The Inugami Curse by Seishi Yokomizo

The Inugami Curse, 1951, is a crime novel by Seishi Yokomizo featuring the private detective Kosuke Kindaichi.  The first in the series, The Honjin Murders was published in 1946 and was followed by a total of 76 more.  A number that invites comparison with the series of Georges Simenon’s Maigret and Agatha Christie’s Poirot.  The latter author, along with fellow ‘Golden Age of Crime Writing’ author, John Dickson Carr, was a huge influence on Yokomizo.

At the end of the Edo era in the 1860s (for 250 years previously, the country was kept isolated from the outside world) Japan underwent a, somewhat, rapid Westernization.  The desire to adopt modern Western military and commercial models while retaining a strict feudal society generated political and cultural difficulties that were only, but not entirely, resolved by Japan’s defeat in the Second World War.

It is in the immediate aftermath of that war that this novel is set.  Rather curiously, the widespread destruction and disruption that the war had caused doesn’t seem to factor into the story.  The war only crops up in regards to some of the protagonists having been soldiers and the attendant difficulties in being repatriated.  There is one important plot revelation that has to do with experiences in Burma but otherwise, in terms of societal dynamics and character behaviour, the war and its consequences don’t seem have had much of an effect.

The set-up for the novel involves the will of Sahei Inugami, a rich industrialist, who had risen to great wealth and power from humble beginnings.  It is of note, though not remarked upon in the novel, that this ‘rags- to- riches’ scenario would not have been feasible during the Edo period with its super-strict social hierarchies.  It’s mentioned, in passing, that Sehai Inugami starts work, as a young man, in a silk mill, in 1887.  This date suggests that his birth would have, just about, coincided with the Meiji Restoration and the beginning of the industrialization of Japan.   

This will, its deliberately devious terms guaranteed to cause upset on a Shakespearean level, has, of course, stirs things up among his heirs.  The inevitable murder and intrigue ensue and so requires the presence of our sleuth, Kindaichi.

So much of the structure, characterisations, and plotting is straight out of Agatha Christie.  It’s a bit darker, and a bit more graphically violent as well as sexually franker, than Christie would have written.  But what’s really fascinating about this novel is seeing all these well-worn and familiar tropes through a, particularly historic, Japanese lens   There is, to our Western eyes, an odd mash-up going on here, that invites a bit of, enjoyable, compare and contrast.

This disjuncture is illustrated, rather succinctly, in the description of the main house on the Inugami estate, “a handsome, cream-colored European-styled villa and a Japanese-style building, topped with by a roof with an intricate confusion of angles.”

Published, 2020, in paperback as part of the Vertigo series by Pushkin Press at £8.99 and $14.99 in the USA.