Death on Gokumon Island (Pushkin Vertigo) (Detective Kindaichi Mysteries): Seishi Yokomizo

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With nothing else to do, Kosuke arrives on Gokumon, despite warnings from his benefactor about the dangers of the island. Seishi Yokomizo was the king of the locked-room mystery, and there's nothing more cut off than an island. My complaints from my review of The Village of Eight Graves are completely resolved in this intriguing book- I now feel as though I know the detective much better and seeing the workings of his mind was a great addition to the story. In a child they might have been deemed precocious, but as young adults such behaviour feels less acceptable. das Motiv lässt mich erschüttert und mit einer bestimmten Frage zurück, die ich hier aber nicht stellen kann (Spoiler).

However, thankfully overall I would say this book suffers from it less than The Decagon House Murders, although I must confess that my mind did glaze over when one of the murder methods is explored by the sleuth. I could say the murder's methods are not exactly similar but they bear a similar method which you will understand once you read the book and also if you have read And Then There Were None. Pushkin Vertigo, the English language edition publisher, has Death on Gokumon Island originally published in 1971 so I wondered if it being one of the later stories in the long 77-book Kosuke Kondaichi series was the reason, but other sources put the book's first publication in 1947 which would make it almost the earliest. Haiku is also something we see a lot of in the book, and which has a part to play in the plot as well, though I won’t say what for that will be a spoiler.

Things become complicated when Kindaichi himself falls under suspicion due to the islanders’ distrust of outsiders. However, drawn by his interest in literature, and the encouragement of Edogawa Rampo (江戸川 乱歩), he went to Tokyo instead, where he was hired by the Hakubunkan publishing company in 1926.

Set in Japan just after the Second World War, Death on Gokumon Island, opens (as did The Village of Eight Graves which I read last year) with a prologue introducing its setting (not sure if this is a device common to all of Yokomizo’s books). As he works out the relationships of the families, the townspeople, local traditions, it happens that his sleuthing skills will be needed. But that said, the fact that some of the conversation sounded very casual as against the usual formality of language one associates with Japan, felt a bit surprising, and I wondered if this was the case in the original books. Then there is also Chimata-san’s mentally ill father being kept in a caged space (though it is airy, clean and large).I managed to spot a red herring solution, but the correct answer was not one you can get a hold of properly. Soon the body count starts to mount up as people are murdered in bizarre and seemingly impossible ways. There's something about the mix of characters, place, and time that makes these works special, but most of all it's Yokomizo's voice, I think, that makes one overlook all those things that could have been off-putting. Seishi Yokomizo took a pinch of John Dickson Carr and a dash of Agatha Christie in creating Kosuke Kindaichi, solver of impossible crimes.

If like me you have not read any other stories featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, you don’t need to worry about starting mid-series as chapter 1 provides a recap on what he has been doing since solving The Honjin Murders. The lack of Streptomycin and other antibiotics also meant that his tuberculosis could not be properly treated, and he joked with friends that it was a race to see whether he would die of disease or of starvation. White plaster-walled houses, glowing in the evening sun, were dotted on the hill slopes under a glowering grey sky that seemed ready to attack at any moment.This shared experience collapses the space between Kosuke and the people on Gokumon Island, allowing Kosuke to develop relationships and exhibit genuine empathy.

We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. There were what seemed like clues (and which were those, but differently than I interpreted), and at one point past the 60 per cent mark, I was sure I’d picked up a strong hint and worked out the solution, but boy, was I wrong. In July 1934, while resting in the mountains of Nagano to recuperate from tuberculosis, he completed his first novel "Onibi" (『鬼火』), which was published in 1935, although parts were immediately censored by the authorities. In a follow-up to my first book review here on Medium, I am now reviewing another of Seishi Yokomizo’s classic Japanese murder mysteries: Death on Gokumon Island. It drops its passengers until there are only three left, all heading for a small island, Gokumon-to, which translates to Hell's Gate Island.

On the boat bringing them back, Kosuke promises a dying man that he will go back to his island home to try and help prevent the murders of his sisters. Before I get into the review, firstly, many thanks to Netgalley and Pushkin Press for providing me with an e-arc in exchange for an honest review. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. As the scruffy detective is an outsider, the insular islanders are suspicious of him, thus making his investigation even more difficult. Surprisingly, Kindaichi’s dandruff does impact those around him as at one point he: ‘immediately began to scratch his head, a look of joy on his face.