“The Devil’s Flute Murders”

 

The Devil’s Flute Murders by Seishi Yokomizo is a very creepy murder mystery, full of sinister, desperate, and unscrupulous characters. Detective Kosuke Kindaichi is called to work with a family of former nobles just after the end of World War II, in 1947. The country is in terrible shape because of the wartime bombings and fires that have destroyed many houses and entire neighborhoods. The formerly wealthy and idle members of the family have all moved into buildings on one estate, where destruction has been only partial. Kindaichi finds them full of resentment. unpleasant rivalries, old feuds, and emotional dysfunction. Clearly, he hates working with them to solve a mysterious suicide, a locked-room murder, and then other murders in the family. 

Discussing the family's corrupt and idle habits, Yokomizo wrote:

"This was all before Osamu Dazai wrote his work Setting Sun, about the decline of the aristocratic class after the war, so we did not yet have ready terms like 'the sunset clan' or 'sunset class' to describe these people, newly bereft of their noble privilege and falling into ruin. But, if we had, then I think it likely that this case would have been the first to see the term used." (The Devil’s Flute Murders, p. 17).

I found the family and their ugly history to be just as distasteful as Detective Kindaichi did. Their arrogance and inability to cope with the recent loss of privilege, which happened to all the Japanese nobility in 1947, isn’t amusing at all. What I did find very interesting was the detailed description of life in immediately postwar Japan as experienced by the detective and his police colleagues. For example, at a family meal which Kindiaichi shares: "Tokyo still struggled with food shortages in 1947, so lunch was a very modest affair, but it managed to satisfy." (p. 122). The few details about food show it to be pretty sparse, such as a lunch of "salad and finger sausages." (p. 295)

Kindiaichi had to make several trips to search out witnesses in other parts of Japan, which in the postwar chaos was also difficult: 

"Travelling was a still a hardship in the autumn of 1947. Even getting a train ticket was no mean feat. Luckily, Kindaichi’s connections with the police simplified that issue, but since the trains tended to be packed with black marketeers and their buyers, they were not places where public displays of police presence were welcome, and his connections did not go as far as securing him a proper seat. So now, Kindaichi found himself squeezed into this sardine-can of a train car looking like a crumpled handkerchief and gasping for breath."  (p. 141). 

As Kindaichi's search for needed answers to more and more questions about the past of the family, he uncovers more and more unsavory details that have created their murderous present-day situation. It's a suspenseful book, and interesting also because he finds them so revolting, and because the final explanation is, of course, quite surprising.

Seishi Yokomizo (1902–81) was a famous and much-loved Japanese mystery writer. I have read three other books of his: The Honjin Murders, The Inugami Curse, and Death on Gokumon Island. His best-known creation is Detective Kosuke Kindaichi, who appears in many of the author's novels. Yokomizo’s mysteries have been dramatized in a variety of TV shows in Japan, and even in video games. The novels are currently being republished in English: this is a recent edition.

Review © 2023 mae sander