It’s fair to say that, in my reading of crime and detective fiction, I generally like my plots fast-moving, my clues brilliantly baffling, and my detection rigorous. It has been known, though, for something a little more calculated in its pacing or with an absence of well-drawn detection to scratch an itch that only manifests once every blue moon. It was absolutely the case with The Devil’s Flute Murders (1953) by Seishi Yokomizo and, returning to the Land of the Rising Sun and the fiction brought therefrom by Pushkin Vertigo, it’s proved to be the case with Murder in the House of Omari (2021) by Taku Ashibe. Another time, in a different mood, this would not have worked for me at all, but, honestly, I delighted in practically every page of this.

Established in the Nanchi traders’ district of Osaka, the House of Omari is a revered cosmetics company, trading on a reputation for excellence in its products and services. To work even as a lowly errand boy for the House of Omari is a significant position in this respected district, and the wealthy Omari family exerts a huge influence. Ashibe’s novel essentially charts the fates of the Omari clan over the latter years of the Second World War, as a series of murders occurs on the premises where they live and work, rocking a family already suffering under the strictures of the era.

But, of course, the book is also about so much more, with an unsparing eye turned upon the effect of the war on the population of Japan, and an undisguised fury turned towards the leaders who made the terrible decisions that resulted in the country as a whole losing so much of its own sense of prestige and self-worth, both in the immediately personal sense…

[I]t was the same old story for those seeing friends and relatives off to war. For a while, there had been almost daily processions through Osaka, and no matter how lavish the send-off, no matter how loud the three cheers of Banzai! — all that ever remained were feelings of heaviness and emptiness.

…and the wider, slow societal crumbling:

Of course, life at first carried on much as it did before, and one could ignore the shadow cast by the war if only one looked the other way. But then, in the blink of an eye, that shadow grew larger — so large that you couldn’t fail to notice it. And soon enough, Natsuko found herself and everything around her engulfed in an oppressive darkness from which there was no escape.

With resources become scarce and the government invoking increasing demands on what must be given up for the war effort, so the wares put out by the House of Omari suffer, and it is against this loss of prestige and, in a sense, identity that the murders play out. Indeed, the book feels to be almost entirely about identity — not just that of the killer, but of the nation as a whole, and especially the individuals who must change their name on being taken on by the House of Omari. See also grandmother of the current clan Taka, whose own birthday has been lost in the change of calendars, and who must confront a world which is increasingly unfamiliar.

A rich vein of Western detective stories — branded “hostile literature” in this era — runs through the book, with work by Freeman Wills Crofts, Ellery Queen, S.S. van Dine, Roger Scarlett, and others providing much of the background (elder sister Tsukiko doesn’t care for books, so you know she’s a wrong ‘un) and informing a great deal of what unfolds. Deliberately, echoes of these books are found in the murders that occur, with, for instance the family massacre recalling The Greene Murder Case (1928) and a piece of iconography being linked to The Cask (1920) but also seeming to me like Ashibe referencing The Inugami Curse (1951) by Seishi Yokomizo.

Structurally this is far from perfect, with the eventual solution falling to a character only introduced in the final stretch, and one feels that some of the conceits — two people have the same name, and it’s still not clear to me if they’re two different people — perhaps working better in the native Japanese. Translator Bryan Karetnyk deserves huge kudos for his work on this, though, which retains the right amount of foreign touches left unexplained (the details of the clothing are fascinating) to make it feel both a world away and very accessible. This really does feel like a Golden Age of translated work in this genre, and the men and women employed by Pushkin for this purpose are in the front rank.

As a celebration of the cultural influence of detective fiction, Murder in the House of Omari is superb, with the very cultural separation I cherish in these books forming a huge part of the overall theme and fascinating to see from the other side. As a work of historical fiction, folding real death and destruction into a blistering critique of the mishandling of resources and communications in wartime, it is a coruscating read, and one that does well to stir so much fury while remaining tightly-focussed on a close-knit group. Don’t come for fair play detection or rigorous examination of crime scenes, but instead for the cultural divide viewed through the lens of personal loss and weighed against the wider devastation of a country completely broken by the people who ran it into the ground. Sobering stuff, but rather magnificent with it.

~

See also

TomCat @ Beneath the Stains of Time: [A] more accessible title for readers who find the usual shin honkaku style with its eccentric architecture, grisly corpse-puzzles, gruesome locked room slayings and elaborate deductions heavy going. Murder in the House of Omari is a pure whodunit without any impossible crimes, unbreakable alibis or untranslatable codes,