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Disemboweled Tradition in Seishi Yokomizo’s The Honjin Murders (1946)

Xinnia Ejaz
Lahore School of Economics, Pakistan

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Abstract
This research paper examines Seishi Yokomizo’s first postwar detective novel, The Honjin
Murders (1946), which scrutinizes Japanese culture and society, specifically the rural area.
This study engages in a thematic analysis of the novel within the context of Japan’s experience
with the Meiji Enlightenment, the decline of feudalism, the import of Western detective
literature, and Japan’s postwar shift to democracy. By placing the murder mystery genre in a
feudal milieu as the characters struggle to grapple with changing times, Yokomizo enacts thetransition of a traditional society into its progression to a modern one. Looking at honor
entwined with the act of hara-kiri or seppuku and the contention between traditional andcontemporary values, it is found that tradition itself has broken down with the family structureof the Ichiyanagi family as its symbolic representation. While the head of the family, Kenzo
Ichiyanagi, has the appearance of a rational individual, he is wrought with the ambivalence of
his rural and urban identities; thus, the only true herald of modernity present within the ruralboundary is the detective Kosuke Kindaichi.
Keywords: Japanese detective fiction, The Honjin Murders, seppuku, honor, traditional values,
modernity

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Detective fiction, which has captivated Japanese audiences since the late 19th century, wasdefined as “the serum for diphtheria” by the famous author Kyūsaku Yumeno (1889-1936) in
1935. The genre held a strange, cure-like allure in Japan during the early 20th century toacclimate the readers to the hovering malaise of modernity. According to Sari Kawana (2008)
the early years of Japanese modern history not only brought along economic growth, politicaldrama, and cultural diversity but also turbulence, plaguing the new generation with melancholy
over the century past while moral concern over public well-being continued to grow. The
beginnings of modernity in Japan can be marked by a departure from the blind worship ofcivilization during the Meiji Enlightenment period (1868-1912), coming to full fruition in the
self-reflexive culture of decadence found in the Taisho period (1912-1926).
During the Meiji Enlightenment, the country imported Western-driven assumptions regarding
rationality and progress in order to survive colonial dominance. Additionally, the newly
imported ideas were Japan’s passage from cultural “immaturity” and feudalism to become aworld power. In the same era, the honkaku (translated as “orthodox”) mystery emerged that
focused on the process of criminal investigation and valued the entertainment that was bornout of pure logical reasoning and deduction (Crampton, 2021). Japanese writers working in thisgenre such as Haruta Yoshitame, Taro Hirai (better known by his pen name Edogawa Rampo),
and Kuroiwa Ruiko followed the standards set by British and American Golden Age crime
fiction writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Edgar Allan Poe (Hirohisa, 2000).
Where American and British writers were experimenting with sub-genres of detective fiction
such as “locked room” and “nursery rhyme” mysteries, their Japanese counterparts imitatedand adapted these sub-genres, and made them their own.
Nakanishi (2014) posits that the early optimism brought forth by this Enlightenment soon
dissipated by the interwar period, due to increased crime, disappearance of traditional
neighborhoods, and unjustified violence against the socially weak in the name of war andscientific progress. Despite the growing social unrest and habitual attacks on the genre due to
its roots in Western literature and a disregard for the Japanese writing tradition by prominent
critics such as Tokutomi Sohō (1863–1957), the popularity of the genre continued to growamong the readers as a reaction to their historical and cultural diphtheria (Saito, 2012).
Following the ban on Anglo-American detective novels in 1941 after the break-out of WorldWar II, Japanese writers turned towards adventure or spy stories that would publicly support
the war effort (Seaman, 2004). Not only was the detective genre revived in postwar Japan but
the idea of preservation of honor through the act of ritualized suicide, hara-kiri, also known as
seppuku, also became questionable in a nascent modern society. The terms may seeminterchangeable, but that is not quite the case. Hara-kiri combines two Japanese words, “hara,”
namely, stomach, and “kiri,” to cut, in which a person uses a short sword or knife to cut open
their own abdomen. While hara-kiri is a transliteration of the word seppuku, they are used in
two different contexts. Hara-kiri involves cutting the stomach by the individual privately ininstances of shame or dishonor but is hardly used in formal contexts. Seppuku is a more formal
term, a self-inflicted punishment for committing a serious offense and violating specific codes
and regulations pertaining to the samurai (Seward, 2012). The term came to characterize the9

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bushido ideal, that is, the moral code of a warrior class. It was not only an honorable death
sentence but also “practiced to demonstrate and emphasize resistance, remonstrance, loyalty,
and affirmation of the correctness of one’s position” (p. 12).
This ritualized suicide was performed by samurais in the 12th century in order to preserve theirand their families’ honor. Although the practice was outlawed in the 19th century, the imperial
government during World War II brought back the adherence to the old samurai code of ethics
called bushido for it to be followed by their soldiers (Hurst, 1990). The two words are also
context and location-specific, and since the text situated in the village of Okayama employs
seppuku specifically, the same term will be used in the analysis.
As Japan surfaced from years of suffering and defeat at the war’s end, detective fiction writerssought to revive the genre and contribute to the nation-building effort. Edogawa Rampo, in
particular, is acknowledged as the grand master of the golden age of Japanese detective fiction
and has exerted a massive influence on the literary culture of Japan, including the author of
The Honjin Murders, Seishi Yokomizo. In his short stories, Edogawa Rampo, in the 1920s,
exhibited a sense of grotesque that was unique and unparalleled for any writer in the world for
its time period (Sharp, 2006). Before the dawn of the Meiji era, crime and mystery fiction in
Japan was weaved from court trial accounts that, after several hundred years, the reading public
had outgrown. Japanese readers were eager for the freshly translated works from Europe andAmerica. Rampo’s stories were ripe for this time as they proved to be an “intriguing artisticsynergy that has existed between East and West since Japan wholly opened itself up to theoutside world in 1868” (p. 26). As part of the literary world, Rampo and Yokomizo worked
together in close proximity, and Yokomizo, who was eight years his junior, supported theliterary master’s work before World War II (Komatsu & Siercks, 2023). While the older writer
struggled with the long form, Yokomizo soon garnered attention for his mystery novels
inspired by traditional customs and folklore rather than the growing urban life.
Seishi Yokomizo (1902-1981) called upon his fellow authors to promote rational thinking
among the populace via their works. His immediate work after World War II is The Honjin
Murders (1946), which plays on the conventions of the locked room mysteries of John Dickson
Carr and Agatha Christie by clearly stating the inspirations behind the novel (Liu, 2020).
Although the novel won Yokomizo his first Mystery Writers of Japan award in 1948 and his“scruffy, amateur sleuth” Kosuke Kindaichi starred in another 76 novels, selling more than 55
million copies, it has only been published in English after 73 years by Pushkin Vertigo, withLouise Heal Kawai as the translator (Flood, 2020). The novel, however, was not a public hit
until the 1970s. Its commercial success came as a result of the commercial strategies of the
Kadokawa Publishing Company, which began publishing Yokomizo’s works in 1971. The
company specialized in paperbacks, so the novel was given a fresh look while aiming to garnerrevenue from both film adaptations and novels. The new president, Haruki Kadokawa, invested
in the company’s first film, The Inugami Family (1976), based on Yokomizo’s novel The
Inugami Curse (Fuwa, 2018). Using the shocking image of a corpse’s leg sticking upside downfrom the surface of a lake in posters, TV commercials, and soundtrack versions of the main

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theme song, coupled with innovative advertising, made the film a huge success and the author’s
most popular film adaptation to date (IMDB, n.d.).
The locked room mystery novel follows the Ichiyanagi family in pre-war Japan’s rural area in
1937, where the newly married couple Kenzo Ichiyanagi and Katsuko Kubo are foundmurdered on the night of their wedding, leading to the arrival of Kosuke Kindaichi toinvestigate the case. It is revealed through logical reasoning and chance that the double
homicide was a pre-meditated suicide murder orchestrated by Kenzo in the form of seppuku(ritual suicide by disembowelment) because she had taken a lover before their marriage.
The narrative explores the impact of war and modernity on a rural area, the irrational
exclusionism of rural communities, and groundless prejudice against marrying outsiders like
Katsuko, emphasizing iegara (social standing, pedigree, and good family) while also
scrutinizing the manifestation of honor preservation in the form of male violence. This research
paper critically analyzes The Honjin Murders through the concept of honor and the clash
between the traditional and new values in a closed rural community struggling to adapt to afading culture of feudalism and the rise of modernity in Japan.
Literature Review
The existing literature on the rise of detective fiction in Japan primarily discusses the impact
of war, industrialization, and modernity on culture, the individual, the development of logicalreasoning within the narrative, and an influx of crime in an urbanized Tokyo. Sari Kawana(2003) examines the relationship between fictional and historical reality in early modern Japanthrough detective fiction, which shaped the genre and reformulated characters and plots.
Detective fiction writers gave less consequence to upholding genre conventions and were moreinterested in disseminating their ideas on urbanization, violation of privacy, sexuality, and war– all deemed modern phenomena. The central figures in these stories are termed the“undercover agents of modernity” who probe three particular sources of modern mystery,
namely, the city, colony, and body. These undercover agents of modernity were daring
transgressors of conventions who: “Fueled both by their dating attitude to know and their
willingness to transgress conventional boundaries, these agents explore and redefine thesespaces and repackage the general anxiety toward modern life into a digestible, consumableform” (p. vii). Since the English translation of The Honjin Murders by Louise Heal Kawai is
only a recent one with not enough significant literature available, my research paper will
explore the detective Kindaichi as an undercover agent of modernity within the novel.
Sari Kawana (2007) again analyzes Japanese detective fiction but focuses primarily on the
post-war murder mysteries of Seishi Yokomizo, whose works have received minimal scholarly
attention in both English and Japanese traditions. In the wake of the war, the rural world ofJapan had gone through vast devastation and destabilization, manifested in the form of anxiety,fear, madness, and senseless murder. Yokomizo seeks to make a political statement throughfiction: to encourage readers to return to rationality. This attribute could have prevented therise of militarism and fascism, in his opinion. In this sense, he is adhering to the tradition of11

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Kuriowa Ruiko, who sought to educate the masses about progressive, rational thinking throughhis translations of Western detective stories. Although detective fiction at that time wasinspired by Western authors, the works of Yokomizo “demonstrate the virtuosity with which
Yokomizo could manipulate the existing rules of the genre and the conventions of Western
detective fiction to introduce to postwar Japanese readers a new type of murderer who could
kill anyone at any time for no comprehensible reason” (p. 119). While the article studies his
novel Death on Gokumon Island, I will scrutinize the interplay between traditional andcontemporary values in The Honjin Murders post-war.
Satomi Saito (2007) also historicizes the formation of the Japanese detective genre,
differentiating itself from “serious literature” as modern popular literature while distancing
itself from popular fiction. By examining the sociopolitical, cultural, and literary trends, theemergence of detective fiction stitches the fantasy and the desirous together to form the national
subject in the domain of culture. It explicitly presents the case for The Honjin Murders as an“authentic” piece of detective fiction, proclaimed by the writer Seishi Yokomizo. She argues
that:
The key word in these discourses about Japanese detective fiction is “authentic”(honkaku), which signifies a classic whodunit written true to the rules and conventions
set in the Golden Age of detective fiction in the West, and authentic was considered“modern” in terms of its celebration of scientific reasoning. The opposite is “inauthentic”(henkaku), which employs some elements of detective fiction but its main focus is moreor less sensationalism (eroticism and the grotesque) related to criminal investigation,and thus connotes the premodern (p. 17).
The novel negotiates within the genre by setting itself apart from the Western model (albeit
explicit about it being a source of inspiration) and incorporating domestic alienation from theconvention of featuring detective stories from the Edo and Meiji periods only. One aspect
closely tied to Japanese tradition is an institutionalized sense of honor, practiced mainly by thesamurai. Inspired by the teachings of both Confucianism and the Japanese Shinto faith, its most
iconic interpretations include “fealty, a dignified code of conduct, and the consequences ofbreaking said code” (Nave, 2021, p. 4). In response to a devaluation, specific to the loss ofsexual purity within gender dynamics, the preservation of honor can also present itself as maleviolence (Rodriguez Mosquera, 2013). An infamous example often seen in Japanese fiction isthat of seppuku, the ritualistic disembowelment of one’s self as a result of a breach of conduct
and to preserve honor after death rather than lose it in life (Seward, 2012). My research paper
probes into the use of honor and seppuku in The Honjin Murders within the context of postwar,
modern Japan and its changing cultural and literary tradition – an unexplored area in criticism.
Kenzo and the Split Between Tradition and Modernity
The spirit of honor is most prominently found in the proposed “master of the house of
Ichiyanagi” (p. 15) and the culprit of the death of himself and his wife, that is, the second eldest
son, Kenzo Ichiyanagi. In his character, the reader can astutely find the contradictions of a

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personhood split between the strict traditional values of a respected and dignified Japanesefamily and the impact of contemporary values brought forth by a change in tradition, war, andWestern culture’s influence. It can be argued that the character also encapsulates Japan’s state,
wrestling with the growing pains of modernity. Kenzo’s introduction captures his personality
as an unbending person who is sure of himself and his values and would ultimately adhere tothem no matter the situation:
The passenger in the rickshaw was a man of forty or so with a dark complexion and asevere expression on his face. He wore dark Western-style clothing, and sat stiffly
upright in his seat. He never once glanced to the side, or took in his surroundings, but
kept his eyes fixed on the road ahead. With his sharp cheekbones and prominent nose,
there was something austere and unapproachable about him (p. 15).
Despite his rigidity, he also carries within himself the essence of individuation and rationality.
This essence can be associated with his Kyoto City education at a private university. Despite
him being a great scholar and academician and having seen the greater world out there, city
life is not a viable option for him due to his deteriorating health: “he had taught for a few years
at his alma mater after graduation but had fallen prey to a respiratory disorder and returned
home, shutting himself away from the world” (p. 19). This breaking away from the polluted
city and returning to the seemingly pure pastoral setting indicates the inner turmoil that
constantly plagues him – to choose tradition or modern values, with the ultimate choice being
the former. Moreover, it is in line with the Taisho literary period (1912-1926), when the modern
cityscape was depicted as a ghostly site, resulting in split selves and loss of identity due to thedisappearance of places and objects that had existed in the pre-modern era (Nakamura, 2020,
p. 42). Perhaps, it is this interaction with the cityscape that results in the warped sense ofidentity that Kenzo experiences himself. However, his return to the pastoral in the textbook
sense does not mean he is a romantic either. The text makes it clear that he has always valued
his studies over marriage prospects: “It wasn’t his poor health that had prevented him frommarrying—he was just too busy with his studies to think about such matters,” (p. 19) making
his character far more complex.
Moreover, Kenzo has mastered the appearance of pragmatic values and rationality. However,
his true personality comes to light when his diary is exposed by his brother Saburo, revealingthat his emotions went from “extreme to extreme” and he had a “very strict sense of justice,”
holding others to an unattainable standard of honesty:
In normal circumstances this might be considered a human virtue, but in Kenzo’s caseI think it should be considered one of his defects. It was merciless and it allowed for no
flexibility whatsoever. He was hard on himself for any dishonesty or deceit, but he wasalso too strict with others. And then he had to grapple with the extra problem that bybirth he was required to be a landowner with power over a whole community. This wasat complete odds with his sense of justice, and his deep dislike of feudal ideology andpractices. But the irony was that at the same time as abhorring the system, he could
sometimes be the most haughtily aristocratic of all the Ichiyanagis. It was the result of13

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being at once the powerful head of a clan, a descendant of the honjin and a large-scalelandowner—when someone failed to show him respect, he was incredibly offended. In
other words, Kenzo was a creature full of inconsistencies (pp. 154-155).
When Gronow (1998) discusses modern culture and the emphasis on rationality, they present
the idea that extreme rationalism in modern societies can take the form of irrationality instead.
I argue that under challenging circumstances, Kenzo embodies that idea. While he succumbsto the traditional act of seppuku to escape from humiliation and maintain a semblance of“honor,” it is, in fact, his extreme rationality, bred from a misconceived notion of modern
values, acting in a place that bleeds into irrationality. When he finds out that Katsuko, his wifeto-be, is not a virgin and her former lover Taya could potentially leverage his dignity in returnfor favors to keep quiet about the relationship, he finds it unforgivable. As he was, after all, apart of a noble family, Kindaichi believes that the murder was inevitable: “He is to the end, inthe eyes of such a family, proud descendants of a honjin, it becomes perfectly natural andreasonable. No, I’d go so far as to say that this was an unavoidable murder. Kenzo had tomurder Katsuko; there was no other way” (p. 158). Even his brother Saburo, an accessory inthe murder, remarks that once this information was revealed to him, “no honor or pride wasleft in him” (p. 183). In his misguided display of honor and adherence to traditional values, hedoes not even measure up to the ideal of the samurai who devotes his entire life to a “single
moment of perfect honor and loyalty” (Hurst, 1990, p. 5) to die with inner peace and is shrouded
in mystery and mysticism. Kenzo cannot resolve the ambivalent tussle between his rational self
and the tradition and sense of duty he feels he must adhere to be respectable in Japanese society.
Another tipping point for the dual murder was the split in his personality. His self is the centerof a battle between a rational self, a product of a modern approach to social values, and a
traditional self that still relies on old traditional family values for self-worth while harboring a
conceptual dislike of it. His social standing after all comes from being born into privilege (p.
155). For example, his lineage makes everyone “impure” while he is the only pure being as
narrated by the maid Kiyo:
She told me how one time a visitor came to the house in winter and she set up a brazier.
The visitor’s hand happened to graze the brazier slightly. After he left, Kenzo couldn’t
settle until that spot had been disinfected with alcohol. I would characterize this as anabnormal preoccupation with cleanliness. I’d go so far as to say Kenzo couldn’t help
feeling that all human beings other than himself were dirty, impure (p. 157).
This split and the injury to his sense of honor and intrinsic values manifested in the form of
seppuku and the murder of his wife, the “only” choice he had left to maintain honor and position
in death. Even his act of murder lies between extreme rationality with his experiment with thesword to make it look like murder by a foreign perpetrator rather than suicide versus the act of
seppuku itself, a Japanese samurai tradition enacted as a form of punishment (Turner, 2018).
The all-important murder method is flouted as Kindaichi is able to reveal how and why themurder was committed.

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It is also highlighted in the initial chapters as a form of foreshadowing of the path he would
take for himself: for his wedding, he was to be dressed in the garb of a samurai “kamishimo”(p. 24). Known for their loyalty, courage, honor, and bravery, the samurai have been an
exemplified part of Japanese warrior history (Nave, 2021), which Kenzo cannot amount to.
Kenzo genuinely believes he is committing the formal act of seppuku instead of hara-kiri, as
he truly thinks of himself as the embodiment of a samurai. It is evidently pointed out by
Kindaichi while he explains the reason for the murder-suicide and why he couldn’t have justsevered ties with his wife-to-be: “To him, to back down and break the engagement in front of
all the relatives that he had power over would be akin to removing his helmet and surrenderingto the enemy” (p. 157). Even though he thought he was making a rational choice, it was done
to preserve his warped sense of tradition. Kenzo’s modern values and rationale are, ultimately,
only a farce.
Purity of Lineage
Additionally, his individuation, which sets him apart from the rest of his siblings, comes fromhis insistence on marrying Katsuko Kobe despite his family’s insistence to the contrary. The
text makes it clear that words like “lineage” have fallen out of use in the city but remain alive
and well in the rural communities. As mentioned earlier, Kenzo represents the new values of
the city where the ideas of lineage and creed which have fallen out of usage but are held close
in rural villages. His brother, who lives in the city, supports the marriage while the rest areagainst it. Kenzo’s new values are referred to as “a large pebble [that] had been dropped into astill pond,” (p. 21) leading to an uproar within his family. Kenzo’s act of going against his
traditional family values ultimately douses the fire of tradition (earlier in the narrative, at least).
A marriage of choice matters more to him than upholding family tradition to marry someoneof a suitable “pedigree” which matters the most to this family:
Despite this, in the eyes of the Ichiyanagi family, it didn’t matter how educated she was,
how wise or intelligent, or how large a fortune she possessed—the daughter of a tenant
farmer would always be just that: the daughter of a tenant farmer. She had no family
name, no pedigree, and they thought of her as no more than the child of Rinkichi Kubo,
poor peasant farmer (p. 23).
One of the shortcomings of individuation includes a disconnectedness from the family and in
effect from a symbolic family lineage, quite the opposite of what would be expected from a
traditional family man. While the family is aware of his honorable stubbornness and apparently
progressive ideas, he can repress and hide his darker, base instincts from the rest of society.
Although Kenzo attempts to be individualistic, he ultimately succumbs to socialization
regarding ideas of honor, which results in the murder of his wife and his self-disembowelment.
It could also be argued that by presenting seppuku as resistive to a change in values, Yokomizo
is extending his critique to the Japanese Empire’s attempts to revive the practice of seppuku
among soldiers during the wartime era. It is exactly that notion of irrationality that Yokomizo
wants his readers to turn away from.

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What is also of import here is the killing of a woman for the sake of honor. Katsuko is described
as a “woman in possession of both her own fortune and a career,” (p. 23), whose only crime
was falling prey to conniving city man Taya and not being a virgin before her marriage to
Kenzo. Transgression of ideas of sexual purity, particularly on the part of a female relative, istaken as an affront to the man’s reputation as described by Kindaichi: “This woman who withher defiled body was attempting to become his wife. It must have driven him to indescribablefury” (pp. 157–158). Kenzo by upholding tradition, bears the flag of patriarchy as well, which
I believe Yokomizo scrutinizes, too. This is evident in his other works such as Death on
Gokumon Island, wherein the chieftain Kaemon’s three granddaughters are murdered despite
them being the rightful successors of the family, in order to make way for their male cousin to
inherit the title in their place. In both cases, the female characters fall short of the expectationsof their patriarchs which leads to their demise.
Familial Breakdown
With Kenzo, it is furthermore questioned if family traditions passed down through generations
can be so conveniently broken when the text reveals that his father Sakue, committed suicide
through seppuku, and then his uncle Hayato, who had died violently by the sword, too. It is notfate that strikes all three of these men by way of blood but their unrelenting tradition, as also
described by the villagers: “The Ichiyanagi family had suffered for generations from stubborn,headstrong men and their intense personalities” (p. 70).
The Ichiyanagi family are also upholders of tradition and a closed unit alongside the villagersof the village Okayama. However, the only thing that unites them is distrust toward outsiders
or the “other.” At the same time, the Ichiyanagi family home was a honjin or an inn where theEdo period nobility used to stay. With the collapse of the feudal system, they were compelled
to move to their current home village. Despite their perceived pride in their lineage, they arestill considered “unpopular among the narrow-minded villagers” and called kappa “mythical,
water goblins” (p. 18). Like the villagers consider the Ichiyanagi family as outsiders, the family,
in turn, is resistant toward welcoming Katsuko as a bride of Kenzo, owing it not to wealth but
to “lineage” as she is the daughter of a poor peasant farmer. While Katsuko has broken freefrom the traditional economy, passed through generations as her father accumulated wealthfrom America, was raised in a non-traditional family set up by her uncle, and earns her keep asa teacher, she is reduced to being the “bride of the heir to the family” (p. 22). The preoccupation
with “heirs” and “lineage” suggests transferring tradition from generation to generation andstaying clear of outside influences. From his own experience of living in the village ofOkayama to escape the air raids in the capital, this is done to depict how the “green pastures of
the countryside hide just as much darkness as the brothels of Yūrakuchō” (Kawana, 2008, p.
200), standing in the way of Yokomizo’s quest for rationality.
This discord and prevalence of death in the family represent the breakdown of the tradition andvalues upheld by the Ichiyanagis (values that have become obsolete) itself triggered by Kenzo’s
actions. After the couple’s death, Saburo died in the war, Suzuko passed away the following
year, and their cousin Ryosuke died in the bombing of Hiroshima; there are daily family

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quarrels – representative of the complete downfall and collapse of familial relations. AlthoughKenzo’s actions seem like a dying attempt at preserving tradition, change has become
inevitable (If no child is left behind then it is the end of the family tree as well). In the shadowof the honjin, the narrator can smell “the odor of decay” left in the wake of a broken family,
thus tradition. The honjin, which is also an inn meant for nobility, is symptomatic of thisbreakdown and the beginning of a new world order. This would mark the shift from“inauthentic” to “authentic” sensibilities of the Japanese populace, “challenging the dichotomy
itself which dictated the prewar discourses” (Saito, 2007, p. 183) and a departure from “aninward aestheticism conditioned by fascist ideology toward an outward modernization suitablefor postwar democracy” (p. 172). The inauthentic, in my opinion, includes the extreme
rationality possessed by Kenzo.
In a period of social upheaval, Yokomizo writes that “farmers and peasants are increasingly nolonger obliged to kowtow to the upper classes or to show the same level of respect for thosewith high social standing, fortune or property. Those values have come crashing down in thewake of Japan’s defeat. However, what is still intact is lineage” (p. 21). Through the
breakdown of the noble family and their honjin, Yokomizo breaks down the last surviving
piece of irrationality. What Yokomizo is criticizing is not a reductive understanding of tradition
as regressive and modernism as progressive in itself but the irrationality that corrupts both endsof the spectrum.
Instruments of Murder
The symbol of the koto – an ancient Japanese musical instrument – is employed by Yokomizo
to represent the obsoleteness of traditional values in rural Japan. In the chapter where Ikoto,
Kenzo’s mother, insists that his bride has to fulfill the custom of playing the koto on theirwedding night because, “For several generations, the bride of the heir to the family title had
been expected to play certain pieces on a koto at the official wedding ceremony,” (p. 24), he
outright refuses to follow the set value, deeming it unnecessary.
The image of the koto – or tradition – becomes an accessory to the crime scene, and its soundhaunts the Ichiyanagi family henceforth. Kenzo’s sister Suzuko, in Katsuko’s stead, performs
a traditional song written by a head of the Ichiyanagi family called ‘The Lovebirds’ which isheld in great respect by them:
Many years ago, the wife of the head of the Ichiyanagi family was a very talented kotoplayer. It so happened that a noblewoman—the daughter of a daimyo—was passing
through on her way west for a wedding ceremony and stopped at the honjin. The expert
koto player performed a song that she had written herself called ‘The Lovebirds’. The
daimyo’s daughter admired the song so much that the next day she sent the family akoto, which they nicknamed ‘The Lovebird’. Ever since, the Ichiyanagi family has
required the bride of the heir to play the koto at her wedding ceremony (p. 33).
The fact that Katsuko reveals that she knows how to play the koto, contrary to what Kenzo
implied, he robs her of the chance to assimilate herself within the family tradition, not just due

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to his ignorance of the fact but also because he does not deem her worthy. The tradition held
so near and dear in the form of the “Lovebirds’ instrument” instead has become a death warrant,
choking the life out of its victims. Chiho Nakagwa (2014) also agrees that the murder has“traditional aesthetics and patrician overtones,” (p. 91) and it is that very instrument that
becomes essential to carry out her murder.
The main instrument of murder though is the katana which makes the act of seppuku possible.
The speculation by the elders of the village that “the cursed Muramasa katana that Sakue had
used to kill his opponent that night was the very same sword that had been used to murder
Kenzo and Katsuko,” (p. 88) proves to be interesting. While the claim is refuted, the sword isstill a weapon that has traditionally been used by his father and uncle to commit the act of
seppuku, one by the head of a noble family and one by a military man, respectively. Kenzo,
who also considers himself akin to a samurai, no other weapon would have sufficed for theritual.
Given the use of the samurai’s katana and the koto, (an aristocratic instrument) Kenzo’s need
to uphold tradition rings true. Here, Yokomizo is criticizing the old values that repress those
who fall under its shadow while exploring the “turbulent postwar world of rural Japan”(Kawana, 2007, p. 119), which is not the idyllic harbor of revered tradition but can also be rifewith madness, anxiety, and prejudice brought to light with the destabilizing effects of war. The
red ochre locked room in which the grotesque murder-suicide takes place is akin to the mise en
abyme “a means by which the work turns back on itself, appears to be a kind of reflection”(Dallenbach, 1989). Yokomizo in the form of the locked room, holds up a mirror for Japanesesociety to reflect on. This is precisely what makes The Honjin Murders a unique locked-room
mystery novel that represents the locked room as a microcosm of the rural area, where uncanny,strange occurrences ran rampant, away from the scrutiny of the outside world.
The Undercover Agent of Modernity
In contrast, sleuth Kindaichi is Yokomizo’s actual “undercover agent of modernity,” as termedby Kawana (2003) rather than the pretend modernist Kenzo. It can be argued that the characters
are a foil to each other. Unlike Kenzo, Kindaichi is unbothered by how he appears and is
described as a “scruffy-looking youth” (p. 81) who scratches his already disheveled hair and isprone to stuttering whenever excited about the mystery. His apparent oddity is owed to his
exposure to city life in Tokyo, where “characters” like him are abundant. Logic and reasoning
are his areas of expertise as he prefers to use his head rather than a “tape and measure” todeduce the culprit of the honjin murder, which means that he is not rational to the extreme
where he would solely rely on scientific measures but observes closely for any discrepancies.
He harbors a flexible rationality that the rigidity of Kenzo could not attain. Kindaichi is
Yokomizo’s mouthpiece for a change in tradition and intellectual thinking that was stressed
less during the war, which he wants to bring back into focus for the readership. Now, afterWorld War II, he argues that the “need to write rational (gōritekina) and intellectual (chitekina)
detective fiction in order to enlighten our readers” (Kawana, 2008, p. 187). This reflects a more

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significant social trend to examine Japan’s defeat in the war and to revive the nation throughdetective fiction.
For him, rationality is a tool to combat “irrational spiritualism,” which plagued Japan to
succumb to fascist ideals during the war – also criticizing rigid conservatism and stubborn
tradition in rural areas. The difference between him and the rural community is that he isimpervious to indigenous prejudice, which has the villagers assign the murder to an outsider –the three-fingered man. This exact “rational exclusionism” in place of Kindaichi’s “flexible
rationality” got someone killed. It becomes clear that Kenzo’s prized values and ideas of honor
are on the decline. Moreover, Kindaichi does not expect everything to be rational; he also relies
on chance and the illogical schemes of the killer. He recognizes that in a postwar world, noteverything makes sense and that Kenzo’s designs may be rational, but his motive is irrational.
For him, it is not enough to decipher how the murder took place and by whom but also why:
“The true horror of this case isn’t in the way it was done, but why it was done” (p. 153). As adetective, he is sharp enough to expose exactly what Kenzo’s rationale was behind the murdersuicide, but he is empathetic enough to recognize that it cannot be reduced to a double suicide,an observation the local Inspector cannot make: “A lovers’ suicide?…No. I am sure it wasn’t.
This was a regular murder, fuelled by malice, hatred, and fury at Katsuko for having entrapped
him in this impossible situation…” (p. 158).
Without this recognition, he would not be an able postwar detective. Also, he is not tied to any
organization or institution like the police, which might not accept his eccentric approach tosolving cases. He can only penetrate a highly exclusive society because Katsuko’s uncle invited
him. His independence and individuation are dissimilar to that of Kenzo, where he is not subject
to external control of values past and values of a set institution. Henceforth, he can dismantle
the mystery without dishonoring his personal values.
Conclusion
In summation, The Honjin Murders is a deep analysis of Japanese culture and society throughthe genre of detective fiction. More than being relevant to Japanese readers in the 1940s, thenovel and subsequent releases owe a significant amount of their success to the commercial
strategies adopted by the Kadokawa Publishing Company in the 1970s, which led to televisionand film adaptations of Yokomizo’s works. It aligned with the literary movement to return to
the “authentic” detective stories. With the onset of modernity and after the defeat of Japan in
World War II, the novel not only revives and reconfigures the detective fiction genre but also
examines the changing values of Japanese society, from those of feudalism, creed, andaristocracy to democratic rationalism. Seishi Yokomizo criticizes the conservatism andprejudice of villagers and the Ichiyanagi family while reproving the extreme rationality
practiced by Kenzo Ichiyanagi. The conflict between tradition and new values is depicted
through the characterization of Kenzo and his last act of seppuku to preserve “honor,” hisfamily and the villagers’ aversion to outsiders, and the aristocratic symbols of the katana andkoto, where the breakdown of the family ultimately results in the death of tradition itself.
Detective Kindaichi becomes the only “undercover agent of modernity” who draws on the19

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power relations in tight-knit rural communities and employs logic, reason, and the probabilityof chance to deduce the mystery. The exploration of such themes is again relevant to a post1970s audience where the genre had taken a turn from “whodunnits” to “whydunnits” as thetussle with societal pressures, the onset of modernity, and the psychological turmoil of anindividual prove to be the focus of Yokomizo’s novels. While ideas of rationalism andmodernism seem to be borrowed with the influx of Western detective novels and given theaftermath of two World Wars, Yokomizo does not fail to indigenize his criticism of traditional
values as well as extremes of rationality in his works.

Acknowledgments
I want to thank my esteemed instructor, Ms Javaria Siddique, for her constant help andguidance throughout this project. I would also like to acknowledge the masterful translation of
The Honjin Murders by Louise Heal Kawai into English, without which this study would nothave been possible.

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Corresponding author: Xinnia Ejaz
Email: xinnia.ejaz@yahoo.com

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