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, c...

Originally posted April 26, 2024. It is a melody of bitter hatred, as if it were drenched in foul blood. The Pushkin Vertigo imprint has been great for crime fiction in translation. The Kōsuke Kindaichi series by Seishi Yokomizo, in particular, seems to have stuck, with five books and counting of the series’ 77. I’ll keep reading them as long as they keep publishing them. Kindaichi can be a frustrating detective at times—he’s a deceptively savvy investigator with a rumpled appearance and a self-effacing manner, and very likeable, for the same reasons as your Father Browns or Columbos. But he’s also not very good at his job. The books often feature high body counts, as Kindaichi endeavours to figure out the reason behind a string of murders to protect the next victim. He proceeds to fail at this on every conceivable level. Rinse and repeat. In one particularly notable example, almost every other named character in the setting is killed off before he “solves” the case. By...