For 43 years, the vicious and gruesome massacre of the Umezawa family has puzzled Japan… Through multiple other mass killings, and a World War, the bizarre and incomprehensible horrors of this mysterious crime had arrested the attention of amateur sleuths all the nation over. Sensational books have been written about the crimes (dubbed “The Tokyo Zodiac Murders”), theories have been published in newspapers and preached on television. And yet, for 43 years, the truth has eluded even the most brilliant, attentive, and dedicated of would-be Sherlocks…
Heikichi Umezawa was an astrologer, alchemist, and artist who, in his last moments of sanity, sought to create “Azoth”, the ultimate and perfect beauty , a Goddess of a human, based on his understanding of astrology. Every person’s birth sign correlated with a part of their body — their head, chest, abdomen, hips, thighs, and legs — and therefore that part of their body was granted strength by their ruling planet. To his immense pleasure, thanks to his massive extended family and his multiple romantic partners, Heikichi has seven daughters, step-daughters, and nieces who, between them, all represent six different birth signs which themselves also have domain over each of the six different body parts. Therefore, before killing himself, Heikcihi intended to murder six of his daughters and nieces, take their “ruling” body part, bury their corpses in astrologically and alchemically significant parts of Japan (correlating to minerals, for example), and then, in “the very center of Japan”, he would bring the collected body parts to construct Azoth. Details of his plans are contained within his last and will testament. Six perfect body parts assembled to create the singular perfect woman…
However, before he could conduct this plan to construct his Goddess-on-Earth, Heikichi was murdered in his locked-and-sealed studio. It was only after his death that, shocking everyone, some unknown force had begun to enact the Azoth murders according to his specifications. Nobody could understand how — or why — Heikcihi’s plan leaked to the public, or why this mysterious new party would begin to commit these disgusting murders…
One day, the six daughters, step-daughters, and nieces of the Umezawa household simply vanished… And over the course of nine months, each of the six girls’ corpses was discovered, each missing the body part mentioned in the late Heikichi’s notes, each buried near a mine with a significant mineral deposit corresponding to their ruling element, and each buried at a different depth.
Six corpses, of six girls, buried in six different locations…
In modern-day Japan, a young woman going by the name of Iida has come forward with an unusual declaration: her father had played a very central role in the Umezawa murder case… involving another, seemingly unrelated case dealing with the killing and subsequent rape of the seventh Umezawa child, situated nicely between Heikichi’s death and the Azoth killings. Desperate to have her father’s reputation cleared, she commissions astrologer Kiyoko Mitarai (who receives details of the case from his closest friend) to finally solve this decades-old murder once and for all, and find the real mastermind..! And thus, Kiyoko does as he promises, playing armchair sleuth, attempting to succeed where the police and millions other have failed…
…and there we have the framework for The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, the landmark impossible crime debut of Sōji Shimada. The novel was written at a time in the genre’s history when the “social” school of plotting dominated — no more were the tedious honkaku puzzles of old! Usher in a new age of socially intelligent plots concerned with psychology and human interests! Naturally, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders represented a rejection of this genre-wide shift away from tricky murder plots, and therefore did incredibly poorly when it was first published. However, in reality, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders was an inspiration for many younger crime writers who also thirsted for the orthodox crime puzzles to return. It may have been Yukito Ayatsuji’s The Decagon House Murders that finally allowed the crime genre to sprout into the shin-honkaku movement of neo-puzzle plots, but it was The Tokyo Zodiac Murders that planted the seed and Shimada’s own subsequent efforts in bringing up prospective shin-honkaku writers that nurtured it. It is for this reason that The Tokyo Zodiac Murders has become regarded as not only a landmark novel in the development of the genre, but also the reason why shin-honkaku even exists at all in its current form, making it possibly the single most important modern Japanese crime novel ever written, bar none.
The Tokyo Zodiac Murders has actually already received a mention on this blog, on my zeroth revision of my Top 15 Impossible Crimes list. However, it only appeared in a passing mention under Shimada’s actual full entry, his sophomore novel, Murder in the Crooked House. This is not because I consider The Tokyo Zodiac Murders an inferior mystery, but it’s a very complicated sort of comparison Shimada has created for us here.
To begin with, as a novel on its own? The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is not great. As the crimes take place over 40 years before the events of the novel, the entire tale is told thrice-removed from the perspective of anyone actually concerned with the murders. Therefore, instead of being a novel about the story of a murder, it instead becomes a novel about the story of a guy listening to a story about a story of a murder. On top of depriving the novel of any human interest, it makes the storytelling and prose bone-dry.
The first third of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is incredibly dense, with the story wasting not a single word on anything that isn’t telling you every single thing you need to know about the three disparate murder cases. You get every floorplan for every conceivable floor, the blood-types, astrological signs, and birth dates of every named character in the story, full details of decades of investigation, including every possible theory and counter-theory and counter-counter-theory for every last clue, red herring, and event to occur within this telling. A full detective novel’s worth of plot, and then some, is dumped into your lap in one of the most purely cerebral murder mystery narratives ever written.
What then follows is another significant portion of the book, concerned entirely with Kiyoko’s investigation in the modern day. If the first third of the novel is the single densest piece of crime plotting ever penned to paper, the subsequent portion is one of the thinnest, most irrelevant, and positively nothing pieces of writing in the genre. Protracted history lessons, discussions on literature, and arguments about the failures of Sherlock Holmes eat up so much of the novel during this section and lead positively nowhere, but the book’s worst sin is that a full six chapters are dedicated to the narrator attempting to have a single conversation, which itself only creates a weak red herring that, on top of being discredited immediately, was by the book’s own admission a perfect waste of time. (By the book’s own admission through the first of its two Challenges to the Reader, the mystery can be solved very early into the narrative, with much of the ensuing story being included pretty much arbitrarily).
The issue isn’t really so much the amount of padding — all detective novels have a lot of it, frankly — but rather the fact that the novel frontloaded the entire, extremely dense plot in the first third and had nowhere else to go, meandering along for no better reason than the story was too long to be a novella but too short to be a good novel. It then unloaded a typical novel’s worth of filler into your lap, instead of dispersing it evenly throughout the story. This makes it an extremely engaging (even if purely cerebral) read for the first third, and then a very mindless slog for the second third. To go from every word contributing something meaningful to six chapters being dedicated to an empty deadend is, frankly, the kind of pacing whiplash I’ve never seen before.
Worse yet, the locked-room murder itself is incredibly pedestrian (hence why it didn’t appear on the favorite impossible crimes list), and the implications of the murder/rape are pretty obvious.
Keeping all of this in mind, do I think The Tokyo Zodiac Murders deserves its monumental reputation?
…Yes!
It may sound insane to say so, but during the long denouement, the novel had done an exceptional job at making me forget every gripe or quibble I had with its storytelling or structure. Because the Azoth murders — the actual titular Tokyo Zodiac Murders serial killing — presents what is one of the most, if not the single most brilliant piece of trickery in the entire crime fiction genre, and I wish I was exaggerating. In my mind, no novel could be so boring, could be so dry, could be so poorly-paced as to ruin the impact of the book’s denouement. For what was 100-odd pages of info-dumping followed by 100-odd pages of Shimada pretending to plot, the final 30 pages of this tale offer a bloody, twisted, macabre stunner of an explanation for the serial killings that bursts forth from the pages like fireworks with ingenuity, creativity, and deviousness unparalleled by, to my mind, almost anything else the genre has to offer. Not only are the mechanics of the crime incredibly unique — something that has never been written before, nor anything even similar to it before this novel — it’s also uniquely Japanese, having all of the thumbprints of shin-honkaku in a way that no English mystery from the early 1900s would ever have managed, making it not only is a tour de force of ingenuity, but also one that perfectly showcases another culture’s unique approach to the genre we all know and love. Even after re-reading the novel, I know that every time I look back on The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, I will not be thinking about the wastes of time in the modern day’s investigation — I will only be able to look back on the jaw-dropping sucker-punch the novel delivers that stunned me into shocked frustrated reverence.
The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is a landmark impossible crime, but that reputation is a bit unfair to it — the impossible crime is minor, and uninspired in the extreme. It’s also a very poorly constructed, unpleasantly-written novel. But for all that, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders contains what has to be one of the most baffling and brilliantly-conceived serial killings in all of mystery-writing fiction (if you think you can name me one better, I dare you to try…), and one of the most deviously-hidden culprits of all time. I’ll never be able to look back on this novel negatively — it’ll be a hard read for those who favor their mysteries on the literary side, but for those like me who appreciate the mystery story as a vehicle for a puzzle I’ll only be able to remember it as one of Japan’s plotting tours de force…
With all of its flaws as a novel, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders ends on a triumph — it’ll never be a favorite novel of anybody’s, but I’m perfectly comfortable calling it one of my favorite mysteries ever plotted.
Solving the Mystery of Murder 