The Village of Eight Graves

 

The Village of Eight Graves, edition published in 2021.

Seishi Yokomizo (1902-1981) wrote very compelling murder mysteries, mainly featuring private detective Kosuke Kindaichi. In The Village of Eight Graves, which was first published in 1950, Kindaichi, with his usual strange appearance in raggedy cloths and his quirky habit of scratching his head, hovers in the background, but is very much essential to identifying the perpetrator of a series of very grizzly deaths, mainly by vicious rapid-acting poison. Here is the narrator's first impression of Kindaichi:

"He must have been thirty-five or thirty-six. He was of slight build and had shaggy hair, and no matter the angle at which you looked at him, he seemed distinctly unimpressive. To make matters worse, he was wearing an old and threadbare serge hakama: at best, he looked like a village clerk or a primary school teacher. And to top it all off, he seemed to have a slight stutter." (The Village of Eight Graves, p. 87). 

I enjoyed reading the descriptions of a village in Japan in around 1950. Unlike several of the other novels by Yokomizo, this one doesn't have a lot of detail about the recent war and its desperate aftermath: the characters seem to have returned to a more normal way of life, though there are mentions of some of their wartime experiences and traumas. Among the details are many food references, but most of them are obsessively related to the painful sudden deaths at the hands of the unknown poisoner! Eventually every innocent rice ball or dish of pickles is suspect. For example, after one of the victims, a Dr. Kuno, is found to have been poisoned from eating rice balls, his wife explains why she couldn't have been the one who gave him this food:

"Dr Kuno’s wife testified that his flight had been so sudden and unexpected that nobody could have prepared any food for him to take. Furthermore, he was so unskilled with these things that there was no way that he could have prepared them for himself. Even assuming, at a stretch, that he had tried to prepare them at home, somebody would surely have noticed. After insisting on all of this, Mrs Kuno blushed to add that her family, large as it was, always worried about not having enough food to put on the table. In recent years, they had lacked the money even to cook white rice, let alone to make rice balls." (p. 256). 

 

The narrator of this novel is a kind of innocent bystander who is drawn in by a variety of coincidences and mysterious connections with the people in this story. Until he received a call from a lawyer in the city where he lived and worked, he thought he knew his own identity — but he has nothing but surprises in store for him as he becomes enmeshed in the terrible history of the village to which he is called. The prologue to the novel describes a horrific crime spree by a murderous man which occurred around 25 years before the action of the novel, and which preoccupies the villagers throughout the story.

The atmosphere of this story is particularly chilling because so much of the action takes place in a labyrinthine network of limestone caves beneath the village. Twisty passages connect to one another in a very scary way, and a deep pool of water is the object of superstitious avoidance. The narrator is constantly having to hide in these passages, and he makes several surprising discoveries as he explores them with a lovely young woman from the village.

As in several other works by Ykomizo, Japanese traditions and folklore, like goblins, are often part of the story. For example, various rock formations in the caverns have names from folklore -- particularly a formation called “The Goblin’s Nose.” To illustrate a goblin's nose, I've selected a woodblock print of a goblin with an elephant, by Japanese artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861). 

Other traditions that the narrator mentions include the Noh drama: a particular Noh mask turns out to conceal a spy hole in the wall of a family home. Japanese religious traditions are also part of the story, and several Buddhist priests and nuns play an important role in the village and in the suspenseful drama of the murders and attempts to find the perpetrator.

Having read several other mystery novels by this lastingly popular writer, I can see why his works continue to be so successful in Japan. Every one is different from the others, and surprising in plot, setting, and characters, though Kindaichi appears in most of them. Yokomizo’s mysteries have been dramatized in a variety of TV shows in Japan, and even in video games.

Review © 2023 mae sander