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flying_monkey's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
fast-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.5
A classic of Japanese crime fiction, this is an atmospheric, dated and also highly irritating novel. The authorial voice is smug and teasing throughout, and at times it almost seems to be a kind of fan fiction, pointing out similarities to European crime stories, and detective novels even play a role in the solution to the case, and the way in which the private detective in the story, the scruffy young intellectual, Kousuke Kindaichi, thinks. Some fans really seem to like this kind of stylized, Cleudo-esque set-up, where everything is like a puzzle (but a puzzle you can only work out in retrospect because for all that there are clues, there's no way the ridiculous solution could ever be worked out from those clues). That said, the members of the Ichiyanagi family are well-painted in the very short time we get to know them - except for the fact that some, like the younger children are mentioned at the start and must be around but are never, ever seen again in the whole novel - and there are some nice satirical touches about Japanese rural life in early Showa era, and the persistence of the old class system even in this 'modern' era of the 1930s. This was the first of over 70 novels Yokomizu wrote featuring Detective Kindaichi. Only one other has so far been translated in to English, and I may read it just to see if it's any better, but frankly my pleasure in this highly artificial sub-genre of crime fiction is very limited.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Violence
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