As a classic crime novel, it has all the necessary ingredients, but there was something about the way they were blended together which left me cold which was a shame as I had previously enjoyed The Inugami Curse and had hoped for more of the same. You should make your readerly decisions based on your personal tolerance for unpleasant-to-you subject matter. But I could see in some characters and the complexities of relationships and influences, where the Agatha Christie inspiration might lie. Undeterred, Yokomizo followed on his early success with a second novel Ningyo Sashichi torimonocho (1938–1939). In the prologue, this is used as a way to explain why it is so difficult for an outsider to solve a crime on the island: the islanders are fiercely protective of their own.

This is Golden Age crime at its best, complete with red herrings, blind alleys and twists and turns galore. Having only read The Village of Eight Graves before this book, I was also pleased at getting to really ‘meet’ Kindaichi and see him in action, as Eight Graves had him mostly on the sidelines and solving the case ‘off the page’. Though there can be some fun in getting lost in the twisty, complicated details of a crime novel, Gokumon Island is keen to hand-hold, and the reader is better for it. As Seishi Yokomizo is acknowledged as the King of Golden Age crime fiction in Japan, it’s no surprise that this proved an intricately plotted murder mystery. While this is a slower paced (particularly at the start) and not-very action packed read, it is also one steeped in place and culture, with an engrossing mystery at its centre the solution to which I didn’t see coming at all, and which I found quite a treat to read.The l It's a strange island, very insular, and the inhabitants are the descendants of pirates that used the island as a base, and prisoners that were exhiled to the island. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. He is often described as “scruffy” and is known for digging his hand into his knot of hair and scratching furiously when engaged in deep investigative thought.

It allows English-language readers a view into another country’s literary DNA, and inevitably illuminates other translated genre work from the same country. I found that the character of Kosuke has yet to be fully realised, he's not yet as defined as Poirot or Lord Peter Whimsey, but this may have more to do with the translation, I'm still looking forward to getting to know him better and have the other two translated books to get to. Although I was right to suspect that *one* character, the motive and the motivation for the killings did boggle my mind. However, the sick and twisted nature of the crimes is already making me squirm uncomfortably so what more can I get from it. Maybe because I was not expecting it and because I felt very grounded in the realities of post-War Japan, I found this style a bit disconcerting, as though it didn’t quite fit in.The book begins with Kosuke traveling to Gokumon Island to deliver the news of the death of Chimata Kito, a friend from the war and the only direct male heir of the island’s ruling family.

It's a cultural thing, permaybehaps, but any time women are victims of crime by virtue of their femaleness, I check out. T]he overall effect was of an island springing from the ocean, its cliffs rising hundreds of feet into the air all around.However, during World War II, he faced difficulties in getting his works published due to the wartime conditions, and was in severe economic difficulties. das Motiv lässt mich erschüttert und mit einer bestimmten Frage zurück, die ich hier aber nicht stellen kann (Spoiler). It's a well written but unsettling book to read and each of the murder case is being committed in some of the most stylist and tasteful ways in the history of Japanese detective novels.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The thing with Seishi Yokomizo's books is that, they will always leave us just staring at the wall for a few minutes. The translator's still giving us subtle hints about the cultural context and slyly explaining objects we in the West haven't a single clue about. Soon the body count starts to mount up as people are murdered in bizarre and seemingly impossible ways. Instead, the murders are treated like an interesting puzzle built around a series of unusual actions, and we're asked to empathize with the men who did the killing.

I put this one down earlier to catch up on my group reads then came back to it, but it probably really took like 3-4 days of actual reading time to get through this one.