``Yatsu Tomb Village'' (1977 edition) What happened in the midst of the Yokomizo boom and Kadokawa films? [That's when movies were born Vol.3 middle part]

Cyanide Chocolate Incident and Tsuyama Incident

In 1977, with the start of production of the TV series and the start of Kindaichi appearing one after another in films and on TV, newspapers and magazines were filled with articles comparing the Kindaichis played by Ishizaka Koji, Atsumi Kiyoshi, and Furuya Ikko.

The evening edition of the Tokyo Shimbun newspaper on February 26th asked Yokomizo Seishi to "appraise" the three Kindaichis. The photo of the three Kindaichis was laid out on a table in the reception room of the Yokomizo residence in Seijo, and Yokomizo was asked to appraise them. At this point, only Ishizaka's "The Inugami Family" had been released, and Atsumi and Furuya's works were unfinished. Yokomizo said of Ishizaka, "His costume was elaborate and close to the image in the original. His somewhat absent-mindedness was very good. However, if I had to say anything negative, it would be that he's too handsome." He was blunt in his response to Furuya, saying, "I don't know this guy. (Omitted) I think a face like this is good enough," but it can't be helped since he hasn't seen the movie yet. And about Atsumi, he said, "He's good. His simplicity is very good. But he seems a little tougher than the Kindaichi in the original. He's such a great guy, so I'm sure he'll develop a new side of Kindaichi..." exuding his expectations.

Incidentally, the date this article was published, February 26th, was also the day that it was revealed that a random murder attempt had occurred in Tokyo. On February 14th, a passerby discovered 40 boxes of Ezaki Glico chocolates in a shopping bag in the Yaesu underground mall at Tokyo Station. Thinking that they were lost items for Valentine's Day, given the time of year, he reported them to the police station near his workplace, but although they were kept as lost property until the 24th, the owner never showed up. Since it was customary for food items to be converted into cash by the manufacturer and returned to the finder six months later, the chocolates were sent to the Ezaki Glico Tokyo branch.

However, when the branch examined the boxes, they found traces of the cellophane having been peeled off and then reattached, and there were many suspicious points, such as the serial number having been cut out, so on the 25th an examination was carried out at the Central Research Laboratory of the Osaka headquarters. As a result, it was discovered that one piece of chocolate in the box had a white powder the size of a grain of rice embedded in it. When the powder was analyzed, 0.1 grams of cyanide compounds were detected. Subsequent investigations by the Metropolitan Police Department revealed that each box contained one grain of sodium cyanide, which was a lethal dose. Additionally, one of the 40 boxes had what appeared to be a handmade rubber stamp written in katakana on the outside of the inner box, saying "Okoreruminikuiniihonshinnitenchiyuuokutasu" (Heavenly punishment for the arrogant and ugly Japanese).

The first person to discover the poisoned chocolate passed by the bag containing it at first, but then changed his mind and went back down the road to report it to the police station. He was reminded of a series of deaths from poisoning that had occurred in Tokyo since January of that year after people had drunk unopened cyanide-laced cola that had been placed next to public telephones. The cyanide chocolate incident became public on the 26th. Comments from experts were published in the newspapers the following day, and Yokomizo appeared in the Tokyo Shimbun newspaper, as he had done the day before, to give his personal opinion on the incident.

"It must be a copycat of the Cyanide Coca-Cola murders. I don't know who the culprit was last time, but I think this one is a sulky young person. (Omitted) These kinds of indiscriminate murder crimes are modern. The cities have fallen into disrepair, and young people are lonely. When we were young, there were really only a few incidents that shocked the entire generation. But now they happen every day. The modern world is a sick place, after all."

It is typical of Yokomizo to cite a similar foreign detective novel. He said, "There was a foreign detective novel I read a long time ago about a man who dies after eating a product sample sent by a candy manufacturer, and in that case, the perpetrator is found by tracing the victim's relationships. That is not the case with this one. Even the great detective Kindaichi Kosuke has difficulty solving it. It is truly a murder without reason."

The final bit about Kindaichi seems to have been led astray by the reporter, but in any case, the fact that Yokomizo is immediately asked for a comment whenever a bizarre incident like this occurs in real life makes you feel the Yokomizo boom.

When talking about Yokomizo and real-life incidents, the existence of the "Tsuyama Incident" cannot be overlooked. On May 21, 1938, 21-year-old Toi Mutsuo used a hunting rifle and a Japanese sword to attack sleeping villagers somewhere in Tomata County, Okayama Prefecture, resulting in a mass murder in which 28 people were killed instantly (two of those seriously injured later died). The Osaka Asahi Shimbun published an extra edition the following day with a large headline reading "A Horrifying Murder of Thirty People," followed by photographs of the faces of 18 of the victims. The Osaka Asahi Okayama edition (May 22, 1938) devoted ten columns to a detailed report of the incident on the local page, including large photographs of Mutsuo's face, the police who had swarmed the house, and the state of the house where an entire family had been massacred.

The strangeness of this case was not only the large number of people killed, but also the fact that the perpetrator "was dressed in a black stand-up collar and gaiters, carrying a 12-caliber 9-shot hunting rifle for hunting wild animals, a Japanese sword on his waist, and a short sword in his pocket, (omitted) with a National lamp strapped to his stomach and two flashlights attached to his head, like an Ashura (as seen in the above mentioned newspaper)" which added to the horror of the crime. The Yomiuri Shimbun (May 22, 1963 evening edition) ran a headline reading "28 people shot dead with a hunting rifle/Okayama sets new record for murder" and it was indeed a mass murder incident in a short period of time that had never been seen before, even in modern Japan. As Takao, a section chief in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department's Forensic Science Division, said, "This is the first case of either a single crime or a crime committed by two or more people, and it will probably be a world record. Generally, the cause of large number of murders is determined to be resentment or a madman. For this reason, the perpetrator is always arrested or commits suicide, and there are almost no cases where the perpetrator remains undetected" (Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun, May 22, 1963), Mutsuo also took his own life after carrying out the crime.

At around 1:30am on May 21, Mutsuo killed his sleeping grandmother by hitting her head with an axe, and then attacked 11 other houses in the neighborhood by around 3am (3 of which killed entire families). After his murder, he climbed a mountain pass and wrote a suicide note at the top of a mountain nearly 4km from the village, then pressed the hunting rifle he used in the crime against his own heart and pulled the trigger with his toe. He is believed to have died at around 4:30am. He accomplished everything in just 3 hours. He was found around 10:30am, 6 hours later. The seriousness of the crime can be understood from the fact that the Tsuyama incident held the record for the number of murders by a single perpetrator until the Kyoto Animation arson and murder incident in 2019.

In 1938, when the Tsuyama incident occurred, Yokomizo was recuperating in Kami-Suwa. The incident was reported in newspapers nationwide, but because it was quickly resolved with the perpetrator's suicide, there were not as many follow-up reports compared to newspapers in the Kansai region, and Yokomizo was completely unaware of the incident at the time. It was 10 years later, in 1948, that he first learned of its existence.

Towards the end of the war, Yokomizo evacuated to Sakura, Okada Village, Kibi County, Okayama Prefecture. Although defeat came soon after, he was unable to return to Tokyo immediately. However, this turned out to be a blessing. "Honjin Murder Case," serialized in the magazine "Houseki" from spring to the end of 1946, was set in Okayama, and the sequel, "Gokumon Island," also depicted a series of murders that took place on an isolated island in the Seto Inland Sea. Both were written during Yokomizo's time living in Okayama, and Kindaichi Kosuke, who first appeared in "Honjin Murder Case," would take on cases that took place in Okayama.

Another unexpected blessing came from his connections as a local cultural figure in Okayama. In early 1948, during a roundtable discussion in the Sanyo Choho newspaper, Yokomizo learned of the existence of the Tsuyama incident during a conversation with the head of the Okayama Prefectural Police Criminal Investigation Division and the police chief. However, he did not seem to have shown much interest at this point, merely asking, "When did this happen?" and "It was solved quickly, so it didn't make a big fuss." However, he had the opportunity to learn more about the details of the Tsuyama incident at a crime prevention exhibition held at Tenmaya department store in Okayama in April of the same year. As Yokomizo recalls, "The exhibition was so beautifully displayed with photos of the bloody bodies of men and women who had been shot or slashed to death that it was the kind of exhibition that made you want to cover your eyes" (The True Story of Kindaichi Kosuke). Even the costume worn by Mutsuo Toi at the time of the attack was displayed as an imaginary drawing, so it seems that a strong image was etched in Yokomizo's mind.

However, learning the details of the Tsuyama incident did not immediately lead to "The Village of the Eight Graves." In August of the same year that he saw the exhibition, Yokomizo returned to Tokyo and settled in Seijo, where he would remain until the end. The following year, Yokomizo began serializing "The Village of the Eight Graves" in "Shinseinen," but the idea for the work originated from his time in Okayama. It was inspired by Sakaguchi Ango's "The Discontinuous Murders." The work, which was serialized in a magazine, also drew attention for its challenge to see if anyone could guess the real culprit. Since he was living in a rural area of Okayama, he was unable to obtain the magazine, but an acquaintance sent him the first three installments, and he was finally able to read them. After reading it once, Yokomizo immediately realized that it was a multiplexing of the trick in Agatha Christie's "The ABC Murders." Yokomizo had been planning a novel about mass murder set in a rural area for some time, but he had not been able to find a motive for killing so many people. However, he realized from "The Discontinuous Murders" that it was possible to do so by multiplexing "The ABC Murders." In other words, in order to cover up the murder of a specific target, the murderer kills random people based on a certain keyword, making the motive unclear. This gives the murderer a reason to take the time and effort to carry out elaborate murders of unrelated people. In this way, Yokomizo quickly materialized the idea for a novel set in a village.

Yokomizo's greatest supporter at this time was Kato Hajime, who lived in the same village. He had experience as a teacher in various schools in Okayama Prefecture, and he showed Yokomizo the lifestyle and customs of those islands and villages. The details of "Gokumon Island" were also developed under his guidance. Similarly, when Yokomizo asked if there was a village like that, Kato mentioned a village near Niimi on the Hakubi Line, and mentioned that the village had a limestone cave, which allowed Yokomizo to expand on the image.

It was only when Yokomizo began writing "The Village of the Eight Graves" that he first came up with the idea of using the "Tsuyama Incident" as a model for the setting. Since the magazine "Shin Seinen," in which the story was serialized, had changed its color scheme after the war, and in order to adopt the style of a biography of horror stories that would appeal to a wider range of readers, the first episode began by unravelling the history of the village. In it, the murder of 32 villagers by Tajimi Yozo was described as follows:

"The man was wearing a Western-style suit with a stand-up collar, gaiters around his legs, straw sandals, and a white headband. Two rod-shaped flashlights that were left on were tied to the headband like horns, and a National flashlight, also left on, was hanging from his chest like a mirror at a midnight visit to the temple. In the hakama sash tied over his Western-style suit, he had a Japanese sword stuck in it, and in one hand he held a hunting rifle. When the villagers saw him, they were all frightened. Or rather, before they could frighten themselves, the hunting rifle the man was holding had fired, and he was shot down on the spot without a second's warning." ("The Village of the Eight Graves" Kadokawa Bunko)

The costume worn by Mutsuo Toi at the time of the crime is quoted almost exactly as it was in Yozo Tajimi. What differs from reality is that Yozo fled into the mountains after the crime, but his whereabouts are unknown, and even after more than 20 years, his whereabouts are unknown, and the villagers are still trembling in fear. This is the underlying fear that continues to stir up the story of "The Village of the Eight Graves."

However, Yokomizo wrote about the Tsuyama incident without visiting the site or checking newspaper articles, relying only on the testimony of the police officials mentioned above and the crime prevention exhibition -- and he did not take detailed notes at the time, but only from memory. For Yokomizo, it was more important to expand his imagination than to know the details of what actually happened.

On the other hand, Yoshitaro Nomura, who will be adapting "The Village of Eight Graves" into a film, and Kiyoshi Atsumi, who will be playing Kindaichi, have taken a completely opposite approach to Yokomizo's to get to the heart of the story. What if Kindaichi visited the scene of the Tsuyama incident?

They set foot into the village where the incident occurred, nearly 39 years after it occurred.

To be continued

Click here for the first part

*References will be listed in the second part.