The Labyrinth House Murders for the price of one!

The story begins with Shimada receiving an advanced copy of Shishiya Kadomi's The Labyrinth House Murders, "An Original Honkaku Murder Mystery! The Truth Behind the Labyrinth House Murder Case Finally Revealed," which finally promises to expose the truth of the real-life murder case at the Labyrinth House – "famous for its complex underground maze." The author claims the right to tell the story as Shishiya Kadomi was one of those present, but not under the penname of the book and presents it from the start as a mini-puzzle ("so which of the characters is Shishiya Kadomi?"). So the main body of the book is Shishiya Kadomi's The Labyrinth House Murders book-ended by Shimada starting to read the book in the prologue and meeting the author in the epilogue to cast a new light on the case.

Shishiya Kadomi's The Labyrinth House Murders tells the story of the 60th birthday party of legendary mystery writer, Miyagaki Yōtarō, who persisted in writing traditionally-plotted, fair play mysteries when "the wave of social detective novels took over the world of Japanese mystery fiction." Miyagaki is more than just a mystery writer. He's a mystery fan who dedicated his entire life to the detective story and through his magazine, Reverie, looked for new blood to carry on the genre.

So, on his 60th birthday, Miyagaki, invites ten people to his underground, labyrinthine lair to celebrate. A group comprising of Miyagaki's long-time editor, Utayama Hideyuki, and his pregnant wife, Keiko. Four promising mystery writers, Kiyomura Junichi, Suzaki Shōsuke, Funaoka Madoka and Hayashi Tomoo, who made their debut in Miyagaki's magazine. A well-known mystery critic, Samejima Tomoo, the housekeeper Fumie and, of course, Shimada. Shimada's is drawn to Labyrinth House because it was designed by that eccentric architect, Nakamura Seiji, who "had built a few curious building" like the Decagon House and Mill House – which all had seen their fair share of bloodshed and tragedy ("would the Labyrinth House be next?"). Labyrinth House is practically designed to court tragedy. A small, low stone building, "like a massive crag of rock," which is just the entrance to a massive, underground labyrinth with rooms clustered around them. All the rooms bare names of characters from Greek mythology. This veritable Minotaur's labyrinth has one entrance/exit in the reception room (Ariadne), brilliantly positioned right next to the kitchen. Nakamura Seiji, you genius, you!

When everyone has arrived, they're informed a tragedy has already happened before they arrived. The terminally-ill Miyagaki took his own life and left behind a curious testament on a cassette tape.

Miyagaki invited the four mystery writers because they're his favorites who got their starts in Reverie, but urges them to not assume he has been fully satisfied with their accomplishments. So poses a challenge to the four writers: over the next five days, they have to write a short story in which Labyrinth House is the setting, the characters in the story are the people gathered at the house and "every author must be the victim in their own story." There are three judges, Utayama, Samejima and Shimada, who have to pick the best story with the winner becoming heir to half of Miyagaki's fortune. And pretty much his successor. But if even one person refuses to participate, the contest is canceled and the testament void.

Not that leaving the underground house is an option as they soon find themselves trapped, or locked, inside the house. Before too long, the nearly decapitated body of one of the mystery writers is found in the drawing room (Minotaur). A murder that turns out to be copy of the murder described in the opening pages of the victim's short story, which becomes a pattern as the bodies pile on during their entrapment in Labyrinth House. And as to be expected from "an original honkaku murder mystery," even a fictitious one, succeeding victims leave behind a dying message or get themselves killed in a locked room. However, you shouldn't read it as "The Classic Japanese Locked Room Mystery" promised on the cover as it simply is not that kind of detective novel. The dying message, locked room and every other trope function here as smaller cogs and wheels in a larger plot, except, of course, the meta-narrative – which is the key to the story. Impressively, Ayatsuji uses the story's only genuine flaw to its advantage. Shishiya Kadomi's in-story novelization of the Labyrinth House murder case is fairly solvable. You can reach the in-story solution, or a big chunk of it, simply by asking a very simple and obvious question the characters stubbornly refuse to ask themselves. So the in-story novel reads and feels like a good, fun, but slightly imperfect, shin honkaku mystery.

In most cases, The Labyrinth House Murders would have been another example of the false-solution, flawed as it may be, outshining the correct solution. The slightly less impressive, but correct, solution has some elements that would have cheapened a detective novel of lesser quality. For example, the (ROT13) fbhepr bs gur oybbq gur zheqrere unq gb pbire hc jvgu gur qrpncvgngvba comes across as a bit cheap and banal (uneqyl jbegu gur jbex gung jrag vagb bofphevat gur zheqrere'f traqre) or the locked room-trick being the kind of shenanigans I normally frown upon. I simply worked on the assumption, a very incorrect assumption, the first victim was nearly decapitated because an ax was needed to break down into a locked room later. And destroying evidence in the process that the door was gimmicked to appear locked. Nevertheless, it served as a rock solid foundation for the correct solution to stand on making the false-solution one of the two biggest accomplishments of Ayatsuji and The Labyrinth House Murders. A fantastic use of the false-solution showing once again Ayatsuji is closer to Ellery Queen than John Dickson Carr. The second thing the book does very well is being a meta-mystery with the final meta-twist as the proverbial cherry on top!

So, yes, I tremendously enjoyed The Labyrinth House Murders. I'm not sure if I would rank it above The Decagon House Murders or The Mill House Murders, purely as traditional fair play mysteries, but as a fun, smart meta-mystery it's first-rate. Something very different from those two previous novels that at the same time feels like a logical next step in the series. Very much look forward to see what Ayatsuji is going to do next with his signature dueling narratives. Pushkin Vertigo has announced that the next translation in the "Bizarre House Mysteries" series is going to be Tokeikan no satsujin (The Clock Mansion Murders, 1991), which means they're skipping Ningyōkan no satsujin (The Doll Mansion Murders, 1989) for now. I don't mind. The Clock Mansion Murders sounds like another treat for detective fans. Anyway, 2025 is off to a good start!

The Mill House Murders (1988) by Yukito Ayatsuji

Soji Shimada's Senseijutsu satsujinjiken (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 1981) and Naname yashiki no hanzai (Murder in the Crooked House, 1982) cracked the thick ice that covered the post-war detective story in Japan, "the winter of the age of honkaku," handing the next generation of mystery writers a blueprint to carry forward the traditional detective story into the new century – ending the dominance of Seicho Matsumoto's social school. Just not right away. Well, not until Yukito Ayatsuji debuted with Jukkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987). A novel seen as the first wave of the shin honkaku (neo-orthodox) movement and remembered in Japan, to quote Shimada, "as an epoch-making event which transformed the world of Japanese mystery fiction with revolutionary new ideas."

Fittingly, John Pugmire's Locked Room International and Ho-Ling Wong's 2015 translation of The Decagon House Murders ushered in a new phase of the reprint renaissance that had been slowly gathering steam during the 2000s and really began to pick up momentum over the next decade.

Locked Room International had been mainly publishing Paul Halter and some odds and ends like a translation of Jean-Paul Török's Carrian pastiche L'enigme du Monte Verita (The Riddle of Monte Verita, 2007) and The Derek Smith Omnibus (2014). The Decagon House Murders appears to have given the traditionally-grounded, non-English mysteries legitimize and opened the floodgates to, what Brian Skupin called, a translation wave – one that's getting progressively bigger every year. Locked Room International continued with translations of writers such as Takemaru Abiko, Alice Arisugawa, Tetsuya Ayukawa, Masahiro Imamura and Pushkin Vertigo followed suit with reprints and new translations of Soji Shimada, Akimitsu Takagi and Seishi Yokomizo. In addition to a smattering of publications from smaller publishers like Yamaguchi Masaya's Ikeru shikabane no shi (Death of the Living Dead, 1989), Hiroko Minagawa's Hirakasete itadaki kōei desu (The Resurrection Fireplace, 2011) and MORI Hiroshi's Seven Stories (2017). And this only touches upon the Japanese mysteries that were ferried across the language barrier since 2015!

More importantly, Yukito Ayatsuji might very well have done exactly what Shimada predicted in his introduction to the LRI edition of The Decagon House Murders. In his introduction, Shimada discussed the shin honkaku movement and stated, "it is my belief that if we can introduce this concept to the field of American and British detective fiction, the Golden Age pendulum will swing back, just as The Tokyo Zodiac Murders and The Decagon House Murders managed to accomplish in Japan." You can argue the translation wave is leaving it traces as can been seen in the recently published A. Carver's The Author is Dead (2022), Jim Noy's The Red Death Murders (2022) and the work of James Scott Byrnside. So it was about time Yukito Ayatsuji got another novel translated into English.

Back in 2020, Pushkin Vertigo acquired the publishing rights of The Decagon House Murders and reprinted the book in a brand new edition. Every reprint of a previously published Japanese author from Pushkin Vertigo eventually receives new translations. It happened to Shimada and Yokomizo and expected it to happen to Ayatsuji some time before it was announced.

Yukito Ayatsuji's Suishakan no satsujin (The Mill House Murders, 1988) is the second entry in the yakata (mansion) series. The strange mansions providing a backdrop for each novel is the creation of Nakamura Seiji, "a curious architect," who "would only work on curious houses, projects that happened to coincide with whatever theme interested him at the time" and "he'd always conceal childish tricks in those houses" – which appear to have began to attract horrific tragedies. Seiji had died in a house he himself had built called the Blue Mansion when it went up in flames. A series of murders took place in another strange house designed by Seiji, the Decagon House. There's always one person who seem to be connected to the mansion tragedies, Shimada Kiyoshi. So begins to travel around Japan "to see what more evil Nakamura Seiji's creations have led to." On his second outing, Shimada travels deep into the mountains north of Okayama Prefecture to visit the Mill House.

The Mill House is a European-style, castle-like building situated in an isolated valley and is named for the three large water wheels attached to the mansion to generate power. A very remote, sparsely populated area, but even there the Mill House got a nickname as some refer to it as Mask Manor. A reference "after its unusual-looking master," Fujinuma Kiichi, who's the son of the late, well-known visionary painter, Fujinuma Issei. Twelve years ago, Kiichi emerged from a car wreck with severely damaged limbs and a horrendously disfigured face. Now wears a white rubber mask to hide his "accursed features" and had the Mill House built to hide from the world. When he had settled into the Mill House, Kiichi began to buy back and hoard all of his father's paintings ("the art world had dubbed it the Fujinuma Collection"). The Mill House has guests only once a year, on 28th September, the day Fujinuma Issei passed away when only four men are allowed to view the collection. Ōishi Genzō, Mori Shigehiko, Mitamura Noriyuki and Furukawa Tsunehito. All four connected to the Fujinumas and the reason why they're allowed to view the collection once a year.

A year ago, the traditional viewing of the Fujinuma Collection became the scene of gruesome murder and the downright impossible. Firstly, the housekeeper, Negishi Fumie, fell to her death from the tower and her body was seen being carried away by the rushing water. Secondly, a painting disappeared from the wall of the Northern Gallery and Furukawa Tsunehito is assumed to have taken it. Thirdly, Furukawa impossibly disappeared from the first floor of the locked and watched annex. Lastly, Masaki Shingo, friend of Kiichi and one-time disciple of his father, is killed, cut up in pieces and burnt in the basement incinerator. The police is unable to find a satisfactory explanation outside of blaming the vanished man. So the case, more or less, remains unsolved.

There ends the prologue and becomes a bit tricky discuss as The Mill House Murders is one of the clearest examples of simplistic complexity I've ever come across! The prologue gives the reader a rough idea what happened a year ago and the narrative than switches back and forth between the past and present. The 1985 chapters is a detailed retelling what happened a year ago, while the 1986 chapters sees the surviving members of that tragic night returning to the secluded house, but this time there's an uninvited guest, Shimada Kiyoshi – who's a friend of the man who impossibly disappeared, Furukawa. Shimada asks Kiichi permission to stay and join the yearly gathering to have a look around the place. So the story alternates between chapters set in 1985 that go over the events of the previous year and chapters set a year later detailing Shimada's investigation. When a 1985 chapters shows one of the incidents, you get Shimada going over that part of the house or talking to the people who witnessed something. Shimada asks a question and the next chapters shows the incident he asked about. These alternating past/present chapters, especially the earlier ones, often mirror each other and gives a pleasing symmetric structure to the storytelling and plot. Brilliantly exploited to frame an ultimately simple, absolutely solvable detective story as a warped maze. I referred to this style of plotting as a simplistic complexity and the difficult thing about spinning a great deal of complexity out of an uncomplicated plot is to do it while playing fair and not obfuscate the plot with clutter. Ayatsuji succeeded admirably as there are no irrelevant, extraneous plot-threads needlessly complicating things with everything that has happened, and continues to unfold, at Mill House is relevant to Shimada's solution.

I was actually somewhat surprised how close some of my initial impressions and suspicions were to be to Shimada's solution. While never fully giving up on those first impressions and suspicions, I questioned and doubted all of them with every twist and turn along the way. Not until Shimada finally got an opportunity to take a look at the first floor annex and bedroom from which his friend inexplicably vanished that some of those suspicions began to look not so far fetched after all. The locked room mystery really is my wheelhouse. Even then, I failed to dot all the i's and cross all the t's. I particular liked what lay behind the secret of the locked study.

Well, I can go on rambling about the book, but you probably get the idea by now. I really enjoyed The Mill House Murders. A superbly written, intricately-plotted shin honkaku mystery weaving a seemingly complex patterns out of sheer simplicity. You can see how Soji Shimada and Yukito Ayatsuji's ideas revitalized a genre that had been dominated for decades by social crime novels, which in turn inspired a new generation who completely rejuvenated the traditional detective story. I don't believe the traditional detective story could have found better custodians when it got largely abandoned in the West and eagerly look forward to the translation of Ayatsuji's third yakata novel, Meirokan no satsujin (The Labyrinth House Murders, 1988).

A Decagonal Shaped Puzzle

"These writers (with others like them) are the aristocrats of the game, the old serpents, the gambit-devisers and trap-baiters whose strokes of ingenuity make the game worth playing at all."

- John Dickson Carr ("The Grandest Game in the World," from The Door to Doom and Other Detections, 1980)

In late June of this year, John Pugmire's Locked Room International published a translation of a landmark mystery novel from the land of the rising sun, Yukito Ayatsuji's, Jukkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987), which is credited with launching the neo-orthodox (shinhonkaku) movement – and putting an end to the dominance of the socially conscious crime novel. If only that would happen over here in the West.

The Decagon House Murders was translated by our very own tour guide through the largely uncharted territory of the Japanese mystery novel, Ho-Ling Wong, who also wrote a postscript on the Kyoto University Mystery Club. They stood at the cradle of this movement and a thinly disguised version of the club (and its members) figure prominently in the book.

A short introduction on the neo-orthodox movement was penned by Soji Shimada, author of that bloody tour-de-force known as Senseijutsu satsujinjiken (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 1981), and sandwiched between the introduction and after word is the answer to an all-important, but rarely posed, question: what do you get when you populate Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939) with the type of characters from Peter Lovesey's Bloodhounds (1996)?

Tsunojima is a small, deserted island off the coast of Japan and would've simply been one of the many, undistinguished rocks in the island nation if it weren't for the burned down ruins of a mansion and decagon-shaped house – which where the scene of a gruesome, quadruple murder case less than a year before the opening of the story.

So it goes without saying that the island is the perfect location for an excursion for the members of a certain university mystery club.

The club-members are known throughout a majority of the story by their adopted nicknames: "Agatha," "Carr," "Van Dine," "Ellery," "Leroux," "Orczy" and "Poe," which are, of course, names of famous mystery writers from the past – primarily from our Golden Age. One of them was exposed in the prologue to harbor plans to commit a small-scale massacre on the island, but the letter promising five victims, a detective and a killer at the end of their stay is taken as a joke or attempt at setting up a murder game.

There are also letters circulated to club members on the mainland, which pertain to tragedy that took place on the island several month ago and a death related to the mystery club itself. 

From this point on, the narrative alternates between the mainland investigation into the past murders and the rising body count on the island in the present. The former poses some interesting questions: why did the murder take several days to murder three or four people? Why was the hand of one of the victims severed? Where's the gardener who disappeared after the murders? Why do the current series of murders on the island tend to mimic the ones from the past?

My exposure to Japanese mysteries have mainly come from comics (manga) and some cartoons (anime), such as Case Closed and The Kindaichi Case Files, but you can easily see how the neo-orthodox movement influenced even that specific branch of mystery fiction. There's the cast of high-school or university students in a remote, isolated location with a dark crime in the past and a murderous avenger in the present, which is also pretty much a basic plot synopsis of every Kindaichi story. Perhaps the best example comes from an animated series, Detective Academy Q, which has several episodes forming The Kamikakushi Murder Case and has arguably the best use of bizarre architecture – alongside several seemingly impossible disappearances. I should re-watch those episodes one of these days and review them here. They were really clever.

However, as interesting and gratifying as the unapologetic attitude as an anti-modern crime novel might be, The Decagon House Murders has one or two flaws that you might expect from a debut novel – even from a (re)debut of an entire genre.

The plot is furnished with all the classic trappings of a Golden Age mystery, but the clueing is sparse and you need experience, combined with some intuition, to make a stab in the right direction. You can't really play the clever and smug armchair detective, as the story begins to unravel, but the only real drawback for me was that the story lacked an impossible crime! There were none! Absolutely zero! And this book was published by Locked Room International! Shocking, Watson! Shocking!

Anyhow... considering what The Decagon House Murders has done for my beloved, classically-styled detective stories in the East, as well as being an incredibly fun book to read, I was more than willing to look pass these minor flaws. And I'm very grateful to both Ho-Ling and Pugmire for tossing this one over the language barrier. May it be the first in a long row!

Finally, the legacy of The Decagon House Murders gives me an opportunity to say to (the memory of) Julian Symons what should've been said a long, long time ago: in your face, you dry-mouthed fairy!