Seishi Yokomizo is one of the most famous and prolific Japanese mystery novelists, and The Village of Eight Graves is one of his most famous works, with countless adaptations in various forms of media. It's filled with death, as one might hope for a murder mystery, yet it feels like it might be trying to make up for quality with quantity. I found the book... underwhelming. It wasn't bad, but it felt more like a spooky suspense story than an orthodox detective plot, and a lot of the more distinctive plot elements have been better utilized in other works (although I acknowledge that The Village of Eight Graves might have been the book to pioneer those plot elements).
Depending on how you look at it, The Village of Eight Graves has a few different starting points. The earliest beginning is in 1566, when eight vassals of a defeated clan flee to a reclusive village with a hoard of gold. While the villagers initially allow the soldiers to take refuge, they begin to worry about reproach from the local lord, and decide that they would in fact like the gold the vassals brought. The villagers massacre the warriors, but can't find the gold and grow fearful of being cursed by the soldiers' spirits. In order to appease the vassals, their spirits become a local god, and the village becomes known as the Village of Eight Graves.
Fast forward to the 1920s. The Village of Eight Graves is mostly controlled by two families, the Tajimi family and the Nomura family. Yozo, the head of the Tajimi family, takes a liking to a local village girl, Tsuruko, and turns her into his sex slave. As you might guess from the fact that he turns a local village girl into his sex slave, Yozo is not a nice man. Tsuruko eventually has a son, Tatsuya, which does nothing to temper Yozo's depravity. Realizing that things will never improve, Tsuruko leaves the Village of Eight Graves with her son.
Tsuruko had already tried to leave Yozo several times before this, but she had returned each attempt. Or rather, she was returned each time. While the villagers didn't like what Yozo was doing to Tsuruko, they preferred Yozo paying attention to her and not them. As a result Yozo figures Tsuruko will come back this time too. But when he realizes that she isn't going to... things get ugly. Yozo descends into a fit of psychotic rage, arming himself with a katana and hunting rifle and massacring 32 villagers before disappearing into the woods. (A tragedy based upon a real event.)
The real story begins 26 years later. Tatsuya is all alone in the world; Tsuruko passed away while Tatsuya was young and, while Tsuruko married and Tatsuya had a loving stepfather, he has passed too. Tatsuya knows nothing of his birth family, since Tsuruko understandably never told him about Yozo and his rampage. Until one day, that is, when a radio ad looking for Tatsuya is broadcast. It turns out Yozo's eldest son Hisaya is dying of tuberculosis, so the Tajimis are trying to find Yozo's other son—Tatsuya—to act as heir in order to prevent the family fortune from being inherited by the branch family. Thus begins another series of gruesome murders....
Yeah, The Village of Eight Graves has a lot of death in it. Even if you ignore the backstories there are a lot of murders—but that ends up working against the book to a certain extent, since when you have so many crimes it becomes difficult to give each one the attention it deserves. The book wastes no time dropping bodies, but typically someone will die, everyone will act shocked, look into it, discover that anybody could have done it, and move on. This is exactly how you end up with "a" solution that feels arbitrary. While there is one murder that involves a neat deduction, it feels a bit strange for the story to include so many murders when only one matters in terms of actually solving the case. The motive was a bit interesting, but also felt a insignificant compared to the scope of the murder plot.
One of the places I was really hoping The Village of Eight Graves would deliver, and one of the places I was a bit disappointed (these two points may be connected), was the atmosphere. The story is told from Tatsuya's point of view as his own record of the events that transpired, and over the course of the book he tells us over and over again how frightening and horrific the Village of Eight Graves is, but... we don't really see it. Part of it is the fact that Tatsuya spends much of the story holed up in the Tajimi house, so we don't get to go out and experience the village. Another part is that there just... isn't that much to the village lore. There's the local god derived from the spirits of the slain warriors, and that's about it. Towns like Hinamizawa from Higurashi When They Cry and Yasumizu from Raging Loop have local belief systems that are both more fleshed out and tied more strongly to their respective mystery plots. Perhaps The Village of Eight Graves was innovative in its setting when it came out, but nowadays there are works that do the "creepy rural Japanese village with weird local customs" thing a lot better.
Even though the sense of place was a bit lacking, I really appreciated the book's sense of time. For me, the time period of a mystery typically does little beyond determining the available level of forensic technology. But The Village of Eight Graves truly felt like a product of its time. The main story takes place shortly after the end of World War II; the war has impacted several of the characters' lives, and some residents of the village are evacuees from the cities, creating a more distinct insider/outsider dynamic than if it had just been Tatsuya versus the rest of the village.
Speaking of Tatsuya against the village—while he generally isn't well-liked (considering what Yozo did to the village two decades prior), he does have a few people on his side. Yet whenever he thinks about one of them, he goes into histrionics about how that person is his only ally in the village. It's a minor quibble, but it feels bizarre for Tatsuya to wax poetic about someone being the only person he can rely on, when 20 pages prior he was saying the exact same thing about a completely different person. Tatsuya, it's true you don't have too many friends in the village, but c'mon man, you have more than one.
I was also a bit disappointed by Kosuke Kindaichi's role in the book—or rather, his lack thereof. I love the Kindaichi Case Files, so I was eager to see its inspiration and Hajime's grandfather in action. Unfortunately, I didn't. Kosuke just happens to be hanging out in the Village of Eight Graves at the same time as Tatsuya and they sometimes run into each other. Kosuke doesn't even "solve" the case.
So maybe it'd be better to look at The Village of Eight Graves as a horror-adjacent suspense story rather than detective fiction. The atmosphere and creepiness play a much bigger role in the work than deductions and the detective, and maybe that's the point? It's not bad and probably worth reading at some point because of how famous it is, but if you want an orthodox detective novel I suspect it might be better to try one of the other Kosuke Kindaichi books.
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