With his novels with mysterious plots and a refined Japanese atmosphere, published in the 1930s in Japan and now republished by Sellerio, Yokomizo Seishi (Kobe 1902- Tokyo 1981) had a large following of readers as an author of crime stories. But to say “crime story” is reductive for Yokomizo, also defined as the “Japanese John Dickson Carr”, master of enigmatic “locked room” detective stories, and whose prose, with the elegant translation by Francesco Vitucci, immerses you in that floating world of impermanence in which, like the narrative of Yukio Mishima or Kawabata Yasunari, you are like “prisoners with no escape of beauty”.
As in “Detective Kindaichi and the Curse of the Inugami”, the fifth of the novels published by Sellerio (after “Detective Kindaichi”, “The Black Cat Inn”, “Fragrances of Death”, “The Phantom Theater”), a story set in the 1940s in that world where one is “like an empty pumpkin floating on the current of water” (as the verses of Asai Ryōi, 1612-1691, say), a world in continuous transformation, because no moment is the same as the previous or the next. And no moment is truly the same as the previous or the next in this story investigated by Kindaichi Kōsuke, a singular detective with a scruffy appearance, a small figure and thick, disheveled hair in which he often puts his hands when he reflects on details or has an intuition.
The horror of death equal to the serene beauty of the moon, the snow, the temples, the torii, the cherry trees and chrysanthemums and the Zen gardens, while in the distance, beyond the mulberry fields, the snow-capped peak of Mount Fuji peeps out, envelops Kindaichi upon his arrival at Lake Nasu, in the Shinshū region. There, the wake of Inugami Sahee, founder of a vast industrial textile empire, is taking place, whose complicated will must be opened only when his nephew Sukekiyo, son of Matsuko, one of the deceased’s three daughters, had by three different women who had never married, returns from the war. Also part of the family is the young Tamayo, of “shocking beauty but also frightening” (thinks Kindaichi), adopted by Inugami out of a debt of gratitude towards a priest who had taken him in as a foundling.
Kindaichi has been called to that idyllic lake by the disturbing letter of a certain lawyer Wakabayashi, who he will have to meet in Nasu and will reveal to him what he fears may happen. But Wakabayashi is killed before he can reveal his fears to Kindaichi who, together with the local commissioner Tachibana, will investigate, overwhelmed by the wave of other brutal crimes within the Inugami family, all spectacularized with the symbols of the axe, the koto (musical instrument) and the chrysanthemum, the three treasures of the Inugami house that represent the right to succession of all the family assets.
