Death on Gokumon Island is set in Japan in 1946 and that's what makes it interesting. Most of the young and middle-aged men had been drafted into the armed services and had been out of touch with their families for years, so no one knew whether they were dead or alive. The survivors are now returning from combat zones. The world-famous detective, Kosuke Kindaichi, has returned from New Guinea, where he befriended the heir to a powerful fishing family on Gokumon Island. The heir dies on the way back to Japan, and with his dying breath exhorts Kindaichi to hasten to Gokumon Island to prevent the deaths of his three younger sisters. The inhabitants of Gokumon Island are descended from criminals and other undesirables, and are notorious for their lawlessness.

Yokomizo's Kosuke Kindaichi books are intricately plotted "impossible crimes". The other books in the series are mainly locked room mysteries, but this one depends on timetables. Characters behave bizarrely in order to accommodate the extraordinarily artificial plot, in which murders are set up to parody Haiku.

As a mystery [Death on Gokumon Island] is sub-par, but the book is worth reading for its picture of post-war Japan. ( )

I didn;t enjoy this as much as the first in the series. Set some years, later, the story is set on Gokumon Island, as soldiers return home after WW2. Kosuke Kindaichi comes to the island after one of his comrades dies on the return home, asking Kosuke to go to the island and protect his 3 sisters as they will be murdered. And, in turn, they are. Kosuke follows a range of clues and trails to find the solution but only after the 3 girls have died. There's lots of too-ing and fro-ing across the island, a map would have been a useful addition had I read this in print. I think I enjoyed this less as this was narrated by an omnipresent narrator, whereas the first book was narrated by one of the people involved, that felt more immediate, this felt more remote. The ending turns out to be somewhat depressing, in that it never need to have happened at all.
In audio the vocal tics of Kosuke get somewhat annoying. ( )

I liked the idea of this story, especially as it dealt with a close-knit community working through the aftermath of the Second World War, but it was very slow; it took 80 pages for the first murder to occur, and I just kept wading through the story with no clue as to the perpetrator or motive. I found the motive bizarre and implausible when it finally was revealed. I did like the dynamic between Kindaichi and Inspector Isokawa, who hung out together to solve The Honjin Murders. I don’t regret reading this, but it was my least favourite of the Kindaichi books I’ve read so far. ( )

** spoiler alert ** *Big time spoiler alert!*

I am going to open by saying that this is a biased review that doesn't take the book on its own terms.

Seishi Yokomizo is a revered Japanese mystery writer. While Death on Gokumon Island is the fourth book in his Detective Kosuke Kindaichi series, it's the first of hist titles I've read. The plotting is complex, the characters are interesting, both individually and in relationship to others. But I'm regretting reading this title.

Here's the thing of it: half of the women in the novel are dead by its end, almost all the rest are depicted as incompetent, addled, or driven mad by ambition. One women remains alive and more or less healthy at the novel's end, but she's the outlier—and her prospects aren't that great either.

Three murders (of women) are committed, each by a different man, in order to prevent any of these women from inheriting their grandfather's estate. On his deathbed, their grandfather made his three closest friends promise that they would kill his three granddaughters if their older brother did not survive WWII. If their brother died, the grandfather wanted his estate to go to a more distantly related male—which would, of course, *necessitate* killing off the women above that man in the order of inheritance. Pure logic. What could make more sense?

And he wants his granddaughters killed so that each death echoes a well-known haiku—which has nothing to do with inheritance, but why not turn murders into visual representations of well-known poems?

In the aftermath of these killings does any character in the novel grieve the death of these women? No. Instead, the murders are treated like an interesting puzzle built around a series of unusual actions, and we're asked to empathize with the men who did the killing.

No, thanks.

The book offers some interesting insights into life in Japan at the end of WWII. In my mind, however, that can't begin to compensate for the female characters who, dead or alive, are never depicted as fully human.

A lot of people love this book. Its average GoodReads rating is close to four stars, but it is most definitely not for me.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via EdelweissPlus; the opinions are my own. ( )