Death of the Living Dead (1989) – Yamaguchi Masaya

Say what was that name you called me?
What was that grin you grinned?
An expression so uncertain
That breaks a line so thin?

“Commercial Breakup” (Thomas Dolby)

 

(Note: This is a review that I wrote early last year, just after I read Death of the Living Dead. Had I written it now, I would have done it very differently. However, I have decided to leave it mostly as is. I still agree with its content, and it doesn’t bug me to the extent that I want to go through the effort of revising it. Let’s just say that it’s a snapshot of how I was writing reviews a couple years ago, and be glad I didn’t start blogging then…)

The Barleycorns could, by any definition of the word, be called an odd family. There’s the patriarch, Smiley, a skilled mortician who, forced to leave England due to his womanizing ways, emigrated to America and decided to reestablish his practice in a grand way, founding the Smile Cemetery, the largest and most prestigious funerary establishment on the east coast. There are his sons, John, a dour, business-oriented man set to succeed his father as head of the house of the dead, William, a would-be theatrical producer who’s always looking to secure more funding, Jessica, Smiley’s only daughter, who married the son of one of his business associates, and James, who, disconcertingly proud of his skills as an embalmer, has no interest whatsoever in such trifles as the management of the cemetery (and that’s without getting into the segment of the Barleycorn siblings who have already shuffled off their mortal coil.). And there’s our protagonist, Francis “Grin” Barleycorn, son of Steven Barleycorn, one of the aforementioned late lamented, who, instead of joining the family firm, chose the life of a punk rocker. From front to back, the Barleycorns are a family touched by death, every one of them having worked in or trained for a role in the running of the cemetery, but, in more ways than one, they’ll soon find that they don’t understand death as well as the thought. For, all around the world, the dead are returning to life. And, against the tableaux of these unnerving events, the Barleycorns will be confronted with death in an even more immediate way when someone begins killing them off. But who would want to kill in a world where the dead can come back to life?

This is the question posed in Yamaguchi Masaya’s Death of the Living Dead, which was released in December of 2021, in an excellent translation by Ho-Ling Wong. Published in 1989, it was Yamaguchi’s debut novel and is considered one of the major works of the shin honkaku movement. Though I had been aware that Yamaguchi had been trying to get it released in English for a few years, I must say that its sudden publication took me by surprise. Especially as it wasn’t the first Japanese mystery novel involving the dead returning to life to be published last year. An surprising coincidence, but a welcome one. (According to the back of the book, there’s a Hollywood film adaption in the works, which probably explains how a publisher was finally found. One wonders how the film will turn out…)

The first half of the novel is rather slow moving, focusing mostly on the establishment of the setting, characters, and themes, but it’s extremely riveting, as well as necessary to the plot. If you don’t pay close attention here, I can assure you that you have very little chance of solving the mysteries that follow. And once the plot gets moving, it really gets moving. Between the killer stalking the Barleycorns, the corpse that vanishes between its funeral and burial, and the possible return of a serial killer from years back, you start to wonder how all of this could possibly tie together.

But tie together it does. As unrelated as they seem, all of these plot threads contribute to a solution that is astonishingly elegant in its simplicity. Its central point is downright Chestertonian (which is quite fitting, given how often he’s quoted here). It’s so blindingly, elementally obvious that we (or at least I) never consider it.

And this isn’t the only similarity to Chesterton. Like the Father Brown stories, Death of the Living Dead is fundamentally a piece of humanistic detective fiction. Yamaguchi is interested in exploring how people relate and react to death, both individually and as a society. This exploration comes into focus well before the mystery itself, but don’t think that they are unrelated concerns. The philosophic questions at the heart of the novel are essential to the solution, and the mystery throws the philosophical questions into sharp relief. Furthermore, to bolster this theme, Yamaguchi includes well-researched information on subjects as diverse as funerary customs, Medieval art, and the history of embalming. This is the kind of mystery that Robert Burton or Sir Thomas Browne would have written.

(At this point, there’s an aspect of the novel’s that I’d like to discuss, but it’s something that some people might consider a spoiler. To be clear, I don’t think it is, and it’s mentioned in the table of contents anyway. Plus, most, though not all, of the reviews out there mention it (and if you’ve read any of those, you already know exactly what I’m talking about). Still, I certainly don’t want to spoil anyone’s reading experience, so if you want to go in absolutely blind, skip the next paragraph and come back when you’ve finished the book. For everyone else, read on…)

Perhaps the most striking thing about Death of the Living Dead is the fact that Grin, who’s both the protagonist and the detective, himself becomes one of the living dead early on in the book, after he is poisoned with arsenious acid. The undead here aren’t the shambling zombies of horror fiction, they retain their personalities and memories. This puts him in the unusual position of having to catch his own killer, but it also adds some extra complications. Chiefly, he has to hide the fact that he’s dead, from both his family and his girlfriend, Cheshire, who acts as his Watson. The only person he lets into his confidence is Dr. Hearse, a close friend of his grandfather’s (and one of my favorite characters!), a professor of thanatology and occasional consultant with the local police. Grin has the good doctor embalm him, as coming back to life doesn’t stop the process of decomposition. Aside from throwing a new wrinkle into the plot, this turn of events also has another narrative function. Since only Grin and Dr. Hearse know that someone poisoned Grin, everyone else investigating the Barleycorn killings is in possession of imperfect information. The police can’t hope to solve these killings, but Grin, and the reader, can.

Not that the police had much of a chance to begin with. The local police are, shall we say, somewhat dysfunctional. The sergeant gladly blabs everything he knows to the press, the junior detective is only interested in two things, getting promoted and slacking off, and the senior detective, Richard Tracy, is a workaholic who’s unhealthily obsessed with his job. At first, he seems to be the force’s only sane man, but as the crimes begin to pile up, Det. Tracy’s stress levels get closer and closer to the breaking point. He also provides one of the novel’s absolute funniest scenes. Near the end of the book, he proposes a false solution which starts out brilliantly clever. However, as he goes on, flaws start appearing in his explanation. They start out subtle, but by the end his audience is chiming in one after another, pointing them out faster than he can keep up with.

As you may have guessed from Det. Tracy’s name, the view of America in Death of the Living Dead is very pop-culture influenced. This becomes apparent early on, particularly in the scene set in NYC, which, with its boom-box carrying gangsters and corrupt cops, feels like it could have come from an over-the-top 80s action flick. As strange an atmosphere as this may seem for a classically styled puzzle-plot mystery, it actually works quite well. After all, you wouldn’t exactly expect strict realism from a novel where punks run around solving murders as the dead rise from their graves…

As far as I can see, the novel only really has one flaw, and not a major one at that. Near the beginning, it’s stated that worldwide, thirteen people in total have returned to life. Conceivably, some may have escaped risen unnoticed, but it couldn’t be that many. So revivification seems to be a fairly rare phenomena, yet in the small town of Tombsville, the living dead just keep on coming, in numbers that are truly surprising, given how few rose before. Vaqrrq, ol gur raq, whfg nobhg gur jubyr Oneyrlpbea snzvyl unf znqr gur erghea gevc (spoilers concealed using rot13). Now, this isn’t a hard science fiction novel, and I’m not demanding some kind of detailed explanation for this. But since we’re told at the beginning that this is an uncommon thing, I think most experienced readers will factor that into their theorizing. Unless told otherwise, we assume that everything in a mystery could be relevant, so I wish that Yamaguchi had somehow indicated that this wasn’t something we needed to pay attention to, rather than just hoping that we don’t notice the mother of all statistical anomalies.

But, that said, I can’t say that this even remotely impacted my enjoyment of the novel. I didn’t even notice it until a few days after finishing it. And that I was still thinking about it days later says a lot. Death of the Living Dead is a triumph as a novel of detection, but it’s also a moving rumination on man and mortality. It’s a book that I’ll not soon forget, and I highly recommend it.

(As I mentioned, I still agree with everything in this review. But I do have a couple of things I’d like to add. The first is actually something that I meant to mention in the review, but which completely slipped my mind. It’s simply that I admire Yamaguchi’s choice of chapter quotes. It takes skill to be able to use John Dickson Carr, Jorge Luis Borges, and King Crimson in the same novel.

The second point has less to do with the book itself, and more to do with its reception. I’ve been shocked at how little attention it’s gotten since its release. When it has been reviewed (on a handful of blogs and in the Washington Post) it’s garnered high praise, but by and large it seems to have slipped under the collective radar. And that’s a shame, because in my opinion this book is a masterpiece of the genre and deserves a wide readership.)