The Man Who Climbed to Heaven

“My father and mother were honest, though poor—”

“Skip all that!” cried the Bellman in haste.

“If it once becomes dark, there’s no chance of a Snark—
We have hardly a minute to waste!”

(Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark)

天に昇った男 (ten ni nobotta otoko, The Man Who Climbed to Heaven, 1994) by SHIMADA Souji (島田荘司) opens in the execution block of a Japanese prison. Like America, Japan still has capital punishment, although normally reserved for murders seen as particularly worthy of punishment (such as multiple murders). KADOWAKI Haruo (門脇春男) has been on death row for decades, while his case, uncontested on his part, proceeded up through the courts to the final judgement. But when the day of his execution arrives, Kadowaki miraculously survives and is released.

For the rest of the book we follow him as he returns to the little town in O. prefecture in northern Kyushu where the crimes he was arrested for were committed. (I imagine readers will guess that O stands for Oita. You find this kind of coy documentary style of naming from time to time in Japanese fiction; I'm not quite sure what it means.) Along the way he thinks back on the events leading up to his imprisonment. This means that most of the short book is a long series of flashbacks from his childhood through the various jobs he had in life and his failed marriage up to the actual crime.

I'm not very fond of flashback narrative in any case; and when it takes up most of the book, my tolerance gets even thinner. As we approach the end, the possible surprises in the narrative are thinned out. In the end the narrative structure has its justification, of a sort, although readers may not be entirely surprised to find that it is a version of storytelling's second most hated narrative idea.

奇想、天を動かす

What brought good Wilkie's genius nigh perdition?
Some demon whispered, "Wilkie, have a mission!"

 (Swinburne on Wilkie Collins)

There are various ways you can divide up crime fiction. Greater or lesser realism is certainly one important spectrum; but in practice, the decision of where a book belongs can be complicated. Discussion of Japanese crime fiction often brings up a 'social school', which is supposedly more realistic and more concerned with depicting the nature of the modern world, as opposed to purely puzzle stories. In fact the two classics most often named in this context, Points and Lines (点と線
1958) and Inspector Imanishi Investigates (砂の器 1962) by MATSUMOTO Seichou (松本 清張, 1909-1992), are both distinctly unrealistic, particularly the latter. Nor do they avoid puzzle elements. But (on the basis of these two books) the style does avoid many of the conventions of traditional puzzle stories. There are alibis and tricks of misdirection by the criminal ; but fantastic crimes like locked room murders, fantastic disguises, unusual buildings or other such settings, the appearance of the supernatural etc. do not occur.  Some recent Japanese writers particularly cultivate such elements. When SHIMADA Souji (島田荘司, born 1948) gets mentioned, it is often as the forerunner of this style. But the stories that I've read featuring the policeman YOSHIKI Takeshi (吉敷竹史) seem to have more in common with the realist school. From western stories the most comparable figure is perhaps Freeman Wills Crofts: an investigation which goes through a period of orientation, then focuses on one suspect, with a problem like an alibi that still needs solving left to the end; a professional policeman as hero, characterised by stubborn persistance.

The 1989 Yoshiki novel 奇想、天を動かす has a rather unusual place in this. One part is pure 'social school', as Yoshiki patiently traces the early lives of a murderer and his victim. The other is a deliberately fantastic impossible crime story. I'll say in advance that this makes a truly, truly terrible mix. But I like both types of story; so it's a readable book despite its faults.

The book starts in the 1950's with a night train journey through a wintery Hokkaido landscape. Down the corridor between the seats, in which almost all the few passengers are asleep, a man in clown's makeup, with a strange and unsettling smile, dances silently past. One wakeful passenger hears a shot and goes to the door through which the dancing clown had passed. He meets another passenger coming from the other compartment; and the two deduce that the shot must have come from the locked toilet. They summon the conductor who unlocks the door. There is the clown, surrounded by burning candles, with part of his head blown off. The conductor relocks the door; but some travellers complain that the burning candles are a danger. He reopens it to extinguish them, and finds that the clown has disappeared.

The story moves to the present day, where a homeless man, less that 1.50 m. high, wanders round Tokyo playing his harmonica at train travellers, but seeking no money. He wanders into backstreets near Asakusa and, apparently in an argument over change, stabs the owner of a small shop. Yoshiki suspects there must be more to the story and finds that the man had previously been wrongly imprisoned for murder. Another prisoner remembers the stories that the man had written, which in turn prove to be reflections of an impossible event in Hokkaido thirty years ago, when the man had been a clown in the circus there. Indeed the events of the night include not only the locked room mystery, but a corpse returned to life, an invisible giant with glowing eyes, and a force that hurls one carriage off the rails.

The final explanation has a wealth of ideas, with a train alibi added to the problem for good measure. But a lot of the explanation comes down to coincidence. The solution to the locked room is not very credible, but it will probably occur to readers. The worst problem for me is that the motivation just doesn't seem to make sense. Even if it did, the mix of social mystery and fantastic mystery feels like a well meaning lapse of judgement.

A core element of the back story is the Japanese kidnapping and use as forced labour of Korean civilians and associated crimes in the period of military rule. Yoshiki is portrayed as someone with no idea of this part of history, which might imply that Shimada expects other Japanese readers to be similarly ill informed. (On the other hand, Yoshiki's role in the novel is generally that of an ignorant but interested listener, whatever the subject.)

The Villa Lilac Murder Case

I have a terrible memory for names. I can generally remember what people tell me about themselves, but not the name. Even in Europe that can be a problem. The ancient Romans had slaves whose job was to remind their master of the name and personal details of people they met in the street. Something like that would be useful for people like me today. Without the slavery, of course -- a smartphone app perhaps. Trying to talk Japanese makes that even worse, since you need the name in place of  saying "you".  A practiced memory for names is a real necessity when reading books too. Some names you can work out from the common kanji, others feature unfamiliar kanji or readings that you would need special knowledge to recognise. Mostly the first time a name is used in a book, it comes with furigana. Japanese readers note the reading and keep it in their head for the rest of the book. I note the reading then forget it three pages later. So unless they're called something simple like Tanaka or Ogawa, their subsequent appearances register in my head as "So and so" or "Yama-something" or some wild guess, since the alternative is to hunt back through the book to the page where they made their first appearance.

In the long run I need to improve my memory, somehow. Or else I could stick to reading こころ　and 博士が愛した数式. In the short term, I sometimes replace the bookmark that Japanese publishers kindly provide with a piece of paper on which I can note down the names of the characters as they appear. That works quite well. Actually perhaps the act of writing them down helps them stick in the memory, as I find that quite quickly I don't need to refer to the bookmark unless the character hasn't appeared for a hundred pages or so. If you're learning to read like me, I strongly recommend it.

That said, if you're going to read りら荘事件 (The Villa Lilac Case) by　鮎川哲也 (AYUKAWA Tetsuya), perhaps my notes can save you some time.

園田万平	SONODA Manpei	caretaker of the Villa Lilac
園田花	SONODA Hana	his wife
日高鉄子	HIDAKA Tetsuko	art student
行武栄一	YUKITAKE Eiichi	music student (bass)
尼ﾘﾘｽ	AMA Ririsu	music student (soprano)
牧数人	MAKI Kasundo	Ama's fiancé, music student
橘秋夫	TACHIBANA Akio	music student (piano)
松平紗絽女	MATSUDAIRA Sarome	music student (violin)
安孫子宏	ABIKO Hiroshi	music student (bass)
由木	YUKI	Saitama police (keiji)
須田佐吉	SUDA Sakichi	charcoal burner
堅持	KENMOCHI	Saitama police (keibu)
二条義房	NIJOU Yoshifusa	student, amateur detective
星影龍三	HOSHIKAGE Ryuuzou	amateur detective
水原	MIZUHARA	Tokyo police (keiji)

To be honest, I didn't find it a very enjoyable book. It's an attempt at a thoroughly classical puzzle mystery, first published from 1956-7 and then in book form in 1958. A group of students gather for a break at a villa belonging to their university in the hills north west of Tokyo. One by one they and those around them get killed, until the police are left with hardly any suspects to choose from. It's a carefully plotted mystery, with a lot of tricks and clues. But I think it has some terrible problems.
Firstly, the murderer is much too obvious. Before I was a quarter of the way in I had a rough idea of who the killer was and what was going on. That was less than a hundred pages in, and it's a long book (about 400 pages), so that I had another 300 pages to go. At the end more or less everything I'd worked out or guessed turned out to be right. All this time the police are shown as bumbling incompetents, neglecting the most obvious questions and evidence. The experience is like having to watch someone else play a computer game badly for hour after hour. The real detective is not even mentioned till the last fifth of the book; and we have to read on quite a few pages before he makes an actual appearance. There's the same structure, and the same problems, in a 島田荘司 (SHIMADA Souji) book that I read recently, 斜め屋敷の犯罪 (The Crime of the Slanted Country House), a locked room mystery from 1982, which seems a deliberate attempt to emulate traditional mysteries like りら荘事件. In that case too, the culprit is very obvious; but I at least did not have the solution to the central puzzle (though certain elements of it are obvious, too).

Coming back to Ayukawa's book, the characters were a problem for me too. They are none of them interesting and most are fairly unlikable. A writer has no duty to cater to a taste for likeable characters of course. If you've always wondered, 'What's it like to spend a couple of weeks with dull, unpleasant, quarrelsome people?', you may find it enlightening.

But perhaps my level of Japanese is a problem here. It took me over two weeks to get through this. If it was in English, I would have read it in a couple of days and looked more tolerantly on the characters and the puzzle. You can read another blogger's more positive take on the book here.