To understand the importance of this work, we must also take a short look at the history of Western detective fiction. The new form of literature we now know as detective fiction was born out of the scientific revolution, which completely changed Western society. It was Edgar Allan Poe who first detailed the curious case of an evil spirit which made its way into a locked room and, with terrible strength, killed a young woman, as well as the surprising truth behind the case that was revealed by cool-headed science. Poe was followed by Doyle, who gave the world the stories of Sherlock Holmes, a young scientist who championed a new field of study: the art of deduction, creating readers all over the world and firmly establishing the genre of detective fiction. More than eighty years after Poe, Van Dine in the United States gave the genre a second start in 1928. It was his idea to put the murder, the solving of the case and everything else from start to finish, inside a mansion or a closed-off stage, in the manner of a sports game, as is also done in The Decagon House Murders.
At the time Van Dine arrived on the scene, fanatical readers had become all too familiar with the various literary exploits of Poe and Doyle and, unlike readers at the dawn of the genre, they now knew what to expect as they turned the pages of a novel, which meant that authors had to readjust and change course also.
The introduction of suspicious inhabitants of a mansion and the fair presentation of the character profiles right from the start; clearly outlining the stage of the murder tragedy; the writer not being allowed to lie in the narration; no vital information necessary for the deduction game to be withheld from the reader; getting rid of elements that could interfere with the enjoyment of the pure deduction game (like the magic of the Chinaman or vulgar love stories): these were the rules of the game as proposed by Van Dine. They themselves may have denied it, but John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen, too, were inspired by these proposals and created their own successful masterpieces of detective fiction—also inspired by the Gothic novel—so leading the way to the Golden Age.
However, this particular creative process also limits the number of elements available when writing a novel and one could say that, after the Golden Age, new developments were not made in the genre. The focus on the latest science, as embraced by Poe and Doyle, had also been abandoned by Van Dine, and the many revolutionary scientific discoveries of the twentieth century left detective fiction trailing in their wake.
Looking back now at what Ayatsuji Yukito accomplished, I think we can say that he conducted an experiment that followed Van Dine’s approach to mystery fiction, but that he was even more daring and more ready to push the genre further. It is for that reason his writing style is called shin honkaku, or “new orthodox,” and why so many writers followed in his steps.
Riding the wave, many new writers of honkaku stories suddenly made their appearance in the short period between 1987 and 1990, including Utano Shōgo and Nikaidō Reito, as well as Ayatsuji’s fellow members of the Kyoto University Mystery Club, such as Norizuki Rintarō, Abiko Takemaru and Maya Yutaka. I also wrote the introductions for these writers’ debuts. In response to this movement, other writers like Arisugawa Alice, Kitamura Kaoru, Imamura Aya and Ashibe Taku also made their debut through different routes. All these writers came together and formed the movement known as shin honkaku. It was as if the grand spirit of honkaku had been biding its time during “the winter of the age of honkaku” and with the time ripe, it had finally woken up again.
Ashibe Taku’s Murder in the Red Chamber (2004) has been translated into English, and two of Norizuki Rintarō’s short stories, An Urban Legend Puzzle and The Lure of the Green Door have been published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, as has my own The Locked House of Pythagoras (in 2004, 2014 and 2013 respectively).
In the manner of Van Dine, Ayatsuji also did away with focusing on the latest science in The Decagon House Murders, and set the murder and the solving of the case with an isolated house as its stage from start to finish. But he ruthlessly eliminated all the elements which Van Dine had thought necessary to make his stories “literary,” such as the depiction of the American upper class; the witticisms; the attention to prideful women; the cheerful conversations while the wine is poured at dinner; the polite demeanour of the butler and servants. Thus his novel approached the form of a game more so than anything previously written.
As a result, his characters act almost like robots, their thoughts depicted only minimally through repetitive phrases. The narration shows no interest in sophisticated writing or a sense of art and is focused solely on telling the story. To readers who were used to American and British detective fiction, The Decagon House Murders was a shock. It was as if they were looking at the raw building plans of a novel.
People devoid of any human emotion, only moving according to electrical signals: a setting reminiscent of the inside of a videogame. Ayatsuji Yukito’s unique method of depicting such abstract murder theatre plays, in which he hides his murderers, follows the traditions of the “whodunit” game of the Kyoto University Mystery Club. The participants in this game are given nothing in print, but have to guess who the murderer is based on an oral reading of a detective story. In a tense situation like that, where every word disappears the moment it is spoken, there is no need for beautiful or witty writing.
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Ayatsuji Yukito first introduced this technique, dubbed “Symbolic Characterisation,” and his experiment The Decagon House Murders was also his debut novel. Some have mistakenly taken his calculated abstractness as inexperience in expressive power or even a lack of writing skill, and he was criticised harshly when the book was first released. However, he had his reasons for writing the book the way he did. And to everyone’s surprise, bot-like characters from videogames became widely popular soon after the book’s release, just as Ayatsuji’s style of detective fiction had already foretold. Thus Decagon found its place among other masterpieces. Anime (Japanese animation) which would soon take over the world, would also feature the closed-off worlds of the Ayatsuji school.
As the person who once introduced this novel to the Japanese world, I am thrilled now to be the person to introduce this experiment in mystifying tricks to the English-speaking world.
Shimada Soji
Tokyo, 2015