At the end of the piece, I joked about musing about family trees in mystery fiction, but lately, I was reminded again of my love-hate relationship with them. So I figured, why not really muse shortly about it?
The direct cause for this post is Houjou Kie's (fantastic!) debut novel Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei ("The Hourglass of the Time-Space Traveller", 2019) which I recently read. Due to scheduling shenanigans, you can expect the review as the first one of the new year. I can already reveal I loved the novel, but one point I did have a lot of trouble with at the start was the insanely complex family relations described in this novel. The novel is about time travel, which of course naturally leads to a long family tree, but the focus luckily lies mostly on the living members of the Ryuuzen family in 1960. At the time there were four generations of Ryuuzen, with Ryuuzen Taiga as the head of the family and young great-granddaughter Fumika as the youngest. But with each generation having siblings who may or may have not died in World War II or after, you still end up with a pretty sizeable cast, who are all family. The family tree diagram included helps a lot at the start of the story, as I doubt I would've fully grasped it without it even at the end of the story, but man, sometimes you feel like you're struggling more with just figuring out who's who to whom, rather than the murders!
Family trees are particularly complex and important in the more famous novels of Yokomizo Seishi, where every other adventure of Kindaichi Kousuke seems to revolve around family feuds with main and branch family lines that go on for several generations. One of the more memorable to me is the one in Byouinzaka no Kubikukuri no Ie ("The House of Hanging on Hospital Hill" 1978), which involves 'just' two families, but as most of the plot revolves around what the members of the Hougen and Igarashi have to do with each other, it's deceivingly complex. In fact, when the book was adaptated to into a movie, they left out an entire generation to simplify things and it was still quite complex, as Kindaichi and his assistant Mokutarou commented while they were drawing out the family tree for themselves.
The family tree in Yokomizo's The Inugami Clan is quite complex too, and here too the whole plot revolves around the exact relations between the people, as it is clear the murders that occur in this novel have to do with the inheritance of Inugami Sahei and the insane last will he made. Minor note: this version is slightly easier than the Japanese version, in the sense that the names have been simplified in the English translation to avoid confusion for the reader. The (great) 1976 movie adaptation too has a scene where Kindaichi draws out the family tree for himself (and the viewer).
I wonder whether these kind of complex family trees are considered easier to handle in Asian cultures though, and therefore more likely to appear as an element in fiction (and therefore also mystery fiction). Ancestor worship is often an essential part of Asian religions, leading to a very solid grasp on family relations in general. And this is also reflected in the sociolinguistics: I know that for example that the Chinese and Korean languages differentiate very detailed when using words that describe family relations: an uncle is not just an uncle, but the younger brother of your father is addressed with a different word than the older brother of your mother, even if in English they're both an 'uncle'. These specific words immediately clarify where they are in the family tree relative to you, so that also helps people contextualize family relations on a regular basis. In Japanese, the distinctions don't go as far (no different words for family on father/mother side, but for example there are different words for older/younger siblings, and also whether your uncle/aunt is the older or younger sibling of your parent), but still, in Japan there's definitely a strong conciousness of family line.
Of course, I'm not saying to keep mystery stories with complex family trees away with me. If an interesting story can be made revolving nine generations of a family, go for it! But at the very least, give me a diagram, because I'm really not going to remember just from text who's what to whom in what degree. Anyway, any stories you remember where you thought the usage of complex family relations/family tree diagrams was memorable, in a good or perhaps bad manner?
I still have problem with just reading Japanese names, so I have to constantly flip back to the 登場人物 or just...write them on the piece of paper I used as a bookmark, so man, complex family tree would push me away from reading a book. The straightforward family in 首無の如き祟るもの still confuses me somewhat.
ReplyDeleteJust as trivia: different words for younger and older siblings of parents also appear in Javanese. Siblings who are older are 'pakde' (male) and 'bude' (female), while younger ones are 'pakle' and 'bule'. There are two words for a 'grandparent' ('Mbah' and 'Eyang'), so some people use one to refer to maternal grandparents, and the other to paternal ones. It's interesting to see what sort of family member has a specific word associated with it in foreign languages. I think you know Dutch, does Dutch have words for family member that does not exist in English?
One of the Kindaichi Shounen novels I re-read a while back had a bookmarker with the character list on it. Super handy!
DeleteAnd thanks for the insight into Javanese. As for Dutch, if anything, we're missing words. A cousin and a nephew/niece are called the same in Dutch (neef (M) or nicht (F)), so at first sight, it's not always clear whether the word means the child of a parent's sibling or the child of their own sibling.