Odd Jobs Man Daizou at Your Service

The title of the short story collection なんでも屋大蔵でございます (nandemoya Daizou degoizaimasu, It's Daizou the Odd Jobs Man, 1985) by OKAJIMA Futari (岡嶋二人) is a bit hard to translate. The job description more or less literally translates as "anything man", so that "odd jobs man" sounds about right. The synonymous 便利屋 (benriya) translates literally as "handyman", which is much the same idea. This sounds like someone you might employ for repairs that don't quite need a proper specialist. The Japanese version seems to include work of this kind, but it is not limited to it. "Anything" can literally be anything. Only the hero of this collection, KUGIMARU Daizou (釘丸大蔵) draws the line at anything criminal or obviously immoral. Even so, by some odd chance, his work keeps bringing him into contact with a variety of mysteries.

Daizou is middle aged, but in manners more like an old man, with a tendency to a modest formal turn of phrase and a fondness for digressing with conventional observations on morality (which combine, surprisingly or not, with good natured kindness in his actual actions). His office is a converted shed and for most jobs his transport is a bicycle. Despite his humble appearance and manner, he has quite sharp wits.  

In "Murder in the moment of infidelity", a client Daizou had previously refused comes to him with a new request. She had wanted him to tail her businessman husband to catch him in the infidelity she was sure he was guilty of. The private detective she employed instead had delivered a report that showed no sign of any infidelity; but a little later the police come to her saying that they had found the detective dead near her house from a road accident. He had had the report in an envelope, apparently to deliver to her. So they hand it to her. In her confusion she does not tell them that she had already received the report. Apparently the detective had broken into her house to steal it. What was in the report to make him want to take it back?

"Snow White has been kidnapped" starts with a phone call asking Daizou to kidnap the favourite white cat of the local cat lady. Daizou refuses, but by the time he gets round to visiting the cat's owner, the cat has been stolen and tthe kidnapper has sent a cryptic letter giving a clue to where the cat is now.

"Punk rock Awa odori" starts with a visit from a young man who is uncertain whether he is speaking to Kugimaru Daizou or is himself Kugimaru Daizou. He had woken a little earlier lying on a path with no memory of who he was. After a passer by steals his wallet, the only clue he has to his identity is Daizou's business card in his back pocket. The cards are new and Daizou had handed out only a few of them, and definitely none to this young man.

In "Tailed, Killed", Daizou is on his way to a salaryman's apartment to feed his pet squirrel while he is on a business trip. On the way he notices that he is being clumsily followed by a young man. He easily loses his pursuer, but feels that after all the effort he has put in, he should not disappoint him to heavily. Instead he waits to confront him, but when no pursuer appears, he retraces his steps and finds the man lying murdered in the road.

In "Where are you off to in such a hurry?" the imperious wife of the owner of a cleaning service calls Daizou out peremptorily as an urgently needed stand in. When he gets there, she complains about the time he had taken and rushes out without explaining what she had called him to do. Her husband, who is left behind with Daizou says with resigned amusement that he does not know either, but they were to wait by the pond at the back of the business. A little later a car drives up there. The figure that gets out dumps a large cardboard drum in the pond and drives off to the indignation of the husband. Apparently the pond is constantly used as an illegal dumping ground, which he and his staff regularly clean each week. When the wife does not appear, the husband pays Daizou for his wasted time. But a few days later Daizou gets a visit from the police. The team of rubbish cleaners tidying the pond have found in the dumped cardboard tube the dead body of the missing wife.

I don't want to praise the mysteries too highly. An experienced reader will probably see through most of them, at least in part. Most do have some new trick to them, even if that is often a variation on familiar old tricks. There is more attention to character (including Daizou's character, both as actor and as narrator) and to non-mystery narrative elements. The style is light and humorous, much more so than in other Okajima Futari books that I have read; two of the stories even get by without a murder. Even without any really stand out mysteries, I thought the collection worked very well.

The stories apparently provided the basis for a Japanese television series, 何でも屋大蔵の事件簿, The Casebook of Daizou the Odd Job Man, in 2002 and 2003.
 

Seven Days' Ransom

七日間の身代金 (Nanokakan no minoshirokin, Seven Days' Ransom, 1986) is an impossible crime puzzle by 岡嶋二人 (OKAJIMA Futari). A little late, I've added "impossible crime" to the blog's post labels. Japanese detective stories often use "locked room" to describe impossible crimes which don't involve a locked room, or sometimes even a room.

CHIKAISHI Chiaki (近石千秋) and TSUKISHIRO Younosuke (槻代要之助) are a musical duo. Chiaki writes the lyrics, Younosuke sets them to music, then Chiaki sings the songs accompanied by Younosuke on piano. The two of them are in their mid to late twenties, hoping to get a start in the music business. When we meet them, the two are friends, who have somehow missed the point where they might have become lovers. Chiaki is also the daughter of a senior policeman. It's through her eyes that we see the story.

The novel starts with the video of a ransom demand. An acquaintance, TOBA Sumako (鳥羽須磨子) has asked Chiaki's advice after receiving the video, which shows her stepson, TOBA Kunihiko  (鳥羽国彦), and her brother, TAKENAKA Kazumi (竹中和巳), tied up. In the video Takenaka is reading a ransom note to the camera, with the kidnappers' demands. Rejecting Chiaki's urgings to contact the police, Sumako sets off with the money. With no time to telephone and not knowing where Sumako has been told to go, Chiaki and Younosuke set off chasing after her Porsche in Younosuke's Sunny. Even though a kidnapping is a really unpleasant crime, the tone here is actually almost light hearted. Sumako drives to one café after another, evidently picking up instructions from the kidnappers. By quick thinking, Chiaki and Younosuke manage to discover the place where the next instruction is and inform the police. When Sumako goes to the final destination, an uninhabited island in a lake, connected to the mainland only by a long bridge, the police are waiting. To avoid being spotted by the kidnapper,  they have kept their distance; but there are boats on the lake and policemen watching from cover on the mainland. A little after Sumako reaches the island, the police hear a shot and rush there from the lake and from the mainland. Sumako has been shot, the killer is nowhere to be seen. The gun and the ransom money have gone too.

This is obviously a fairly open impossible crime. Escape via the lake, on the water or under the surface, cannot be absolutely ruled out, although the police seem confident that that would be impossible. Other possibilities are likely to occur to readers familiar with the form. But whatever we may have been speculating gets put aside about half way through, when a discovery removes this impossibility and replaces it with a new kind of impossibility.

The puzzle has an odd form: for most of the story, all our suspects are off scene, since everyone connected with the case is either dead or missing. The lighthearted tone also evaporates fairly quickly. Chiaki starts looking like she might be a typical figure of Japanese popular literature, the attractive young woman who always gets what she wants by self confidence or wheedling or family connexions. But the depiction does not go very far in the "charming but infuriating" direction and treats her more seriously as a young woman deciding what she wants in life. The depiction of the two central characters is perhaps a little weak. Their profession is potentially interesting, but has no relation to the story; and we see very little of it. One could criticise the puzzle on the grounds that some bits are overclued and some underclued. It also demands that the police miss a few things, some understandably, some less so. The two main tricks are good enough for a novella, perhaps not quite for a full novel; but Okajima Futari are skilled at involving the story in interesting episodes.

I nearly left out the illustration here. I like that Japan keeps cover artists in business; and some are lovely. This isn't one of those. I put the picture size to "small".

Six People to go to the Solution

I've looked at several books by OKAJIMA Futari now, and each one has been quite different from the others. 解決まではあと６人　5W1H殺人事件 (Kaiketsu made ha ato rokunin: 5W1H satsujinjiken, Six People to go to the Solution: the 5 W 1 H murder case, 1985) is a detective story; but it's in no way a fair play mystery, and it doesn't have one detective, it has six, each solving part of the case. The names of the chapters are Who, Where, Why, How, When and What, the '5 W 1 H' of the subtitle. Each begins with a different private detective being given a problem to investigate by a young woman calling herself HIRABAYASHI Takako (平林貴子). Japanese private detectives are a pretty competent lot, apparently; and each of them finds the answer sought, while unaware of the larger mystery that links the various problems.

Now this is a really interesting idea for a book; but in the end the execution doesn't quite work for me. The different detectives and their different problems are interesting to start with. There's the contrast of characters from detective to detective, and there's variety in the different mysteries they have to solve, finding the owner of a camera, finding a café with green matchbooks and a name beginning with two Vs, code breaking, etc. And as the story progresses, the reader can puzzle over how the different problems fit together. From the second chapter on, we know more than each investigator, as they come across names and places about which we already know. In this way the story gets gradually more interesting as it progresses; but the integration of the various parts of the mystery was a little disappointing. The urgency of the story increases as we get closer to the end, especially with the introduction of a less ethical pair of detectives in the fifth chapter. But to get to the point where we can see the outline of the case requires a dump of previously unavailable information at the beginning of the sixth chapter. From there the remaining mystery plays out like a fair play puzzle; but there isn't much room left for surprises by this point.

That probably sounds pretty negative; if it does, I've given the wrong impression. I didn't hate it and I wasn't bored; I'm just disappointed that a promising idea didn't amount to a better book.

Klein Bottle

クラインの壺 (Klein Bottle, 1989) is the last mystery written by 岡嶋二人 (OKAJIMA Futari), a team of two writers, who after this worked separately. The other Okajima Futari novels that I've discussed, 焦茶色のパステル and そして扉が閉ざされた, are fairly clearly puzzle detective stories, although the first also has a strong adventure story element. Klein Bottle still has detective story type clues; but it is much more of an adventure story. Specifically it's a science fiction mystery.

 I make a character list when reading Japanese detective stories, because otherwise I tend to forget the kanji readings. In case it's any use to anyone else, here it is. 

Kanji	Reading	Character
梶谷孝行	KAJITANI Takayuki	Epsilon Project operations manager
上杉彰彦	UESUGI Akihiko	game scenario author
敷島映一	SHIKISHIMA Eiichi	Uesugi's brother in law
敷島邦子	SHIKISHIMA Kuniko	Uesugi's sister
百瀬伸夫	MOMOSE Nobuo	Epsilon Project research engineer
高石梨紗	TAKAISHI Risa	game tester
ｹﾈｽ･ﾊﾞﾄﾞﾗｰ	Kenneth Badler	Epsilon Project research engineer
笹森貴美子	SASAMORI Kimiko	Epsilon Project manager
真壁七美	MAKABE Nanami	Risa's friend
豊浦利也	TOYOURA Toshiya	game tester
姫田恒太	HIMEDA Kouta	journalist

The setting is modern day Japan. A firm called Epsilon Project buy a game scenario written by the young Uesugi Akihiko. They mean to make not a normal computer game, but a virtual reality game, where the player is completely immersed in the game world and experiences it like the real world. When the game is developed, he and another tester are invited to play it through. But is it really a game they are developing?

All the Okajima Futari books that I've read have been good storytelling. The mystery element here (as in their first book) is a bit too obvious to people expecting this kind of story, so that the reader is often well ahead of the narrator, Uesugi. (Perhaps that was less of a problem in 1989, before so many films with constructed realities came out.) Even if we have more of an idea what could be going on than the narrator, the larger question of what the Epsilon Project is doing remains; and it is easy to share Uesugi's confusion and fear.

My only problem while reading it was that the science fiction premise just didn't seem realistic. I read through thinking "OK, we'll say this happens. But you know that wouldn't really work, don't you?"

Pastel with the Dark Brown Coat

OKAJIMA Futari's first book, 焦茶色のパステル, was published in 1982 and won the Edogawa Rampo prize in that year. It's a good example of the sort of mystery that is the staple of the genre outside of a few classics. It has a perfectly good fair play puzzle element; but that makes up at most half of the novel. The rest is the kind of mystery which is solved by investigating, without the reader having a chance to get ahead of the characters or the narrator. A good part of it is pretty much an adventure story. Pasteru of the title is a thoroughbred horse. (The katakana of the name seem to resolve as "pastel", even if that's an unexpected name for a dark brown horse.) The setting of the story is an area in Touhoku devoted to horse breeding; and the book is clearly one of those books based on (and a little bit dominated by) research into an unusual world.

Incidentally, when I review a book that I've just read, I'll try and give a list of characters, as I did with The Villa Lilac Murder Case. But I read 焦茶色のパステル a year ago, and hunting for the furigana on the first entry of the characters would be too much work. Happily the Japanese Wikipedia has an article on the book which does just that.

Kanae (香苗) is unhappily married to a horse racing journalist, who has disappeared. The police want to question him about the disappearance of a university professor. Soon she learns that her husband, another man and two race horses have been killed. From the set up this feels like the kind of story, not rare in western mysteries, where a widow, who had not known what she wanted during her marriage, finds her true character, and surprises about her husband, after his death. But the story developes in a different direction. Kanae remains on the whole more a reactive and reflective character; and the driving force in the story is her friend Fumiko (芙美子), another journalist on the racing bulletin her husband had worked for.

I said that the puzzle is a relatively small part of the mystery. I would bet that it's also a bit too obvious for readers used to puzzle mysteries. Even so, this was a really enjoyable book. Part of this is perhaps Fumiko's character, which provides an answer to that question that so often runs through readers' heads when they read detective stories, "Why on earth aren't you going to the police?" The question just doesn't arise with Fumiko, who is recklessness personified.

I include a scan of the cover of my rather tatty second hand copy, partly to show exactly what colour 焦茶色 in horses is supposed to be, partly because even this artwork is for my European eyes something unusual. It's a curious aspect of Japanese publishing that cover illustration is still normal. In the seventies artwork on the cover was just disappearing in England, and photographs were starting to be used. These days new books almost always use a photograph or a piece of classical art on the cover. In Japan that still seems to be the exception, reserved in the crime genre for the kind of thrillers that give the technical specifications or whatever machines gets used in their pages. Even unsophisticated illustration gives the impression that the publisher is making an effort. And a culture that still values artwork on book covers has the chance occasionally to produce something really good.

And then the door shut

Outside of genre literature, writing teams are rare.  Somerville and Ross is the only one that occurs to me. But science fiction (e. g. Pohl and Kornbluth) and detective fiction (Ellery Queen, Patrick Quentin, Sjöwall and Wahlöö, Boileau-Narcejac) have many examples. OKAJIMA Futari (岡嶋二人) is the pseudonym of two Japanese crime writers.  According to Wikipedia, the name can be understood as meaning 'Odd pair'.

"And then the door closed" (そして扉が閉ざされた) is a mystery published in 1987.  The viewpoint character Yuuichi wakes up on the floor of an atomic bomb shelter in the grounds of the villa of his former girlfriend Sakiko's family. He and three others have been drugged and locked in by Sakiko's mother.  The four had been holidaying with Sakiko months before, when Sakiko's Alfa Romeo had gone over a cliff in a mysterious accident.  Now they are locked in the bomb shelter.  On the wall of the toilet are photographs of Sakiko and her car, and the words "You people killed her" written in red paint.

I mentioned Patrick Quentin above; and the style of the mystery reminds me of some of his books. (The extreme situation is a bit like "Puzzle for Fiends", for instance.)  As with many of Quentin's later works, the mystery unfolds in stages, with major revelations leading to the next part of the puzzle and suspicion shifting to each of the major characters.  The action is divided between the bomb shelter, as the prisoners puzzle and argue over the case and try to find a way to break out, and flashbacks to Yuuichi's memory of the events themselves. The mystery itself is perfectly satisfactory, without having any elements that make it really outstanding.  But it's an entertaining book and a nice exercise in the closed circle detective story, with almost everything depending on the memories and arguments of the four prisoners.