I’ll start by giving away my surprise ending: 

In May of next year, The Little Sparrow Murders will be the sixth Seishi Yokomizo mystery to be released in English by Pushkin Vertigo. If the publisher continues in this vein with all seventy-eight of Yokomizo’s books, the chances of my being around long enough to read titles like Pimple on Human Face may be slim, but at least more and more of the work by the man often called “the Japanese John Dickson Carr” is being made available. Reading Yokomizo is a little like reading the French author Paul Halter. An English-speaking mystery fan approaches their books with a sense of cockiness, for here are two men so enamored of our Western style of classic mysteries that they devoted their long careers to writing their own. 

And yet, once you start reading (and reading about) Yokomizo or Halter, you realize that they are taking the concepts created by Carr, Christie, Queen and their ilk and imbuing them with their own cultural history and style. The result is a reading experience where certain recognizable elements – the eccentric detective, the locked room murder, the gathering of suspects at the end – are filtered through a cultural lens that can be both fascinating and somehow frustrating to our sensibilities. 

This happens to me a bit with Halter – but as he sets most of his work in English villages during the early part of the 20^thcentury, he is trying hard to replicate the tone of those English authors of old that he loved. Seishi Yokomizo’s oeuvre is set firmly in post-war Japan. Like Halter, as a young man Yokomizo took advantage of the many translations of British and American mystery authors that became available. Yet he was also a student of classic Japanese literature and became part of a Modernist movement that sought to mix traditional and Western styles together. When his attempts at historical fiction failed, he became a prolific post-war mystery author from 1946 to the end of his life in 1981. 

Certainly, the shadow of World War II permeates his early novels: the changes wrought by the war on Japan infuse the background of Death on Gokumon Island (1948), and a scarred soldier figures prominently in The Inugami Curse (1950). The specter of the war is an even greater factor in the latest release, The Devil’s Flute Murders, first published in serial form between 1951 – 1953, and here presented in a fine translation by Jim Rion.  The new constitution foisted upon Japan by the Allies in an attempt to transform the nation into a democracy has stripped all royals of their titles. The damaged infrastructure of the country is everywhere: great houses have been bombed into rubble, food is scarce, and electric power goes on and off. Buses and trains are badly crowded and operate on sporadic schedules, making it harder for detectives to beat murderers at their game. 

Yokomizo uses all of this and more to create the plot and setting for the novel, most of which takes place on the estate of former Viscount and famous flautist Hidosuke Tsubaki. As a result of bombing and widespread damage from fires, Tsubaki’s in-laws have come to stay in various guesthouses on his estate, which was also damaged by fire but remains habitable. This creates a large cast of wives, children, and servants, a cast that is doubled in size as events unfold, and I’m sure every reader will turn more than once to the handy cast of characters provided at the start. 

Devil’s Flute starts strongly: the ex-Viscount, perhaps the only kindly person in the family, has died, presumably a suicide. This may have some connection to a horrific unsolved crime, the Tengindo Incident, where a man entered a jewelry shop on the pretense of being from the health department and poisoned the entire staff with a fake vaccine in order to rob the store. (The effect of reading this section during our own troubled times is quite chilling.) Due to the description of the criminal given by a survivor, Tsubaki becomes a person of interest to the police, and yet he seems to have an alibi, a secret trip to a far-off island. Something – perhaps due to the Tengindo murders or the trip he took – shattered Tsubaki entirely and led to his death. Or – is he dead? 

The Viscount’s daughter consults detective Kosuke Kindaichi: her father has been spotted alive, but the sighting was from afar at a darkened theatre.  The family plans a divination to see if Tsubaki is really dead, and the daughter asks Kindaichi to attend.  Here he meets the members of the large clan, who are all better rendered than the characters in, say, Death on Gokumon Island. They include Tsubaki’s beautiful but strange widow Akiko, her uncle, the grotesque ex-count Kimimaru Tamamushi, who lives on the estate with his young (and wonderfully sardonic) mistress Kikue, and Akiko’s brother, the loathsome Toshihiko Shingu, and his long-suffering family. 

The divination yields surprising results, including a locked-room murder. But before we can get too settled in, Kindaichi decides to focus on the question of whether or not Tsubaki is truly dead or has decided to pick off his family members. And so Kindaichi and a young policeman set off to trace the alibi Tsubaki had provided for the Tengindo murders. And here’s where things start to, well, drag out a little. We are introduced to a whole new set of characters, most of them dead or missing, and several with names like Otami, Osume, and Okami, which can be confusing to the uninitiated. Another murder occurs, and it’s clear that the novel is heading in a different direction from where it started. And then we head back to the Tsubaki family and their relations where more murders occur before the killer quite cheerfully offers a full confession. 

In the beginning, the unnamed narrator warns us multiple times that this is a “miserable tale” full of darkness that they didn’t want to tell. 

“Even as the author, I cannot predict what the final sentence will be, but I fear that the relentless dread and darkness that proceed it may end up overcoming the readers and crush their very spirits in its grasp. By their nature, stories of crime and mystery leave little enough good feeling in their wake, but this case in particular is so foul that even I feel it is perhaps too extreme.”

I imagine some elements of this novel were profoundly shocking and disturbing to readers of its day and may indeed be so to those who pick up the novel now. Yet I feel the shock is severely mitigated by several warning incidents, including the mention of a novel that would seem to spoil things for learned readers the way a certain play did for a certain Agatha Christie novel. (I’m not familiar with this novel, but I could spot what was going to be revealed at the end a mile away.) 

In the end, Yokomizo serves up a story that is indeed “dark and foul,” but I have a few caveats about its effectiveness as a mystery. My friend John Harrison mentioned a good one in his review of the book. There are also a couple of groaning coincidences, some problematic nonsense about the nature of birthmarks, and a certain wishy-washiness about the murderer’s state of mind. I wonder if my own problems with the novel stem from a serious lack of knowledge of early 20^th century Japanese culture. I don’t know if it’s something an introduction or suggested reading can fix, or if I will have to accept that the pleasure of reading these books will have to include embracing a limited ability to understand them. 

That said, the novel provides a fascinating portrait of post-war Japan that effectively permeates the mystery from start to finish, from the impetus for the Tengindo murders to certain passages in the killer’s confession that give ample proof of how emotionally devastating the war was to soldiers and their families. In addition, Yokomizo includes some fine creepy stuff in his puzzle plot, not the least of which revolves around the mysterious composition for flute that gives the novel its Japanese title (The Devil Comes and Plays His Flute) and which is heard to presage each murder. The final words of the book reveal the secret of how this composition came to be, and it is chilling in the best of ways.