By Yukito Ayatsuji
I first heard about The Decagon House Murders, and the genre of Japanese honkaku, from Olman. The premise (and cool book cover) seemed very appealing: a group of university students who are part of a Mystery Fiction Club get dropped off by boat to spend a week on Tsunojima Island, once home to a famous yet eccentric and reclusive architect, Seiji Nakamura. He had built the Blue Mansion where he and his wife resided, as well as the Decagon House, a ten-sided annex building that was primarily designed for amusement.
Several months previous, a multiple homicide occurred on the island, with the Blue Mansion completely destroyed by fire. The bodies of Seiji Nakamura, his wife (missing a hand!), their housekeepers, and the gardener’s wife were identified, but the gardener had apparently disappeared without a trace. The case remains unsolved by police. The uncle of a member of the Mystery Fiction Club had recently bought Tsunojima Island, so this gave the other members an “in” to visit the site and investigate the mystery of those recent events.
The seven students use the still standing Decagon House as their home base. The idea of a group of characters staying in a ten-sided house on a tiny island is genius, providing a cool location in which to set a locked room mystery. An illustration of the interior early on in the book's pages shows how the layout is designed: a decagon within a larger decagon. There are ten rooms that comprise the outer decagon: 7 guest rooms with the remaining 3 rooms as the entrance hall, kitchen and bathroom. The main hall takes up the inner decagon and in the middle of the decagonal hall is a decagonal table with ten chairs. There are even ten-sided plates and cups! Also included in the book is an illustrated map of Tsunojima Island showing the location of the Blue Mansion ruins and The Decagon House.
I love the concept of a Decagon House, and there are a number of artistic envisionings of Nakamura's decagonal curiosity in mangas and various book covers (shown above and below).
And I really enjoyed reading the novel, though I wasn’t able to figure out who the murderer was until the end. As with most mysteries, it was slow going at first, as characters got introduced and the set up was established. The narrative alternated between the students trapped on the island and the few characters on the mainland, three of whom received a mysterious letter, apparently from the ghost of Seiji Nakamura.
I haven’t read very many of the classic mysteries, including And Then There Were None, from which The Decagon House was heavily influenced by, having only read one Agatha Christie book, Murder On the Orient Express. As I had already noted:
“I always thought that part of the fun of reading murder mysteries is to guess who the culprit is based on what the investigator discovers and observes, but I find this limiting as you can only deduce based on what the author chooses to reveal in the narrative. Thus, the reader always has an unfair advantage, especially if you’re dealing with an implausible story.”
[SPOILERS AHEAD]
This same limited omniscience also applied to The Decagon House Murders. The plot was not as implausible as Murder On the Orient Express, but it did involve love triangles, secret affairs, illegitimate children, and of course, multiple murders. The author was very careful to mask the murderer (for both the backstory AND the present timeline) for the reader until he was ready to spring the surprise. It was very nicely done. In hindsight, all the clues were there, though doled out very strategically, and I think if one took the time to analyze all the characters and the carefully revealed info, it’s possible to deduce who the mastermind was. I only took a few moments to think about who the murderer could be, and my best guess was it could’ve been the First Victim, Orczy (only one of two females, the other being Agatha). Orczy had a motive as she was good friends with Chiori (later revealed to be Seiji’s daughter) and was devastated by her death. If she were to take revenge, Orczy would’ve feigned her death and be in cahoots with Poe, the medical student who confirmed her death to the others (plus the monologue at the beginning was male). No one else really looked at her body, so it was easy to keep herself confined to her room, yet she can go out the window to commit her nefarious deed. Of course, when Poe died, I knew I was wrong, because author Yukito Ayatsuji was very careful to set things up to have the reader rule out the actual suspect.
First, you never knew the real names of the Mystery Club members, as they went by their famous author nicknames from the very beginning. When it was revealed that six bodies were found, you then realized that it could be either Van or Ellery, but then Ellery’s body was identified. So who was Van (Dine)? And then shortly after, it was revealed to be the armchair detective, Kyoichi Morisu, who had a secret romance with Chiori. Then it launched into his POV, ie. his motives, him making sure to tell certain people he had opted out of going to Tsunojima Island, and then took great pains to hide the fact that he had been traveling back and forth between the island and the mainland to make it seem that he was always at each respective location to whomever he was interacting with. As Van, he had to convince the other club members, who were sharp and observant mystery fans, that he was sick with a fever so that he could retire early to rest in his room.
The one factor that the novel hinged on was that, even though it had occurred to the students that it was necessary to search each other’s rooms, to see if they were hiding anything, this never happened for whatever reason I couldn’t remember. But this should’ve been a priority, especially after two of their members had died by strangulation and poison! It seemed a little hard to believe that no one looked inside Van’s room this entire time. One of them even remarked how odd it was that he locked his door when he gone to bed early that first night!
The Decagon House Murders has recently been adapted for a 2024 Japanese mini-series, and has received some decent reviews. I may have to check this out now that I’ve read the book. Olman also has no plans of keeping the book, so I'm holding onto it for now!
The Decagon House Murders is the debut novel of Yukito Ayatsuji, and the first volume of the House Series. A draft of the novel was originally submitted to the twenty-ninth Ranpo Edogawa Prize in 1983 under the title Island of Remembrance, but ultimately fell short. It was later published by Kodansha Novels with its updated title in 1987.
Although Souji Shimada's 1981 debut with The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is oftentimes credited as the first true shinhonkaku detective novel, The Decagon House Murders is widely given credit for launching the boom in shinhonkaku-style novels that came to dominate the 1990s. Many of the trademarks of the movement can first be seen in this particular title, such as metatextual references to classical detective fiction, as well as subtle nods to more contemporaneous writers.
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