Seishi Yokomizo

Seishi Yokomizo (1902–1981) was a Japanese crime writer whose creation of the detective Kosuke Kindaichi — a dishevelled, seemingly bumbling sleuth who solves impossibly complex murders in rural Japan — made him one of the most beloved popular writers in Japanese literary history. His Inugami Clan (Inugamike no Ichizoku, 1950) and The Honjin Murders (1946) are among the most celebrated works in the Japanese mystery tradition.

What distinguishes Yokomizo's best work is its atmosphere: the dark, ancestral estates of rural Japan; the weight of inheritance and feudal grudge; the way that modern murder seems to erupt from beneath the surface of an older, stranger world. He is one of the central figures of the Japanese Golden Age of detective fiction, and his work was adapted numerous times for film and television. The recent English translation of The Honjin Murders by Louise Heal Kawai introduced his work to a new generation of international readers.