Friday means Friday’s Forgotten Books
with Patti Abbott. The list will be here
later today. In the meantime, please welcome back Patrick Ohl…
There is a legend about three powerful
sorcerers who once lived in the Nagano prefecture. They were known as
Tsunedahime, Jiraiya, and Orochimaru, and have been the subjects of numerous
legends, plays … and tattoos. Akimitsu Takagi’s The Tattoo Murder Case involves the story of three such tattoos.
Mysteries in Japan have evolved in a
completely different direction than those in the Anglo-Saxon world, at least
from what I can gather. I don’t know Japanese, nor am I too familiar with the
culture, but the translations we get into English only seem to confirm the
idea. It seems that in Japan, the “game” is still highly respected—you give the
readers all the clues and you tell a story instead of wallowing in angst and
self-pity. In other words, a Japanese detective novel is about a mystery, and not about telling readers
how awful society is, vaguely disguising the lecture as a mystery by throwing
in a corpse or two and some violence.
So as you can probably tell, I eagerly
looked forward to revisiting the Japanese detective story, finally settling on The Tattoo Murder Case. This particular
book was originally published in 1948, and was published in English by Soho
Press. And much to my delight, I discovered that it involved a locked-room
mystery!
In itself, that posed a difficulty,
because Japanese-style homes do not lend themselves very well to the
locked-room mystery. Takagi finds a way around this, however, and an
explanation is given in full. The situation is an intriguing one: a woman,
beautifully tattooed, is found in her locked bathroom, murdered. More
specifically, her head and limbs are found, because some maniac has carted off
the tattooed torso for himself!!!
And thus the plot is set into motion.
Steeped in the world of that Japanese art tattoo, The Tattoo Murder Case is a fascinating read. You really get a lot
of information on post-WWII Japan, with American GI’s roaming the streets,
side-by-side with Japanese citizens who are still getting used to the Emperor’s
announcement that he is not, after all, a God. Tattoos are still technically
illegal, and the police might choose any time to crack down on them, so a sense
of shadiness is embedded right into the plot. When the author talks about these
tattoos and the appreciation societies and the mad collectors who literally
will decorate their homes with tattooed human skins… the book is at its most
fascinating.
There’s also a lot of neat touches of
social commentary, all done quite subtly. I’m sort of surprised you could get
away with publishing this kind of stuff in 1948… although then again, this was Japan and there was a fifty-year
delay in getting it published in the States. Some of this material is rather
sickening in fact, such as one point in the story in which several prostitutes
are questioned, and one of them is a mere fourteen years old. Then there’s the
nearly-sexual fetish one character has for tattoos… And the most disturbingly
beautiful art collection I’ve ever read about!
Unfortunately, the plot doesn’t quite
live up to its promise. The situation is intriguing and there are several moments
with seemingly-supernatural touches. All of this is excellent build-up to a
rather anticlimactic finish. Most of the plot’s secrets become fairly obvious
by the end, with only one or two surprises left. One of these surprises is how
the locked-room trick was worked… but to be honest, I’ve never been a fan of
such tricks. All the variations work on the same principle. With merely a few
memorably ingenious exceptions, they all seem to boil down to one major
mish-mash of a category of locked-room solutions. It’s very underwhelming to
say the least. Instead of a gasp of astonishment—“How could I have been so
silly as to not see it?” my reactions was more of an: “Oh, so it was
just this type of solution all over again…”
There’s one other major problem with the
book, and that is the translation. It’s not
a bad translation, let me clear that up, and I’m not blaming anyone here, least
of all translator Deborah Boehm. In fact I’d love to see more of this sort of
stuff translated. However, there is a
lot of explanatory material in
the book. Some of it makes sense, but much of it seems out of place—something
any Japanese reader at the time would not have needed to be told. That
information seems like it was added to help explain things to the Western
reader, but to be honest, they tend to interrupt narrative flow. That’s why I
prefer the footnote approach personally.
Still, The Tattoo Murder Case is an interesting book overall. It reads
like a Japanese S. S. Van Dine without Philo Vance. It’s just as tricky and ingenious…
and unfortunately, most of it is just as obvious. The book’s title even fits
the pattern of Van Dine’s titles: The
[Six Letter Word] Murder Case. It’s a tricky, complex, and delightful read,
and it’s pretty well written too… it just doesn’t get that extra push of
ingenuity to make it a classic like The
Tokyo Zodiac Murders.
Notes:
Unfortunately, the publisher seems to have missed out on the whole
this-is-a-puzzle-mystery thing. The reviews they choose to quote describe the
book in distinctly modern terms: “chilling”, “kinky”, a tale of voyeurism “down
the charred streets of bombed-out Tokyo” involving “sexual obsession and
perversity”. One review even calls the locked-room mystery one that will outdo
John Dickinson
Carr!!! The truth is, this is an excellent fair-play puzzle mystery that should
be enjoyed by fans of the Golden Age mystery despite its flaws. Don’t be fooled
by the rather off-putting reviews.
Patrick Ohl ©2014
Patrick
Ohl is a 20-year old Canadian crime fiction aficionado who enjoys hobbies such
as taxidermy and runs a dilapidated motel in the middle of nowhere alongside
his crazed mother. He enjoys relaxing in his subterranean evil lair while
watching his favourite hockey team, the Toronto Maple Leafs, and will
occasionally make chicken chow mein to die for. His life is accompanied by a
soundtrack composed by John Williams, and James Earl Jones provides occasional
voice-overs.
Posts
