I’m very, very pleased to be finally releasing this translation of an esoteric murder mystery by Oguri Mushitarō. I’ve been working on this one on and off for six months. Even figuring out a proper title for it was difficult. The print edition will be even harder to produce, due to the need to recreate all of the drawings that were not included in the ebook, as they are not necessary due to their detailed descriptions in the text. Of all the translations I’ve done to date, this is still the one that was of the most interest to me from the start.
THE BOOK OF THE BLACK DEATH
Half a century before Umberto Eco sealed monks inside an abbey with a serial killer and a poisoned Aristotle, Oguri Mushitarō locked a detective inside a Gothic castle with a grimoire, a glowing corpse, and a prophecy of six murders written in the hand of a dead man. Serialized in 1934, The Book of the Black Death is the novel Eco might have written had he been born in Tokyo and raised on Charcot, Cagliostro, and the Kabbalistic Exegesis rather than Aquinas and Borges. Its detective, Norizumi Rintarō, is William of Baskerville’s mad Japanese twin, a polymath who deploys heraldry, toxicology, and medieval sorcery with equal fluency, and whose erudition is both the instrument of his investigation and the source of its deepest dangers. Recognized in Japan as one of the four greatest mystery novels ever written in the language, it has never before appeared in English.
In the Celtic Renaissance château known as the Hall of Black Death, a family descended from the Medici through the sorceress-consort Bianca Capello has kept four foreign musicians sealed within its walls for forty years. When the first violinist is found dead with her corpse glowing with an unearthly phosphorescence and the locked room undisturbed, a document surfaces in the hand of the mansion’s long-dead patriarch. It is a prophecy naming six members of the household and the method by which each will be slain.
As Norizumi races to prevent the next murder, he finds himself contending not only with a killer of extraordinary cunning but with the accumulated sorcery and science of four centuries, encrypted in a grimoire that was old when the Inquisition was young. The translation, by Vox Day, is the first-ever English translation of Kokushikan Satsujin Jiken. Now available on Amazon for Kindle and audiobook.
You can probably see why I was so interested in making it available to the English-reading world after reading this description from Athos, which it produced when I first started delving into Japan’s library of untranslated texts for books that would be particularly interesting for me to read. At that time, I had not really thought about Castalia putting out translations into English, I was just in search of something new and different to read.
In Japan, Kokushikan Satsujin Jiken occupies a position for which there is no precise Western equivalent. It is counted as one of the three great “strange books” — the sandai kisho — in the entire history of Japanese detective fiction. The designation is less an honorific than a warning: these are the novels said to “cause mental disturbance upon reading,” works so structurally peculiar and intellectually dense that they have generated their own mythology. The novel is often described as the only true Gothic romance ever written in Japan, and Edogawa Ranpo, the father of Japanese mystery fiction, publicly praised it — writing an introduction to the 1935 first edition that helped establish its reputation as a landmark.
The novel’s defining characteristic is its gengaku shumi — pedantry elevated to an architectural principle. The disciplines deployed across its pages include theology, demonology, pharmacology, astrology, botany, cosmology, religious studies, physics, medicine, heraldry, psychology, criminology, cryptography, and history. Japanese critics describe the effect not as decoration but as structural inversion: the vast pedantic apparatus overwhelms the mystery itself, producing what one reviewer called a “reversal of subject and object” — the erudition becomes the point, and the murders become its occasion. It has been called a “grand temple of detective fiction,” a novel that satisfies not only the mystery reader’s appetite but a voracious intellectual hunger across every field it touches.
That Shinchōsha, a publisher not especially known for detective fiction, issued the first edition in 1935 speaks to how much attention Oguri commanded at the time in the Japanese publishing world. The novel has been continuously republished since the end of the Pacific War, appearing from Kōdansha, Chikuma Shobō, Shakai Shisōsha, Tōkyō Sōgensha, Kawade Shobō, and Kadokawa in editions spanning seven decades, a publishing record that testifies to its enduring hold on Japanese literary culture. It remains famous as the novel most readers abandon after the first chapter, and the one that those who finish it never forget.
There is a very good chance that THE BOOK OF THE BLACK DEATH will one day be a Library book. It certainly deserves a place next to THE NAME OF THE ROSE, FOUCAULT’S PENDULUM, and THE ISLAND OF THE DAY BEFORE. It’s the sort of book that you either never finish reading, or that you read repeatedly, again and again, and never entirely put down.
You can read an excerpt on the Library site, which won’t tell you anything that I haven’t told you already, but will let you see the cover as well as today’s other release, a very well-regarded Italian work of psychological fiction by Luigi Capuana.
A word of warning: there WILL be formatting issues, without any shadow of a doubt. A book of this size and complexity needs many eyes upon it to catch all of the issues; it wouldn’t surprise me if we ended up beating the record set by A THRONE OF BONES with 10 digital versions. So you know the drill, keep a list and send it to me if and when you finish the book.
UPDATE: THE BOOK OF THE BLACK DEATH is the #1 bestseller in Japanese language fiction.
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