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

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In my mind, however, that can't begin to compensate for the female characters who, dead or alive, are never depicted as fully human.

Soon the body count starts to mount up as people are murdered in bizarre and seemingly impossible ways.

Loosely inspired by Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, the fiendish Death on Gokumon Island is perhaps the most highly regarded of all the great Seishi Yokomizo’s classic Japanese mysteries.

The scruffy detective is determined to get to the bottom of this mysterious prophecy, and to protect the three women if he can. There are some aspects that the modern reader may find problematic, like the assumption that since Gokumon was an island of priests and convicts, its people are strange, crazy even. The plot was slow pacing, as typical of Yokomizo because the author always started with the history of the places to create the atmosphere/ setting of the book.

But as he investigates, Kindaichi uncovers a shocking truth — the islanders are descended from pirates and criminals, and their dark past may be the key to unlocking the killer’s identity. 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. He is often described as “scruffy” and is known for digging his hand into his knot of hair and scratching furiously when engaged in deep investigative thought.

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. Hace unos meses, mirando el catálogo de Quaterni, descubrí que en 2015 publicaron 2 libros más de la serie del detective Kindaichi Kosuke así que me tiré de cabeza.

After serving as editor in chief of several magazines, he resigned in 1932 to devote himself full-time to writing. But Kindaichi has not come merely as a messenger - with his last words, the dying man warned that his three step-sisters' lives would now be in danger. And he wants his granddaughters killed so that each death echoes a well-known haiku—which has nothing to do with inheritance, but why not turn murders into visual representations of well-known poems? The thing with Seishi Yokomizo's books is that, they will always leave us just staring at the wall for a few minutes.