James Nicoll Reviews

1948¹​’s Death on Gokumon Island is the second volume in Seishi Yokomizo’s Detective Kosuke Kindaichi series. The 2022 English edition was translated by Louise Heal Kawai.

Like many Japanese men, eccentric detective Kindaichi spent 1937 to 1945 serving in the Japanese army. A lucky survivor, he was repatriated back to Japan. Kindaichi has one final war-related task, one that brings the no longer young man to ill-omened Gokumon (Hell’s Gate) Island.

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1971’s The Village of Eight Graves is the third novel in Seishi Yokomizo’s Kosuke Kindaichi mystery series. The 2021 English translation is by Bryan Karetnyk.

Tatsuya survived unspecified unpleasantness during the conflict of the early to mid-20^th century and returned to Japan to discover that he no longer had a family or home. His mother is long since dead, his step-father has died during the war, and his step-family has scattered to parts unknown. Having no other choice, he has built an unremarkable solitary life for himself in the Japan of the 1940s. 

Thanks to his late mother’s unwillingness to speak of her past, Tatsuya has no idea that he was born into a family, and a rural village, scarred by terrible events. Ignorance is no defense. History seeks him out.

The aging matriarchs of the Tajima family summon Tatsuya to their home village. They believe that he is their long-lost nephew. As such, he is the Tajimi family’s only healthy, adult male heir. Such good fortune! Save for the fact that the community to which he is summoned is the ominously named Eight Graves.

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The Inugami Curse is the sixth volume in Seishi Yokomizo’s Detective Kosuke Kindaichi series. First published in 1951¹, the 2020 translation is by Yumiko Yamazaki.

Lawyer Toyoichiro Wakabayashi summons detective Kosuke Kindaichi to the town of Nasu. The lawyer needs the detective’s help to prevent a wave of horrific murders. Alas for Wakabayashi, the detective is momentarily distracted while saving a beautiful woman from drowning in a nearby lake. When the detective returns to his client, the lawyer is dead. Someone poisoned one of the lawyer’s cigarettes. 

Losing one’s client before the case has begun is embarrassing. Kindaichi decides stick around the town to wait for more murders and then solve them after the fact. He won’t have to wait long, thanks to some very bad choices by the late Sahei Inugami.

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Seishi Yokomizo’s 1946¹ The Honjin Murders is the first novel in the seventy-seven volume Kosuke Kindaichi detective series. The 2019 English translation is by Louise Heal Kawai.

Kenzo Ichiyanagi’s wedding will be remembered for decades. Not for the happy marriage that followed (it didn’t). Not for the Ichiyanagi clan’s misgivings about Katsuko, the bride-to-be. It will be remembered for the brutal deaths of groom and bride on their wedding night — that, and the fact that their dead bodies were found in a room from which egress appeared to be impossible. 

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