The device that the plot turned on was fiendish, but part of me wants to quibble about the mechanics - specifically the speed which everything happened, but that's just pickiness - the buildings could have been further apart, the people slower, or the water faster than I'm imagining them.None of that matters anyway, it didn't detract a bit from my enjoyment of the book. Even though it's written much later, everything about it harkens back to those magic days when mystery writing was new and full of unexplored nooks and crannies. This is a really well-written, cleverly plotted ode to the Golden Age of mystery, specifically, the golden age of locked room mysteries (I loved all the name dropping!).
I wavered between 3.5 and 4 stars ultimately, I'm going with 4. It won the first Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 1948 but has never been translated into English, until now. The Honjin Murders is the first Kosuke Kindaichi story, and regarded as one of Japan's great mystery novels. He went on to become an extremely prolific and popular author, best known for his Kosuke Kindaichi series, which ran to 77 books, many of which were adapted for stage and television in Japan. He was born in Kobe and spent his childhood reading detective stories, before beginning to write stories of his own, the first of which was published in 1921. Seishi Yokomizo (1902–81) was one of Japan's most famous and best-loved mystery writers. The murder seems impossible, but amateur detective Kosuke Kindaichi is determined to get to the bottom of it. Then, on the night of the wedding, the Ichiyanagi family are woken by a terrible scream, followed by the sound of eerie music – death has come to Okamura, leaving no trace but a bloody samurai sword, thrust into the pristine snow outside the house. But amid the gossip over the approaching festivities, there is also a worrying rumour – it seems a sinister masked man has been asking questions about the Ichiyanagis around the village. In the winter of 1937, the village of Okamura is abuzz with excitement over the forthcoming wedding of a son of the grand Ichiyanagi family. Japan's greatest classic murder mystery, translated into English for the first time
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