- By Yukito Ayatsuji
- First published: Japan, 1987, as 十角館の殺人 (Jukkakukan no Satsujin)
- Translation: Locked Room International, 2015, by Ho-Ling Wong
The Decagon House Murders – adapted for television? Impossible, one would suppose; but there it is. Proof that, where detective fiction is concerned, the impossible is always possible.
Decagon House is a mystery for mystery addicts. All the characters – victims, murderer, and amateur sleuth alike – are detective fiction enthusiasts; the plot pays tribute to the classics; and Ayatsuji delivers a solution as ingenious as the best of the Golden Age.
Mystery fiction, Ayatsuji rightly argues, is “at its core, a kind of intellectual game. An exciting game of reasoning in the form of a novel. A game between the reader and the great detective, or the reader and the author. Nothing more or less than that.
“So enough of the realism of the social school of mystery fiction once so favoured in Japan… No more of the corruption and secret dealings of the political world, no more tragedies brought forth by the stress of modern society and suchlike. What mystery novels need are – some might call me old-fashioned – a great detective, a mansion, its shady residents, bloody murders, impossible crimes, and never-before-seen tricks played by the murderer. Call it my castle in the sky, but I’m happy as long as I can enjoy such a world. But always in an intellectual manner.”
And those are what Ayatsuji delivers in spades. (Almost; it lacks a couple of those necessities: no great detective and no impossible crimes.)
Here’s the plot (and stop me if you’ve heard this one before): a small group of people come to an island expecting a holiday; instead, they are marooned, and picked off one by one…
That’s the premise of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, as we all know. Ayatsuji expects us to know; he makes it explicit. In the Prologue, his unnamed mastermind outlines his plan “to kill them in order, one by one. Precisely like that story written by the famous British female writer…”
And the seven people who visit Tsunojima all know that work. They are members of Kyoto University’s Mystery Club, all nicknamed after seven great (well, four great and a few historically important) writers: Ellery, Carr, Agatha (a pharmacy student, of course), Van Dine, Leroux, Orczy, Poe. (No Chesterton? No Dorothy?) But their knowledge of detective fiction might not be enough to save them.
Moreover, these are not the first deaths to take place on Tsunojima: the year before, the architect who built the strange houses on the island, Decagon House and the Blue Mansion, and his family were murdered. While the Mystery Club members are trapped and being slaughtered, other students, safely on mainland Japan, are investigating those deaths.
Decagon House is not as tense as Christie’s 1939 novel, and its characterisation is nowhere near as vivid, but in some ways it is a better puzzle-plot. Ayatsuji knows what seasoned detective readers will make of burnt corpses and missing gardeners, and he dangles “the Birlstone Gambit” and “the headless corpse trick” in front of them. But is it bluff, or double bluff?
He also understands the excitement of deductions; Ellery’s analysis of the footprints at the fourth crime scene is as brilliant a bit of reasoning as his great namesake’s. ROT13 Vg bcraf gur pvepyr – naq, yvxr znal bs Ryyrel’f fbyhgvbaf, vf pbeerpg, ohg ynpxvat.
To cap it off, Ayatsuji indeed has one of those “never-before-seen tricks played by the murderer” ROT13 gjb qvssrerag punenpgref pbyyncfvat vagb bar crefba, with a single-sentence epiphany.
However, I’m not entirely convinced it’s fair play: yes, there are plenty of remarks and phrases that in hindsight take on new meaning, but the mystery isn’t solved by a great detective or through deduction, and there doesn’t seem to be a conclusive clue. (ROT13: Creuncf gur fhttrfgvba gung gur ubfg / betnavfre vf hfhnyyl gur zheqrere, be gung obgu Ina naq Zbevfh fzbxr Frira Fgnef pvtnerggrf.)
Nevertheless, this is a landmark in Japanese detective fiction. Its publication was “an epoch-making event which transformed the world of Japanese mystery fiction with revolutionary new ideas,” Soji Shimada (author of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders) states. It is, in fact, the pioneering work in the shin honkaku (new orthodox) movement: “the rebirth of the classic puzzle-plot novel with a new twist, audacity: pushing the bounds of the puzzle-plot novel while adhering to its fair-play rule”, translator Ho-Ling Wong points out.
Just as Decagon House heralded the Japanese movement, its translation into English was spearheaded the appearance of several more Japanese masterpieces of detective fiction. (Do read Masaya Yamaguchi’s Death of the Living Dead). Here’s to more: and to the hope that Werewolf Castle might one day be built in Europe!
Blurb
Students from a university mystery club decide to visit an island which was the site of a grisly multiple murder the year before. Predictably, they get picked off one by one by an unseen murderer. Is there a madman on the loose? What connection is there to the earlier murders? The answer is a bombshell revelation which few readers will see coming.
The Decagon House Murders is a milestone in the history of detective fiction. Published in 1987, it is credited with launching the shinhonkaku movement which restored Golden Age style plotting and fair-play clues to the Japanese mystery scene, which had been dominated by the social school of mystery for several decades. It is also said to have influenced the development of the wildly popular anime movement.
This, the first English edition, contains a lengthy introduction by the maestro of Japanese mystery fiction, Soji Shimada. Locked Room International discovers and publishes impossible crime masterpieces from all over the world.
Other reviews
- Ho-Ling Wong (16 May 2015 and 15 November 2020)
- Crossexaminingcrime (15 September 2015)
- Ah Sweet Mystery! (21 June 2016)
- In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel (27 March 2017)
- Countdown John’s Christie Journal (12 December 2020)
- Mysteries Ahoy! (2 March 2022)
The Grandest Game in the World 
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