What’s a Few TATTOO MURDERS Among Friends?
Where to start with Akimitsu Takagi’s The Tattoo Murder? It’s hard for me not to think of Seishi Yokomizo’s The Inugami Curse. Tattoo Murder was published in 1948, and Inugami Curse came two years later. Both novels take advantage of the post-war time period in Japan when soldiers were returning (or not) from their posts overseas. And both Takagi and Yokomizo are credited for popularizing honkaku mysteries in Japan with their respective series of detective novels.
(Honkaku mysteries often feature locked rooms or impossible crimes and follow Western “fair play” mysteries in setting out a puzzle for readers to solve.)
However, both of Yokomizo’s Kosuke Kindaichi novels which I’ve read so far have taken place on country estates and present a very different picture of post-war Japan than The Tattoo Murder, where the action is spread around Tokyo. From small, hidden bars to traditional homes tiled with tatami mats to the Specimen Room at Tokyo University, the characters travel Tokyo by subway (or occasionally by car), hiding their crimes in construction sites and warehouses.
But of all the period details present, The Tattoo Murder engages most fully with the hidden world of Japanese tattoos. This English translation by Deborah Boehm provides plenty of cultural context, and it's hard to know if any of this this was added in translation. These background details are fascinating as well as vital to the plot. Even so, the beginning of the novel dragged under the weight of introducing not just the characters but also an entire subculture. (Takagi did so much research into tattoos in 1948 that a book of his photographs was published in 2022 under the title The Tattoo Writer).
Cover of The Tattoo Writer (2022), Kintaro Publishing
Source: https://kintaro-publishing.com/products/the-tattoo-writer
The explorations of tattooed Tokyo begin when protagonist Kenzo Matsushita attends a competition held by the Edo Tattoo Society. Kenzo’s interest in tattoos is purely academic, since he is training to be a doctor, but he quickly starts to lust after Kinue Nomura, whose full body Orochimaru tattoo makes her uniquely identifiable as well as a target for murder. Following an affair between the two, Kinue confides in Kenzo, and when she is found dead shortly afterwards, he is driven to investigate her death.
The novel unfolds in roughly three parts. The beginning exposition expounds on tattoos and portrays Kenzo’s affair with Ninue. Eighty pages in, the first murder takes place, and we follow Kenzo and the police’s investigations as well as additional fallout from the murder. Finally in the last third of the novel, boy genius Kyosuke Kamizu appears and solves the case. (Kamizu returns for in more of Takagi’s novels).
Tattoos play an important role in the murders that unfold, which provides payoff for all that earlier exposition. The permanency of tattoos provides important hints towards the identity of the victims, while the gruesome removal of tattoos from two crime scenes suggests an unusual motive. Professor Hayakawa, nicknamed Dr. Tattoo, is openly obsessed with collecting tattoos (posthumously, from their wearers), but you never know who else might be interested.
I enjoyed following the initial detectiving carried out by Kenzo and his brother Daiyu, a police detective working the case. The middle of the novel largely follows Kenzo but occasionally includes other characters’ perspectives, and several months pass as the investigation stalls and additional incidents occur. The chapters in this book are short (many are 5-10 pages), and it was hard to escape from reading “just one more” chapter once I got drawn into the mystery.
Our detective enters the novel by coincidence – running into his old friend Kenzo by chance at medical school – and it’s notable how late in the novel Kyosuke Kamizu appears. It’s delightful to see Kenzo and Kamizu reinterview the suspects (posing as police in one instance). I didn’t mind that some of Kamizu’s deductions came from iffy psychological observations, and I loved Kamizu’s approach to confirming the culprit’s guilt.
The locked room murder at the heart of the novel has a solid – but not mind-blowing – solution. However, Kamizu reveals the how-dunnit of the crime fairly early on while much of the mystery is yet to be solved. I’ve seen this in other locked room murder mysteries: the detective demonstrates how the murder happened to demystify the impossible crime and open up the investigation. In this case, I felt like knowing how the murder was done deflated some of the novel’s mystique a bit early, even if every element of the crime was not revealed.
At 352 pages, The Tattoo Murder is longer than many of the translated Japanese mysteries in the Pushkin Vertigo line, but it’s worth every page. Along with The Inugami Curse, this book is a great choice for anyone looking to explore classic Japanese detective fiction. I can’t recommend approaching women and asking them to leave you their tattooed skin when they die, but I can recommend The Tattoo Murder by Akimitsu Takagi.
The Tattoo Murder by Akimitsu Takagi, published originally in 1948, translated by Deborah Boehm and released by Soho Crime as The Tattoo Murder Case in 2003, published as The Tattoo Murder in 2022 by Pushkin Vertigo.
My Rating:
8 out of 10 stolen tattoos
- Beginning is interesting but slow
- Locked room is solved unceremoniously
+ Kyosuke Kamizu is an entertaining detective
+ Satisfying solution to the mystery
+ Great use of setting in post-war Tokyo