The Coincidental Murders
By Sakaguchi Ango
Translated by Alexis J Brown
Zakura Books (2024)
ISBN-13: 978-8333284129
Review by Laurence Green
It’s the summer of 1947 and a group of bohemians gather at a friend's mountain retreat to escape the city heat. Then things get messy. Tempers flare, motives proliferate, and the bodies begin to stack up. An unassuming amateur detective is tasked with identifying the killer among an eccentric cast of characters that includes blackmailers, poets and sexual perverts. But are the murders related, or is everything pure coincidence?
Sakaguchi Ango’s whodunnit mystery won the Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 1949, the year after Yokomizo Seishi took the prize for The Honjin Murders - and it is very much in the same vein of old-school crime hijinks that this book occupies. Aiming at an audience for classic Japanese mystery fiction that seems to grow and grow with every new release, The Coincidental Murders feels tailor made for a very specific niche of readers who will no doubt lap up its heady mix of quirky characters and mind-boggling intrigue.
Like so many classic examples of Japanese murder mysteries, The Coincidental Murders really doesn’t let you off the hook easily - as the reader, you’re forced to work overtime if you’re to remember both all the key players, and the varying plot machinations that unfurl between them. For many, the joy comes in the difficulties of piecing these elements together - but be warned, it’s not an easy ride. The character dynamics are deeply intertwined, and the literary style in this instance verges on the archaic to say the least. At times, this is the novel’s chief joy - in its best moments it resembles the kind of erotic-grotesque creepiness of Tanizaki Jun’ichiro at his most verbose, but at others, it can feel positively Victorian in its musty, plodding delivery of dialogue.
Desire ultimately lies at the heart of the novel’s motivations, and it is this that lends the novel its most memorable flavour. Some will take issue at the way female characters are described and utilised as quasi sexual-puppets by the inclinations of their male counterparts, but ultimately this all adds to the sense of deep unease and scene-setting that builds into a characterisation of time and place as involving as the plot itself. While many of Ango’s crime counterparts excelled in creating a portrait of a Japan at a time of change, on the cusp of modernity, The Coincidental Murders feels like it looks backward - not only to literary heroes like Tanizaki, but to pulp novelists like Edogawa Ranpo, or to give a western counterpart, Edgar Allen Poe.
There’s a wonderful sense of self-awareness to proceedings at times too - the book name checks not only to the likes of Agatha Christie, but also Ango himself. With its tightly confined dialogues, there’s a staginess at times too, a theatriality that can feel unreal - characters go by odd nicknames; for example a detective named for his hunchback. The claustrophobia builds piece by piece through these devices, a thickly cloying sense of unease building as one by one, characters are killed off.
Not all will find favour with the book’s style - compared to the clinical, easy-reading liveliness of some of Ango’s contemporaries like the aforementioned Yokomizo, the pedestrian pacing of The Coincidental Murders will feel like an insurmountable hurdle. This is a murder mystery for sure, but a high-octane, page-turning thriller it is not. But for the reader prepared to take their time with it, to bathe deeply in the distinctly odd world it constructs, there’s an undoubtable charm that will find its way under your skin, whether you want it to or not.