The Decagon House Murders: Yukito Ayatsuji (Pushkin Vertigo)

Product Information

It was serialized in Kodansha's seinen manga magazine Monthly Afternoon from August 2019 to April 2022, with its chapters collected in five tankōbon volumes. The book’s supposed self-awareness didn’t really add anything, if anything it made me all the more unconvinced by the characters’ ignorance and ineptitude. She is the one in her group — and there’s always one — who hits the puberty jackpot, developing myriad physical enchantments while her friends go to war with blackheads. Seven cocky students, all members of a university “mystery club”, decide to spend a week on an island where, six months earlier, owner Nakamura Seiji, his wife and their two servants were murdered.

In his Introduction Shimada Soji claims Ayatsuji's: "characters act almost like robots" and that they are: "devoid of any human emotion, only moving according to electrical signals: a setting reminiscent of the inside of a videogame", but that's not really accurate: Ayatsuji's characters lug around a lot of emotion, it's just that he doesn't do much with it (leaving it as a terrible distraction); automatons would have been more fun. Ho-Ling Wong’s English translation reads well, the narrative itself being moved along briskly by short paragraphs with lots of conversation among the characters. The Spiral is ambitious and well executed, with a zippy writing style, but may prove hard going for those with a low tolerance for fantasy. Occasional slips into overt translationese (“That night he saw a terrible dream” for instance) are rare, and may go unnoticed if you’re unfamiliar with Japanese. Halloween special about protagonists swapping bodies streams on YouTube ― Remember the fake Ple Ple Pleiades x Kage-jitsu!

Kodansha USA publishes the series digitally in North America from August 17, 2021, [8] to November 29, 2022.

The Decagon House Murders is an interesting read and it is exciting not to know who the murderer is, waiting for the final reveal (it is also great that the book provides diagrams/plans of the isolated island and the Decagon House). In fact, the book contains an absolutely fascinating introduction, giving a brief history of the Honkaku sub-genre and is well worth a read (I particularly liked the bit of info where they discuss that it’s looked less as a literary genre and more like a game between author and reader). It turns out that Chiori was another member of the Club but died, suddenly, the previous year after drinking a lot of whiskey at a party. They are many obvious similarities between the two to the point where The Decagon House Murders may even be considered a parody book. stars because I am the sort of mystery fan described above and the ending is clever enough to warrant a notation.

One doesn’t hear much in the US about Japanese fiction, much less a genre like Japanese detective fiction. One of the students meets an ill fate, and the remaining classmates must use their collective knowledge of sleuthing to uncover the facts of the case and ensure their own survival. But here the characters were bland, the girls left a lot to be desired (they are the type of characters that would have been okay-ish if they existed in a 1930s whodunnit) whil

He is the perfect embodiment of honkaku: a distinctly Japanese outlook combined with the steely intellect of the golden age detective. Although anime and manga fans are more likely to know him as the author behind the horror story Another, The Decagon House Murders is probably the literary work Yukito Ayatsuji is best known for. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thoughts on Papyrus with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.First, I want to say thank you for Sanny who introduced me with this novel, and more importantly introduced me with Honkaku mystery genre. I was reading the last pages at the morning and still sleepy, then the climax words successfully slapped me into fully awake. A knowing tribute to classic crime, it features all manner of puzzles, including locked rooms, jigsaws and magic tricks.

Inept kidnapper Diego’s release is secured by his pious hypocrite of a lawyer, but there’s a trade-off: Diego must help stop-at-nothing psychopath Ricardo rob an armoured money transporter. Ayatsuji signals his intentions with this novel from the get-go, from the nicknames of the club members to the name of their magazine. Another man -- their gardener -- went missing, and the assumption was that he killed them all and then escaped.Bad things happened on the island relatively recently, with its owner, architect Nakamura Seiji, murdered there, along with his wife and another couple who worked for them, and the main building on the island, the 'Blue Mansion', burned down (leaving only the 'Decagon House', which is where the visitors live while on the island). After learning that several other people have received a similar letter, he also begins to suspect that something sinister is happening. The disappearances are not what they seem, and to find out why, you’ll have to read more than this 275-word blurb can honorably divulge.