Yoshitame, another early honkaku writer, was working in the 1920s. Writing under the nom de plume Kōga Saburō, he used details from his day job as an engineer to create highly technical plots with a strong scientific slant. (His 1930 story The Spider is an excellent example, and has recently been republished as part of the British Library’s Foreign Bodies anthology.) I recommend this novel for whodunit stories fans. If you don't know Honkaku genre, I recommend to search a bit about it, as what I have been doing for several days. A group of students who love crime literature, convene on an desolate island with a dark past - supposedly a gardener murdered the family who he worked for, to then completely disappear. His celebration of traditional whodunits plays with the mystery genre in a wonderfully self-referential way... With each new murder, the remaining members of the group must use their knowledge of the genre to find the killer and try to stay alive." — Esquire , The 50 Best Mysteries of All Time

Youmay recognise the plot. It’sbased on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, although Ayatsuji’s versionfollows the rules of detective fiction even more closely than the queen of the Golden Age herself. The writing, and the careful translation, mean you’ll be ableto guess who the murderer is at the same time as the detective, although don’t be disheartened if you get it wrong. The translator handles the original’s intelligent wordplay well, without resorting to excessive footnotes or explanations. EditSynopsis Seven students, members of their university's mystery club, decide to spend a week-long vacation on Tsunojima Island off the coast of Japan. Six months earlier, the owner of the island was brutally murdered alongside his wife and housekeepers, and the case remains unsolved. Soon after their arrival they begin to suspect that one of their number is intending to kill them one at a time, but who?

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If you’re not all that familiar with Asian and Japanese literature, I think this is an ideal point to start. Here are the North American anime, manga, and light novel releases for October. Week 1: October 5 - 11 Anime Releases C³ [incl. Rinkan Gakkou Confusion!] (C&sup... read more Note: this book was first published in Japan under the title of 'The Island of Lamentation' and it won the author an award when he was still a student. Decades later it has been published as 'The Decagon House Murders' in English. This manga started off with a lot of promise, but the idea is not at all original, from the island murders, the house with secret passageways to the mystery club and the members being aptly named after famous writers. Nothing about it is remotely unique, but the art is very good and the overall mystery is decently fleshed out until it isn't.

The Decagon House Murders will appeal to all those classic crime lovers out there. I certainly am left with the desire to read more Honkaku stories. The book actually has two storylines, one that takes place on the remote island while another takes place on the main land that eventually blends to disclose a big reveal. Artistically, Kiyohara does a great job. Every detail of the decagon house is well-drawn, and he does a good job of making the bizarre layout make sense. The rest of the scenery is also very nice, from the lovely nature imagery on the island to the thoroughly detailed and lived in locales on the mainland. The characters are also quite expressive and easily distinguishable from one another; there’s an actual variety in body types and facial structures even before more individual personality quirks come into play. I had absolutely LOVED the premise of the manga, the artstyle and even the characters. Albeit this volume only showed the start of the murder and the questions behind the mystery letters, it has invoked some curiosity, on how will everything unfold at the end.years ago, Nakamuro Seji built a Blue Mansion and a decagonal Annex on an uninhabited Japanese island. 6 months prior to this book, the mansion burned down and took the livers of the owner, his wife, and their 2 servants. Strange detail was that all the dead had been administered a sedative and were murdered prior to the blaze.

He had been suffering for months. He had been brooding for weeks. He had been thinking about just one thing for days. And now his mind was focusing on one single, clearly defined goal. And no simple deaths. Blowing them all up in one go would be infinitely easier and more certain, but he should not choose that route. Since the sender is given as 'Nakamura Seiji' he has to wonder whether the mass-murder on the island several months earlier unfolded differently than the police believe -- and whether Nakamura Seiji might, in fact, still be alive. Seven members of a university mystery-fan club travel to a desolate island for a week to read, write, and explore the remains of a burned-down mansion where multiple murders were committed not long before. They’re staying in “Decagon House,” which is exactly that: a ten-sided structure that survived the earlier tragedy. But during their first night there, one of the group is killed, and the body left with a grisly reminder of what happened to the island’s ill-fated inhabitants. It will not be the last death during their stay.

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On the other hand we see how 2 former members of the Mystery Novel Research As Absorb the history of sumptuary law from a STANFORD PROFESSOR whose book contains a section titled Decorative Orthodontic Devices (a.k.a. Grillz)?