The Honjin Murders

The novel is narrated by a detective fiction writer evacuated to a rural village in Okayama Prefecture during the Second World War. The villagers tell him about an infamous crime at the estate of the Ichiyanagi family. Drawing on notes from a local doctor and his own conversations, the narrator reconstructs the events of November 1937.

The Ichiyanagi family descends from operators of a honjin, an inn where feudal lords once stayed. After the feudal system collapsed in the late 1860s, the family relocated to the village of O— and became powerful landowners. The household is governed by Itoko, the fifty-seven-year-old matriarch, proud of the family's elite lineage. Her eldest son, Kenzo, is a forty-year-old reclusive philosophy scholar. Other members include the youngest son, Saburo, twenty-five, widely despised for his sly nature; the youngest daughter, Suzuko, seventeen, who has an intellectual disability but is a prodigy at playing the koto, a traditional Japanese stringed instrument; and Ryosuke, a thirty-eight-year-old cousin who manages the family's finances. The second son, Ryuji, is a doctor in Osaka.

The family unites in opposing Kenzo's engagement to Katsuko Kubo, a schoolteacher whose father was a former tenant farmer. Despite Katsuko's education and personal fortune, they consider her lineage beneath theirs. Kenzo meets their resistance with silence until they relent.

Two days before the wedding, a suspicious figure appears at a nearby tavern: an emaciated man whose mask reveals a stitched scar on his right cheek and a right hand with only three fingers. He asks directions to the Ichiyanagi residence and departs. The narrator notes these are exactly the fingers needed to play the koto.

On the evening of 25th November, the three-fingered man appears at the kitchen door and delivers a folded note, then flees. Reading it, Kenzo displays fury, tears it to shreds, and stuffs the pieces into his kimono sleeve. The subdued ceremony proceeds with few guests. Suzuko performs on the family's gold-lacquered Lovebird koto, and the couple retires to the annexe around two in the morning amid heavy snowfall. Great-Uncle Ihei, who has gotten extremely drunk, is escorted home by Saburo, who stays the night.

Around 4:15 a.m., screams erupt from the annexe, followed by the wild strumming of a koto and then silence. Ginzo Kubo, the bride's uncle, rallies the household. After breaking through the bolted gate, Ginzo notices the snow in the annexe garden is untouched. All entrances are locked from inside. Near a stone lantern, a katana stands blade-first in the snow with no tracks leading to it. When a servant breaks through a rain shutter, they find Kenzo and Katsuko slashed and soaked in blood. The koto rests beside Katsuko, its strings streaked with blood and one snapped. On a fallen folding screen is a bloody three-fingered handprint bearing scratch marks from koto picks.

Detective Inspector Isokawa leads the investigation. Muddy footprints near the cliff behind the annexe indicate someone entered between seven and nine in the evening. A storage closet shows where someone lay hidden alongside the katana's scabbard. The police reconstruct the attack: The killer slashed Katsuko first, then ran Kenzo through the heart. Yet the building remains sealed. The reconstructed note references an "island agreement" and is signed by someone Kenzo called his "Mortal Enemy." A photograph in Kenzo's study labeled "My Mortal Enemy" resembles the three-fingered man. Pages from Kenzo's diaries have been torn out and burned. Kenzo held a life insurance policy naming Saburo as sole beneficiary, and Saburo has the strongest alibi, having been at Ihei's house.

On 27th November, Kosuke Kindaichi arrives. A shabby, stammering young private detective, Kosuke possesses extraordinary deductive abilities. He once solved a murder in San Francisco's Japanese community, where he met Ginzo, who later funded his detective agency. Ginzo reveals he saw Kenzo's brother Ryuji on a train the day before the murders, contradicting Ryuji's claim of arriving afterward. He also recounts that Suzuko, apparently sleepwalking, encountered a three-fingered figure near the grave of her recently deceased pet kitten, Tama. At the crime scene, Kosuke notices a mismatched koto bridge and a hollowed-out bamboo support among the garden props. He engages Saburo in conversation about locked room mysteries, noting Saburo's encyclopedic knowledge.

On 28th November, Saburo is found collapsed in the annexe with a deep gash in his back. The folding screen bears fresh bloody three-fingered handprints. Meanwhile, Shizuko Shiraki, Katsuko's close friend, reveals that Katsuko confessed to Kenzo before the wedding that she was not a virgin, having had a lover named Shozo Taya. When shown the "Mortal Enemy" photograph, however, Shizuko states it is not Taya.

Kosuke discovers that the route to H— village passes through O— village, using the Ichiyanagi residence as a landmark. The three-fingered man was not seeking the family; he was following directions. At the residence, Kosuke finds a koto bridge hidden in Itoko's kimono and learns Suzuko never buried Tama as claimed, hiding the coffin in her room. Realizing the grave has been disturbed since the initial police search, Kosuke digs up the coffin and finds a severed right hand with three fingers concealed inside. At a charcoal kiln on the cliff, police unearth the three-fingered man's body, his right hand severed at the wrist.

Kosuke demonstrates the mechanical trick behind the locked room. A loop of koto string runs from the sword's hilt, through the transom above the shutters, and outside, where it passes through a koto bridge on the lavatory roof, over the stone lantern, across the sickle blade in the camphor tree, through the hollowed bamboo, and connects to the waterwheel's axle. When the waterwheel turns, the string reels in until the sickle severs it, releasing the sword to plunge into the ground where it was found.

Kosuke announces the truth: Kenzo killed Katsuko and then killed himself. His diaries reveal an obsessively fastidious man who considered all others impure. Katsuko's confession devastated him, but he could not break off the engagement without surrendering to the relatives who opposed the match, which his pride would not permit. Taya's reappearance raised the threat of extortion. Kenzo resolved to murder Katsuko and kill himself while ensuring no one would know it was suicide, since discovery would mean the ultimate humiliation. Kosuke calls this "the tragedy of the honjin," a crime born of the family's obsession with lineage and honor.

The three-fingered man was Kyokichi Shimizu, a taxi driver who lost fingers in a car accident and died of natural causes in the bamboo thicket behind the annexe. Kenzo found the body and used it to rehearse his device. Saburo stumbled upon the rehearsal and, realizing a suicide ruling would void the insurance payout, agreed to help disguise the death as murder. Saburo swapped the album photograph with Shimizu's taxi-license photo, fabricated the island vendetta from rearranged diary fragments, and conceived the plan to sever the hand as a fingerprint stamp. Kenzo disguised himself as the three-fingered man to deliver the note, faked footprints in the genkan, or earthen entryway, using the dead man's shoes, and planted bloody handprints hours before the crime. The locked room was accidental: Kenzo had planted fake escape footprints, but the unexpected snowfall buried them, forcing him to leave the shutters locked.

Saburo later confesses, corroborating Kosuke's reconstruction. He admits to staging the third incident and retrieving the hand, but insists he never knew Kenzo planned to murder Katsuko. Saburo is charged but called up for military service and dies in battle in China. Suzuko dies the following year. Ryosuke travels to Hiroshima and is killed by the atomic bomb; his father had also died there by seppuku, or ritual suicide. Ryuji refuses to return, having had enough of the honjin legacy. Visiting the property one last time, the narrator finds deep red spider lilies at Tama's grave and imagines them soaked in the blood of Suzuko.