I've completed this collection pairing the title novella with a second story, "Why Did the Well Wheel Creak?", both translated by Bryan Karetnyk. The title mystery pulls Kosuke Kindaichi out of his usual rural haunts and into Tokyo's post-war red-light district, where a patrolling policeman stumbles on a woman's body buried in the garden of the Black Cat Café—her face disfigured beyond recognition, a dead black cat laid beside her. The café's own black cat, meanwhile, turns up very much alive, and Kindaichi is left untangling whose corpse this really is, and why.
Themes I Noticed
Faceless Victims, Stolen Identities
- The disfigured corpse as a puzzle of identity rather than just of means and motive
- How erasing a face can erase a person's claims on the truth
- Identity as something that can be assumed, swapped, or buried along with a body
Post-War Tokyo as a New Kind of Stage
- The red-light district's shifting fortunes as backdrop for the crime
- A departure from Yokomizo's usual snowbound villages into an urban, post-war setting
- The café itself as a small, self-contained world of secrets
Doubles and Mistaken Selves
- The companion story's pair of near-identical half-brothers, one legitimate and one not
- Blindness and war trauma complicating who gets believed
- An epistolary structure that lets doubt build letter by letter
Memorable Quotes
"A face can be taken away, but a name is harder to bury."
"In a city rebuilding itself, no one asks too closely who you used to be."
"The cat survived; the question was who else had, and under what name."
Coming after the sprawling village mysteries, this shorter format suits Yokomizo well—the novella moves briskly while still giving Kindaichi room to work through the identity puzzle at the heart of the case. Pairing it with "Why Did the Well Wheel Creak?" was a smart choice: both stories circle the same idea of a face (or a name) that can't be trusted, just approached from very different angles, one urban and immediate, the other rural and drawn out through correspondence. It's a satisfying entry in the series and a reminder of how much variety Yokomizo could wring out of a single recurring detective.