In the continuing saga that is the translation and publication of Japanese honkaku mysteries into English, Pushkin Vertigo brings us another prolific but seldom read author. Taku Ashibe has been producing crime novels and stories for thirty-five years, many of them with fanciful names like The Palace of Bizarre Idea Murder Case, Murder at the House of Another Dimension, The Puzzle Box of 300 Years, and Alibi in Wonderland. You’d think that for the last ten years, we would be reading Ashibe’s novels alongside Ayatsuji, Shimada and Yokomizo. But aside from a few short stories and one novel, Death in the Red Chamber, Ashibe’s vast canon has remained, ahem, a mystery!
But now, we can thank PV and translator Bryan Karentyk for giving us one of Ashibe’s most recent novels, 2021’s Murder in the House of Omari. This is an historical mystery spanning most of the 20th century but focusing on the mid-1940’s when Japan was fighting a fierce losing battle against the Allies during World War II. The war plays a central role in our tale, but so do other tragedies reaching back as far as 1906. The novel shares several elements with The Honjin Murders and The Inugami Curse, my two favorite mysteries by Seishi Yokomizo: a large and prominent family beset with various tragedies, including a series of bizarre murders, various impossible elements, and a wealth of historical detail woven into the narrative.
Our story: at the turn of the last century, Manzo Omari transforms his small dry-goods and pharmaceutical business in Osaka into a cosmetics empire by focusing on manufacturing healthier products (such as removing lead from face powder.) Soon, the House of Omari is known throughout Japan. Young lads dream of leaving poverty behind by entering the business as errand boys, moving up to clerk and perhaps managing one of the many branches of the company. Manzo resides in a sumptuous residence atop the main store in the South Kyuhoji-Machi area of Osaka with his wife and children and plans on leaving the business in the hands of his son Sentaro when he retires.
That plan changes one day in 1906 when Sentaro performs an act of kindness by taking one of the family’s errand boys to see the art exhibit at the Panorama Museum, a building the servant had admired. On that day Sentaro disappears, and with no son to inherit the business, it becomes necessary that daughter Kiyoe find a husband worthy of running the House of Omari. One clerk seems especially promising, and so the family adopts him, renames him Shigezo, and makes him Kiyoe’s husband.
Shigezo, Kiyoe, and their family comprise the main characters of our mystery proper. Again, the plan is that the eldest son, Taichiro, inherit the business. But Taichiro would rather become a doctor, and so the responsibility falls on the younger son, Shigehiko, a bright, outgoing lad who wants to write books like the murder mysteries he collects and loves, books by Ellery Queen, Freeman Wills Croft, Agatha Christie, and his favorite, S. S. Van Dine. Shigehiko is willing to take over the business when the time comes, but the exigencies of war take both sons off to serve their country.
The brothers leave behind their parents, their grandmother, their two sisters – the imperious Tsukiko and the charming teenager Fumiko – and Taichiro’s new bride, a beautiful and kind-hearted girl named Mineko, along with a small staff of workers to run a business that has frankly been ravaged by the war. Cosmetics are deemed a luxury item and are banned from advertising. The family is now trying to subsist on the manufacture and sales of comfort bags – packages containing essentials like toothpaste – to send to the soldiers at the front. Even this product is proving difficult to sell:
“The comfort bags were barely scraping by as a leading product. Special sales were held to boost numbers, but with customers becoming more and more scarce – just like the items with which the bags were filled, and so too the means by which to send them to the battlefield – there was little that could be done. Meanwhile, the number of soldiers who are either starving or sick on the front lines was increasing, and the men themselves were becoming too weak even to untie the bags.”
If I seem to be taking a long time to set up the mystery here, Ashibe takes even longer. The wealth of detail about life during a time of war and deprivation is fascinating, and it’s an added bonus that the author puts much better effort into characterization than most of the honkaku writers I’ve read. But we’re well into the novel before the murders begin, and once they do – well, I’ve got good news and bad news.
The good news is plentiful: the killings are both bizarre and frightening. Ashibe gives us scene after scene of the inhabitants wandering through the chilly household at night and stumbling upon bodies in horrific situations. This brings in a charming amateur detective in the form of Natsuko Nishi, a young doctor-in-training who works for the local clinic whose chief medical man is summoned to assist the police at crime scenes. Natsuko accompanies her boss to the first murder and discovers that Mineko Omari is an old school friend. This prompts the young doctor to offer both emotional support and a clever brain to assist as the bodies pile up.
But there’s a problem with this middle section of the book. Suddenly, the narrative becomes confusing, switching back and forth in time, often repeating events for reasons that seem unclear, and constantly using the same descriptors instead of advancing things. A minor character named Zenbei Kiyokawa is always referred to as “a distant relative of the family,” whenever he appears. Information we’ve been given earlier in detail is repeated over and over again. And the story is so well-steeped in Japanese customs that I sometimes wished for a footnote or two to further explain some of the things I was reading about. (This would have been appropriately Van Dine-ian!!)
Frankly, it became a struggle for me to hold my interest, even as interesting things were happening. This may be a problem with the way Ashibe tells stories, for I looked up Death in the Red Chamber and found a 2017 review from my pal JJ at The Invisible Event, where he seemed to have a similar struggle with the author’s prose. I looked up other reviews of Omari and found readers divided between full-on enjoyment and a struggle similar to the one I was having. Still, I was determined to finish – because there is a lot to admire here and the wealth of historical detail and the way the war becomes an integral part of the mystery plot is mostly fascinating.
And indeed, before the solution can be reached, real life intrudes in the form of strategic bombing air raids of Osaka that began on March 13, 1945 and continued into August. Much of the city was leveled and the casualties were tremendous. The commercial neighborhood where the fictional House of Omari lies was one of the hardest hit, which means that much of what we have read before – the people and the places – are wiped out. But Mineko and Natsuko survive and are determined to find the solution to this murder spree, if only to regain some of the control over their lives that the war robbed them of.
That’s all to the good, but the final section of the book places control of the case in the hands of a wholly new character, and the solution sprawls over fifty pages. Is it any good? I have to say that, despite the fact that the murderer was clearly inspired by the best mystery writers in the business, the complicated saga of the truth is ultimately something of a letdown. There are several “twists” that I don’t believe for a second should play out the way they do. And while I don’t have a bit of a problem with Ashibe folding the bombing of Osaka into his fictional narrative, it’s shocking how many characters end up surviving and thus lessening the impact of this real-world disaster on the world of the book.
In the end, I have to admit that I’m struggling with honkaku. The last half dozen reads have left me scratching my head, albeit for a variety of reasons, depending on the book. I came to this art form nearly ten years ago, when I naively suggested I might move to Japan since so many modern-day authors were writing Golden Age mysteries. Now I’m not so sure if this attempt to recapture the past is the dream world that I imagined it to be. Granted, I’m basing my opinion on my experience with maybe ten authors and thirty titles. And goodness knows there’s a ton of GAD that doesn’t float my boat at all. So please don’t let my reticence keep you from picking up this book. And if you have read it, I would really like to know what you thought.
Ah Sweet Mystery! 
I have tried dipping my toes into Japanese mystery fiction with very mixed success. Have you tried Gold Mask by Edogawa Rampo? That has been one of my few successes. I really enjoyed reading it back in January.
Thank you for your review. It sounds like one I can pass on. I still have The Little Sparrow Murders on my TBR pile. The annoying thing is the Japanese mysteries have such intriguing or engaging titles that I keep being tempted to buy them. Murder at the Black Cat Cafe is coming out this September and as I say I am tempted. If you ever did a draft for mysteries with cats in then I would be a shoe in!
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Though I’m certainly unqualified to speak from knowledge about Shin Honkaku, I understand your discouragement regarding the hoped-for “wonderland” of the tradition. Stilll, there’s something to be said for a country where their literature is repeatedly paying overt tribute to the traditions of Golden Age detective fiction, as opposed to ours where that influence, while real, is largely subconscious and unrecognized. A lot of people here love the Knives Out films and other examples of the recent renaissance of puzzle plotting in western entertainment, without any knowledge of the names of Queen, Van dine, Croft, Berkeley, etc… let alone specific familiarity with their works.
Most of them have heard of Christie, of course, but I don’t think that really counts— although that’s probably a tribute to the multifaceted appeal of her works rather than any criticism of it. There are no doubt many Christie fans whose interest in the puzzle aspect is minimal— they are primarily drawn to her detective characters, her evocation pre- and post-war England, etc… On the other hand, the number of Ellery Queen readers with little interest in the puzzle aspect is presumably quite small.
Thus, seeking Shin Honkaku is, if nothing else, a more targeted exploration into a more specified appeal. It’s somewhat akin to the difference between staying at a house in a country influenced by the Beatles (which can be said of any house in most of the countries of the world) and staying at a house where they have a specifically Beatles-themed guest room. Your odds of having a robust conversation about the Fab Four is significantly higher.
At the same time, the fact that the protagonist of this story’s favorite author— among that GAD group— is S. S. Van Dine (presumably reflecting the author’s own preferences) is perhaps an indication of unfocused genre interest, even in Japan. After all, my conscious effort to solicit from the GAD community the suggestion of a single compelling, significant “real” clue in all of Van Dine (as opposed to colorful but meaningless false clues as in The Bishop Murder Case) netted no results. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing in all of the Philo Vance novels in any way equivalent to the significant choice of murder weapon in The Tragedy of Y, the sudden change in attitude of Avery Hume in The Judas Window, the inappropriate size of the gown tear in Green for Danger, the odd wording of a suicide note in The Moving Finger, or even the apparently uncharacteristic behavior of the two generals in The Sign of the Broken Sword. Suggesting that perhaps, like a primary interest in Christie’s detectives, the primary interest in the Van Dine novels lies in an appreciation of the “upholstery” rather than the “engine” of the work (the difference of course being that Christie offers plenty of “engine” interest for those who seek it). But still, an affinity for Van Dine suggests an interest in the promise of the cerebral joys of the genre, even if Van Dine never delivers on that promise.
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Spoilers follow:
Actually, true fans of the Golden Age will get more a kick out of this, besides the fact that several characters, including the murderer, have a deep knowledge and love for specific authors. Mention is made twice of Van Dine: a major plot line is compared to The Greene Murder Case, and a trick is pulled straight out of Canary. Christie’s Orient Express also inspires the killer, as do a couple more specific titles.
The book IS clued, although ultimately I don’t think much of the puzzle. But while honkaku pays tribute to what you call “upholstery,” great attention is paid to the “engine” as well.
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Well, I’d be surprised if honkaku WASN’T concerned with the “engine” of puzzle plot fiction. As I mentioned, “the number of Ellery Queen readers with little interest in the puzzle aspect is presumably quite small.” It’s just that a particular worship in Van Dine suggests a visceral conflation of the trappings of the genre with its structural core.
I recognize this kind of thing in myself— the presence of denouement flashbacks in a whodunit film almost always make it more satisfactory to me, even when such flashbacks offer little in terms of retrospective illumination. That is, the mere presence of the package provides the pleasure of the gift. And I myself am drawn to Van Dine because of the promise of the puzzle— few authors could create problems as tantalizing as that of, say, The Bishop or Dragon Murder Cases (and the footnotes and intellectual digressions— and the presumption that they will all prove be of great pertinence to the solution— only add to the power of the promise).
It’s just that, unlike Christie, Carr, Queen, Crofts, Berkeley, or Brand, Van Dine’s solutions were never nearly the equal of those puzzles (Bishop is the epitome of this dynamic— an avalanche of mouth-watering clues that have no bearing whatsoever on the solution). And the footnotes and academic discussions invariably turn out to have been, for the most part, unrelated edification. They’re good for reinforcing the idea of Vance as a man of great erudition, but have little power in providing retrospective illumination.
In Christie terms, it’s somewhat like the difference between the reaction of an American reader to the “Debenham & Freebody”clue (“really? I never knew that. That’s interesting“) and “Everything tastes foul today!” (“Of course! That was right before my eyes the whole time”). Admittedly, for Christie’s initial intended audience (I doubt she was thinking all that much about her international readers in 1934) they both fit into the latter category. But with Van Dine, even when the explanation of a factoid preceded the denouement, it rarely had any illuminative power during the denouement.
The great Japanese interest in Van Dine suggests that they too can confuse promise with fulfillment— but at least their pantheon of authors suggests a greater interest in puzzle plot fulfillment than can be found in the western world.
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Well, I’d be surprised if honkaku WASN’T concerned with the “engine” of puzzle plot fiction. As I mentioned, “the number of Ellery Queen readers with little interest in the puzzle aspect is presumably quite small.” It’s just that a particular worship in Van Dine suggests a visceral conflation of the trappings of the genre with its structural core.
I recognize this kind of thing in myself— the presence of denouement flashbacks in a whodunit film almost always make it more satisfactory to me, even when such flashbacks offer little in terms of retrospective illumination. That is, the mere presence of the package provides the pleasure of the gift. And I myself am drawn to Van Dine because of the promise of the puzzle— few authors could create problems as tantalizing as that of, say, The Bishop or Dragon Murder Cases (and the footnotes and intellectual digressions— and the presumption that they will all prove be of great pertinence to the solution— only add to the power of the promise).
It’s just that, unlike Christie, Carr, Queen, Crofts, Berkeley, or Brand, Van Dine’s solutions were never nearly the equal of those puzzles (Bishop is the epitome of this dynamic— an avalanche of mouth-watering clues that have no bearing whatsoever on the solution). And the footnotes and academic discussions invariably turn out to have been, for the most part, unrelated edification. They’re good for reinforcing the idea of Vance as a man of great erudition, but have little power in providing retrospective illumination.
In Christie terms, it’s somewhat like the difference between the reaction of an American reader to the “Debenham & Freebody”clue (“really? I never knew that. That’s interesting“) and “Everything tastes foul today!” (“Of course! That was right before my eyes the whole time”). Admittedly, for Christie’s initial intended audience (I doubt she was thinking all that much about her international readers in 1934) they both fit into the latter category. But with Van Dine, even when the explanation of a factoid preceded the denouement, it rarely had any illuminative power during the denouement.
The great Japanese interest in Van Dine suggests that they too can confuse promise with fulfillment— but at least their pantheon of authors suggests a greater interest in puzzle plot fulfillment than can be found in the western world.
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I’ve just finished reading it and like you I enjoyed a lot of the history but as you say it was way too long. And there was just a lack of detection during the main narrative. I liked parts of the ending but had to skip over one part as it referred to a book I have but haven’t yet read. And so I still don’t know why one key thing happened. I will need to re-read the final section again in detail once I have read that book. It is frustrating that it sounds like there is some really good Japanese stuff out there – I’d love to read another Alice Arisugawa or some of the fusion stuff that Libby Stump has blogged about. If Pushkin are going to keep doing translations, please give us the best stuff!
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In terms of spoilers, I assume you’re talking about a certain Van Dine novel! Ashibe could just as easily have referred to a certain Christie novel that you HAVE read to give you the same information.
And yes – I, too, am intrigued by the titles that both Libby and TomCat have described. But I don’t think I’m going to be able to learn Japanese quickly enough to read them!!
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