If you can read Japanese (preferably some archaic Japanese and a lot of difficult kanji at that), and if you are ever in the mood for something like Umberto Eco’s erudite thrillers with shocking endings like The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum, broad literary canvas of interlocking individual lives captured in a certain historic period like Honoré de Balzac’s magnum opus The Human Comedy, and pure masterpieces of interwoven arcane lores and mystery like Robertson Davies’ The Deptford Trilogy, combined with touches of the eerily beautiful that is typical of Japanese kaidan tales, I would recommend to you without reserve a series of supernatural detective novels written by Kyōgoku Natsuhiko (京極夏彦) known as the Hyakkiyagyō series (百鬼夜行シリーズ), which is also popularly referred to as the Kyōgokudō series (京極堂シリーズ).
A screenshot from the DVD of "Ubume no Natsu" (姑獲鳥の夏), a movie adaptation of the first novel of the series.
The Background
This novel series is set in Japan in the 1950’s when society was just returning to some resemblance of order after WWII. I personally think there couldn’t be a better time to set a series like this in. The war put a pause of seven or eight years in people’s lives – men were conscripted to fight abroad and those who remained behind were dislocated etc. But past action, no matter how long ago and how much the face of society has changed, always has an effect in the present. The past just never goes away.
The timescale of some of novels in the series spans across centuries and millennium. Actions from distant history, actions before and during the war, and actions in the near present combine to form these stories. The 1950’s was a time for unearthing past shattering secrets and settling scores.
It was also an interesting time from the reader’s point of view. The 1950’s was a time of transition when old beliefs gave way to the unknown. The country was directionless and exhausted from the high tension and mass hysteria during the war. A number of new spiritual cults were springing up from nowhere. The characters in the books can only ask open questions as to what the new social order and various trends in technology may bring in the future. Now that some sixty years had passed since the 1950’s, the reader is free to draw his or her own answers to those open questions in the series.
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