It was published in 1946 and translated into English in 2019. This is a quintessential locked-room murder mystery. The Honjin Murders is a spectacular place to begin if you want to explore Honkaku-style novels. Typically these novels have diagrams, maps, family trees, and roughly drawn floor plans to aid the visualization of the crime and its clues. The authors who write in this style abide by “fair play” rules by giving all the clues needed to solve the crime. These are stories that act as a kind of puzzle, challenging the reader to solve crimes using logic and deduction. Japan created a genre of mystery novels called Honkaku (translated as orthodox), inspired by the western Golden Age of Detective Fictions by authors like Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, and Ellery Queen, to name a few. Hence, if you enjoy some good old detective fiction in addition to history, this series shouldn’t be missed. Along with intriguing mysteries, each novel cleverly encapsulates the era that had gone by and gives us a native’s perspective of post-war society in Japan. I fell in love with the series and went on to read more authors to appreciate it thoroughly. For 21st-century readers, who are addicted to fast-paced thrillers, I am taking an “unorthodox” step here in sharing my recent discovery of a gem – a century-old mystery novel from Japan.
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