In the centre of the island is the eerie Decagon House, which is described as “ the decagonal trap” unbeknown to the students. They are all members of the Mystery Club at their university, and the island to which they arrive is the place where horrific deaths of the owner of the house Nakamura Seiji, his wife and their two servants happened some time previously. Seven students (five boys and two girls) of K-university arrive to an island not that far from the main land for a week to get some inspiration or write their own stories of mystery. The book premise is exciting, but the book also reads like a videogame script with little character insight, context or emotion (which is intentional, but may not be for everyone), and the final solution is, arguably, too unbelievable and underwhelming. The students on the island are then start to be killed off in a fashion reminiscent of that in Agatha Christie’s famous novel.

Some months previously there occurred on the island the mysterious deaths of the owner of the property, his wife and their two servants. Heavily influenced by Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, The Decagon House Murders is about seven Japanese students who decide to stay on an isolated island not far from the main land in a mysterious Decagon House. The new movement was characterised by robot-like personages game-like setting and lacking literary context or significance, being purely about solving a whodunit mystery using logical reasoning. That movement was a revival of the traditional “logical reasoning” detective fiction in Japan that was prevalent in the Golden Age of detective fiction in the 1920s.

This book, translated from the Japanese by Ho-Ling Wong, “ was seen as a milestone in detective fiction and the start of the shin honkaku (new orthodox) movement”.

The decagon house murders review