Even before the sad death of John Pugmire, who brought us much in the way of foreign language impossible crime novels through Locked Room International, Pushkin Vertigo had started some heavy lifting in supplying us with ingenious puzzle plots from the other side of the language barrier. They’re not all bangers, of course, but the commitment Pushkin have shown, and continue to show if the raft of upcoming titles on their slate is anything to go by, is heartening for those of us who love a complex problem rigorously exploited. And The Labyrinth House Murders (1988) by Yukito Ayatsuji, recently translated by the talented Ho-Ling Wong, is certainly that.

Interestingly, The Labyrinth House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji is presented here as the framing device for the In Cold Blood (1965)-adjacent true crime novel The Labyrinth House Murders (1988) by Shishiya Kadomi, telling the story of a recent case of multiple murder in Japan, written by one of the people who was present at the eponymous house when the baffling series of events unfolded therein. The house in question was the home of famed mystery writer Miyagaki Yōtarō, and designed by the famous architect Nakamura Seiji, who was also responsible for the houses in The Decagon House Murders (1987) and The Mill House Murders (1988), offering the thread which runs through this series. Frankly, I hope the value of his real estate falls significantly by the time The Clock House Murders (1991) is published in English later this year.

To celebrate his 60th birthday, Miyagaki invited four writers he felt to be proteges of his alongside his editor Utamaya Hideyuki, Hideyuki’s pregnant wife Keiko, the critic Samejima Tomoo, and Shimada Kiyoshi, a mystery fan who struck up a friendship with Miyagaki in recent years. Shimada was, apparently, also involved in the previous cases, but I don’t remember him — he’s not a character so much as a name attached to a series of movements — and it makes no difference if you don’t, either. Basically, everyone gets to the underground labyrinth house, which would exhaust my patience after about ten minutes getting lost every time I tried to make my way through its literal maze of corridors, and very soon people start dying. Whodunnit?

The recent glut of honkaku and shin honkaku translations have made it very clear that characterisation takes a significant backseat, and I couldn’t help but be a bit relieved with how quickly things start to go south. When everyone suddenly realises they’re trapped in a maze-like house with a violent killer, there’s barely the quirk of an eyebrow before theories are being thrown around and more people die. I had a wonderful moment where something very different to what I had expected suddenly seemed to be going on, but for the most part this is a series of swift, violent ends and some intelligent speculation between each death.

“[T]o put it bluntly, I don’t care about how well-rounded a story feels or whether it will sell or not. I also don’t have any time for those reviews that only can only pick holes by pointing out minor problems, like how a certain trick wouldn’t work in real life, or how the real police conduct investigations differently from how they do it in a book. What matters to me is the degree in which some kind of excessive, over-the-top element in the work resonates with me.”

Ayatsuji, or rather Shishiya, has fun in the mystery toybox — dying messages, locked room murders, characters discussing how real life differs to mystery stories — but the book seems to be lacking something really clever for most of its duration. The locked room explanation is gut-bustingly underwhelming, the shocking revelation held back until the end of chapter 10 had occurred to me nearly 100 pages earlier, and beyond some fun with the labyrinth there’s little here to get too excited about. Then you get to the final revelations and realise how a very neat trick has been played on you, and I defy you not to have fallen for it — it’s great, and almost enough to salvage this.

Plenty of small touches are just nice to experience, too: the clear novelty of word processors in the 1980s, the historical note that “[t]he ancient Chinese believed evil could only fly in a straight line, so city walls were built in rows, but with the entrances out of line with each other so as to create a mini-maze [like how] in England, labyrinth patterns used to be drawn on doorsteps to ward off demons and witches”, and the clever lifting of that dying message so that it works for a Western audience. The book rockets along, no doubt thanks to another superb translation from Ho-Ling, and if you’ve found shin honkaku to your liking then you’ll enjoy this for the trappings it evinces.

I wish I loved it rather than merely liked it, but it does show the series on an upturn again after the disappointing The Mill House Murders, and makes me very keen for The Clock House Murders, and hopefully another few to follow after that. I would imagine there’s little that’s genuinely original left in the genre, but expeditious, memorable, and inventive experiences such as this don’t come along every day and should be celebrated when they do. Here’s hoping much more in the way of creative, complex murder mysteries from other shores come out of Pushkin in the years ahead; it’s lovely to finally experience these highly enjoyable flights of imagination.