Book Review: The Little Sparrow Murders by Seishi Yokomizo

Japan’s foremost private detective needs a vacation. It’s 1955 and Kosuke Kindaichi wants to go somewhere where he can rest his mind and body in tranquil surroundings, unbothered by any thoughts of crime-solving or mystery. His old friend Inspector Isokawa might have the perfect place for him, though even the inspector has to admit that the village he has in mind has not always been entirely free of intrigue. Kosuke protests:

“No, this will never do, Inspector! As I told you just this afternoon, I’m looking for somewhere to rest, a place where nothing or no one will–”

 

“I know, I know!” said Inspector Isokawa, interrupting the detective with a dismissive wave of the hand. “You may rest assured, though: the murder took place more than twenty years ago. It didn’t just happen yesterday! All I’m saying is that finding somewhere that’s entirely cut off from the world is a bit of an impossible task nowadays. Twenty odd years ago, Onikobe was far more isolated than it is today. But even then, there was a murder that’s remained unsolved.”

Somewhat consoled by this distance in time, Kosuke decides to stay for a month at Onikobe’s Turtle Spring spa resort, run by Rika Aoike, a friend of the inspector’s. The resort is shabby but respectable, and it doesn’t take long for the naturally inquisitive detective to figure out the who’s who and what’s what of the village’s past and present, even as he pretends that he’s uninterested in solving the long ago mystery.

Two decades earlier, it was the husband of the resort owner herself who was found brutally murdered. Genjiro Aoike had brought his young family back to the village where he’d grown up, in preparation for a bigger move to Manchuria. Genjiro became suspicious of a visiting businessman named Ikuzo Onda, who had ingratiated himself with the village’s powerful Nire family. After family head Jinpei Nire gave Genjiro some money to investigate the newcomer, Genjiro was found murdered in the cottage Ikuzo had been renting. There was little doubt amongst the villagers that Ikuzo hadn’t liked being questioned and potentially exposed, and had killed Genjiro before fleeing the area.

A pregnant and devastated Rika had eventually inherited Turtle Spring and made a fairly solid go of running the resort while raising her children, who are now grownups themselves. Ikuzo was never tracked down, and life seemed to go on. But soon after Kosuke’s arrival, a strange old woman begins appearing in the village, claiming to be someone long dead. Worse, each sighting of her heralds a new and terrible murder. Will Kosuke be able to figure out what’s going on and stop a remorseless killer, or will Onikobe’s secrets claim yet more lives?

Pushkin Vertigo’s line of murder mysteries in translation is to be commended, both for the high quality of the works and for the absolutely gorgeous packaging they come in. The Giallo poster-inspired covers of these novels are arresting, and certainly do justice to the contents. This atmospheric classic murder mystery, for example, is a brain-teaser in the fair play tradition and a must-read for all genre aficionados. Bryan Karetnyk’s English-language translation allows those of us who don’t read Japanese greater access to author Seishi Yokomizo’s creative oeuvre. That’s a boon to all mystery-lovers, as Kosuke is a terrific sleuth, relatable even in a climate and culture foreign to many readers outside of the Far East:

Overcome by fear, he felt the hair on his neck stand on end. He looked around himself, half-expecting to see the ghost of the old woman appear in the half-light. Nearby, at the foot of an enormous cedar, there was a little Shinto shrine, in front of which was a flower canister with a bunch of red dahlias wilting in it. From up there in the mountains, they looked down over the silent village of Onikobe, sunk in mist and twilight, with little trails of smoke rising up from the houses here and there. At first glance, it appeared to be a peaceful little village, but behind that facade lurked something sinister…

My favorite part of The Little Sparrow Murders was the way in which the killings were linked to a temari song, a sort of nursery rhyme sung while bouncing a brightly colored embroidered ball. The author’s prologue refers to the song directly, though the verses only make a reappearance—and in a crucially changed manner—in the back half of the rest of the novel. The framing device of the song, as with some of Agatha Christie’s own nursery-rhyme-themed novels, foretell the events depicted with a sort of dreadful inevitability. That only makes it that much more intriguing when things go awry, and both murderer and detective must increasingly improvise in this cat-and-mouse tale of hidden identities and murderous grudges.