The Tokyo Zodiac Murders
The cover of the first English edition
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| Author | Soji Shimada |
|---|---|
| Original title | Senseijutsu Satsujinjiken |
| Translator | Ross and Shika Mackenzie |
| Illustrator | Unlisted |
| Cover artist | Takumitz Ohga |
| Country | Japan |
| Language | Japanese |
| Series | Detective Mitarai's Casebook |
| Genre | Murder mystery |
| Publisher | IBC Publishing |
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Publication date
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1981 |
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Published in English
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2004 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 251 (2004 edition) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 55795584 |
The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is the debut mystery novel of Soji Shimada, the musician and writer on astrology who is best known as an author of over 100 mystery novels. Besides being Shimada's first novel and a best seller, it was nominated for the prestigious Edogawa Rampo Prize for mystery novels.
The mass of the novel is divided up into several sections. A foreword from the author challenges the readers to try to solve the gruesome mysteries themselves; it claims that every clue necessary will be included in the text, and that the characters will have no unfair advantage over the reader.
The first item is a fictional short story or will which lays out the setting: it is 1936 in the Shōwa period of pre-World War II Japan.
A painter and womanizer named Heikichi Umezawa, who has long been obsessed with astrology and alchemy; he is a wealthy but fairly old man from a respectable family who stills lives in a traditionally run sprawling household. He is finishing up his great cycle of paintings: 12 large paintings, each on one member of the Zodiac. As he works in his private studio on the last one, a portrait of Aries, his head is smashed in with a blunt object. The murder is curious: it took place on a heavily snowing day, and many of the suspects have solid alibis. Further, when discovered, the room is locked and apparently had been locked from inside - leading to a locked room mystery.
When the studio, which is a building to itself, is investigated, a notebook is discovered containing a bizarre lengthy piece of prose, the same will or short story which starts the novel. In it, the narrator, who identifies himself as the same Heikichi who was murdered, describes a long-running battle with mental disease, his diabolism, and his murderous urge to create the perfect woman called "Azoth", which he will do by cutting his 2 daughters, 2 of his 3 stepdaughters and his 2 nieces up and taking a single astrologically significant and aligned piece of her body and combining it with the others (the reason listed for excluding his remaining daughter, Kazue Kanemoto, is that she is not a virgin); each one will be killed with an alchemically-significant metal and buried in a place which produces those metals. He writes that he will carry out his insane plan as soon as he finishes the Aries portrait.
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