The Decagon House Murders

THE DECAGON HOUSE MURDERS

JUKKAKUKAN NO SATSUJIN

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THE DECAGON HOUSE MURDERS

Yukito Ayatsuji

Translated by Ho-Ling Wong

The Decagon House Murders

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Jukkakukan no Satsujin © 2007 Yukito Ayatsuji. All rights reserved.

Publication rights for this English edition arranged through Kodansha Ltd., Tokyo.

THE DECAGON HOUSE MURDERS

English translation copyright © 2015 Yukito Ayatsuji

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ayatsuji, Yukito

[
Jukkakukan no satsujin
Japanese]

The Decagon House Murders/ Yukito Ayatsuji;

Translated from the Japanese by Ho-Ling Wong

For information, contact
[email protected]

All names in the text of this work are given in Japanese order, family name preceding given name.

Dedicated to all of my esteemed predecessors

Contents

Introduction

Prologue

Chapter One: The First Day On The Island

Chapter Two: The First Day On The Mainland

Chapter Three: The Second Day On The Island

Chapter Four: The Second Day On The Mainland

Chapter Five: The Third Day On The Island

Chapter Six: The Third Day On The Mainland

Chapter Seven: The Fourth Day On The Island

Chapter Eight: The Fourth Day On The Mainland

Chapter Nine: The Fifth Day

Chapter Ten: The Sixth Day

Chapter Eleven: The Seventh Day

Chapter Twelve: The Eighth Day

Epilogue

Translator’s Notes

The Kyoto University Mystery Club

Introduction:

The experiment called
The Decagon House Murders

Shimada Soji

There is a particular term in the world of Japanese mystery fiction called “
honkaku
mystery,” or “orthodox mystery.”
Honkaku
refers to a form of the detective story that is not only literature but also, to a greater or lesser extent, a game. It follows the concept of “a high degree of logical reasoning,” the key prerequisite for the most exciting form of detective fiction as proposed by S.S. Van Dine, a prominent figure of the English-language Golden Age of detective fiction during the 1920s.

I shall introduce a brief history of Japanese
honkaku
mystery for the fans of English-language mystery fiction, focusing mainly on works that are available in English. As one of the earliest short stories, we first have Edogawa Rampo’s take on the locked room murder,
The Case of the Murder on D. Hill
(1925). Other stories by Rampo are
The Psychological Test
(1925) and
Beast in the Shadows
(1928).

Before World War II,
honkaku
mysteries mostly used the short story form, although some novel-length stories were published. Major works are, for example, Hamao Shirō’s
Murderer
(1932, not available in English), which was strongly influenced by Van Dine, and Aoi Yū’s
The Tragedy of the Funatomi Family
(1936, also not available in English), which was influenced by F.W. Crofts and Eden Phillpotts.

Almost immediately after the war, novelists like Takagi Akimitsu and Yokomizo Seishi wrote several excellent
honkaku
detective novels. Takagi Akimitsu made his debut, thanks to Edogawa Rampo’s recommendation, with
The Tattoo Murder Case
(1948). That novel, together with Yokomizo Seishi’s
The Inugami Clan
(1951), are the quintessential Japanese
honkaku
mystery novels of this period.

Rampo and Ellery Queen started exchanging letters in 1950
[1]
. Two years later, both Edogawa Rampo and Takagi Akimitsu became members of Mystery Writers of America,

In Japan,
Prison Gate Island
(1949) is considered Yokomizo Seishi’s most important work, but I mention
The Inugami Clan
as it is his only work available in English.

In the latter half of the 1950s, the literary world of the Japanese detective novel was shaken up by a heavy earthquake. With Matsumoto Seichō in the forefront, detective novels emphasising natural realism started being published one after another, gaining popularity and becoming mainstream practically overnight.
Honkaku
was thus driven away. The new style was called “the social school” in the Japanese literary world and its attention for natural realism was seen as the next evolutionary step of the detective novel. Seichō novels of this period available in English are
Points and Lines
(1958),
Inspector Imanishi Investigates
(1961) and
Pro Bono
(1961).

When Ellery Queen (the Frederic Dannay half) visited Japan in 1977, Matsumoto Seichō and he held a discussion session, during which Seichō declared that the most important elements of the detective novel were the motive that led to the crime and the depiction of the psychology of the criminal. While this is certainly an opinion worth listening to, his ideas differed greatly from those of Van Dine. Seichō did not consider the characteristic elements of
honkaku
important, such as the genius deductions of the young great detective, his occasionally theatrical behaviour when he explains it all and the closed-circle situations. In fact, Seichō openly disapproved of such elements, as he considered them unrealistic.

After Seichō’s appearance on the scene, editors stopped actively publishing good old-fashioned
honkaku
mystery novels—detective novels in the spirit of the Golden Age—and the climate in Japan turned to “the winter of the age of
honkaku.
”
The criticism aimed at the social school made by one of the characters in the first chapter of
The Decagon House Murders
refers to this overreaction of the Japanese publishing world at the time. Among the writers who fought against this ordeal of time and who kept on writing
honkaku
mystery were Ayukawa Tetsuya and Tsuchiya Takao. As of today, one short story by Tsuchiya has been translated into English, but so far none of Ayukawa’s has.

What put an end to this “winter of the age of
honkaku
” were my own humble works:
The Tokyo Zodiac Murders
(1981) and
The Crime in the Leaning Mansion
(1982, not available in English). The thick ice conjured by Seichō’s spell had started to thaw, but unfortunately more writers following in my footsteps did not readily appear.

In 1987, however, the
honkaku
mystery writer I had waited so long for finally arrived. He was Ayatsuji Yukito with his debut novel
The Decagon House Murders
. I felt this writer’s appearance to be of tremendous importance, so I wrote an introduction for the novel and supported his debut in every way I could.

While the road may have been full of twist and turns, Golden Age detective fiction is still alive and thriving in Japan today, whereas in the United Kingdom and the United States it seems to have shut up shop. This is because in Japan we have the concept of
honkaku
. The word refers not only to the novels themselves, which emphasise logical reasoning, but it is also a badge of pride to the authors who write
honkaku
, indicating they are writers from whose novels their readers can expect a certain level of intelligence.
Honkaku
is a word that has given all Japanese writers, prominent or otherwise, the power to keep on writing.

It is my belief that if we can introduce this concept to the field of American and British detective fiction, the Golden Age pendulum will swing back, just as
The Tokyo Zodiac Murders
and
The Decagon House Murders
managed to accomplish in Japan. Ayatsuji’s first novel is to this day remembered by many in Japan as an epoch-making event which transformed the world of Japanese mystery fiction with revolutionary new ideas.

To understand the importance of this work, we must also take a short look at the history of Western detective fiction. The new form of literature we now know as detective fiction was born out of the scientific revolution, which completely changed Western society. It was Edgar Allan Poe who first detailed the curious case of an evil spirit which made its way into a locked room and, with terrible strength, killed a young woman, as well as the surprising truth behind the case that was revealed by cool-headed science. Poe was followed by Doyle, who gave the world the stories of Sherlock Holmes, a young scientist who championed a new field of study: the art of deduction, creating readers all over the world and firmly establishing the genre of detective fiction. More than eighty years after Poe, Van Dine in the United States gave the genre a second start in 1928. It was his idea to put the murder, the solving of the case and everything else from start to finish, inside a mansion or a closed-off stage, in the manner of a sports game, as is also done in
The Decagon House Murders
.

At the time Van Dine arrived on the scene, fanatical readers had become all too familiar with the various literary exploits of Poe and Doyle and, unlike readers at the dawn of the genre, they now knew what to expect as they turned the pages of a novel, which meant that authors had to readjust and change course also.

The introduction of suspicious inhabitants of a mansion and the fair presentation of the character profiles right from the start; clearly outlining the stage of the murder tragedy; the writer not being allowed to lie in the narration; no vital information necessary for the deduction game to be withheld from the reader; getting rid of elements that could interfere with the enjoyment of the pure deduction game  (like the magic of the Chinaman or vulgar love stories): these were the rules of the game as proposed by Van Dine. They themselves may have denied it, but John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen, too, were inspired by these proposals and created their own successful masterpieces of detective fiction—also inspired by the Gothic novel—so leading the way to the Golden Age.

However, this particular creative process also limits the number of elements available when writing a novel and one could say that, after the Golden Age, new developments were not made in the genre. The focus on the latest science, as embraced by Poe and Doyle, had also been abandoned by Van Dine, and the many revolutionary scientific discoveries of the twentieth
century left detective fiction trailing in their wake.

Looking back now at what Ayatsuji Yukito accomplished, I think we can say that he conducted an experiment that followed Van Dine’s approach to mystery fiction, but that he was even more daring and more ready to push the genre further. It is for that reason his writing style is called
shin honkaku
, or “new orthodox,” and why so many writers followed in his steps.

Riding the wave, many new writers of
honkaku
stories suddenly made their appearance in the short period between 1987 and 1990, including Utano Shōgo and Nikaidō Reito, as well as Ayatsuji’s fellow members of the Kyoto University Mystery Club, such as Norizuki Rintarō, Abiko Takemaru and Maya Yutaka. I also wrote the introductions for these writers’ debuts. In response to this movement, other writers like Arisugawa Alice, Kitamura Kaoru, Imamura Aya and Ashibe Taku also made their debut through different routes. All these writers came together and formed the movement known as
shin honkaku
. It was as if the grand spirit of
honkaku
had been biding its time during “the winter of the age of
honkaku
” and with the time ripe, it had finally woken up again.

Ashibe Taku’s
Murder in the Red Chamber
(2004) has been translated into English, and two of Norizuki Rintarō’s short stories,
An Urban Legend Puzzle
and
The Lure of the Green Door
have been published in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine,
as has my own
The Locked House of Pythagoras
(in 2004, 2014 and 2013 respectively).

In the manner of Van Dine, Ayatsuji also did away with focusing on the latest science in
The Decagon House Murders,
and set the murder and the solving of the case with an isolated house as its stage from start to finish. But he ruthlessly eliminated all the elements which Van Dine had thought necessary to make his stories “literary,” such as the depiction of the American upper class; the witticisms; the attention to prideful women; the cheerful conversations while the wine is poured at dinner; the polite demeanour of the butler and servants. Thus his novel approached the form of a game more so than anything previously written.

As a result, his characters act almost like robots, their thoughts depicted only minimally through repetitive phrases. The narration shows no interest in sophisticated writing or a sense of art and is focused solely on telling the story. To readers who were used to American and British detective fiction,
The Decagon House Murders
was a shock. It was as if they were looking at the raw building plans of a novel.

People devoid of any human emotion, only moving according to electrical signals: a setting reminiscent of the inside of a videogame. Ayatsuji Yukito’s unique method of depicting such abstract murder theatre plays, in which he hides his murderers, follows the traditions of the “whodunit” game of the Kyoto University Mystery Club. The participants in this game are given nothing in print, but have to guess who the murderer is based on an oral reading of a detective story. In a tense situation like that, where every word disappears the moment it is spoken, there is no need for beautiful or witty writing.

Ayatsuji Yukito first introduced this technique, dubbed “Symbolic Characterisation,” and his experiment
The Decagon House Murders
was also his debut novel. Some have mistakenly taken his calculated abstractness as inexperience in expressive power or even a lack of writing skill, and he was criticised harshly when the book was first released. However, he had his reasons for writing the book the way he did. And to everyone’s surprise, bot-like characters from videogames became widely popular soon after the book’s release, just as Ayatsuji’s style of detective fiction had already foretold. Thus
Decagon
found its place among other masterpieces.
Anime
(Japanese animation) which would soon take over the world, would also feature the closed-off worlds of the Ayatsuji school.

As the person who once introduced this novel to the Japanese world, I am thrilled now to be the person to introduce this experiment in mystifying tricks to the English-speaking world.

Shimada Soji