The Honjin Murders

To say I have a hard time sticking with one thing would be like saying D-Day was a crowded visit to the beach. It’s technically true in some respects but fails to capture a certain je ne sais quoi related to both texture and scope. Getting a new therapist a few months ago who focuses on folks with ADHD has been a big help though, and while I think the modern world has over-corrected for our parents’ deep love of not addressing any of the elephants in the room by labeling anything that moves or breathes as both gray and massive, my experience is that accepting the diagnosis of ADHD has helped bring a lot of clarity to my day to day life. The underlying causes for it will no doubt be discovered to be more organic and strange, but the plastic umbrella term has certainly already helped to keep a great deal of rain out.

As an example, I’ve probably finished less than 10% of the books I’ve ever started because of a combination of boredom/distraction and forgetting the book even exists after a week or two. For a while I beat myself up about that, but once I stopped caring if I liked reading anymore or not I started to wander back to it in more meaningful ways. That’s something that’s generally true for me, I think. There are exceptions, like how much help I got from David Goggin’s book Can’t Hurt Me, but for the most part the less seriously I take something the more serious and disciplined I become about it over time. I just don’t get a lot out of rah-rah shit and short sprints.

Another thing that’s helped quite a bit is starting to read more of the sort of thing I actually like, rather than picking up stuff I want to like or wish I liked. That might seem obvious, but for me the amount of aspirational shopping I’ve done in my life probably rings up to enough for a house down payment and while I forgive myself and am grateful for the process, it’d be sick if I could get some of that coin back. And a minor breakthrough I’ve had lately is that I love crime novels a lot. Like a lot a lot. So rather than trying to care about Gravity’s Rainbow again for the 10th time, I decided to switch gears a couple weeks ago and just start buying and devouring as many well-reviewed Whodunnit Beach Reads as I can get my hands on. And shout out Thomas Pynchon, I’m really happy for you, but I wanted to let you all know this morning that Seishi Yokomizo has one of the best crime series of all time.

Seishi Yokomizo began writing historical detective novels in the mid-1930s, but didn’t find any sort of notoriety until 1946 as the post-WWII dust began to settle both in Japan and the West. He’s been referred to as the Japanese John Dickinson Carr, partially because of his eventual presence within the detective genre and partially because of his deep chops when it comes to locked room mysteries specifically. It isn’t easy to come up with puzzles that readers can’t immediately figure out, and in the midst of a modern monolith of true crime sleuthing whose revelations border on pornography, it’s refreshing to find someone who can put together grand reveals that feel like something much closer to high art.

If you’re looking for a good starting point with his work, your best bet is The Honjin Murders. It was a seminal moment for Yokomizo, earning him his first major award after 12 years of publishing, and served as the first of 77 books the detective character Kosuke Kindaichi would appear in. It’s since become one of the most famous Japanese crime novels of all time, and at 190 pages you can rip through it in an afternoon while you sip virgin daiquiris at the pool. If you want to get your little fingies on it you can snatch a copy over on Bookshop, and don’t blame me when your other habits run out of funding because Pushkin Press’s translations of Yokomizo gobble up all your grain.