Yukito Ayatsuji
Yukito Ayatsuji is a Japanese crime writer who is credited with reviving the honkaku (orthodox, puzzle-based) detective novel tradition in Japan in the 1980s with his debut The Decagon House Murders (Jukkakukan no Satsujin, 1987), written while he was still a student at Kyoto University. The novel, which pays explicit homage to Agatha Christie and S. S. Van Dine while reimagining the closed-room mystery for a Japanese literary context, launched both his career and a wave of shin-honkaku (new orthodox) mystery writing that transformed Japanese crime fiction.
His subsequent ้คจ (mansion) series โ Labyrinth House Murders, Clock Castle Murders, and others โ has become one of the most sustained and celebrated puzzle-mystery series in contemporary Japanese literature. The Decagon House Murders arrived in English translation by Ho-Ling Wong in 2015 and introduced a new generation of international readers to the pleasures of rigorous, architecturally ingenious detective fiction.
