From the "detective story" and "science fiction" labels I've added to the post, you might guess thatノックス・マシン (Knox Machine, 2013) by NORIZUKI Rintarou (法月綸太郎) is a science fiction detective story. In fact it is a collection of pure science fiction stories, which don't contain a proper mystery, but have golden age detective stories as their subject matter.
The title story ノックス・マシン ("Knox Machine", 2008) takes its inspiration from the ten commandments for detective stories that Ronald Knox wrote as part of the introduction to an anthology. In the mid twenty first century, computer creation of satisfying literature has become possible. Chin Loo, a Chinese researcher attempting to create new golden age style mysteries, uses Knox's rules as a central part of his modelling of the pattern of the story. The choice is politically questionable, because of the fifth law "no Chinaman shall figure in the story". Persevering despite disapproval Chin Loo succeeds in generating new puzzle mysteries; but it seems that his choice has condemned him to a life without career advancement, when he is unexpectedly and alarmingly summoned by senior figures in a government research program. Their interest, it turns out, lies in the fact that the time when Knox wrote his laws seems to be tied in to the possibility of time travel.
The second 引き立て役倶楽部の陰謀 ("The Supporting Characters' Club Conspiracy", 2009). Captain Hastings narrates how in 1939 a letter from Doctor Watson, the president of the Supporting Characters' Club, summoned him and other members to discuss what action needs to be taken in the light of a new affront to the honour of the society offered by Agatha Christie's forthcoming mystery. Their last intervention, following her publication of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, had gone as far as kidnapping. Now Watson seems ready to countenance even more extreme measures.
The third バベルの牢獄 ("The Jail of Babel" 2010) is not so directly concerned with detective stories, but again has a metafictional aspect.
The last, ("Knox Machine 2" 2013) is a sequel to "Knox Machine", this time centred on Ellery Queen's The Siamese Twin Mystery and The Chinese Orange Mystery and the presence or absence of Queen's famous "challenge to the reader". The electronic library of the world's texts, managed by a powerful American corporation, is being attacked by sudden fires, and the source seems to be The Siamese Twin Mystery. Terrorists, it seems, have manipulated the text, creating an instability that spreads through the neighbouring books. The only solution seems to be a new kind of time travel, back into the book.
I have to admit that I didn't enjoy this much. I like a lot of science fiction and I like classic detective stories, but the mix did not work well for me. One problem is that the exposition overwhelms the story to a greater or lesser extent in all four stories, most of all in the title story and its sequel. The exposition of detective story history (on Knox, Christie and Queen) is readable enough, although I knew much of it already. The physics reads less well. It feels as though having invested so much effort in creating a scientific justification for the story, the author is treating his invention with too much respect. For detective story fans the second story is likely to be of more interest, demonstrating a surprisingly thorough knowledge of early and golden age detective stories, and offering a reflection on the way the genre changed in its choice of plot.
Showing posts with label detective story. Show all posts
Showing posts with label detective story. Show all posts
Saturday, 4 May 2019
Saturday, 2 March 2019
The Spring Term Special Strawberry Tart Case
米澤穂信 (YONEZAWA Honobu, born 1978) is probably best known outside Japan for a series of everyday life mysteries, starting with 氷菓 (hyouka, Ice cream, 2001), which were the basis for an anime series of the same name. I've only seen the anime series of this; but judging from that 春期限定いちごタルト事件 (shunkigentei ichigotarto jiken, The Spring Term Special Strawberry Tart Case, 2004) is very similar. This book is also a series of "puzzles of everyday life", solved by a boy and girl who have just started high school (which in Japan would make them probably fifteen years olds´): the teenage narrator, 小鳩 常悟朗 (KOBATO Jougorou) and his friend 小佐内 ゆき (OSANAI Yuki).
Kobato and Osanai were at middle school together, and various unfortunate experiences there have led them to adopt a life philosophy, which they describe to themselves as aiming to become a perfect 'petit bourgeois'. In practice this means keeping their heads down and not doing things that might attract attention. In particular, Kobato tries to avoid showing off his skill at deduction. Osanai behaves like a reserved and timid child, very dependent on Kobato and only showing enthusiasm for desserts. What part of her character she is suppressing only becomes evident in the course of the book.
The 'life philosophy' will probably make older readers roll their eyes a little; but you could say it is a realistic reflection of the things teenagers do. The stories are all mysteries, but they make a comedy of school life. Kobato comes across as a somewhat intellectual type, at any rate a student who reads a lot and pays attention in class. This occasionally makes the Japanese a little more difficult than you might expect for a reader who doesn't come equipped with this standard knowledge. There is a certain tendency to melancholy in the stories, a suggestion that the main characters are suppressing part of their own nature; but comedy is prevalent. Despite the reliance on certain "types" from popular literature, this is generally pretty successful.
Kobato of course does not manage to avoid getting involved in mysteries, and throughout the book he solves a series of mostly minor puzzles, often pulled into them by a busybody friend from his primary school days. Some involve a real (mostly very minor) crime but others are merely puzzles. Most notable is a chapter devoted to finding out how someone managed to make cocoa using only three mugs and one teaspoon (but no milk pan), which is played as a kind of 'impossible crime' type puzzle. As with many such short story collections in Japan, there are developments over the course of the book, a gradual revelation of Kobato and Osanai's characters and background, and an overarching mystery which comes to a high point in the final chapter.
The mystery aspect is generally good enough. Although nothing stands out as a classic puzzle, the surprise for the reader at seeing where the carefully laid preparation is leading is real. And the mix of school comedy and mystery allows for some pleasing humour about what constitutes a reasonable deduction.
The book is the first in a series of three (one for each term of the Japanese school year). I owe my awareness of it to Ho-Ling's blog. You can read his review there, as well as a review of the second book in the series (which I haven't yet read).
Kobato and Osanai were at middle school together, and various unfortunate experiences there have led them to adopt a life philosophy, which they describe to themselves as aiming to become a perfect 'petit bourgeois'. In practice this means keeping their heads down and not doing things that might attract attention. In particular, Kobato tries to avoid showing off his skill at deduction. Osanai behaves like a reserved and timid child, very dependent on Kobato and only showing enthusiasm for desserts. What part of her character she is suppressing only becomes evident in the course of the book.
The 'life philosophy' will probably make older readers roll their eyes a little; but you could say it is a realistic reflection of the things teenagers do. The stories are all mysteries, but they make a comedy of school life. Kobato comes across as a somewhat intellectual type, at any rate a student who reads a lot and pays attention in class. This occasionally makes the Japanese a little more difficult than you might expect for a reader who doesn't come equipped with this standard knowledge. There is a certain tendency to melancholy in the stories, a suggestion that the main characters are suppressing part of their own nature; but comedy is prevalent. Despite the reliance on certain "types" from popular literature, this is generally pretty successful.
Kobato of course does not manage to avoid getting involved in mysteries, and throughout the book he solves a series of mostly minor puzzles, often pulled into them by a busybody friend from his primary school days. Some involve a real (mostly very minor) crime but others are merely puzzles. Most notable is a chapter devoted to finding out how someone managed to make cocoa using only three mugs and one teaspoon (but no milk pan), which is played as a kind of 'impossible crime' type puzzle. As with many such short story collections in Japan, there are developments over the course of the book, a gradual revelation of Kobato and Osanai's characters and background, and an overarching mystery which comes to a high point in the final chapter.
The mystery aspect is generally good enough. Although nothing stands out as a classic puzzle, the surprise for the reader at seeing where the carefully laid preparation is leading is real. And the mix of school comedy and mystery allows for some pleasing humour about what constitutes a reasonable deduction.
The book is the first in a series of three (one for each term of the Japanese school year). I owe my awareness of it to Ho-Ling's blog. You can read his review there, as well as a review of the second book in the series (which I haven't yet read).
Tuesday, 15 January 2019
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.
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.
Wednesday, 2 January 2019
The Gymnasium Murder
体育館の殺人 (taiikukan no satsujin, The Gymnasium Murder, 2012) is a mystery novel by AOSAKI Yuugo (青崎有吾, born 1991). The publishers, Sougen Suiri, often have an invented English title on their cover, and in this case it is The Black Umbrella Mystery, which might suggest some similarity to the first Ellery Queen mysteries, such as The Roman Hat Mystery. If that was what they wanted to suggest, the suggestion is certainly warranted. Although the book is a locked room mystery, the style of detection involves a string of deductions around a single object, leading to criteria that narrow the field of suspects, very much in the style of The Dutch Shoe Mystery and particularly The Roman Hat Mystery.The table tennis club and other sports clubs are using the old gymnasium of their high school. At one end of the hall is a stage, and unusually its curtain is down. When the theatre club arrives for its rehearsal they open the curtain. On the stage is the body of the president of the broadcasting club, stabbed in the back. The investigating police soon stumble on a puzzle: the doors at the stage end were both locked, so that the only exit was through the hall; but the president of the table tennis club claims that nobody had come through from the stage end since the victim entered. Since she had been alone in the gym for part of this time, they soon decide that she must be the killer. High school first year, 柚乃 (Yuno), who overhears their discussion, is convinced that her club president is innocent, and desperately seeks the help of secretive and eccentric schoolboy genius 裏染天馬 (URAZOME Tenma). She finds him in an unused club room, which he has turned into his own apartment and filled with toy figures of anime heroines. Urazome has no interest in school work or anything else except for anime and manga, to which he devotes all his time and money.
I get the impression that the target audience for this book is young teenagers who have not yet read much mystery fiction. Except for one meta-literary joke about 'fair play', all the cultural references seem to be to anime and manga. Most of these escaped me; but I didn't get the impression I was missing anything of value. They seemed simply part of the thin characterisation of Urazome as an otaku. The emphasis on Urazome's effortless intellectual superiority is another element that reads like something only a book for children would do.
Although the 'fair play' joke I mentioned touches on what some might consider improper misdirection, the mystery is very much fair play. All the elements needed to solve the mystery are presented openly and in many cases their significance is noted in advance of the final explanation. I'm not quite sure how good the reasoning is. There were points in the series of deductions where I thought that obvious alternatives were being missed, while a lot of time was being spent on ruling out possibilities that weren't very likely in the first place; but that's a criticism it probably shares with Ellery Queen's acknowledged classics. I didn't enjoy the deductions here as much as I enjoyed Ellery Queen. I'm not sure if that's because I actually was a teenager when I read Ellery Queen or because there was something slightly lacking here. It felt a little like we were creating Venn diagrams more than reading a story. In Ellery Queen the deductions often lead to a real surprise, and perhaps that was what was missing.
The school setting felt like a deliberate reversal on the kinds of unusual setting favoured by Ellery Queen and others: a completely mundane world, in which every object, room and role is something everyone is familiar with. A few characters are more like types from popular literature than real people; but the only bit that was really far from everyday life was Urazome. I did slightly feel that a sharper observation of the everyday world might have made even that a bit more interesting.
This sounds a bit negative; but if you like classic puzzle detective stories, this is certainly one to try. I certainly expect I'll try another one in the series at some time. One point I liked was the confidence shown in giving us a full length novel with only one murder. Many writers, including the most famous, almost feel obliged to have at least two (Sayers and Crofts are the exceptions that spring to mind); but there is something pleasing to me when the whole book is about just one crime.
You can read a different take on the same book at Ho-Ling's blog here.
Sunday, 25 November 2018
The Last Confession
After deciding to return to blogging, but only for books for which I feel some enthusiasm, my first review goes against that decision. It's a solid but unremarkable collection of short stories, by TAKAGI Akimitsu (高木 彬光), 最後の自白 (saigo no jihaku, The Last Confession, 1967). Takagi was one of the major post war writers of traditional puzzle mysteries, with some classics to his name, especially in his earlier works. There are six long short stories in this collection, all featuring public prosecutor, 近松茂道 (CHIKAMATSU Shigemichi).
Chikamatsu is one of the prolific Takagi's many detectives (he is not even the only prosecutor detective). As a prosecutor, he is involved in the case, but only at a later stage. Most of the investigation is done by the police, who report to Chikamatsu and take advice from him. A common pattern is for the police to fix on one suspect, but find Chikamatsu unwilling to prosecute without further investigation. Each story has a different investigating policeman. At least, they have different names. If there is any difference of character, it is hard to detect, except that some stories demand that the policeman be a little more stubborn and obtuse than the average.
All the stories are traditional mysteries, with attempts at misdirection and alibi tricks, some moves towards impossible crimes, though nothing that fully qualifies as such. Two feature a floor plan. Most have a second murder. The stories generally aim for a little originality in the framing to catch the reader's interest, but most still feel a little bit routine. The same goes for the puzzle element. For the most part the likely reaction to the revealed solution is 'Okay, fair enough' (except for couple where most readers would probably wonder how the killer could pick such an improbable approach to their problem).
パイプの首 (paipu no kubi 'The Pipebowl'). Two policeman notice a parked car on a lonely mountain road as they drive past on a different errand. Seeing it still there as they drive back hours later they investigate and find that there is a corpse a the bottom of the roadside cliff, the brother of an importer of French luxury products. When a secretary in the same firm is murdered, the bowl of a pipe is found lying next to her dead body.
影の男 (kage no otoko 'The Man in the Shadows') A wealthy man's family is gathered for his last hours. Moments before his death, one of his managers rushes in with news that the eldest son has been murdered.
愛と死 のたわむれ (ai to shi no tawamure 'The Play of Love and Death'). Police suspicions soon fasten on the wife of a murdered man; but Chikamatsu is cautious.
かみきりの情熱 (kamakiri no jounetsu 'The Passion of the Mantis'): an inverted mystery. A woman has an almost foolproof plan for the murder of the lover who rejected her.
消えた死体 (kieta shitai 'The Missing Corpse'). Late at night a constable is called out from his kouban by a man claiming to have seen a murder in a different apartment in the building where he lives. But although the man had set other residents to watch the door, when they enter they find an undisturbed room with no corpse and no sign of a struggle. The constable remembers that the day is April 1 and decides that this is a joke; but later that night, the man who lives in the apartment rushes in to say he has found the body of a murdered woman there.
最後の自白 (saigo no jihaku 'The Last Confession'). When a blackmailer is killed, three people each claim to be the murderer. Which is the real killer, or is it someone else entirely?
Chikamatsu is one of the prolific Takagi's many detectives (he is not even the only prosecutor detective). As a prosecutor, he is involved in the case, but only at a later stage. Most of the investigation is done by the police, who report to Chikamatsu and take advice from him. A common pattern is for the police to fix on one suspect, but find Chikamatsu unwilling to prosecute without further investigation. Each story has a different investigating policeman. At least, they have different names. If there is any difference of character, it is hard to detect, except that some stories demand that the policeman be a little more stubborn and obtuse than the average.
All the stories are traditional mysteries, with attempts at misdirection and alibi tricks, some moves towards impossible crimes, though nothing that fully qualifies as such. Two feature a floor plan. Most have a second murder. The stories generally aim for a little originality in the framing to catch the reader's interest, but most still feel a little bit routine. The same goes for the puzzle element. For the most part the likely reaction to the revealed solution is 'Okay, fair enough' (except for couple where most readers would probably wonder how the killer could pick such an improbable approach to their problem).
パイプの首 (paipu no kubi 'The Pipebowl'). Two policeman notice a parked car on a lonely mountain road as they drive past on a different errand. Seeing it still there as they drive back hours later they investigate and find that there is a corpse a the bottom of the roadside cliff, the brother of an importer of French luxury products. When a secretary in the same firm is murdered, the bowl of a pipe is found lying next to her dead body.
影の男 (kage no otoko 'The Man in the Shadows') A wealthy man's family is gathered for his last hours. Moments before his death, one of his managers rushes in with news that the eldest son has been murdered.
愛と死 のたわむれ (ai to shi no tawamure 'The Play of Love and Death'). Police suspicions soon fasten on the wife of a murdered man; but Chikamatsu is cautious.
かみきりの情熱 (kamakiri no jounetsu 'The Passion of the Mantis'): an inverted mystery. A woman has an almost foolproof plan for the murder of the lover who rejected her.
消えた死体 (kieta shitai 'The Missing Corpse'). Late at night a constable is called out from his kouban by a man claiming to have seen a murder in a different apartment in the building where he lives. But although the man had set other residents to watch the door, when they enter they find an undisturbed room with no corpse and no sign of a struggle. The constable remembers that the day is April 1 and decides that this is a joke; but later that night, the man who lives in the apartment rushes in to say he has found the body of a murdered woman there.
最後の自白 (saigo no jihaku 'The Last Confession'). When a blackmailer is killed, three people each claim to be the murderer. Which is the real killer, or is it someone else entirely?
Saturday, 30 September 2017
The Yufuin Murder Case
湯布院殺人事件 (Yufuin satsujinjiken, The Yufuin Murder Case, 1994) is a not very interesting mystery by UCHIDA Yasuo (内田康夫). The main characters are IZUMI Naoto (和泉直人), a professor who has just resigned from the law department of his university in protest at its involvement in a corruption scandal, and his wife Asako (麻子). His former students honour his departure with the gift of a "honeymoon travel pass" which he can use with his wife on trains throughout Japan. Uchida's books are often the basis for television dramas that combine a murder mystery with views of an interesting tourist destination somewhere in Japan. In this case the television drama was already invisaged before the book was written. Indeed the travel pass element of the plot is there because Japanese Railways were sponsoring the television show. (At the time the book came out, the TV drama had been dropped; but it was finally televised in 2002.)
The mystery starts with the murder or perhaps suicide of the secretary of the politician involved in the corruption scandal, then shifts to a traditional drama surrounding machinations within a wealthy rural family whose patriarch is lying on his death bed. As the death toll rises we wonder how the two stories fit together. The answer (SPOILERS, I suppose) is that they don't; and the original mystery is basically dropped in place of another one.
My memory of the few Uchida books that I've read is that they do occasionally have an interesting idea somewhere in them, although swamped by the lukewarm soup of platitudes that serves as fodder for mid evening television drama. In this case, anything promising in the story leads only to disappointment. On their way to their holiday in Kyūshū, the Izumis are suddenly summoned by the train conductor to come and look after their child. When they find the conductor, he is with an unknown boy, six years old, who has a letter asking them to accompany him to Yufuin (an peaceful onsen town in Ōita). Who is the boy and why has his mother taken such a strange method to send him to this distant town? The answers prove to be both implausible and uninteresting.
The mysteries of the actual murders are poorly supplied with clues; but there is no chance that you will not spot the killer.
The mystery starts with the murder or perhaps suicide of the secretary of the politician involved in the corruption scandal, then shifts to a traditional drama surrounding machinations within a wealthy rural family whose patriarch is lying on his death bed. As the death toll rises we wonder how the two stories fit together. The answer (SPOILERS, I suppose) is that they don't; and the original mystery is basically dropped in place of another one.
My memory of the few Uchida books that I've read is that they do occasionally have an interesting idea somewhere in them, although swamped by the lukewarm soup of platitudes that serves as fodder for mid evening television drama. In this case, anything promising in the story leads only to disappointment. On their way to their holiday in Kyūshū, the Izumis are suddenly summoned by the train conductor to come and look after their child. When they find the conductor, he is with an unknown boy, six years old, who has a letter asking them to accompany him to Yufuin (an peaceful onsen town in Ōita). Who is the boy and why has his mother taken such a strange method to send him to this distant town? The answers prove to be both implausible and uninteresting.
The mysteries of the actual murders are poorly supplied with clues; but there is no chance that you will not spot the killer.
Sunday, 27 August 2017
Stakeout
張込み (Harikomi, Stakeout, 1965) is a collection of short stories by MATSUMOTO Seichou (松本清張).
In the title story, a detective on the team hunting for a man on the run after a robbery gone wrong turns to murder thinks that the best lead is the woman he once loved, now living a quiet, married existence in far away Kyushu.
In 顔 (kao, "Face"), a stage actor in a minor theatrical group is starting to get small parts in films. When the chance of a larger role comes, his future looks promising. The only problem is that he knows that there is an eyewitness who can connect him to a murder several years back. If he becomes more famous, it is only a matter of time before the eyewitness sees him in a film and can identify him to the police. Before things get that far, he needs to get rid of the eyewitness. An excellent suspense story.
声 (koe, "Voice") is a counterpart to "Face". A telephone operator on a Tokyo newspaper makes a wrong connection in the middle of the night and gets insulted by the irritated person on the other end of the line. The next day she learns that the occupant of the house she had misdialled has been murdered and realises that she has heard the voice of his killer. This story divides into two parts, a suspense story and an alibi breaking story. Each is good in its own way (with some minor implausible elements in both), but they don't really seem to belong in the same short story.
The basic idea in 地方紙を買う女 (chihoushi o kau onna, "Woman buying a local paper") was already used as a minor plot element in "Face". A woman who needs to keep track of the news in a provincial town orders the local paper, claiming to be interested in the novel being serialised in it. The paper informs the novelist of this flattering news, and again when she cancels her subscription. The novelist, irritated by this insult, starts to wonder if she had some other reason to order the paper.
In 鬼畜 (kichiku, "Monster"), a skilled print setter works his way up to owning his own, moderately successful print works. He starts to use some of his spare money supporting a mistress, and eventually three children. When business gets worse he can no longer support his second family and the mistress ends up leaving the three children with him. Encouraged by his angry wife, he starts thinking that the children may not be his and his life would be much easier if they were gone. Matsumoto is sometimes taken as a standard bearer for a "social school" in Japanese crime fiction; and this could be taken as a good example of that. (If you click on the social pages of a Japanese newspaper, you'll find that much of what's reported under that rubric is crime.) The story reads like it originates in response to the reaction most readers of reporting of instances of horrifying cruelty have: 'How could anyone do something like that?' There's a 1978 film by NOMURA Yoshitarou, which I haven't seen.
一年半待て (ichinenhan mate, "Wait a year and a half") presents first a "social school" story of a woman who kills her abusive husband in defense of herself and her children, then turns this around in a conversation between a mysterious man and the campaigning journalist who championed her. Reconsidering the evidence the visitor shows the unwilling journalist that there must be more to the story than she thought.
In 投影 (touei, "Projection) a lazy journalist quits a major Tokyo newspaper and takes his severance to a seaside town in provincial Shikoku. As the money runs out, he first allows his cabaret hostess girlfriend to support him, then finally takes a job with a tiny scandal hunting independent paper run by a cranky invalid. Soon the reporter's dormant professionalism is reawakened, as he gets on the track of local corruption and then murder. This is an enjoyable story, with some ingenuity in the trick of the story; but as in "Voice" there is some mismatch between the realism of the motive and setting and the detective story unreality of the crime. In addition, the trick is distinctly implausible in any context, both physically (though this felt like something that a writer could make plausible with a few minor changes) and as a method someone might choose.
カーネアデスの舟板 (Carneades no funaita, "The Plank of Carneades") is a sarcastic little story about academics in postwar Japan. After writing nationalist history under the former regime, a young professor successfully tacks left to succeed in the world of textbook publishing and popularisation; but when changes in the committees that oversee textbooks makes a swing back to "great men" and national history desirable, his old professor, rehabilitated through his help, threatens to overtake him. The title is from an ancient thought experiment about whether it is justified after a shipwreck to push away a drowning man from a plank that can only support one person.
In the title story, a detective on the team hunting for a man on the run after a robbery gone wrong turns to murder thinks that the best lead is the woman he once loved, now living a quiet, married existence in far away Kyushu.
In 顔 (kao, "Face"), a stage actor in a minor theatrical group is starting to get small parts in films. When the chance of a larger role comes, his future looks promising. The only problem is that he knows that there is an eyewitness who can connect him to a murder several years back. If he becomes more famous, it is only a matter of time before the eyewitness sees him in a film and can identify him to the police. Before things get that far, he needs to get rid of the eyewitness. An excellent suspense story.
声 (koe, "Voice") is a counterpart to "Face". A telephone operator on a Tokyo newspaper makes a wrong connection in the middle of the night and gets insulted by the irritated person on the other end of the line. The next day she learns that the occupant of the house she had misdialled has been murdered and realises that she has heard the voice of his killer. This story divides into two parts, a suspense story and an alibi breaking story. Each is good in its own way (with some minor implausible elements in both), but they don't really seem to belong in the same short story.
The basic idea in 地方紙を買う女 (chihoushi o kau onna, "Woman buying a local paper") was already used as a minor plot element in "Face". A woman who needs to keep track of the news in a provincial town orders the local paper, claiming to be interested in the novel being serialised in it. The paper informs the novelist of this flattering news, and again when she cancels her subscription. The novelist, irritated by this insult, starts to wonder if she had some other reason to order the paper.
In 鬼畜 (kichiku, "Monster"), a skilled print setter works his way up to owning his own, moderately successful print works. He starts to use some of his spare money supporting a mistress, and eventually three children. When business gets worse he can no longer support his second family and the mistress ends up leaving the three children with him. Encouraged by his angry wife, he starts thinking that the children may not be his and his life would be much easier if they were gone. Matsumoto is sometimes taken as a standard bearer for a "social school" in Japanese crime fiction; and this could be taken as a good example of that. (If you click on the social pages of a Japanese newspaper, you'll find that much of what's reported under that rubric is crime.) The story reads like it originates in response to the reaction most readers of reporting of instances of horrifying cruelty have: 'How could anyone do something like that?' There's a 1978 film by NOMURA Yoshitarou, which I haven't seen.
一年半待て (ichinenhan mate, "Wait a year and a half") presents first a "social school" story of a woman who kills her abusive husband in defense of herself and her children, then turns this around in a conversation between a mysterious man and the campaigning journalist who championed her. Reconsidering the evidence the visitor shows the unwilling journalist that there must be more to the story than she thought.
In 投影 (touei, "Projection) a lazy journalist quits a major Tokyo newspaper and takes his severance to a seaside town in provincial Shikoku. As the money runs out, he first allows his cabaret hostess girlfriend to support him, then finally takes a job with a tiny scandal hunting independent paper run by a cranky invalid. Soon the reporter's dormant professionalism is reawakened, as he gets on the track of local corruption and then murder. This is an enjoyable story, with some ingenuity in the trick of the story; but as in "Voice" there is some mismatch between the realism of the motive and setting and the detective story unreality of the crime. In addition, the trick is distinctly implausible in any context, both physically (though this felt like something that a writer could make plausible with a few minor changes) and as a method someone might choose.
カーネアデスの舟板 (Carneades no funaita, "The Plank of Carneades") is a sarcastic little story about academics in postwar Japan. After writing nationalist history under the former regime, a young professor successfully tacks left to succeed in the world of textbook publishing and popularisation; but when changes in the committees that oversee textbooks makes a swing back to "great men" and national history desirable, his old professor, rehabilitated through his help, threatens to overtake him. The title is from an ancient thought experiment about whether it is justified after a shipwreck to push away a drowning man from a plank that can only support one person.
Sunday, 20 August 2017
Living and Dead
I reviewed The Book of Happiness by AWASAKA Tsumao (泡坂妻夫, 1933-2009) last year. That book was characterised by a bit of trickiness that readers were requested not to reveal, making a review a little difficult. Its sequel, 生者と死者 (seisha to shisha, Living and Dead, 1994) is also a very unusual construction; but in this case its unusual features are evident from the start. In fact there's a big warning label on the cover telling you how to read the book. Most books are made up of gatherings or quires (if I'm using the words right). The printers print large pages then fold them to make a set of folded pages, with one pair in the centre, and the others around them. Mostly printers use a machine to cut the outer edges; but it was common in the nineteenth century to leave the pages for the reader to cut. Even a hundred years later, if the topics you research are obscure enough, you might find yourself having to cut open the pages in a library book. A few publications still do this today; but this is probably the only mass market paperback in Japan that has the format. The reason is that the book is a kind of magic trick. If you read the pages that are open without cutting (a spread of two pages every sixteen pages), you read a short story. If you then cut open the pages, there's a full novel with a somewhat different story to it.The short story features a man called Chiaki and a manager Satomi. Chiaki has memory loss and apparently also psychic powers. The novel also features Chiaki and Satomi, and Chiaki again has memory loss and apparent psychic powers; but many things that meant one thing in the short story mean something quite different in the novel. In particular, Awasaka seems to go out of his way to divide up a word (represented by two kanji) over the page break between the open and the uncut pages. The word in the novel is then a quite different one to the one in the short story. And many other things take on a quite different meaning in the new context. Many of these are trivial, in themselves unimportant for the larger story. The idea seems to be that the reader will enjoy finding the changes in meaning from what they read the first time.
It's certainly an enjoyable game. How successful are the stories? I think only moderately. The short story as a narrative works like many modern short stories as a sequence of unconnected and inconclusive scenes, from which readers construct their own interpretation; but knowing that the story was a product of a trick construction, the interpretative effort is too much to ask. Some of the joins are a little clumsy too, syntactically correct, but looking like something no-one would ever write.
The short story is not a mystery, and the series detective Yogi Ganjī and his associates only appear once one has cut the pages to read the novel. That is a mystery, with two deaths in it; but it is not clear exactly what we are investigating. The same is true in The Book of Happiness; but there the eventual solution adds up to more than we had been expecting. Here the solution concerns what might be considered the more trivial parts of the narrative, and many elements are narrated at the end rather than deduced. It does hold some surprises though; and as part of Awasaka's craftmanship, several of the differences between short story and novel also have thematic relevance to the ending.
The title, incidentally, refers to a performance by spiritualists or stage magicians, in which after an audience member wrote down several names of living people and one dead person (known only to them), the performer would find among the various folded pieces of paper the one referring to the dead person.
Sunday, 25 June 2017
Coffin of Flowers
YAMAMURA Misa (山村美紗, 1934-1996) was very popular in her day, but has probably faded of late. The last time I looked, few if any of her books were in print; on the other hand they were still the staple of Japanese television mysteries the last couple of times I visited. The television mysteries looked a bit boring, cosy mysteries which succeed by catering to Japanese television's love of sightseeing (mostly within Japan). 花の棺 (hana no histugi, Coffin of Flowers, 1975) certainly fits that pattern, with a series of murders and other crimes taking places in different famous parts of the ancient captial Kyoto. The difference to the world of cosy mystery in England and America is that the mystery still keeps up the golden age enthusiasm for tricks, particulary locked room mysteries and impossible crimes.
The book is the first in the "Catherine" series. Catherine, the daughter of the American Vice President, has recently graduated from university and is visiting Japan for a year, keen to study Japanese flower arranging. The three main schools of flower arranging are each keen to win a pupil who could increase their reputation in Japan and beyond; but Catherine hopes that a woman whose exhibition she had seen in New York will agree to teach her. The woman is a member of the largest of the three schools, but had taken a critical attitude to its leader. Unfortunately nobody seems to know where she is at the moment. When she finally does turn up, it is as a dead body, poisoned near one of Kyoto's temples.
This is one of a series of murders and lesser crimes taking place at regular intervals in the ancient grid pattern of Kyoto's streets. Soon there is another poisoning, this one in a locked Japanese tea house surrounded by untrodden snow. An element of another murder is the disappearance of a car and caravan from a campsite with only one, watched, exit. I wasn't that keen on either of these tricks. The locked room has as boring a solution as you can imagine, and the disappearing caravan feels like an idea for a short story shoehorned into a longer mystery where it doesn't belong.
The biggest surprise about the book is how small a role Catherine plays. For most of the story, the actual investigation is done by the police, who are not incompetent. Catherine appears in some chapters as a witness; but the point of view character here is a young political functionary appointed by his foreign minister uncle to escort Catherine. This looks like the setup for a romance, which is certainly implied by the end of the book; but for most of the book we see very little of Catherine and that mostly without any insight into her character, except as a wealthy and influential American, who knows that people are going to let her do what she wants.
I'm not sure how I rate the book. It reads easily. It has a lot of ingenuity. But the different tricks are neither well developed nor properly integrated into the larger mystery.
The book is the first in the "Catherine" series. Catherine, the daughter of the American Vice President, has recently graduated from university and is visiting Japan for a year, keen to study Japanese flower arranging. The three main schools of flower arranging are each keen to win a pupil who could increase their reputation in Japan and beyond; but Catherine hopes that a woman whose exhibition she had seen in New York will agree to teach her. The woman is a member of the largest of the three schools, but had taken a critical attitude to its leader. Unfortunately nobody seems to know where she is at the moment. When she finally does turn up, it is as a dead body, poisoned near one of Kyoto's temples.
This is one of a series of murders and lesser crimes taking place at regular intervals in the ancient grid pattern of Kyoto's streets. Soon there is another poisoning, this one in a locked Japanese tea house surrounded by untrodden snow. An element of another murder is the disappearance of a car and caravan from a campsite with only one, watched, exit. I wasn't that keen on either of these tricks. The locked room has as boring a solution as you can imagine, and the disappearing caravan feels like an idea for a short story shoehorned into a longer mystery where it doesn't belong.
The biggest surprise about the book is how small a role Catherine plays. For most of the story, the actual investigation is done by the police, who are not incompetent. Catherine appears in some chapters as a witness; but the point of view character here is a young political functionary appointed by his foreign minister uncle to escort Catherine. This looks like the setup for a romance, which is certainly implied by the end of the book; but for most of the book we see very little of Catherine and that mostly without any insight into her character, except as a wealthy and influential American, who knows that people are going to let her do what she wants.
I'm not sure how I rate the book. It reads easily. It has a lot of ingenuity. But the different tricks are neither well developed nor properly integrated into the larger mystery.
Sunday, 26 February 2017
Meiji Guillotine
I generally don't use the dictionary very much when I'm reading. In a normal modern text I can generally understand almost all of the words on a page; and, as when reading English, I guess the ones I don't know unless I really have no idea. Some books, though, are more of a challenge. When I read The Panic of A Tomoichirou some months ago, the large amount of background knowledge and unfamiliar vocabulary connected to the end of the rule of the shogun in the mid nineteenth century made for a not very enjoyable reading experience for someone with my level of Japanese. The same problem comes up in the book reviewed here, 明治断頭台 (Meiji dantoudai, Meiji Guillotine, 1979) by 山田 風太郎 (YAMADA Fuutarou, 1922-2001), set only a few years later, on the other side of the revolution which replaced the shogun with the until then more or less ceremonial emperor. The short stories in this collection are a series of murder cases investigated by the newly established police force in Tokyo.Short story collections have two types. Some are simply the book form publication of diverse stories, most of which have been published before in other outlets, united at most by having the same series detective. Others are a bit more like a concept album: they have a common theme and planned developments that span the whole volume. (Dorothy L. Sayers' Hangman's Holiday is an example of the former type, Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime for the latter.) The latter is found occasionally in the west, but seems to be very common in Japan. This book is certainly an example of the form. A mystery is solved in each chapter; but there is also an overarching story. That too added to the reading difficulty, as much of the narration at any point is not really relevant to the case in hand, sometimes because it is part of the larger story, sometimes because it is historical colour. There too a better knowledge of Japanese history would have been useful, so that I could understand whether something was being referenced for historical interest or because it was part of the story. Typically the stories take a long time to get to the actual puzzle part of the mystery. The crime often happens about three quarters of the way through the story.
Strictly speaking none of the stories are impossible crimes; but the stories are a little remiscent of John Dickson Carr. There are a lot of mechanical tricks, often using items specific to the setting, sometimes with a pleasing ingenuity, though never very plausibly. The police captain detective has returned from a visit to France, accompanied by a beautiful blonde woman, his landlord's daughter. His landlord's family had been the hereditary executioners in Paris (a very Carrian touch); and the guillotine features heavily in several of the stories. The solution to each mystery is presented by the French girlfriend, who dressed as a miko, acts as a medium to let the victims tell their story. This has the disadvantage that we never get actual reasoning for choosing a particular solution.
Saturday, 11 February 2017
Ash Woman
灰の女 (hai no onna, Ash Woman, 1970) is a detective story by TAKAGI Akimitsu (高木 彬光) featuring his series detective, prosecutor KIRISHIMA Saburou (霧島三郎). I reviewed a collection which included one short story featuring Kirishima last year, Return of the Detectives ( 帰ってきた探偵たち, 1992). As with the stories in that collection, the public prosecutor is not quite an armchair detective, but still only involved at intervals in the investigation, most of which is of course carried out by the police. The narrative in this story switches back and forth between one of the suspects in the case (a suspect to the police, that is, not to us) and the investigators (either the police or Kirishima or both together).
SHIGA Sadahiko (志賀貞彦) is planning to leave his job as secretary for shady business owner IWAMOTO Gisuke (岩本義介) and run off with WAKISAKA Noriko (脇坂則子) the wife of the manager of a larger business, for which Iwamoto's company is actually a "tunnel" firm, a secret conduit for dealings they do not want on their own books. But the day after Sadahiko's resignation, Iwamoto is murdered. Noriko is a central witness in the case. She and her cousin had been sitting in the window of a café across from Iwamoto's office when the cousin thought he saw an attack through the window, and the two of them later discover the body. Noriko hides the fact that she had also seen her lover Sadahiko hurrying out of the building shortly after her cousin saw the fight.
Sadahiko however assures her that he has everything in hand and offers a convincing alibi to the police. He had been lured to the office by a false telephone call and had only entered the main workspace, not Iwamoto's private office; and there were witnesses outside to see that that was true. Still, the inspector on the case cannot help suspecting Sadahiko's immense confidence. Could the ash and wire remains found outside one of the office windows be a clue to some kind of trick? Noriko meanwhile, separated from her lover, is filled with panic about the crime and fear that Sadahiko may be the killer, especially when another murder follows.
I added the "locked room mystery" tag to this post, because Takagi treats the first murder as a locked room mystery. In many Japanese locked room mysteries, the holes are so large that they hardly deserve the name. In this case, the locked (or observed) room aspect only comes into play if you find plausible the police's assumption that it would be odd for a murderer to wait in a room until the people who are in the corridor outside have gone away before making his escape.
There are a couple of other implausible elements to the story, but on the whole it is well constructed and clued, with some ingenious elements. The main problem is that the actual killer is far too obvious. The detectives employ Ellery Queen level subtelty of reasoning, while ignoring the plain as day reasons why one suspect is almost certainly the criminal.
SHIGA Sadahiko (志賀貞彦) is planning to leave his job as secretary for shady business owner IWAMOTO Gisuke (岩本義介) and run off with WAKISAKA Noriko (脇坂則子) the wife of the manager of a larger business, for which Iwamoto's company is actually a "tunnel" firm, a secret conduit for dealings they do not want on their own books. But the day after Sadahiko's resignation, Iwamoto is murdered. Noriko is a central witness in the case. She and her cousin had been sitting in the window of a café across from Iwamoto's office when the cousin thought he saw an attack through the window, and the two of them later discover the body. Noriko hides the fact that she had also seen her lover Sadahiko hurrying out of the building shortly after her cousin saw the fight.
Sadahiko however assures her that he has everything in hand and offers a convincing alibi to the police. He had been lured to the office by a false telephone call and had only entered the main workspace, not Iwamoto's private office; and there were witnesses outside to see that that was true. Still, the inspector on the case cannot help suspecting Sadahiko's immense confidence. Could the ash and wire remains found outside one of the office windows be a clue to some kind of trick? Noriko meanwhile, separated from her lover, is filled with panic about the crime and fear that Sadahiko may be the killer, especially when another murder follows.
I added the "locked room mystery" tag to this post, because Takagi treats the first murder as a locked room mystery. In many Japanese locked room mysteries, the holes are so large that they hardly deserve the name. In this case, the locked (or observed) room aspect only comes into play if you find plausible the police's assumption that it would be odd for a murderer to wait in a room until the people who are in the corridor outside have gone away before making his escape.
There are a couple of other implausible elements to the story, but on the whole it is well constructed and clued, with some ingenious elements. The main problem is that the actual killer is far too obvious. The detectives employ Ellery Queen level subtelty of reasoning, while ignoring the plain as day reasons why one suspect is almost certainly the criminal.
Thursday, 26 January 2017
One More Red Nightmare
Before you read ふたたび赤い悪夢 (futatabi akai akumu, One More Red Nightmare, 1992) by NORIZUKI Rintarou (法月綸太郎), you need to decide whether you want to read the two earlier books in the series 雪密室 (yuki misshitsu, Snow Locked Room, 1989) and 頼子のために (Yoriko no tame ni, For Yoriko, 1990). Events and characters of both of these books are important background to this one; and Norizuki supplies readers with enough information to understand the story even if they haven't read those. That means that they get a good deal more information about the mysteries than they would ideally want before reading them. He doesn't go so far as to give away the whole mystery; but when I think of the trouble I go to avoid spoilers, I feel that authors could make a bit of an effort in that direction too. In this case I accept the inevitable and add the warning that this review, like the book it discusses, will show a little bit more than you might want about at least one of the previous books (but less than the author does).
Detective story author and amateur detective NORIZUKI Rintarou (the character with the same name as the author is an Ellery Queen homage that several Japanese writers have maintained) is suffering from the memories of his investigation in For Yoriko. He has lost any sense of purpose as a detective, and that crisis of confidence has also spread into his writing career, leading to a one year long writer's block. Trying to puzzle out a way forward he finds himself meditating on mid to late Ellery Queen novels that feature a similar mental trial, particularly Cat of Many Tails (1949).
He is partially shaken out of his self absorbed inaction by a call for help from young singing star, HATANAKA Yurina (畑中有里奈), looking for Rintarou's father, the police superintendant, who had promised to help her if she ever needed it in the first book, Snow Locked Room. Yurina has been attacked with a knife, apparently by an obsessive fan, in a store room of the radio station where she had been invited for an interview. Her memory is that she felt the knife stabbing her and fainted; yet when she came to she was covered in blood, but without a scratch. Meanwhile in a nearby park the attacker has been found stabbed in the stomach, although he was apparently unharmed when he left the radio station.
Accompanying Yurina's fear of her responsibility in the killing, there is a secret in her past which weighs on her: her mother had apparently murdered her baby brother and father, before committing suicide, when Yurina was a baby. So the investigation involves two mysteries, the stabbing of Yurina's attacker and the murder of her family in the distant past.
All in all this is an odd book. When I write that the investigation involves two mysteries, in fact the various mysteries also break down into smaller parts, which are solved bit by bit, sometimes by deduction, sometimes by revelation. Those puzzles which allow the reader to solve them are fair enough, but generally not very compelling; one trick where I was led quite astray was very effective (the real solution made more sense than the red herring but was still a surprise). But there are some odd problems of balance in the book. Rintarou's self doubt is far more the theme of the book than the actual mystery (much more so than in the related Ellery Queen books). The mystery however seems too unrealistic for such a novel. And the narrative sometimes slows almost to a halt: a monologue of many pages, which accompanies a guided tour through the radio broadcasting building, feels like it should have something relevant in it; so does a chapter long timeline of popstar marketing in Japan. It almost makes you suspect that some plot points were not quite fixed when the earlier chapters were written.
I could add quite a bit to the things that didn't quite seem to work in the book; but I didn't especially dislike it. You can read Ho-Ling's review of the book here, if you'd like a second opinion, though I didn't notice much that I'd disagree with.
Detective story author and amateur detective NORIZUKI Rintarou (the character with the same name as the author is an Ellery Queen homage that several Japanese writers have maintained) is suffering from the memories of his investigation in For Yoriko. He has lost any sense of purpose as a detective, and that crisis of confidence has also spread into his writing career, leading to a one year long writer's block. Trying to puzzle out a way forward he finds himself meditating on mid to late Ellery Queen novels that feature a similar mental trial, particularly Cat of Many Tails (1949).
He is partially shaken out of his self absorbed inaction by a call for help from young singing star, HATANAKA Yurina (畑中有里奈), looking for Rintarou's father, the police superintendant, who had promised to help her if she ever needed it in the first book, Snow Locked Room. Yurina has been attacked with a knife, apparently by an obsessive fan, in a store room of the radio station where she had been invited for an interview. Her memory is that she felt the knife stabbing her and fainted; yet when she came to she was covered in blood, but without a scratch. Meanwhile in a nearby park the attacker has been found stabbed in the stomach, although he was apparently unharmed when he left the radio station.
Accompanying Yurina's fear of her responsibility in the killing, there is a secret in her past which weighs on her: her mother had apparently murdered her baby brother and father, before committing suicide, when Yurina was a baby. So the investigation involves two mysteries, the stabbing of Yurina's attacker and the murder of her family in the distant past.
All in all this is an odd book. When I write that the investigation involves two mysteries, in fact the various mysteries also break down into smaller parts, which are solved bit by bit, sometimes by deduction, sometimes by revelation. Those puzzles which allow the reader to solve them are fair enough, but generally not very compelling; one trick where I was led quite astray was very effective (the real solution made more sense than the red herring but was still a surprise). But there are some odd problems of balance in the book. Rintarou's self doubt is far more the theme of the book than the actual mystery (much more so than in the related Ellery Queen books). The mystery however seems too unrealistic for such a novel. And the narrative sometimes slows almost to a halt: a monologue of many pages, which accompanies a guided tour through the radio broadcasting building, feels like it should have something relevant in it; so does a chapter long timeline of popstar marketing in Japan. It almost makes you suspect that some plot points were not quite fixed when the earlier chapters were written.
I could add quite a bit to the things that didn't quite seem to work in the book; but I didn't especially dislike it. You can read Ho-Ling's review of the book here, if you'd like a second opinion, though I didn't notice much that I'd disagree with.
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