The Decagon House Murders (29 page)

[1]
In Japanese, Edogawa Rampo and Matsumoto Seichō are affectionately referred to by their given names of Rampo and Seichō, rather than by their family names.

[i]
Agatha Christie’s
And Then There Were None
(1939) was first serialised in Japan in 1939 under the title
Dead Island
(
Shininjima
), translated by Shimizu Shunji (1906-1988).

[ii]
The
Manyōshū
(lit. ‘Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves’) is the oldest existing anthology of Japanese poetry, compiled in the 8th century. More than 150 grass and tree species are mentioned in the 4500 entries.

[iii]
The
Kokin Wakashū
(lit. ‘Collection of Japanese Poems from Ancient and Modern Times’) is an imperial anthology of Japanese
waka
poetry, compiled in the early 10th century.

[iv]
Japanese legend has it that a rabbit lives on the moon.

[v]
The Japanese academic year starts in April and ends in March of the following year. The week long spring holiday in high school is usually late March, while spring holiday for universities usually starts late February and lasts until the start of the new academic year in April.

[vi]
A
tatami
mat is a type of mat made of rice straw, which is used as flooring material. It is also used as a unit for measuring room sizes. While there are slight regional differences, the standard size is 1.8181 metres by 0.9090 metres (ratio of 2:1).

[vii]
Japanese names can be written with a wide variety of characters, even if the pronunciation is the same, so people often have to ask for the exact characters of a name. Reading names is just as difficult in Japanese. Japanese names can have multiple readings, despite being written with exactly the same characters.

[viii]
Most Japanese characters of Chinese origin have multiple readings. In this case, the family nam
e
江
南
Kawa-Minami
can also be read as
Ko-Nan
, or Conan.

[ix]
The “Birlstone Gambit” is the name Ellery Queen biographer Francis M. Nevins used to describe the plot device in the Sherlock Holmes novel
The Valley of Fear
(1914).

[x]
The translator decided to rewrite Ellery’s riddles to give the reader a chance to solve them. The first riddle was “What is down when it’s up, up when it’s down and on the shoulders of a child after his mother has given birth to him?” The solution is the long horizontal stripe in the characters of up
(上
), down
(下
), mother
(母
) and child
(子
).

[xi]
For his second riddle, Ellery asks the group to read the character combinatio
n
春夏冬二升五
合
, which appears to be nonsense. The answer turns out to be
akinai masumasu
hanjō
or “booming business.”

[xii]
Shoku Sōanshū
(lit. ‘Grass Hut Collection, Part 2’) is a poem collection by the Buddhist poet Ton’a in the 14th century. About 2000 poems are collected in the
Sōanshū
collections.

[xiii]
The
Tsurezuregusa
(lit. ‘Essays in Idleness’) is an essay collection written by the monk Yoshida Kenkō between 1330-1332. It is considered one of the major works of Japanese medieval literature.

[xiv]
Genji Monogatari
(lit. ‘The Tale of Genji’) is a classic work of literature written in the early 11th century by noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu. It recounts the romantic escapades of Hikaru Genji, or the Shining Genji, son of the emperor.

[xv]
At a number of Japanese universities, a college club room is called a “box” instead of the more common Japanese word
bushitsu
(club room). K—University is based on Kyoto University, which has traditionally used the English term “box” instead of
bushitsu.

The Kyoto University Mystery Club

Ho-Ling Wong

Tucked away in a corner of the main campus of Kyoto University is the so-called “box,” or club room of the Kyoto University Mystery Club. The club was founded in 1974 as a place for students to talk and write about detective fiction and simply have a good time. It has two major activities: reading circles, where participants read and discuss selected books; and the so-called “whodunit” game, in which the first part of a detective story is read out to an audience who must not only find the solution, but more importantly, explain the logic leading up to it. This, of course, is reminiscent of Ellery Queen’s Challenge to the Reader.

The whodunit stories of the Kyoto University Mystery Club are designed as competitive detective games in literary form: they are not only a battle of wits between the author and the listener, but also between participants. Most members of the club write at least one story during their membership. The names of the participating authors and the titles of their stories are all written on the wall of the club room and, to date, the game has been held more than 400 times since the club’s birth. The influence of the whodunit games can be felt in the works of the mystery authors who debuted here.

Ayatsuji Yukito joined the club soon after entering university in 1979. He became one of its more prolific writers, producing not only a slew of whodunits and other stories for fellow members to enjoy, but also stories for the club magazine
Sōanoshiro
, which is sold to the general public during Kyoto University’s annual November Festival.

He had hoped to make his professional debut with
Island of Remembrance
, a story he submitted for the 29th Edogawa Rampo Award (1983), but the manuscript only passed the first of four rounds.
Island of Remembrance
was later rewritten to become
The Decagon House Murders,
which
was published by Kodansha in 1987 (this translation is based on the revised edition from 2007). The book would be the first in a popular series featuring the many bizarre buildings designed by the eccentric architect Nakamura Seiji. In more recent years, Ayatsuji’s
Another
(2009), a horror-mystery set at school, and its
anime
adaptation have found wide success in the English-language world.

The publication of
The Decagon House Murders
was made possible with the support of famed mystery writer Shimada Soji. He had been advocating the return of
honkaku
(orthodox) detective novels ever since his own debut, and he found kindred spirits in mystery clubs in universities all across Japan. The Kyoto University club was one of the places he frequented most and it was here that he discovered Ayatsuji’s work and decided to promote it.

The publication of
The Decagon House Murders
in 1987 was seen as a milestone in detective fiction and the start of the
shin honkaku
(new orthodox) movement. The term
shin honkaku
was originally coined as a marketing slogan for the sequel to
Decagon
in 1988 by Uyama Hideomi, an editor at publisher Kodansha, but the word now symbolises the rebirth of the classic puzzle-plot novel with a new twist, audacity: pushing the bounds of the puzzle-plot novel while adhering to its fair-play rule. Uyama and Shimada Soji would go on to help many other new
shin honkaku
school writers make their debut, including Norizuki Rintarō, Abiko Takemaru and Maya Yutaka, all of them Ayatsuji Yukito’s fellow club members.

Thus did the Kyoto University Mystery Club become the wellspring for the renaissance of the fair-play puzzle novel, and the place where
shin honkaku
was born. It is fitting that the first and most famous novel in this new genre should feature a group of students from the thinly-disguised K—University Mystery Club, bearing the names of famous writers of the Golden Age, whose deaths would lead to the rebirth of the genre in Japan. And maybe, one day, in the rest of the world.