THE SEISHI YOKOMIZO PAGE (3): THE LITTLE SPARROW MURDERS & THE DEVIL'S FLUTE MURDERS, fifth and sixth of the Kindaichi series translated into English

THE LITTLE SPARROW MURDERS
SEISHI YOKIMIZO (Kosuke Kindaichi #6; tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An old friend of Kosuke Kindaichi's invites the scruffy detective to visit the remote mountain village of Onikobe in order to look into a twenty-year-old murder case. But no sooner has Kindaichi arrived than a new series of murders strikes the village - several bodies are discovered staged in bizarre poses, and it soon becomes clear that the victims are being killed using methods that match the lyrics of an old local children's song...

The legendary sleuth investigates, but soon realises must unravel the dark and tangled history of the village, as well as that of its rival families, to get to the truth.

PAGE ONE IS HERE★PAGE TWO IS HERE☆
PAGE THREE IS HERE★
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My Review: An interesting cross between Kawabata's masterwork Snow Country and a sideways take on Dame Agatha's lesser work Hickory Dickory Dock mixed with her absolute chef d'œuvre The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, only in 1950s Japan.

One factor that must be attended to by Anglophone readers of this series is that in Japan they are historical fiction. Japanese readers will be as "at sea" as any Anglophone reader would be; the story is sixty-five years old, and was about a bygone way of life even then. So there's a layer of anachronism baked into the modern reading experience irrespective of language it's read in. That doesn't mean it's not a good read. It is indeed a fun story to follow. Don't expect fair play in modern mystery terms, and all will be well. Read it for atmosphere, read it for the trip to the past...you'll enjoy it more that way.

Dysfunctional family dynamics are crime-fiction evergreens. The rage and hatred needed to work a person up to killing someone build in that pressure cooker. This story has a corker of a horrible family in it. The murder Kindaichi investigates took place twenty years before the present...remembering that present is 1959...and the victim is one of those folks who just need killin' in the old US Southern idiom. Mysteries exist because we, as a society, need to see ma'at maintained in our fiction because it seems so unmaintained in the world. The zeitgeist of 1950s Japan would reasonably suggest itself as a similarly traumatized one. I suspect the Kosuke Kindaichi series serves much the same function as the Poirot series did post-Great War...a superior intellect comes along and apportions blame for the guilt of tearing the already fragile fabric of a society in flux.

Letting the reader in on all the clues, all the information the superior intellect possesses, isn't the playbook for the crime stories of this period. I'm sure some sociology thesis treats this topic, but I don't have access to such material. I suspect it goes along with the social norms of trusting experts, even...especially...if they know more than The Authorities...which seems almost quaint in this day and time.

It's a series I get a lot from reading. I enjoy the historical aspects on several levels, within the story told and the storytelling itself. It feels, in these translations at any rate, like work that could have come from the same era as the original Japanese work.

That's a compliment. Four stars for solid enjoyment of a fun-to-read story.

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THE DEVIL'S FLUTE MURDERS
SEISHI YOKIMIZO (Kosuke Kindaichi #5; tr. Jim Rion)
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An ingenious and highly atmospheric classic whodunit from Japan’s master of crime.

Amid the rubble of post-war Tokyo, inside the grand Tsubaki house, a once-noble family is in mourning.

The old viscount Tsubaki, a brooding, troubled composer, has been found dead.

When the family gather for a divination to conjure the spirit of their departed patriarch, death visits the house once more, and the brilliant Kosuke Kindaichi is called in to investigate.

But before he can get to the truth Kindaichi must uncover the Tsubakis’ most disturbing secrets, while the gruesome murders continue…

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My Review: A peek at the very immediate aftermath of WWII in bombed-out Tokyo, and the dreadful inconvenience all this war nonsense with its barbaric social leveling brings to The Better Classes.

Deeply dislikable "noble" people doing disreputable things for ignoble motives, aaahhh there's the sweet spot for a story! The supernatural window-dressing was sort of fun. Seances are entertaining silliness in fiction, cynical and sordid manipulations in person. The one in this book is, oddly, both; the fact is the "supernatural" gubbins of the music playing eerily would not work at all in today's world, but was very amusingly handled so flew under my eyeroll threshhold.

Again, and as always in this vintage of Japanese crime novels (based on my limited sample size, anyway), be prepared for the sleuth to know things you do not. You're here to be Dr. Watson, or Inspector Japp, not Hercule or Sherlock. Accept this and enter in the spirit of "what did bombed-out Tokyo look like?" and this read will both entertain and educate you. Kosuke Kindaichi's rumpled Columbo-like presentation of self is a lot more...unusual, noticeable, in Japanese society both then and now. The author's choice to make him rumpled is making a statement about surfaces in a country where they're even more important than they are here in the West.

I land on four stars, per usual in this series, for the fun of being in this very, very dissimilar-to-mine world.

THE KOTARO ISAKA PAGE: The Assassins series, THREE ASSASSINS & BULLET TRAIN, as they're best experienced

THREE ASSASSINS
KOTARO ISAKA (tr. Sam Malissa)
Abrams (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: “Three Assassins feels like a fever dream that makes sense when you’re in it, but whose strange contours linger long after you wake up.” —New York Times

Three Assassins is the high-stakes, high-style, and utterly propulsive follow-up to Kotaro Isaka’s international bestseller, Bullet Train, a Crime Reads “Most Anticipated Book of 2021.”

Suzuki is an ordinary man until his wife is murdered. To get answers and his revenge, Suzuki abandons his law-abiding lifestyle and takes a low-level job with a front company operated by the crime gang Maiden, who are responsible for his wife’s death. Before long, Suzuki finds himself caught up in a network of quirky and highly effective assassins:

The Cicada is a knife expert.
The Pusher nudges people into oncoming traffic.
The Whale whispers bleak aphorisms to his victims until they take their own lives.

Intense and electrifying, Three Assassins delivers a wild ride through the criminal underworld of Tokyo, populated by contract killers who are almost superhumanly good at their jobs.

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My Review: I read these books out of order; the fact is I didn't realize at the time I read them that there *was* an order! I strongly recommend reading this book before reading Bullet Train, because many details will make a lot better sense in the latter if you do.

A truly trippy, peculiarly anime-inflected story about...about...umm...Life, The Universe, and Everything, maybe? How easy it is to come unmoored from societal norms when they stop serving you? When an ordinary teacher's wife is assassinated, he doesn't grieve and get on with life. He turns his entire existence into a revenge-dealing machine. (Okay, okay, it's totally fridging and it's not a little icky in 2024, but the book was written in Japan in 2004; your 2020s US sensibilities are a liability in this read.)

What kept me reading in spite of feeling, quite often in fact, that I wanted to give Suzuki a hard shake and a two-cheek slap, was the inventiveness and gonzo pace of the exercise. Read it in chunks, not driblets. You'll think too much about how incredibly implausible the entire enterprise is unless you build a solid head of steam. The first ~30 pages at the least should be taken at a gulp.

A big part of the universe created here is the awful, cruel nature of modern society. The assassins who commit mayhem for money are no more horrible than corporate lobbyists who pay to pass laws that get their masters out of having to pay taxes, or damages, or take responsibilty for any awful thing that their (in)actions cause.

And that really os the heart of the book: Who are the clients for the terrible deeds that Suzuki and his co-workers are performing? Who has the money to make these terrible things happen, untraceably, repeatably, repeatedly?

Those in Control.

I'm not going to belabor this point. If you get it, you got it already. This, however, very important in the events that you're reading about in this book, and the next. The cruelty of the universe isn't personal. There isn't some vengeful gawd looking down on you and pointing an accusatory digit, using that to hurl thunderbolts and maledictions upon you more precisely. It would be, I suppose, comforting if there were.

Instead it's those in control looking at a population-level situation and moving the pieces of the solution into place. The motives, the results, the consequences...never vouchsafed to any of the victims inevitably suffering from those impersonal moves. Give someone a target for their misery and that target takes the heat and bears the blows. That's gawd's purpose in religion: the heat for the awfulness of the world is justified because gawd is mad at you, or your neighbors, or The Gays, or...the list is endless, changes with (often generational) fashions, and never includes the real culprits. If one depersonalizes, takes the face away from, the abuser, there's no outrage to build into rage, then erupt into violence.

Suzuki learns this horrible truth in the first thirty pages. No one murdered his wife. She was killed by a person, but not for a reason. Now what? Knowledge is power. Power over what you do next. Suzuki has to decide what will replace his desire for personal revenge.

And that, mes amis, is this novel's point. I'm not particularly edified by it, I'm not too happy about the violence herein so lovingly described. I was entertained by the full-throttle pace of the storytelling. I was abosrbed by this Everyman's decisions, the thoughtfulness of them, and the resultant mayhem. If you saw the westernized adaptation of Bullet Train, you have a grasp on the pace and style of events. But, and this is CRUCIAL!, you have no smallest idea of what the story is about. Read the books.

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BULLET TRAIN
KOTARO ISAKA (tr. Sam Malissa)
Abrams
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now (non-affiliate Amazon link)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Five assassins on a fast-moving bullet train find out their missions have something in common in this witty and electrifying thriller

Satoshi—The Prince—looks like an innocent schoolboy but is really a stylish and devious assassin. Risk fuels him as does a good philosophical debate, such as . . . is killing really wrong? Kimura’s young son is in a coma thanks to The Prince, and Kimura has tracked him onto the bullet train heading from Tokyo to Morioka to exact his revenge. But Kimura soon discovers that they are not the only dangerous passengers onboard.

Nanao, nicknamed Ladybug, the self-proclaimed “unluckiest assassin in the world,” is put on the train by his boss, a mysterious young woman called Maria Beetle, to steal a suitcase full of money and get off at the first stop. And the lethal duo of Tangerine and Lemon are also traveling to Morioka. The suitcase leads others to show their hands. Why are they all on the same train, and who will make it off alive?

A bestseller in Japan, and soon to be a major film from Sony starring Brad Pitt and Joey King, Bullet Train is an original and propulsive thriller which fizzes with an incredible energy as its complex net of double-crosses and twists unwinds to the last station.

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My Review: Not the movie. The movie is fast and loud, American and violent. The book is slower, more nuanced, and very Japanese. It also has a universal message for its readers: Nothing, but nothing!, can be allowed to get in the way of Revenge. Call it Retribution: It is the eternal weighing of deeds for the pinpoint-accurate design of their equal and opposite results.

Revenge alone is sacred.

If you haven't read Three Assassins, a lot of the why of this story is not going to make a blind bit of sense. I strongly recommend getting into the universe of the assassins before embarking on this exciting outing into their world. Don't spend a lot of time asking "why" of this book only to get the unsatisfying answer a) because, 2) read Three Assassins, that's why.

A must for initiates, though. The increased famailiarity the book assumes you have is license for it to really ramp up the use of multiple, intersecting though definitely not parallel, PoV chapters...and that narrative technique requires practice to get used to when decoding tangentially connected story lines. This weird story of five assassins doing similar but not causally related things on one speeding train that's going nowhere special or significant to no unusual purpose. It's just moving at speed, and it's not going to stop for a predetermined period of time; perfect for a murder or two. The assassins, like in the first book, are very highly skilled at very weird specialties of killing. They operate at a superhuman level of concentration. They are, in short, very fictional. Since this is unabashedly fiction, that's okay by me. Big fun, nothing deep; the original story had more of the Message, this one merely plays the videogame for you.

Now, about that film: Like 3 Body Problem, it shifts things to a safely western, US-white-male footing so as not to run afoul of the clucking hens of the right wing who glare with their beady little eyes and three functioning neurons at any and all things queer (let alone Queer!) because...well, here I sit with my teeth in my mouth, unable to come up with any reason for their hostility except "they's stupid." Anyway, whatever the source of their rage, the entertainment studios won't take risks that will unquestionably, positively not pay off as increased profits in short, medium, or long runs, so here we are with a pallid, denatured action flick of what was a more subtle, subversive idea once in its life.

THE SEISHI YOKOMIZO PAGE (2): First English translations two of four Detective Kosuke Kindaichi novels, THE INUGAMI CURSE & THE VILLAGE OF EIGHT GRAVES

THE INUGAMI CURSE
SEISHI YOKOMIZO (Kosuke Kindaichi #2; tr. Yumiko Yamakazi)
Pushkin Vertigo
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A fiendish classic murder mystery, from one of Japan’s greatest crime writers.

In 1940s Japan, the wealthy head of the Inugami Clan dies, and his family eagerly await the reading of the will. But no sooner are its strange details revealed than a series of bizarre, gruesome murders begins. Detective Kindaichi must unravel the clan's terrible secrets of forbidden liaisons, monstrous cruelty, and hidden identities to find the murderer, and lift the curse wreaking its bloody revenge on the Inugamis.

The Inugami Curse is a fiendish, intricately plotted classic mystery from a giant of Japanese crime writing, starring the legendary detective Kosuke Kindaichi.

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PAGE ONE IS HERE★PAGE TWO IS HERE☆
PAGE THREE IS HERE★
My Review: Ex post facto narration isn't a trope for me to consume in rapid succession without psychic consequences, it seems.

When elderly Sahei Inugami finally has the grace to die already, he leaves behind the most viciously hateful will I can even conceive of. Much like the way Kindaichi gets into the family ugliness in Death on Gokumon Island via a request from someone who's dead now, the Inugami family lawyer calls on him to referee at the reading of this horrible will. Of course he dies on page three or thereabouts for his temerity.

What follows is a twisting, terribly sad recounting of the endless resonances of privilege in a family's life. Privilege won, in a society like Japan's pre-war was, counted for little...it was at best a grudging thing and this warped Inugami's experience of the prosperous life he wrested from an ill-willed social milieu. The man's surname means "dog god" and, since he was without a family, he had no way to know if it was something they'd have reason to take pride in or simply some long-vanished imaginative spark's cruel jest at him, an orphan.

The Inugamis of the next generations are warped by the curse of wealth, of deference given but grudged, and their lives made purposeless by their patriarch's iron control. His life ended far too late for the family not to be cruelly torqued into self-aggrandizing defensive arrogance. The children of the old man's mistresses, since their disadvantages were somehow socially sanctioned by being obvious, weren't entirely guilty...of more than usual awfulness, anyway.

What made this into a delightful set-up for a killing spree, also made it less than perfect: the presence of a gay couple whose dirty deeds made them unclean and unacceptable...period-appropriate and not exactly unknown as an attitude in present-day Japanese society. What bothered me the most, frankly, was the awful way a seriously disfigured war veteran was treated, described, dealt with; it all made his actions feel more like a man clawing back some dignity...too late and in the wrong way.

Translator Yumiko Yamazaki made some odd-sounding choices for my ears, e.g. choosing to switch between using the proper word kōtō and the oddly off-kilter transliteration "zither"...while the instruments are related they are not identical...despite making quite a palaver about defining a kōtō as a zither, she goes on to use both in the text. If there was some pattern to when and why the different words were used, I couldn't discern it. This played into a kind of story fatigue, an unforgiving hardening of my narrative-transporting arteries.

All in all, though, this survivor from Author Yokomizo's early publications presents a lovely and involving puzzle to solve, with several ancillary riddles on the edges of the main puzzle that were very interesting in themselves. I won't say it's perfect but I will say I've greatly enjoyed more time in Kindaichi-san's company.

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THE VILLAGE OF EIGHT GRAVES
SEISHI YOKOMIZO (Kosuke Kindaichi #3; tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
Pushkin Vertigo
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The third title in Japan’s most popular murder mystery series—after The Honjin Murders and The Inugami Curse—fiendish classics featuring investigator Kosuke Kindaichi.

Nestled deep in the mist-shrouded mountains, The Village of Eight Graves takes its name from a bloody legend: in the Sixteenth Century eight samurais, who had taken refuge there along with a secret treasure, were murdered by the inhabitants, bringing a terrible curse down upon their village.

Centuries later a mysterious young man named Tatsuya arrives in town, bringing a spate of deadly poisonings in his wake. The inimitably scruffy and brilliant Kosuke Kindaichi investigates.

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My Review: "The Village of Eight Graves" has a terrible history, and a terrible genesis in violence and unchecked greed. The common run of its people are afraid of life; they believe, and thus find evidence for, their manifold misfortunes being rooted in a curse that hangs over their heads from a long-ago unforgivable act. They are thus creating those conditions, interpreting the common misfortunes of life in that context. Superstition is a powerful drug. It allows us to Be Right, and there is absolutely nothing humans like better, need more, will work as hard to attain and maintain, than Being Right.

Bet you're nodding along....

I wanted to Be Right that Author Yokomizo couldn't tell a poorly paced story. I was...Not Right. The issue with this read is that our usual omniscient Watsonesque narrator is not here. Instead we have an irritatingly dimwitted PoV character called Tatsuya, whose chills are very much on a par with Miss Silver's cough in the irritating-authorial-choice derby. He spends our time sort of vaguely bumbling around while stuff happens and people he has reason to kill up and die, and then Kindaichi-san pops up (as we knew he must but, if I'm honest, I couldn't tell you why or how this hard-luck burg caught his attention...it was that little melded into the story). So the killings and deaths, somehow all connected to the village's ancestral curse, will all stop. Right? Right. But this time it's not Kindaichi-san doing detecting. It's the rush of events that Tatsuya has trouble keeping up with that reveals the malefactors. Kindaichi-san is here as window dressing, like a late Poirot novel! *grumble*

I sense a furtive glance up at the rating...yes, that's a "4" in front of the "*". What...the.... Well, it's like this: the translator, Mr. Karetnyk, proved more than capable of exceeding Ms. Yamazaki, the previous book's translator's, occasionally clunky choices. That was a big plus. Then there was the sheer gonzo pace of the murdering that's happening in Tatsuya's orbit. I can't quit a mystery mid-murder spree! I'm not made of stuff that stern. And the spree being so obviously calculated to implicate Tatsuya, who (poor wee lambkin) only now learned that the father who raised him was not only not his real father but knew who that person was...and Tatsuya was really thrown into emotional chaos by the entire unfolding plot to entrap and incriminate him through his parentage's revelation.

Then, while the bodies were piling up and the exsanguination was about ankle-deep, we go on an historical treasure hunt! The awful crime the villagers committed all those years ago was, you see, fruitless; they did not find the treasure they had filled the titular eight graves for. And now that Tetsuya's here, there's a reason to have a treasure hunt! Why? I don't know, whatever, treasure hunt! Does it make sense? Not to me. I am long past suchlike ponderin' when it comes to these stories. The secret to enjoying them is to flow with the river.

In the end, isn't that sort of a life lesson? Flow with the current, don't resist the pulls and changes, be there wholly and let the events unfold...I enjoyed this read's atypical ending a lot. I admit I don't want another Tetsuya narrator any time soon, but there was a reason he had to be the one to tell this story. It wouldn't have worked any other way, hence my seemingly over-generous rating. But do factor the change of focus via narrator into your reading plans.

Now, Pushkin Vertigo, it's on y'all not to dangle us over the pit for too much longer! More soon, please.

THE SEISHI YOKOMIZO PAGE: First English translations two of four Detective Kosuke Kindaichi novels, THE HONJIN MURDERS & DEATH ON GOKUMON ISLAND

THE HONJIN MURDERS
SEISHI YOKOMIZO (Kosuke Kindaichi #1; tr. Louise Heal Kawai)
Pushkin Vertigo
$14.95 trade paper, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending September 15, 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: One of Japan's greatest classic murder mysteries, introducing their best loved detective, translated into English for the first time.

In the winter of 1937, the village of Okamura is abuzz with excitement over the forthcoming wedding of a son of the grand Ichiyanagi family. But amid the gossip over the approaching festivities, there is also a worrying rumour - it seems a sinister masked man has been asking questions around the village.

Then, on the night of the wedding, the Ichiyanagi household are woken by a terrible scream, followed by the sound of eerie music. Death has come to Okamura, leaving no trace but a bloody samurai sword, thrust into the pristine snow outside the house. Soon, amateur detective Kosuke Kindaichi is on the scene to investigate what will become a legendary murder case, but can this scruffy sleuth solve a seemingly impossible crime?

PAGE ONE IS HERE★PAGE TWO IS HERE☆
PAGE THREE IS HERE★

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My Review: In a very Sherlock's-Watson fashion, the events of this premarital murder are narrated to us after the fact; we know, by this very technique, that the mystery is one that can be solved if we're game to follow the clues. Which clues? Well, the mystery-writer narrator and I are glad you asked:

When I first heard the story, I immediately racked my brain to think of any similar cases among all the novels I’ve read. The first that came to mind were Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room and Maurice Leblanc’s The Teeth of the Tiger; then there’s The Canary Murder Case and The Kennel Murder Case, both by S.S. Van Dine; and finally, Dickson Carr’s The Plague Court Murders. I even considered that variation on the locked room murder theme of Roger Scarlett’s Murder Among the Angells.

You really can't get a lot more fair-play than that, can you, giving the reader the crib sheet from which the author made choices and still, not to make it too easy by telling the reader *what* was cribbed from the Greats of the Golden Age. I found it endearing. I was very amused by the conceit, and by the writer/narrator following in the footsteps of the wildly disheveled amateur detective. Now...keep in mind this is a story written in the late 1940s and set in the 1930s. The idea of a Japanese man presenting himself as less than polished and perfect is damned near heretical. There was no beatnik, or proto-hippie, movement in Japan. It is a culture of Face, something I equate with my mother's endless mantra, "but what will People Think?" It's very, very important not to insult your neighbors, or your betters, by deciding to be different, to wear your Otherness on the outside...so featuring someone who's indifferent to Face in this mystery series is quite a powerful statement of value and intent on the author's part.

What's important for your pleasure in an amateur-sleuth read? An aura of verisimilitude? A relatable cast of characters? An evocation of a place and time? I'd venture to say that no one would behave the way the characters in this mystery do...but I could be wrong...at any rate, the point for me wasn't the verisimilitude (never is with amateur-sleuth mysteries, pace all you true-crime podcasters) but the delicious evocation of the time and the place:

A honjin was a kind of inn in feudal Japan where daimyo lords and other important officials would stay on their way to or from paying attendance on the Shogun in the capital, Edo—the old name for Tokyo. Ordinary members of the public were not permitted to stay at a honjin. A family who owned such a high-class lodging house were also members of the elite, and so it followed that this was a place where the rules of high society were closely adhered to.

The author, or more likely the editor and translator, gives me such a full and satisfying sense of the place with this simple paragraph. I wanted to feel transported and I did...as well as catered to, told a story to, and one that really did leave me guessing until the end. Very satisfying that Anglophone readers are getting this series (it has SEVENTY-SIX MORE VOLUMES!!) at long last...the author's only been dead since 1981. No rush, guys.

The things I wasn't quite so pleased to read were the class-conscious snobberies of the groom's family, presented without apparent or, to my mind, appropriate negativity cast on them. This being a thing that bothers me now, in the 21st century, I can't even try to guess if I'd even have noticed it had I read the book around the time the author died...almost forty years after it appeared. The snobbish tone is grating on old-man me, anyway. And the last chapter, number 18, is such a Golden-Agey thing...the way the guilty party is dealt with, the careful recounting of the places the clues were left...it was both what I wanted, and a hair too much to swallow in one draft.

If your mystery-story shelves are a touch too light, this is a good, solid, entertaining read...my crotchets aside.

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DEATH ON GOKUMON ISLAND
SEISHI YOKOMIZO (Kosuke Kindaichi #4; tr. Louise Heal Kawai)
Pushkin Vertigo
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Kosuke Kindaichi arrives on the remote Gokumon Island bearing tragic news – the son of one of the island’s most important families has died, on a troop transport ship bringing him back home after the Second World War. But Kindaichi has not come merely as a messenger – with his last words, the dying man warned that his three step-sisters’ lives would now be in danger. The scruffy detective is determined to get to the bottom of this mysterious prophesy, and to protect the three women if he can.

As Kosuke Kindaichi attempts to unravel the island’s secrets, a series of gruesome murders begins. He investigates, but soon finds himself in mortal danger from both the unknown killer and the clannish locals, who resent this outsider meddling in their affairs.

Loosely inspired by Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, the fiendish Death on Gokumon Island is perhaps the most highly regarded of all the great Seishi Yokomizo’s classic Japanese mysteries.

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My Review: This 1971 publication is the second case for Kosuke Kindaichi by internal chronology. I'm going by that order because it makes the most sense to do so for my little orderly brain.

But...here we go!...there's a lot wrong with this read. It's a cultural thing, permaybehaps, but any time women are victims of crime by virtue of their femaleness, I check out. I don't like or want that kind of imagery in my head. The way the author presents this heinous tontine by accident of birth as...a puzzle, a problem to solve. He goes about the solution methodically, and of course murder is wrong, but...there's a sort of "well, they were just women, after all" lackadaisicalness to the proceedings that truly got up my nose.

But I kept reading. Because there is a deeply unpleasant truth I must face in reviewing this book: I love a puzzle so much that, when I'm offered it wrapped in enough sweetly seductive mystery, I will just keep reading and ignore my squicked-out "but this is appalling!!" responses to see where we're going.

Ew. True, but ew.

The merest tinge of remorse, it seems to me, was plastered like a too-small figleaf over the fact that the whole crime...the entire murdering spree, ending three innocent women's lives...could easily have been prevented by a simple consultation with a living man's moral compass long before the events became inevitable. As it was, that crucial step now, with their deaths accomplished, the detective suffers agonies of self-reproach...they're still dead, dude. The blame's not really his, in all honesty. It's properly placed on the planner of the crimes and the idiots who blindly follow orders.

It's a solidly atmospheric piece, which I know won't surprise you as it's the fruit of twenty-three years' practice of his craft. 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. The temple bell's cultural resonance...the island's peculiar patriarchal culture...the delicately handled, and odd, romantic strand that would've passed by me unremarked without the translator's quiet nudges...all beautifully handled.

Culturally intriguing, nicely constructed puzzle, all get big ol' tick-marks. The last-minute application of regret, even though I think the whole story's revoltingly misogynistic, does at least gesture at some sense of the trope's wrongness. You should make your readerly decisions based on your personal tolerance for unpleasant-to-you subject matter.

I've continued the series, so clearly it's not a deal-breaker for me. I really thought it would be.

DRAWING FROM MEMORY, Allen Say's gorgeous graphic memoir, full five stars

DRAWING FROM MEMORY
ALLEN SAY
Scholastic Press
$17.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Caldecott Medalist Allen Say presents a stunning graphic novel chronicling his journey as an artist during WWII, when he apprenticed under Noro Shinpei, Japan’s premier cartoonist.

DRAWING FROM MEMORY is Allen Say's own story of his path to becoming the renowned artist he is today. Shunned by his father, who didn't understand his son's artistic leanings, Allen was embraced by Noro Shinpei, Japan's leading cartoonist and the man he came to love as his "spiritual father." As WWII raged, Allen was further inspired to consider questions of his own heritage and the motivations of those around him. He worked hard in rigorous drawing classes, studied, trained--and ultimately came to understand who he really is.

Part memoir, part graphic novel, part narrative history, DRAWING FROM MEMORY presents a complex look at the real-life relationship between a mentor and his student. With watercolor paintings, original cartoons, vintage photographs, and maps, Allen Say has created a book that will inspire the artist in all of us.

My Review: Allen Say's world doesn't exist anymore. This is the roughest part of getting truly old. The kind of universe where a twelve-year-old boy could be thought capable of living on his own is long gone. The kind of world where the famous cartoonist could be reached by the simple expedient of showing up at his place of work and saying, "I'd like to work for you," well! Need I belabor the point? Say wrote this book in a world that could be on a different planet than the one he grew up on. But from such foreign stones he built an exciting life, a life of art and creation and replete with stories that need telling.

This book, a graphic memoir I suppose, though it's less thoroughgoing than is Lynda Barry's work (eg Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor), is no whit less sophisticated.

I recently read Artist Say's magisterial Silent Days, Silent Dreams. It was such a gorgeous visual feast and so deeply affecting a tale that I couldn't bear to leave his world for long. Look above, look below...do you blame me?

Look at the great simplicity of the lines you're tricked into believing are real, three-dimensional objects:

Look at the care and attention you're not smacked with, look at the invisible framing of each image that makes it the perfect size and the perfect space for exactly that moment of storytelling to be within.

See the colors? See the volume of each object, each space between objects?

See the texture of matte-coated paper, the way that it creates the same effect as a gallery's neutral wall color does? See the fruit of more than seventy years practicing what a master, a cicerone, a sensei was wise, prescient, generous enough to give the boy artist? We receive the gift's fruit.

There was never a truer aperçu proverbialized than, "A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in." To your private orchard you bring trees whose shade soothes you, yet almost never will you stop to regard still less thank the long-gone hands and long-past rains that made the tree into what it is now.

Take that moment now, be grateful to Noro Shinpei for himself and for the soothing shadows of Allen Say's talented evocation of a world we can never see any other way but through his eyes and by his hands. Let him plant you a tree.

YOKOHAMA YANKEE, the burden and blessing of Being Other in one of the world's most homogeneous societies

YOKOHAMA YANKEE: My Family's Five Generations as Outsiders in Japan
LESLIE HELM
Chin Music Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

The Publisher Says: Leslie Helm's decision to adopt Japanese children launches him on a personal journey through his family's 140 years in Japan, beginning with his great-grandfather, who worked as a military advisor in 1870 and defied custom to marry his Japanese mistress. The family's poignant experiences of love and war help Helm overcome his cynicism and embrace his Japanese and American heritage.

This is the first book to look at Japan across five generations, with perspective that is both from the inside and through foreign eyes. Helm draws on his great-grandfather's unpublished memoir and a wealth of primary source material to bring his family history to life.

**CHIN MUSIC PRESS PROVIDED ME WITH AN ARC OF THIS TITLE AT MY REQUEST**

My Review: It's the "to life" part of the book description that I want to discuss. How many of us have family secrets? Okay, silly of me to ask. How many of us wish we could spill the family secrets and get away with it? Helm decides to take a look back at the whole sweep of his German-Japanese-American family's riot of repression and dysfunction so as not to have to write Yet Another Adult Child of Alcoholic Father story. I don't like Helm's father Don, not because he's an alkie but because he's a mean drunk. Got no time for that. Me, I'm a happy drunk, I like to laugh and screw and do pep-u-uppo drugs while drinking. Still not someone who should engender and "raise" four kids as Helm senior did. Or didn't, exactly.

So Helm sets out to put the whole sad affair into a multigenerational context that stops this from being cringe- and yawn-worthy, going into detail about the life of his ancestors in Germany and Japan before and between the World Wars in a well-documented and quite vividly drawn way. It's here that the narrative launches itself into some very interesting territory, and here that the stars are earned. Once we get to Don and Barbara, I don't care anymore because we've heard it all a zillion times and nothing makes this iteration any more interesting than the others were. Leslie and his wife facing racism in Japan was fascinating to me; the sheer incomprehension of Japanese people as to why these weirdos would adopt *strangers* which is to say the children of people they aren't related to makes me a lot clearer on the reason Japan's such a strange place, so much duty and honor and ceremony and so little welcome for the other, the different.

I won't quibble with the odd absence of wartime tales and stories. It's a great deal like Memoirs of a Geisha in that way; a paragraph or two of musings and oh will you look at the time it's 1945! What is it that exerts such a very powerful repulsion on those who write about Japan, let alone the Japanese, when WWII comes up?

This trope, or rather tropelessness, aside, the book is an engrossing and edifying read, and a pleasure to look at, and a very entertaining way to spend a day or so. The photos throughout are well-chosen and the design accommodates them exactly as one wishes all publishers would require it to do. This being a Chin Music Press title, that statement could easily go without saying, but I enjoy saying it.