THE BLACK SWAN MYSTERY, looking back nigh-on seventy years at a crime that rings familiar bells today

THE BLACK SWAN MYSTERY (Inspector Onitsura #1)
TETSUYA AYUKAWA (tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5 of five

The Publisher Says: THE JAPANESE CRIME FICTION CLASSIC: A prize-winning railway murder mystery set in 1960s Japan—for fans of Agatha Christie and Seicho Matsumoto! Full of devious twists and turns, this brilliant puzzle mystery is considered to be one of the greatest alibi deconstruction mysteries ever written

Early one morning, the owner of a local mill is found lying next to the railway tracks just outside of Kuki Station. Suspicion initially falls on the workers' union, with whom the man had been embroiled in a labour dispute, then on a new religious sect that has been gaining followers recently.

Chief Inspector Onitsura and his assistant Tanna are called in to investigate, and soon set off in a journey across Japan, from Tokyo to Kyoto and Osaka, and finally to the island of Kyūshu, in a hunt for the killer.

But as they investigate, the killer strikes again, and again. Will they be able to catch the murderer before even more people are slain?

Fans of Agatha Christie’s 4.50 from Paddington and Seicho Matsumoto’s Tokyo Express will delight in the devious twists and turns of The Black Swan Mystery, as well as in the characterisation and portrait of 1960s Japan.

The author, Tetsuya Ayukawa, is considered to be the master of alibi deconstruction mysteries–a talent that is on full display in this brilliant classic railway murder mystery, which won the prestigious Japanese Detective Writers Club Prize.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I really struggled to apply the tag "historical mystery" to the 1960s setting of this story. It was written in the time period, and wasn't ever revised by the author to reflect later knowledge; but people born in the 1960s are (great-)grandparents as I have cause to know. Historical mystery it is.

Japan's train-riding culture is alive and well today unlike the US version. That alone makes this short novel feel very much like historical fiction in 2025. That and the clues being heavily involved in facts of train-riding culture, so harking back to another of Dame Agatha's classic mysteries, The ABC Murders. An interesting side note on the choice of trains as the setting for this story is that the author was an employee of Japan's imperial colonial railway system in Manchuria until that regime ended in 1944.

The death of a wealthy industrialist embroiled in an ugly labor dispute is seldom cause for me to weep. As ma'at must be preserved, and as those who transgress must be made to feel the weight of their arrogation of the power of life and death, I was reluctantly drawn into the procedural search for a murderer whose crime seemed reasonable to my id.

There is a lot of to-and-fro travel as Onitsura-san does his evidence-gathering...it felt a lot like a train-travel brochure at times...but the result is one of those logic puzzles that, when it comes together, one can't unsee the pattern. I'm not a sympathetic audience to those who holler about spoilers. In the case of intricate designs like this, however, any tiny hint of the real way the thing happened can feel just too revealing too soon. The pleasure of this Japanese crime classic is matching wits with the criminal beside the sleuth. I'll assert my inalienable human privilege to be inconsistent and decline to say more about the mystery bit.

I'll tell you instead about the reading experience. Translator Karetnyk did a very good job of enabling me to feel I was reading a fresh, new work. I was not given the occasionally inevitable experience of dislocation, of distance from the story being told about a culture not my own in a time gone by.

That's quality work, that is. I really hope it sparks a demand to translate the entire series of Onitsura stories...I'm here for 'em. See if you are too.