Yukito Ayatsuji – The Decagon House Murders
Some time ago, I bought some classical Japanese mystery books. The honkaku genre interested me, but, alas!, as it is with to-read-piles, you buy books and then time passes before you remember that hey, that specific one is in it. My father watched the old Hercule Poirot movies recently when I visited and it kinda got me into the mystery mood again. Since the honkaku genre is the Japanese response to the British golden area of mysteries, why not?
The Decagon House Murders came out in 1987. It shows in some of the character interactions, Japan was what it was in 1987. The honkaku genre also doesn’t bother with character depth. It wants to be a puzzle to solve, giving the readers the means to work out what happened. There are no glorious whimsical detectives. The characters are paper-thin, since the important part is the how it happened, why is not that relevant.
The novel is heavily inspired by “and then there were none” by Agatha Christie. From the message in the bottle, to the lonesome house on a lonesome island that nobody will visit for a week at least. The Japanese variant assembles a crew of seven university students who are all in a mystery club and love their detective stories. They all have nicknames coming from famous novels and writers, and they will call each other so (actually a kinda neat way to not give away their real name). As it happens, some month ago, there was a big mystery murder that happened on that same island. The main house burned down, the people are all dead, the Gardner missing, nobody knows what happened. As it also happens, one of the club members’ families does do in real estate and got their hand on the island when it was sold. So, of course, the mystery clubs really wants to go and stay on the second house of the island which was preserved: the decagon house. And they do, except two of them. While everyone dies on the island, the two other characters got a mysterious letter from Seiji, the head of the household living on the island before they all died. They then start their own investigation parallel to the murder happening in the island, because, you know, dead people aren’t very good at sending letters.
I must say that the book kinda got me. I had my suspect but they were so obvious from the start that I kinda let it go, it couldn’t be that obvious. How the murderer did it, though, I wasn’t able to figure out entirely, so it was a pleasant short read. Although quite similar to the Agatha Christie stories, it is still different enough to make it enjoyable.
