The Black Death Mansion Murders — Summary and Characters
Erudite murder; one of three oddities
- Author
- Oguri Mushitarō
- Published
- April 1934
- First appeared in
- Shin Seinen
- Form
- Novel
- Genres
- Mystery
- Horror
- Length
- 295,509 characters
- Reading time
- About 9 hr 51 min
- Orthography
- Modern script and kana
About this work
The long detective novel Oguri Mushitarō serialized in Shin Seinen in 1934. The detective Norimizu Rintarō takes on a chain of murders in a cursed Western mansion, the Black Death Manor. It is famous for a style that floods the page with erudition of every kind — theology, medicine, heraldry, the occult, ciphers, spiritualism — and is counted, with Yumeno Kyūsaku's Dogra Magra and Nakai Hideo's Offerings to Nothingness, as one of the three great oddities of Japanese detective fiction.
Summary
The Western-style mansion where the Furuyagi family — a holy family boasting four hundred years of lineage — live, known as the Black Death Mansion. In this strange building, said to be the only one of its kind east of the Bosphorus, a series of poisonings opens against the family and the musicians of its quartet. The great detective Norimizu Rintarō goes to the mansion with the prosecutor Hasekura and Kumashiro, chief of the investigation bureau, and takes on the riddle of one incomprehensible death after another. The bonds of blood hidden in the house, codes, mechanical contrivances, and the legend of a curse handed down in the Furuyagi family — Norimizu deploys an enormous learning that ranges over theology, forensic medicine, heraldry, occultism, music and cryptography, and piles up one dazzling deduction and counter-argument after another. In a flood of quotation and pedantry the riddle only deepens, until it converges at last on the last of the holy family. Difficult and gorgeous, it is a legendary long novel called the furthest north of Japanese detective fiction.
Characters
- Norimizu Rintarō The great detective of prodigious learning, who takes on the murders at the Black Death Mansion with a knowledge of every branch of study
- Prosecutor Hasekura and Chief Kumashiro The prosecutor and the chief of the investigation bureau who work on the case with Norimizu
- Furuyagi Santetsu The former head of the house and doctor of medicine who built the Black Death Mansion. He died a mysterious suicide about ten months before the case
- Furuyagi Hatatarō Santetsu's son and the present head of the house. A precocious boy still in his teens, who plays the violin
- Kamiya Nobuko The late Santetsu's secretary. Not a member of the family, she is kept at the front line of the case
- The four foreign musicians A string quartet whom Santetsu brought home as infants and kept inside the mansion for more than forty years
Chapter-by-chapter synopsis
The app covers this work chapter by chapter (full text in the app).
- 1. About This Work
- 2. Main Characters
- 3. Main Supporting Characters
- 4. The Black Death Mansion — Four Hundred Years of Blood, and Three Mysterious Deaths
- 5. The First Atrocity — Corpse-Light and the Olive-Wreath Scar
- 6. The Apocalypse Chart, and the Riddle of Santetsu's Death
- 7. The Second Atrocity — Ekisuke Inside the Armor
- 8. Nobuko in the Carillon Room, and Tsutako in the Room of Ancient Clocks
- 9. The Third Atrocity — Madame Krivov Suspended in Midair
- 10. Digsby's Cipher, and Darkness at the Concert
- 11. The Waterfall in the Mortuary Room, and Doctor Faust's Thumbprints
- 12. The Solution — The True Identity of Doctor Faust
- 13. Key Motifs and Foreshadowing
The opening (original text)
On the tenth day after Norimizu failed to publish his solution of the murder at the Church of St. Alexei, when talk was beginning that it would go unsolved, the heads of the investigation had from that day to give up their pursuit of Lazarev's killer. For in the mansion of the Furuyagi, entangled since four hundred years ago and called a holy family since the days of the Jesuit seminary at Usuki, the wandering of a poisoner like a jet-black wind had suddenly begun. Of that mansion of the Furuyagi, commonly called the Black Death Mansion, it had been said that sooner or later some such strange terror was bound to arise.
The Black Death Mansion Murders by Oguri Mushitarō (Aozora Bunko)
The ending (original text)
And so the coffin of Kamiya Nobuko, the last of the holy family of the Furuyagi, of the blood of the Medici and a descendant of the bewitching Bianca Cappello, was covered with the flag of the city of Florence and carried on the shoulders of four priests robed in linen. And through the swirl of the rising chorus and the incense smoke it was carried toward the graveyard in the back garden — curtain.
The Black Death Mansion Murders by Oguri Mushitarō (Aozora Bunko)
Read the original
The original Japanese text is available at Aozora Bunko, and the app downloads the same text for its vertical-text reader.
Related works
- Dogra Magra January 1935
- Kotō no oni January 1929
- The Fiend with Twenty Faces January 1936
- The Holy Man of Mount Kōya February 1900
- Tales of the Peony Lantern July 1884