The Subtle Angles of THE NOH MASK MURDER (1949)

When you left us, you told me that Koichi’s journal could form the basis for a new type of detective novel, unprecedented anywhere in the world. I would rather you read it simply as the record of one man’s blood and tears.

My touchstone for Akimitsu Takagi’s work is The Tattoo Murder Case (1949), which shows up often enough on “best impossible crime” lists. First published in English in 2003 (tl. Barry Lancet), it was slightly ahead of the curve in terms of honkaku offerings in the anglosphere. Pushkin Vertigo republished it in 2022 as The Tattoo Murder (tl. Deborah Boehm), and last year followed it up with Takagi’s other best-known novel, The Noh Mask Murder (tl. Jesse Kirkwood).

The Chizurui family is haunted; not just by family maladies, the lingering effects of World War II, or the suspicious death of its radiochemist patriarch, but by a sinister figure who stalks their halls in a Hannya Noh mask. Taijiro, the current head of the Chizurui household, calls in mystery writer Akimitsu Takagi in to investigate.

“Akamitsu Takagi” is also the pen name of the author, and based on that fact you might think (as I initially did) Takagi’s books use an Ellery-Queen-alike premise where the detective is writing novels based on his own investigations. But that’s actually not the case. Even though this is one of those reflexive mystery novels that is genre-aware enough to fully state the ending of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Noh Mask Murder is the only novel of Takagi’s with this hook. That gives the book kind of a fun meta angle.

Takagi (the author, through the character) tells us in the prologue his intention to write “something a little different” than the average mystery novel with “some hapless Watson-type following Sherlock Holmes or whoever around and relaying his dazzling exploits to the reader.” Instead, he’s interested in a high-fidelity memoir:

‘I’d have the detective solving a genuine real-life mystery, and narrating his actions as he does so—a first-hand account, if you like. […] Instead of the detective merely stating what he did, on what date, with whom and so on, all that detailed evidence would form the basis for a meticulous account of his every thought, his precise chain of reasoning—and all the actions he took as a result.’

The two stories narrated by Sherlock Holmes aren’t my favourite—I find them a little procedural. In defence of the hapless Watson-type, when done well, they maintain narrative tension by portraying the investigation through the eyes of someone who sees, but does not observe. This creates a puzzle-reveal structure for the detective’s deductions. Holmes’s exploits are dazzling partly because Watson sees them as dazzling.

Akimitsu’s friend Koichi Yanagi, the narrator for most of the novel, seems primed to be the Watson. But rather than being dazzled, his narration is saturated with disdain for his friend. No surprise, then, that Koichi is the one who ends up explaining the crime to the police. Again, we are told this up front. It’s a book that likes to play with genre expectations.

Noh Mask is operating in a gothic mode interlaced with postwar social commentary that I associate with Seishi Yokomizo’s novels. There is something sick in the Chizurui family. Noh Mask‘s big villain Rintaro is a scumbag nihilist who sees himself as a superior type of person, as much the symptom as he is the cause. “It becomes the tragedy of a family, of a society—indeed, of a country,” says the family doctor. What counts as ‘insane’ or ‘sociopathic’, from a societal perspective, is highly contextual, in the same way that Noh masks can be by turns tragic, malevolent, or hopeful depending on their angle. Koichi is staying with the Chizurui family after being demobbed, to which Rintaro quips:

“So, Koichi—a bit better at killing people now, are you? Still, there’s nothing quite so idiotic as war. All those millions of lives extinguished for nothing—and each solder forced to gamble his own life against the enemy’s. What an unappealing way to go about murdering people…”

That’s the number one suspect saying this, and can we really disagree with him? Isn’t it a bit rich, the novel suggests, to worry about these individual murders—even the obliteration of the entire family—when so many civilians were pointlessly obliterated in World War II?

I definitely wouldn’t say this is one of the better murder mysteries I’ve read, but I liked it disproportionately to that. Despite some stiff writing and goofy science, The Noh Mask Murder had an interesting unconventional approach to murder that made it a good read. As far as whether this counts as “a new type of detective novel”, my opinion is “technically”, but that’s up to the reader.