The Decagon House Murders: Yukito Ayatsuji (Pushkin Vertigo)

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Anyway, this book is stunning, you need to read it, i can promise you this is one of the best reading experience you'll get.

Pages later the friends then have a similar conversation with each other where one states the same facts concerning theirself-given names. No way of escaping, or communicating with the outside world, surrounded by your increasingly dead friends, with a maniac on the loose. The Decagon House Murders ( 十角館の殺人, Jūkakukan no satsujin) is a 1987 Japanese mystery novel, the debut work of author Yukito Ayatsuji. But from another perspective, the parallel between this novel and Agatha Christie’s seminal work And Then There Were None is also made plainly obvious.The reason for their presence there is a bit flimsy, as they are supposedly there to try to solve this cold case but do not have an actual plan in place to figure out how they will spend their week there.

By and large the dialogue between the characters is instrumental, to aid the reader in their personal unravelling of the plot.If you’re not all that familiar with Asian and Japanese literature, I think this is an ideal point to start. Also, there seems to be a lot lost in translation as the dialogue is very stilted and not all that realistic, which can leave the reader rolling their eyes and being pulled out of the story.

But at the end when the mystery is resolved, the characters are suddenly addressed by their original names. They’re staying in “Decagon House,” which is exactly that: a ten-sided structure that survived the earlier tragedy. Yes fine all of our characters are in a Detective Fiction club and have taken on the names of their favorite authors as their nicknames, but they seemed to run together too much. After all, I didn’t want to get so used to Christie’s style that I could pick out her storytelling tricks and solve her mysteries with my eyes closed. I don’t know if this is because of the clever conclusion or if there was something majorly lost in translation, but I don’t quite get why this would be one of the standouts.Six months before the students go to the island, the architect, his wife, and two servants are all murdered, and the Blue Mansion is burned down. Now, they are meant to be crime fiction experts, and yet do not really implement any actual knowledge of this genre.

Six months earlier the owner of the island was brutally murdered alongside his wife and housekeepers, and the case remains unsolved. Seven students, members of their university's mystery club, decide to spend a week-long vacation on Tsunojima Island off the coast of Japan. The body under the Decagon House is the gardener, whom Seiji likely killed and hid there, or the gardener tried to escape but Seiji killed him there. Besides that everyone acted unusually calm for their friends being murdered and when someone did die it kinda just….

stars because I am the sort of mystery fan described above and the ending is clever enough to warrant a notation. It felt as if the translator is not a native English speaker, or at least the translator never stepped out of literal translation, and the unusual nature of the language in the novel gave it a charged, unexpected feeling as I read.