The Inugami Curse by Yokomizo Seishi

Yokomizo was encouraged by another classic Japanese mystery writer, Edogawa Ranpo

The Inugami Curse (aka The Inugami Clan) was first published in Japan in serialization from January 1950 to May 1951. The time period of the novel is the 1940s, with the Japanese invasion of Burma forming a backdrop. 

Review

Yokomizo was influenced by Western detective novels, which he hoped to emulate. He especially admired John Dickson Carr; but those unfamiliar with Carr might think of his work as being reminiscent of better-remembered British Golden Age mystery novelists like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. Yokomizo's series detective, Kindaichi Kosuke, appeared in 76 novels and has several idiosyncrasies, including a stammer and a tendency to wildly scratch his always-disheveled hair when he gets excited. In The Inugami Curse, Kindaichi hardly does any detective work at all, simply observing events while being as puzzled as everyone else, until everything clicks into place in his mind near the end. As in an Hercule Poirot novel, the final chapters consist of Kindaichi gathering everyone into a room, along with the chief of police, and slowly unravelling the mystery to everyone present, extracting confessions in the process.

The novel begins with the death of the wealthy patriarch of the Inugami clan, Inugami Sahei, "at his lakeside villa in Nasu at the venerable age of eighty-one." The Inugami clan is an unusual family because Sahei never married. Instead, he kept three mistresses (all deceased by the time the novel begins), none of whom he made his legal wife. With them he had three daughters -- Matsuko, Takeko, and Umeko. The three daughters each have a son -- Kiyo (for Matsuko), Take (for Takeko), and Tomo (for Umeko). Takeko and her husband also have a daughter named Sayoko.

Although Sahei died wealthy, he had been born into poverty. Nonomiya Daini, the priest at the Shinto shrine in Nasu, took Sahei in as a young man. He was a penniless drifter (like a stray dog). Daini, in his forties at the time, was married to Haruyo, a young woman in her twenties. The sexual relationship between the priest and his wife was not strong, but the handsome young drifter became the lover of both of them. Sahei eventually moved out, and it was believed that the relationship between Daini and Haruyo became stronger as a result because they soon had a daughter named Noriko, who would herself eventually bear an extraordinarily beautiful daughter named Tamayo. Noriko and her husband both died when Tamayo was young, and the now-wealthy Sahei took her in and saw to it that the granddaughter of his revered master was treated as a special guest on the estate.

Sahei had always treated his daughters with a certain level of contempt, and that attitude extended to their husbands. Upon his death, the reading of the will revealed that Sahei's vast fortune and business empire would not be left to any of them. Instead, most of it would be left to Tamayo, but only if she married one of the three grandsons (Kiyo, Take, or Tomo). The situation was complicated by the fact that Kiyo, the grandson Tamayo favored most, had been hideously wounded in the war. His nose had been cut off and his face scarred beyond recognition.

Is the man in the mask that hides the deformed face really Kiyo? Will Tamayo choose to marry, instead, the brutish Take or the shifty Tomo? Complications ensue, and then complications compound upon complications, as murders and kidnappings take place and hidden identities are revealed.

If your tastes run to modern hardboiled detectives, Nordic noir, or forensic police procedurals, Yokomizo may not be for you. If, however, you enjoy old-fashioned British drawing-room mysteries in which the detective solves crimes mainly by observing and thinking, then The Inugami Curse will be just your spot of tea. Like the tumblers of a lock falling into place, every baffling enigma that has surfaced in the course of the novel is fully explained in the final chapters as private investigator Kindaichi sits the players down in a room and goes over the events with them.

Character development is not a strong suit of the author, at least not in this novel. We basically learn enough about the characters so that their moves around the chessboard are credibly motivated. Many of the details of the crimes committed depend on coincidence to a greater degree than most contemporary readers are likely to find plausible (one chapter is even titled "A Series of Coincidences"), but such contrivances aren't unknown to readers of the classic mysteries of the 30s and 40s that inspired Yokomizo. Those quibbles aside, it's an entertaining read for the cozy reader, not the least because of the glimpses into Japanese culture that few of us in the West are afforded in life. Plot twists and intriguing turns of events come quickly and often enough to keep the reader alert, and the short chapters with their cliffhanger endings make it imperative for that reader to keep turning pages.