Murder At Mt. Fuji by Shizuko Natsuki
May. 17th, 2026 09:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
A classic mystery novel from Japan’s Queen of Crime.
When American student Jane Prescott is invited to spend the holidays with her classmate Chiyo, she jumps at the chance to see in the new year at a luxurious mansion at the foot of Mount Fuji. Chiyo belongs to one of Japan’s wealthiest families, headed up by Yohei ‘Grandpa’ Wada.
With the whole Wada family gathered and snow falling outside, the festivities are in full swing. That is, until Chiyo bursts into the room - covered in blood, holding a knife, and screaming that she has stabbed her grandfather to death.
Stunned, the family closes ranks to protect one of its own - but Jane alone has more questions than answers. Could her sweet, timid friend really be capable of such violence? Did any other member of the Wada clan stand to gain from the patriarch’s death? And if so, could the real murderer still be in their midst?
25-year-old Jane Prescott is an American graduate student studying modern Japanese literature at Japan Women’s University. To supplement her grant, she took a job tutoring 22-year-old fellow student Chiyo Wada in conversational English. Chiyo is writing her graduate thesis on Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and invites Jane to spend the New Year holiday with her and her family at a villa on Lake Yamanaka near Mount Fuji to read through her thesis to identify any English errors and also to help her prepare for her oral exams.
Jane is conscious that it is unusual for an outsider such as herself to stay at what is traditionally a family-only event, especially given how wealthy Chiyo’s family is. Her great-uncle, Yohei Wada is the 66-year-old president of Wada Pharmaceuticals, one of Japan’s biggest companies. However Jane is fond of Chiyo, who is kind, fragile and also desperate for Jane’s help and so agrees to stay and help her.
Staying at the house with Chiyo and Yohei are:
- Mine Wada, Yohei’s wife, a small quiet woman who is deeply concerned with the family reputation;
- Shigeru Wada, Yohei’s youngest brother, who is 60-years-old and also works at Wada Pharmaceuticals;
- Kazue Wada, Chiyo’s mother who is in her late 40s;
- Sawahiko, Chiyo’s step-father and Kazue’s third husband who works as a Professor of Biology at a private university near Tokyo and who is a few years younger than his wife;
- Takuo Wada, Chiyo’s cousin who works in the accounting division of Wada Pharmaceuticals; and
- Dr Shohei Mazaki, Yohei’s personal doctor and a professor of surgery at the university hospital.
But on Jane’s first evening at the villa, with snow falling heavily outside, she and the family are suddenly disturbed by Kazue’s screams. She has discovered Chiyo standing in her grandfather’s bedroom holding a knife, which she then uses to try and slash her own wrist. Yohei is dead and Chiyo admits that she stabbed him to death after he attacked her.
Everyone in the family loves Chiyo and agree that the best way to protect her and to protect the family’s reputation is to make it seem that a burglar broke in and killed Yohei while trying to steal artworks from the villa. Jane and Dr Mazaki agree to help, in Jane’s case because she can’t help but think that her quiet, somewhat timid friend simply didn’t have it in her to brutally kill the man she called grandfather and she has more questions about the crime than Chiyo has answers for.
When the family notify the police the next day, the case is assigned to Chief Detective Nazkazato and his assistant Narumi. At first they buy into the family’s cover up but it isn’t long before, like Jane, they start to have questions that lead in Chiyo’s direction and as Jane and the family frantically try to maintain the cover up, Jane and Nazkazato begin to realise that there may just be something entirely more sinister at play …
Published in 1982 Shizuko Natsuki’s murder mystery (translated from Japanese by Robert B Rohmer in 1984) is a mixed bag with a slow first third and hampered by dull characterisation and heavy-handed writing. There are some funny moments and the mystery itself has a neat reveal but it would have benefited from a character sheet to keep track of who everyone is and Jane ultimately isn’t on the page enough to offer an insight into what is happening.
Although I’ve read a number of Japanese mystery novels before, this is the first one I’ve read by Natsuki. I don’t know if my issues with the book come from her writing or from the translation and I wonder if it would benefit from a fresh translation because some of it is a little stilted and heavy handed, although that may equally be due to the nature of the time.
There is a lot of potential in Jane who is set up as an outsider looking into the dynamics of the Wada family and who has a friendship with the quiet and somewhat timid Chiyo. However it ultimately doesn’t really go anywhere and although Natsuki gives you a lot of personal information about Jane and her background but there’s not a huge amount of character for her on the page and nor does she interact hugely with the Wada family. She does participate in the cover up, but it’s as a bystander and witness more than a participant, you don’t get her direct thoughts about it and she certainly doesn’t do any investigating afterwards to support her doubts. That’s part of the reason why the final third of the book - which sees her act on her suspicions as to what has really happened - falls flat, notwithstanding the neat twist. There’s also a hint of a romance between her and Muzaki at the end which, again, comes out of nowhere.
The opening third plays out like a Columbo episode with Netsuke establishing the crime, identifying who you think has done it and how the family plan to cover it up and get away with it. It’s all a bit slow and, again, heavy-handed but the plot does start to move with the arrival of Nazkato and Narumi who begin to poke holes in the cover up that the family have contrived. Both detectives slowly identify the mistakes that the family has made and Natsuki has a lot of fun with the fact that the policy superintendent is keen to keep the press updated as to their progress because he wants to run for mayor after he retired, only to have to back track from each announcement as the detectives uncover new evidence. Again, there’s not a lot of personality on the page for any of the detectives but it matters less because the action moves more quickly.
There is a good twist in the mystery in the final third, which I enjoyed but I do think this is one of those books that would have benefitted from having a character sheet at the start so that it’s easy to keep track of who is who and what their relationship is to each other.
Ultimately although the story and the translation didn’t work for me, there was enough here for me to understand why Natsuki was a popular writer and I would be curious to try more of her work on the back of it.
The Verdict:
Published in 1982 Shizuko Natsuki’s murder mystery (translated from Japanese by Robert B Rohmer in 1984) is a mixed bag with a slow first third and hampered by dull characterisation and heavy-handed writing. There are some funny moments and the mystery itself has a neat reveal but it would have benefited from a character sheet to keep track of who everyone is and Jane ultimately isn’t on the page enough to offer an insight into what is happening.
When American student Jane Prescott is invited to spend the holidays with her classmate Chiyo, she jumps at the chance to see in the new year at a luxurious mansion at the foot of Mount Fuji. Chiyo belongs to one of Japan’s wealthiest families, headed up by Yohei ‘Grandpa’ Wada.
With the whole Wada family gathered and snow falling outside, the festivities are in full swing. That is, until Chiyo bursts into the room - covered in blood, holding a knife, and screaming that she has stabbed her grandfather to death.
Stunned, the family closes ranks to protect one of its own - but Jane alone has more questions than answers. Could her sweet, timid friend really be capable of such violence? Did any other member of the Wada clan stand to gain from the patriarch’s death? And if so, could the real murderer still be in their midst?
25-year-old Jane Prescott is an American graduate student studying modern Japanese literature at Japan Women’s University. To supplement her grant, she took a job tutoring 22-year-old fellow student Chiyo Wada in conversational English. Chiyo is writing her graduate thesis on Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and invites Jane to spend the New Year holiday with her and her family at a villa on Lake Yamanaka near Mount Fuji to read through her thesis to identify any English errors and also to help her prepare for her oral exams.
Jane is conscious that it is unusual for an outsider such as herself to stay at what is traditionally a family-only event, especially given how wealthy Chiyo’s family is. Her great-uncle, Yohei Wada is the 66-year-old president of Wada Pharmaceuticals, one of Japan’s biggest companies. However Jane is fond of Chiyo, who is kind, fragile and also desperate for Jane’s help and so agrees to stay and help her.
Staying at the house with Chiyo and Yohei are:
- Mine Wada, Yohei’s wife, a small quiet woman who is deeply concerned with the family reputation;
- Shigeru Wada, Yohei’s youngest brother, who is 60-years-old and also works at Wada Pharmaceuticals;
- Kazue Wada, Chiyo’s mother who is in her late 40s;
- Sawahiko, Chiyo’s step-father and Kazue’s third husband who works as a Professor of Biology at a private university near Tokyo and who is a few years younger than his wife;
- Takuo Wada, Chiyo’s cousin who works in the accounting division of Wada Pharmaceuticals; and
- Dr Shohei Mazaki, Yohei’s personal doctor and a professor of surgery at the university hospital.
But on Jane’s first evening at the villa, with snow falling heavily outside, she and the family are suddenly disturbed by Kazue’s screams. She has discovered Chiyo standing in her grandfather’s bedroom holding a knife, which she then uses to try and slash her own wrist. Yohei is dead and Chiyo admits that she stabbed him to death after he attacked her.
Everyone in the family loves Chiyo and agree that the best way to protect her and to protect the family’s reputation is to make it seem that a burglar broke in and killed Yohei while trying to steal artworks from the villa. Jane and Dr Mazaki agree to help, in Jane’s case because she can’t help but think that her quiet, somewhat timid friend simply didn’t have it in her to brutally kill the man she called grandfather and she has more questions about the crime than Chiyo has answers for.
When the family notify the police the next day, the case is assigned to Chief Detective Nazkazato and his assistant Narumi. At first they buy into the family’s cover up but it isn’t long before, like Jane, they start to have questions that lead in Chiyo’s direction and as Jane and the family frantically try to maintain the cover up, Jane and Nazkazato begin to realise that there may just be something entirely more sinister at play …
Published in 1982 Shizuko Natsuki’s murder mystery (translated from Japanese by Robert B Rohmer in 1984) is a mixed bag with a slow first third and hampered by dull characterisation and heavy-handed writing. There are some funny moments and the mystery itself has a neat reveal but it would have benefited from a character sheet to keep track of who everyone is and Jane ultimately isn’t on the page enough to offer an insight into what is happening.
Although I’ve read a number of Japanese mystery novels before, this is the first one I’ve read by Natsuki. I don’t know if my issues with the book come from her writing or from the translation and I wonder if it would benefit from a fresh translation because some of it is a little stilted and heavy handed, although that may equally be due to the nature of the time.
There is a lot of potential in Jane who is set up as an outsider looking into the dynamics of the Wada family and who has a friendship with the quiet and somewhat timid Chiyo. However it ultimately doesn’t really go anywhere and although Natsuki gives you a lot of personal information about Jane and her background but there’s not a huge amount of character for her on the page and nor does she interact hugely with the Wada family. She does participate in the cover up, but it’s as a bystander and witness more than a participant, you don’t get her direct thoughts about it and she certainly doesn’t do any investigating afterwards to support her doubts. That’s part of the reason why the final third of the book - which sees her act on her suspicions as to what has really happened - falls flat, notwithstanding the neat twist. There’s also a hint of a romance between her and Muzaki at the end which, again, comes out of nowhere.
The opening third plays out like a Columbo episode with Netsuke establishing the crime, identifying who you think has done it and how the family plan to cover it up and get away with it. It’s all a bit slow and, again, heavy-handed but the plot does start to move with the arrival of Nazkato and Narumi who begin to poke holes in the cover up that the family have contrived. Both detectives slowly identify the mistakes that the family has made and Natsuki has a lot of fun with the fact that the policy superintendent is keen to keep the press updated as to their progress because he wants to run for mayor after he retired, only to have to back track from each announcement as the detectives uncover new evidence. Again, there’s not a lot of personality on the page for any of the detectives but it matters less because the action moves more quickly.
There is a good twist in the mystery in the final third, which I enjoyed but I do think this is one of those books that would have benefitted from having a character sheet at the start so that it’s easy to keep track of who is who and what their relationship is to each other.
Ultimately although the story and the translation didn’t work for me, there was enough here for me to understand why Natsuki was a popular writer and I would be curious to try more of her work on the back of it.
The Verdict:
Published in 1982 Shizuko Natsuki’s murder mystery (translated from Japanese by Robert B Rohmer in 1984) is a mixed bag with a slow first third and hampered by dull characterisation and heavy-handed writing. There are some funny moments and the mystery itself has a neat reveal but it would have benefited from a character sheet to keep track of who everyone is and Jane ultimately isn’t on the page enough to offer an insight into what is happening.
