The Meiji Guillotine Murders

By Yamada Futaro
Translated by Bryan Karetnyk

‎Pushkin Vertigo (2023)
ISBN-13: 978-1782278887

Review by Chris Corker

Yamada Futaro (the pen name of Yamada Seiya) was discovered by Edogawa Ranpo, arguably Japan’s most famous and prolific writer of detective fiction; Yamada, however, went on to produce an impressive body of work and became a renowned writer in his own right. A large number of his stories concern the (often sneaky) exploits of ninjas. Indeed, if he is known today to English-speaking audiences it is likely by those familiar with the adaptations of his Kouga Ninja epic, including Basilisk: The Kouga Ninja Scrolls in its 2003 manga and 2005 anime forms, as well as the 2005 live-action Shinobu: Heart Under Blade adapted from the same material. Cinephiles (and incognito-window browsers) may also indirectly know his 1962 novel Hitsugi no Naka no Etsuraku by its transformation into Oshima Nagisa's sexually-explicit 1965 film Pleasures of the Flesh.

Published through Pushkin Press’ Vertigo label, which in recent years has delivered translations of a number of Japanese detective stories, this first English translation of 1979’s The Meiji Guillotine Murders gives readers a chance to experience Yamada’s work directly. Set in 1869, two decades after the Black Ships forcibly lifted Japan’s policy of isolationism and Western ideas began to flow into the country, the story takes place in a fraught but fascinating time of clashing institutions and ideologies. Amongst this culture of disarray, detectives Kazuki and Kawaji, part of a newly-formed police force that aims to tackle governmental corruption, are assigned to investigate a number of strange murders that seem to have no connection to one another. Fighting duplicitous officials and mediating civil unrest, the pair also struggle with their own conflicting opinions on the direction this new Japan must take.

While Pushkin recommends Yamada’s novel to fans of other Japanese mystery writers such as Yokomizo Seishi, The Meiji Guillotine Murders is not your typically breathless thriller. On the contrary, the pace can sometimes feel leisurely, with the wider historical picture and its implications referenced throughout in authorial asides. Perhaps this is an acknowledgement of the sheer amount of instrumental changes occurring during the early-Meiji period, in which Japan, but also the very notion of what it meant to be Japanese, was evolving. While much of this was in response to a foreign threat, the country was also still reeling from a bloody civil war that re-instated the emperor as the centre of the nation after two and a half centuries of Tokugawa rule. If this snapshot of history seems a little overwhelming, then strap yourself in, because Yamada’s novel delves even deeper, offering up a list of names, places and government bodies that could leave readers unfamiliar with Japan’s Meiji history a little nonplussed. In fact, reading The Meiji Guillotine Murders it’s hard to shake the feeling that the work is only really one part detective story and two parts historical fiction.

While the short introduction by Bryan Karetnyk, whose translation is accessible and reads well, does help to foreground some of the key issues of the time, this is perhaps a novel that would have benefited from more thorough notations, particularly with reference to certain names that leave characters in the novel in awe (such as, for example, Fukuzawa Yukichi) but would likely underwhelm a reader not fully-versed in Japanese early-modern history. Elsewhere, uncommon government titles and items of clothing are left in the original Japanese but seem little more than exotic dressings. Perhaps for a story that bills itself as a pacey whodunit it might have been better to offer English alternatives to facilitate such a flow.

“There came a noise that defies description: the hiss of iron, and then a cry that mixed with wonder and horror.”

Where the novel excels is in its central motif of the guillotine. An import from France where it was used to instigate a revolution, here it is brought in by the Japanese authorities to administer state justice (though who and what are really running the state is still somewhat vague). The guillotine is lauded by its proponents as a more humane alternative to the sword, the most common method of execution until the point—but the dispassionate manner in which its dispatches criminals lends it an air of sterile cruelty. A “grim spectre” that leaves criminals and prosecutors alike frozen to the spot, what the guillotine embodies is the fear of those who believed an adoption of modern western techniques was simply an unnecessary switch of processes that did nothing but dilute the cultural character of the Japanese. While the sword was considered to be a vital part of the one who wielded it (however romantically-skewed that notion may), the guillotine is a machine that seems to take the human out of the equation altogether. This sense of modernity eliminating the communal human is one that endures in Japanese cultural criticism today, finding hearty echoes all over the world. Just as the guillotine separates head from body, so a rampant pursuit of modernity can be seen as a mechanism that severs the human subject from its culture.

Sometimes in The Meiji Guillotine Murders there are scenes in which characters act or speak in a way as to make their personalities and foibles quite clear, only for the author to describe these traits unequivocally in the next paragraph. Exposition like this is quite common in the novel and indicative of the sort of work that readers should expect going in. While some of the characters and situations are intriguing, the prominence of the bigger picture, enduringly referenced, relegates these events, and characters especially, to the paraphernalia of a nation-defining epoch. This is a novel for those who like their history at the front and centre of their historical fiction. Similarly, those fans of detective fiction prepared to sit patiently through historical detail to reach a conclusion that may resonate more for their efforts will also be content. The Meiji Guillotine Murders is undoubtedly a historical novel, but detailing as it does a period of near-unique rapid modernisation and cultural transformation, it is a historical novel on one of the most interesting periods of not only Japanese but world history.