The Aosawa Murders

 Japanese honkaku (tr: orthodox) mysteries are structured around rules of deductive reasoning. Through the strategic disclosures of clues, the author leads a careful and attentive reader to the book???s conclusion, sometimes around a twist as well. Honkaku novels emerged in the 1920s, in direct response to the western ???Golden Age??? of detective fiction (Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, etc). Pushkin Vertigo has been translating these to English of late, and last year I read several of them. This book, The Aosawa Murders, by Riku Onda, is part of a newer generation of shin honkaku novels, which advocate a return to this classical style of mystery novels, with ???fair play to the reader??? as a guiding principle. 

In The Aosawa Murders, the identity of the killer is made clear quite early on; you are told that they were identified but killed themselves before they could be convicted. Initially it looks like the mystery we???re untangling is not who did it, but why they did it ??? but by the end of the book, you???re once again asking, was it really that person???s fault? Or was another hand involved? 

This complex story is also narrated in the form of a book about a book about the murder. We are told early on that the crime being investigated is the mass murder of the rich, well-known Aosawa family, through poison delivered in the form of a gift of bottled drinks at a multigenerational birthday celebration. Twenty-seven people are killed, leaving only a housekeeper, who swallows some poison but survives, and young Hisako Aosawa, the beautiful, visually-impaired daughter of the family, who didn???t drink anything. The delivery man, thought to be the killer, is tracked down by detectives, but not before he has already committed suicide. Decades later, Makiko Saiga, a neighbour and one of Hisako???s many admirer-friends, writes a book about the murders, trying to uncover why a seemingly unconnected man would want to kill so many people in an apparently motive-less crime. Her book, The Forgotten Festival, is the only thing she ever publishes, a deeply-researched nonfiction account that has since been forgotten. A few decades later, the Aosawa Murders is purportedly a book about this book, looking back at the events of the murder, the book that followed, retracing Makiko's steps, and re-examining the clues that have since emerged. 

If this sounds too complex, it doesn???t feel that way when you read it. Each chapter is in the form of an interview with the nameless author, who talks first to Makiko about her book, and then to various people involved, including the detectives, a friend of the killer, the housekeeper Kimi, the book's publisher, and finally, the beautiful Hisako herself. On first reading, the end of the story might seem ambiguous ??? but if you???ve been paying careful attention, and you go back, all the little clues fall into place, and you???ll know exactly what happened, even if the author hasn???t laid out explicitly in so many words. The careful, attentive reader is rewarded (which explains so many discontented Goodreads reviews). I enjoyed it.