It would be a shame if Kindaichi were to solve the case before the killer could complete the set, right? The “axe” murder happens early on, and the reader is given the pleasure of anticipating what the “koto” and “chrysanthemum” murders will look like. The Inugami family motto is “yoki koto kiku,” an expression that means “tidings of good fortune” but is also synonymous with the words “axe, koto, chrysanthemum” ( 斧・琴・菊 ), which is as good a set-up as any for a series of themed murders. The detective’s “razor-sharp deduction skills” are no match for a long-held grudge, and the novel has plenty of time for an additional assortment of gruesome deaths. Someone is obviously out for blood, and it’s up to Kindaichi to figure out what’s going on before anyone else is killed. Even though Tamayo is saved, Kindaichi returns to the hotel to find Wakabayashi dead from ingesting a poison that had been applied to the filter of one of his cigarettes. This woman is Nonomiya Tamayo, who stands to inherit the entire Inugami fortune. Before the lawyer arrives in Kindaich’s hotel room, however, the detective witnesses a beautiful woman going down with a sinking boat on the lake beside the hotel. (“Physically, he is a stammering, inconsequential fellow with nothing to recommend him, but his remarkable faculty for reasoning and deduction has been attested to,” the narrator says.) Because of the detective’s fame, he has been summoned to the Nasu Lake region ( in Tochigi prefecture) by Wakabayashi Toyoichirō, a lawyer associated with the estate of the recently deceased Inugami Sahei, a local silk magnate. The primary point-of-view character of the novel is Detective Kindaichi Kōsuke, an eccentric private investigator of strange appearance and stranger personal habits. In other words, The Inugami Clan is both ridiculous and ridiculously entertaining. The pulp dial on this book goes up to eleven. Even the paper Stone Bridge Press used for its publication of this translation has a deliciously pulpy smell.

Someone gets murdered every five chapters. The sexuality on display isn’t overt, but it’s always kinky. The men regularly walk around with assault weapons. The beautiful young female victim is always fainting. The murders are fantastically improbable.

The chapters are only a few pages long and always end with cliffhangers.

Reading The Inugami Clan reminded me of sitting in my local public library as a kid in the early nineties and reading crime novels with yellowed pages and crappy covers that were always on the verge of falling off.

Publication Year: 2003 (America) 1951 (Japan) Japanese Title: 犬神家の一族 ( Inugamike no ichizoku)

The inugami clan