Picked this up on a whim in the library; I had never heard of the author. It’s interesting that this genre novel was translated, because in many respects, it’s not an especially innovative detective novel (in retrospect, I should have foreseen the big twist, because this exact trick was used in a detective manga:  so therefore I find it bizarre in a forty-year old case which was the center of so much obsession, no one ), and it is openly written as a puzzle plot, complete with ‘and now can you solve the crime, dear reader?’ letters from the author, and the amateur detective and his would-be Watson (a detective story addict), while amusing, don’t really fascinate as characters because we don’t get that much background on them. (Although there is a hilarious part where the detective (who is BTW a fortune-teller) rips on Holmes, but says that he loves him because he showed us what a human was.) In any case, I never read detective stories as puzzle plots. I don’t bother reading them strictly in materialist views, as a puzzle, because the author is always trying to fool us, and therefore the narrator is not playing entirely fair. So I made no serious attempts to solve the crime, although I did have many suspicions.

Oh wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. So what is the crime anyway? In Tokyo, in 1936, a painter, Heikichi Umezawa, was murdered in his studio. A note was found at the crime scene, in which the painter outlined a deranged occult plan to create Azoth, the perfect woman from the body parts of the six young women, his daughters, step-daughters and nieces, who lived with him. The plans included many complex astrological calculations, geomancy, bizarre references to the alchemical correspondences of the planets and the elements, as well as attempts to link the idea of Azoth to the legend of the shamanist-empress Himiko of Yamatai. In any event, after Heikichi’s death, his eldest stepdaughter, who was divorced and lived outside of the house, and was not mentioned in the note, is raped and murdered, and more shockingly, the six young women disappear, and later their dismembered corpses, each missing the part which the note specified would be taken to summon Azoth, are found in mines corresponding to the element of the missing part. For forty years afterwards, this crime becomes an obsession, but the motives and the identity of the killer remain obscure. That is, until the daughter of a police officer brings some shocking evidence to the heroes in 1979.

 Anyway, if you really really want to know what went down, you can read the wikipedia entry, which thoroughly spoils the case. I did feel the appearance of a certain minor character was suspicious, as was the note itself and the disposition of the money. What kept me reading the book until the wee hours of the morning was the atmosphere of occult dread, the psychotic specifications of the creation of Azoth, the maddened attempts of later sleuths to calculate her birthplace. The seemingly meaningless obscenity of the crimes (although in the end a mystification:  which is what is interesting, how geniunely creepy and unnerving even the red herrings in the case are, the asides about obsessions with mannequins and dolls) is more redolent of the thriller genre than the classical fair-play mystery it structurally is.

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