I live down the street from a graveyard. It has foxes. I walk there at least once a week. But not at night.

This book does not tie everything up with a neat bow, but it is creepy and slowly builds up the horror. It was a fun read.

I almost feel sorry for not giving this book more than a three and a half stars. The locked room mystery and its solution was excellent and the insights into the Japanese tattoo culture was fascinating.

I had two specific problems with this book, though:

1. I haven´t had have a sense of time and place throughout the entirety of the novel. The story is set in the year 1947 in war-ravaged Japan and the dialogue between the characters have an outdated feel and read like something written in the late 1940s. However, this novel had a contemporary feel to it and it that regard the dialogue felt incredibly disjointed and out of place. Not sure whether this is the fault of the book or the fault of the translation.
2. The reader follows a character called Kenzo, an avid mystery reader / amateur sleuth. In the overall scheme of this novel, he is supposed to be a character like John Watson. But Kenzo lacks his Sherlock Holmes for most of the novel and only towards the last 50 pages of the mystery a Sherlock type of character is cropping up. And I´m sorry, but Watson without Holmes doesn´t work and there have been some chapters in the middle of this book that dragged considerably.

I would recommend this book to any locked room mystery enthusiasts. Even though this book has its flaws.

Some dialogues in this book sound incredibly stilted (though I do think people might have talked like that in Japan back in 1947). Take this drama queen moment for example:

"You stupid idiot! What the hell do you think you were doing! How dare you withhold something so important from me! Goddamn son of a bitch! Stupid, little brat! Thanks to your incompetent interference, this case is even more screwed up than it was before! Damn, damn, damn!" Daiyu Matsushita pounded the nearest wall with all his might, and loose plaster flew in every direction.

"I´m sorry, I´m sorry, I´m so very, very sorry," Kenzo cried, involuntarily throwing himself on the ground at his brother´s feet. "I was completely wrong, and I don´t know how to apologize. I wish I were dead." Kenzo burst into tears of grief and shame.

 

And then this little episode, in which Kenzo is thinking about the phenoma of the Doppelgänger:

 

So far Kenzo has managed to avoid being introduced to any of these walking wraiths, but he had a feeling that if he ever did meet his own doppel, he would gäng away in the opposite direction as fast as possible.

 

I´m actually blaming the translator for the wrong use of the German language.