With their gloomy house in isolated woodland, overlooking a dreary bay and containing a mask from Japanese Noh theatre that is rumoured to carry a curse, it’s frankly amazing that no-one in the Chizui family — “[r]iven by mutual suspicion, hatred and a sheer failure to understand one another…” — has been found murdered in a locked room before. Thankfully, hard upon the return of Hiroyuki Ishikari to the area, ostensible head of the family Taijiro is found thus slain, and mystery fan Akimitsu Takagi is on hand to help dig to the bottom of the tangled skein that will see yet more of the clan wiped out in the days that follows. Though how much use he’ll be is up for debate.

The second novel by Akimitsu Takagi, The Noh Mask Murder (1949) at first represents a slightly complex nature in its framing: the prologue is from Takagi’s perspective, before a letter from Ishikari then introduces us to the journal kept by Koichi Yanagi which tells the story of the murders…and features Takagi and Ishikari as characters. My advice is not to think about it too much because a) it gave me a headache, and b) the book is sadly not good enough to warrant too close attention in this way.

As a mood-piece, it’s fabulous: long on HIBK suspense, using its gloomy woodland setting effectively to crank up the despair and paranoia as the eponymous mask — as with tattoos in his debut, Takagi does a brilliant job of painting the history of Japanese theatre — haunts the house, and the various elements of the Chizui clan make their own madness, nihilism, or frank terror evident to Takagi, the character, who “fancies himself as Japan’s answer to Philo Vance“. A light touch with history is always appreciated, too, with some of the characters being repatriated following their deployment in World War 2 and the bitter reflection that “Japan owes its current dire predicament…to the collective derangement that possessed its former leaders”.

As a piece of puzzle plotting, however, I found the book pretty awful. Hell, I’m also not sure that Takagi really plots here; instead, he seems to reach a point where he wants you to know something and so tosses it in like a handful of gravel in a cement mixer. The various revelations at the end of chapter 6, for instance, come out of nowhere in the least organic means possible. Takagi’s plot advances by lurches that come from the most unlikely of places — one character just picks up a teenager’s diary and starts reading it, say — and relies on principles that surely couldn’t have been common practice at the times (c.f. blood tests on babies revealing incipient mental health problems…?).

It is also absurdly talky, with one character, upon the discovery of the first of several bodies, stopping to give us a two-page lecture on how little they care for human life, say, and lots of reflection and pondering between sudden bursts of action as another and then another person shows up dead. This focus on our detectives having so much time to reflect means that the characters don’t come through as much more than names…which is weird given how much time is also given over to their views — see above — or the single distinguishing characteristic given to them. For the first time reading a honkaku translation, I honestly had trouble keeping track of who was who, so that a couple of deaths came as a surprise simply because I thought that person was already dead.

It’s very much a fault of the book rather than of Jesse Kirkwood’s translation, though, which does strong work in, one feels, slightly thankless circumstances, stirring up the moodiness of the milieu and finding some lovely turns of phrase to set your skin a-shivering:

“I don’t know what, precisely, is going to happen next, but tragedy is in the air. Indeed, we may be powerless to stop it — in which case our task shall simply be to keep the bloodshed to a minimum.”

Beware, too, that Takagi makes the questionable decision to spoil the works of two other authors, namely The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) by Agatha Christie and The Greene Murder Case (1928) by S.S. van Dine. A few nice touches almost make up for this — the mini-treatise on impossible crimes is a pleasingly compact undertaking — but then again some key aspect fall rather flat: I’m not completely sure how that locked room murder was achieved, and we’ll add this to the likes of The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934) by Ellery Queen on the list of titles whose denouements cause us to ask “Er, could we possibly have a diagram?”.

Thankfully shorter than The Tattoo Murder Case (1948), The Noh Mask Murder demonstrates many of that book’s strengths — unusual setup, fascinating light thrown on an area of Japanese life that Western audiences would largely be ignorant of — and, perhaps inevitably, contains many of the same flaws. It was well-received in its native land, but, for the type of mystery it’s trying to be, Takagi is hamstrung by his ignorance of what had already come before in English that had done this sort of thing so much better. These honkaku translations remain fascinating, and I hope we have a good many more to come, but thus far Seishi Yokomizo seems to be their most successful proponent for my money. Curious readers might wish to head there first.

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See also

Brad @ Ah, Sweet Mystery: The twists keep coming, right up to the final page, but the plot never threatens to become so complex as to cave in on itself. We end up with a satisfying puzzle, an emotionally resonant tragedy, and some fascinating insights into various subjects, including the history of Noh drama, the psychological damage wrought upon Japan due to the War and the great social upheaval that followed. The novel never becomes didactic, though: as it should, the history permeates and informs the mystery in subtle ways. Given that my last couple of honkaku reads were a bit ponderous and/or disappointing, it was nice to pick up and devour this in a few days and find it so lively and entertaining.