Of course it’s a big claim but there may not be a more beautiful, ethereal city on earth than Kyoto. Greater Kyoto contains one and a half million people but the city’s centre is the cultural heartland of Japan. It is a city (alternatively known as the Imperial City sometimes) of ancient culture, religion and architecture – those picturesque streets of wooden houses that make Kyoto so instagramable! The capital was moved from Kyoto to Tokyo after the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and so the city avoided the worst of the firebombing in World War Two that levelled the current capital. It is a city where you can still capture a Japan before it began to interact with the West and perhaps it is that element of Kyoto that inspires so many historical mysteries (and the mega-successful Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, back in 1997) to be set within its confines.
Additionally Kyoto can claim to be the home of Japanese crime writing, and arguably globally crime writing. Honcho Oin Hiji (Parallel Cases From Under the Cherry Tree) contains accounts of several dozen historical court cases heard by the shoshidai, the shogun’s regional deputy in Kyoto. It was originally published in 1689 by the Osaka writer Ihara Saikaku (1642-93). An English translation was published by The University of Haiwaii Press in 1980 as Tales of Japanese Justice.
And Kyoto is perhaps where the current trend for Golden Age style crime is being resurrected in Japan. Kyoto has become a spiritual home for many traditional style murder mysteries reminiscent of the Golden Age – known in Japan as honkaku (literally “orthodox”). The writer most attributed with the new fad for honkaku is Yukito Ayatsuji, author of several locked room mysteries featuring detective Kiyoshi Shimada (The Decagon House Murders and The Mill House Murders). Yukito Ayatsuji started writing as a member of the Kyoto University Mystery Club, a society dedicated to the writing of fair play mysteries inspired by the Golden Age greats. So Kyoto is essentially Ground Zero for crime writing in Japan.
Susan Spann’s Claws of the Cat (2013) takes us back to 1564 and introduces Master ninja Hiro Hattori, and Father Mateo, a Portuguese Jesuit priest under Hiro’s protection. A samurai has been stabbed to death in a Kyoto teahouse and the hostess accused of the murder appeals to Hiro for help. The investigation takes Hiro Hattori, and Father Mateo deep into Kyoto’s “floating world” of pleasure-seeking. Rare weapons and illicit love affairs complicate the tale. The book was successful enough to have since spawned another seven Hiro Hattori and Father Mateo mysteries. In Death of a Samurai (2014), a man is stabbed to death in the shogun’s palace. The investigation reveals a plot to assassinate the shogun and overthrow the ruling Ashikaga clan. With Lord Oda’s enemy forces approaching Kyoto. Subsequent books take our investigators into a Kyoto brewery, the exclusive world of Kyoto’s theatre guild, the nearby mountains of Iga province, the sacred peak of Mount Koya and a murderous rural mountain village. By book eight in the series, Fires of Edo (2022) it is now 1566 and a samurai’s corpse is discovered in the ruins of a burned-out bookshop. An arsonist on the loose in a city built of wood is never a good idea!!
More up to date, Rebecca Copeland’s The Kimono Tattoo (2021) sees American translator, Ruth Bennett return to her childhood home in Kyoto after losing her job and her husband. She soon finds the storyline of the mystery novel she’s translating leaking into her everyday life. Fictional characters turn out to be real, and the past catches up with the present in a menacing way. Using her skills as a translator and her intimate knowledge of both kimono and Kyoto.
Amy Tasukada’s The Yakuza Path series is largely set in Kyoto. It starts with Blood Stained Tea (2016) and Nao Murata is hiding from his violent past in the Japanese Yakuza by opening a teahouse in Japan’s cultural center, Kyoto. His past comes flooding back when he discovers a gravely injured man with a tattooed chest, a bloody knife, and a Korean business card. Nao’s supposed retirement in Kyoto is about to turn into a bloody war with the encroaching Korean mafia. In Better Than Suicide (2017) Nao has become the new Godfather of the Matsukawa syndicate. When Detective Yamada confronts Nao over a dead drug dealer, the Nao knows his organization isn’t responsible. The Matsukawa doesn’t deal drugs… or does it? The series continues by spiralling out into the lives of other Kyoto Yakuza – in One Thousand Cranes (2017) Aki Hisona, Nao’s personal secretary, is tasked with disposing of his friend’s corpse. In The Deafening Silence (2018) Nao is on the verge of brokering peace between his syndicate and the rival Mafufgumi mob and supplying them with Russian prostitutes. It does not go well and Kyoto descends into a brutal turf war. In Flowers of Flesh and Blood (2020) Nao must deal with a traitor in his ranks while defending himself against the ever-encroaching Korean mafia. Finally (so far) in Wrapped in Screams (2021) it seems the Korean syndicate is finally vanquished, and Nao can relax. Of course, it doesn’t work out like that.
A few more Kyoto-set novels:
- Kaylin McFarren’s Twisted Threads (2017) is another Yakuza thriller. Akira Hamada, a Japanese geisha, failed at killing Kaito Mitsui in Kyoto, yakuza gang leader who murdered her lover. Now she has another chance, but there are consequences and conditions.
- Mai Mochizuki’s Homles of Kyoto is a fun YA series for younger readers who also like manga. There are five books in the series all called Holmes of Kyoto and staring in 2020. After moving to Kyoto, high school girl Aoi Mashiro brings her late grandfather’s old scrolls to Kura, an antique store nestled in Kyoto’s Teramachi-Sanjo shopping arcade, for an appraisal. One thing leads to another, and she winds up working there part-time. The manager’s son, Kiyotaka Yagashira—nicknamed the “Holmes of Kyoto”—is uncannily perceptive, and together, they solve strange cases relating to the antiques brought to them by clients.
- Didier Decoin’s The Office of Gardens and Ponds (2019) is a gentle tale that starts with a tragedy. The village of Shimae is thrown into turmoil when master carp-catcher Katsuro suddenly drowns in the murky waters of the Kusagawa river. Who now will carry the precious cargo of carp to the Imperial Palace and preserve the crucial patronage that everyone in the village depends upon? Miyuki, Katsuro’s grief-struck widow, must journey to Kyoto to resolve matters.
And finally, as ever something a bit different a bit special. This time a Japanese classic, Yasunari Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness (1961). In a similar style to the other great classic Rashomon, the novel is narrated from the present and past perspective of the characters and how they differed from each other’s point of view. Oki, a successful middle-aged writer, is full of regrets. He returns to Kyoto to find Otoko, a young woman, Otoko, who he seduced when she was just fifteen. Otoko is now a painter, living with a younger woman, Keiko, as her lover though has continued to love Oki and has never forgotten him. the unfolding relationships between Oki, Otoko, and Keiko form the rest of the novel revealing issues of duplicity, infidelity, abandonment etc. Though from Osaka Kawabata wrote often of Kyoto, lovingly describing its streets and temples.
Whether going back to the court cases of the 1600s, the rebirth of Golden Age style writing and honkaku of contemporary Yakuza thrillers, it seems Kyoto remains central to Japanese crime writing today.
