Yokomizo Masashi (1902-1981) -- Flower of Trick and Darkness of Soil, Two Faces Reflecting the Postwar Era

Yokomizo Masashi (1902-1981) -- Flower of Trick and Darkness of Soil, Two Faces Reflecting the Postwar Era
Yokomizo Masashi's work is first known for his technique of "authentic detective stories" from the prewar to the postwar period. Locked rooms, alibis, switching places, and strange murder weapons. He took the rational spirit of European imports to its utmost limit in the Japanese style, leading the reader to the pleasures of logic. However, when the landscape reversed with the defeat in the war, his detective novels showed another face. Evacuation, air raids, repatriation, hunger, and the black market. In mountain villages a short distance from the rubble of the city, the ties of the family system and views of lineage that remained before modernization were intertwined with the distortions of the wartime regime and precipitated. Yokomizo descends there and illuminates the darkness of the soil with the light of his reasoning.

What is depicted in "The Honjin Murder Case," "The Village of Eight Tombs," and "The Devil's Ballad" is the pressure of a community that runs parallel to eccentric tricks. The appearance of a prominent family, the succession of a family head, and the envy and fear of kinship. The lessons of violence that the war has imprinted on people's minds erupt under the guise of "sane logic" in the village after demobilization. Kosuke Kindaichi is an observer and mediator standing at the site of these historical aftereffects. His Western-style frivolity and shaggy-headed demeanor are gestures of border crossing between urban modernity and rural antiquity, and when he calmly interrupts the community's narrative, he discloses a story of secret genealogy and sealed shame. The flamboyant monstrosity is a garment of appreciation, but inside it is planted an irony toward the prominent families and village authorities who "collaborated" during the war, and a critique of the curse of maintainin
g order through blood.

The historical background even changed Yokomizo's style. The neat logical movement of the prewar period became a refrain that persisted in the reader's memory, absorbing the oral tones of folk tales, folklore, and children's songs in his postwar works. The reasoning accompanied by the melody of folklore became more than mere entertainment; it was transformed into a device for visualizing what modern Japan had "pretended not to have seen. The mechanism by which the obsession with bloodlines leads to a desire to kill also illuminates the dark side of a society that draws on notions of eugenics and national identity. In other words, Yokomizo's trick was a surgical instrument for dissecting the social origin of motives.

On the other hand, the wave of TV movies and serial dramas brought Yokomizo's horror into the family's living room. Storehouses, masks, white powder, bamboo groves at night, ballads - the images amplified the symbols and turned the "imagination of fear" of the postwar Japanese into a common language. Their popularization also led to misinterpretation as an abuse of the bizarre, but at the same time, they preserved the memory of communal violence for a long time. With each rebroadcast or re-movie, we are somehow touched by an old wound of the times, simultaneously exhilarated by logic and tingled by ethics.

Yokomizo Seishi is a writer who, while loving the flower of logic, is rooted in the darkness of the soil. The lightness of Kosuke Kindaichi becomes a scale to weigh the village, and the clarity of his tricks becomes a light to illuminate the blind spots of the community. In the long twilight of the postwar period, he asks "Who is the culprit?" and at the same time, "What in this society made the crime possible? So the story leaves a small reverberation in the reader's mind even after he or she has arrived at the truth. The wind still rumbles in the scene where the horror should have ended--this is the faint line that connects Yokomizo's time and our own.