It's been so much fun, as a lifelong fan of whodunits and detective novels (and someone who doesn't know Japanese) to have these translations of Seishi Yokomizo's classics available! I've loved getting to see the classic puzzle mystery (and boy are they puzzles) in this midcentury Japanese setting, though sometimes the writing feels detached and quite stilted in a way that might be a translation issue, or might be reflective of the original text. (I would usually lean toward the former, but there are some specific aspects of the story that would have been especially tricky to translate and which seem quite natural in English, so kudos to the translator for that!)

As for the plot, I always feel that the mark of a great mystery is when the reader figures out some elements of the solution but not everything, and that everything they haven't worked out for themselves makes them feel like "Ah, of course, I should have gotten that!" Death on Gokumon Island gets some of this - I worked out a bit but certainly not all (more the who, much less of the how), though the answers ultimately given didn't all feel like things I reasonably could have worked out as a reader. Still, the less than plausible complexity is in keeping with the genre, and does hold together in the end. (It's definitely a fair play solution, with no sly narrative tricks up the author's sleeve.)

It's a surprisingly slow-feeling pace for a story that's both fairly short and has more than its share of bodies piling up, but by the end, the atmosphere, situations, and solutions were eerie, chilling, and definitely intriguing. Fans of Agatha Christie and other Golden Age mystery novels should certainly check out Yokomizo's work, and be grateful for the new English editions being put out by Pushkin Vertigo!

Thank you to the publisher for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.