The Secret of the Old Mill

‘We were thirteen. Some fellow failed at the last minute. We never noticed till just the end of dinner.’ 

"Lord Edgware Dies"

Thinking of tridecagons, I realized I can't even count anymore in (classical) Greek. Man, I studied the language for five years, and now it's mostly gone from my head... 

Ibaragi Kanki may seem like your regular elderly drunk roaming the red light district, but he's in fact a doctor who not only helps the women there with his medical knowledge, his keen mind is also appreciated by the local police force, as Kanki has solved many murder cases as an amateur detective. Kanki is enjoying an early evening with drinks, when the establishment is visited by a female high school student who obviously should not be roaming the red light district. Young Keiko's looking for the brothel Koiguruma, which is run by her mother's friend Kuramado Hatae. Keiko's mother, who is residing in a mental institution at the moment, asked her daughter to deliver a package to Hatae. As he knows where Koiguruma is, Kanki decides to escort the girl safely to her destination. Kurumada Hatae is a well-known figure in these parts, who is not only admired because of her looks, but also because of her sense for business and her heart for the women who work for her: Hatae runs several brothels in town, but she's adamant her girls never use drugs and is always happy whenever one of them manages to get married and escape this hopeless life. When Kanki and Keiko arrive at Koiguruma, they however make a gruesome discovery: body parts have been tied to the blades of the big neon-lighted windmill set to the front wall of the building! With the head as one of the parts, it's clear to all that the victim is indeed Kurumado Hatae. From the investigation it becomes clear that Hatae had gone though her usual daily routine today: each day she swung by all of her brothels to do accounting, with Koiguruma as her last stop. She arrived at Koiguruma early in the evening, and had seven visitors come to her room upstairs that night, some of them known by name and face, like her own husband and a narcotics detective, but also a few unknown visitors who hid their faces. The mystery in Yamada Fuutarou's Juusankaku Kankei ("Thirteen-Sided Connections", 1956) revolves around who of these seven visitors killed and cut-up a woman who was loved by all?

The volume I read included not only the novel Juusankaku Kankei, but also other short stories of which most, or perhaps all, star Ibaragi Kanki as the detective. This particular book is titled Yamada Fuutarou Mystery Kessakusen 2 - Juusankaku Kankei (Meitanteihen) ("Yamada Fuutarou Mystery Masterpieces 2 - Thirteen-Sided Connections - The Great Detective", 2001), but I am only reviewing the titular novel here, not the whole volume with the short stories.

Yamada Fuutarou was a prolific post-war writer, who nowadays is best known to the wider public for his many historical fantasy novels on ninja like Kouga Ninpou Chou ("The Kouga Ninja Scrolls"). His ninja stories where everyone had the most fanciful powers with technique names had a huge influence on not only the popular image of the ninja, but also popular culture in general. Series like Naruto and Bleach are basically direct descendants of Yamada's work. Yamada however started out as a mystery writer and was written some really enjoyable stories: Meiji Dantoudai ("The Meiji Guillotine") and  Youi Kinpeibai ("The Bewitching Plum in the Vase") for example were fantastic examples of the linked short story collection. I was looking forward to reading Juusankaku Kankei therefore, as it's one of his better known mystery novels.

But man, I had trouble getting through this novel! This book has been in my possession for some years now, and I had actually started reading Juusankaku Kankei already. But for some reason or another, it dropped back into the backlog pile, so when I picked it up again earlier this week (*at time of writing), I decided to start from the beginning again. As I read, I kinda recalled the parts I had read already of course, but it turned out I was already beyond the halfway point when I stopped reading this book the first time. Which usually isn't a good sign.

The biggest problem is of Juusankaku Kankei is that the first half of this novel is really boring. After a very good first chapter where Kanki and Keiko discover the cut-up body of Hatae, you're presented with like five chapters of interviews with witnesses and suspects about what happened that night, and about the seven visitors of Hatae. It becomes immensely repetitive very fast, as each person just states this and that about who came at what time for what reason and and what they thought of the victim and all of this takes up half of the length of the novel! In hindsight, I can also hardly say Yamada did something truly clever with looking at the chain of events of the evening from different angles, so this is a really difficult part to get through as it just goes on and on.

But what do you get if you do make it through? Well, the core mystery plot at first seems to focus on the problem of how the killer could've killed, cut-up Hatae and attached her body parts to the blades of the windmill outside the window given the time schedule of the seven visitors, but that part is surprisingly easy to guess. There is another murder later in the book, but too that's resolved by Kanki even before the reader gets any chance to think about the event. In the end, the focus of the story falls upon the very complex relations between the many characters of this novel. As the title of the book already suggests, a triangle relation is nothing to the lines and arrows you can draw between the characters in this novel. Each plot development seems to shake up the relational chart a bit, giving new motives to the suspects, and in that sense, I do like the way the murderer is slowly revealed to be at the center of things as you uncover new angles to the diagram. A character who at first is in the background, but comes closer and closer as the book nears the end. At the same time, because Juusankaku Kankei is so much about thinking about motives and the relationships between the characters, the puzzle element is slightly weak: Kanki's deduction at the end is little more than vague guesses about the who and why, and never do you get the feeling of 'Oh yeah, now that clue mentioned in that chapter makes sense' as there are few 'real' clues. I guess that other Yamada novels have that too in a sense: Taiyou Kokuten actually reads as a normal youth novel about a young student's love life until the very end when suddenly everything is turned around and you're told you were reading a mystery novel. But Juusankaku Kankei is about a murder investigation from the very start, and because of that, I'd have wanted a bit more tangible or satisfying clewing.

And now I mentioned Taiyou Kokuten, I can definitely recommend Yamada's mystery stories if you like the post-war Japan setting: most stories I read by him are set in the fifties, just as Japan recovered from the war and started to transit into the period of high economic growth. His focus is always on the less fortunate side of society, from poor students who have to do awful jobs to earn a living to the people in the red light districts and the like. No posh country houses here!

But no, Juusankaku Kankei is hardly my favorite Yamada mystery story. I guess the novel earned his reputation as one of Yamada's best works due to the characterisation and the complex way with which he positions the characters in regards to each other and how this relational twister is used to unveil the murderer, but it didn't really work for me personally, though I guess this is a Your Mileage May Vary thing.

Original Japanese title(s): 山田風太郎『十三角関係』