Article: Top 10 Japanese Mystery Novels

Japanese mystery stories (honkaku) of the 20th century and beyond present some of the best investigator novels ever. These Japanese writers formed the golden era of mystery novels in Japan.

1. Malice

Keigo Higashino is one of the masters of mystery/crime novels, with his works being quite popular while frequently receiving movie and TV adaptations. "Malice," the fourth book of his featuring police detective Kaga as the protagonist, follows the same path. Acclaimed bestselling novelist Kunihiko Hidaka is found brutally murdered in his home on the night before he's planning to leave Japan and relocate to Vancouver.

2. All She was Worth

All She stood Worth is a fiction charging Japanese perspectives towards debt and groups. Shunsuke Honma, a widower with a ten-year-old son, is on rest from the police, trudging along after being shot on duty. Also surprised Sekine lives driven to such harsh measures when her mystery comes out.

3. The Honjin Murders

The Honjin Murders is narrated by an unnamed character, who is a mystery novelist. He has been evacuated to the area where the "Honjin murders" occurred and is therefore looking back on events, having collected evidence from local people. There is no such narrator in Death on Gokumon Island, and the crimes occur in the book's present time. The locked room component of the mystery is brought to the reader's attention.

4. Journey Under The Midnight Sun

The location begins in the earlier 1970s and spans about twenty years. The two main characters are Yukiho and Ryo, young kids whose lives are shaped by their association with one another at the novel's start. Yukiho appears to be gifted with unnatural beauty and dignity. This book was a twisty-turny rollercoaster ride of a thriller.

5. Ring

The Japanese mystery horror novel RING has several mangas, film, and TV adaptions. The book was the foremost in a trilogy, followed by SPIRAL (1995) and LOOP (1998). A mysterious videotape cautions that the viewer will die in one week unless a specific, unknown action is completed. Just one week after overseeing the tape, four teenagers die one after another of heart failure.

6. Murder in the Crooked House

The stories are all about these subtle moments and clues that stand out in retrospect when encountered on the page but just get lost in the background when presented on film. The story unfolds in an architectural monstrosity named Ice Flow Mansion. The house was built with a five-degree slope to it – a mansion-sized version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa – and in proper form, is accompanied by its sloping tower.

7. Grotesque

The primary narrator is a lady who is never named. Some two decades after, two of the girls she moved to the prestigious Q High School for Young Women with -- Yuriko, her stunningly attractive, more youthful sister, and classmate Kazue -- have been killed. Her characters are a weird lot, but it's a society that has provided them a big inspiration for their futures.

8. The Tokyo Zodiac Murders

Foremost published in Japan in 1981, Shimada's fascinating first novel combines metafiction with a locked-room secret. The label refers to a (fictional) series of startling unsolved murders executed in 1936. Painter Heikichi Umezawa rejected an eerily specific note about how he wanted to create the perfect woman, his Azoth, comprised of the severed parts of his six daughters and nieces.

9. The Inugami Curse

The Inugami Curse is the 6th of Yokomizo's detective novels. He takes on another staple of classic mystery fiction with a group of people gathered together in a manor place for the reading of the will of wealthy industrialist Sahei Inugami. This book is fiendishly complicated and, like The Honjin Murders, is both a whodunit and a whodunit.

10. Out

Out is a solid thriller -- a bit messy, over-full, and long, but with enough that's worthwhile to justify most of that. Off shows some exciting slices of Japanese life, especially those of the women at the center.