Overheard

傍聞き (kataegiki, Overheard, 2008) is a collection of four long short stories by 長岡弘樹 (NAGAOKA Hiroki, born 1969). It won the short story award from the Mystery Writers of Japan in 2008; and the title story has been translated into English and published as "Heard at one remove" in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, February 2010. These are not conventional mysteries with a clearly defined crime to be solved by the reader. In some ways they are like the Japanese "puzzles of everyday life" genre, but there are various ways in which that description would be misleading. Firstly the focus in the stories is on the emergency services and the justice system. Secondly there is no well defined puzzle in many of the stories: we see things that we can't understand, but there are so many elements needing explanation that there is no central puzzle evident as we read the story. Thirdly there is a much larger suspense element in these stories than in most puzzles of everyday life. This last point in particular, I think, makes the stories surprisingly effective.

In the first, 迷走 (meisou, "Wild run", 2008), an ambulance crew is trying to deliver a stabbing victim to a hospital. The town's hospitals are overloaded and after contacting several and finding that none are at that moment ready, the team has to gamble on which they should head for. Adding to the tension of the situtation, the victim is known to two of the team. He is the prosecutor who decided not to prosecute a hit and run driver who ran over the wife of one of the team and daughter of the team leader. As they approach the hospital, the team leader starts giving unexpected orders.

In 傍聞き (kataegiki, "Overheard", 2008) a police detective is on bad terms with her teenage daughter, who communicates only through postcards sent through the mail (although they live in the same apartment). The detective normally works theft cases, but is currently seconded to the hunt for a knife wielding attacker, which keeps her out every evening to the annoyance of her daughter. But she also has another reason to worry. The suspect taken in for questioning about the theft from a neighbour's apartment is known to the detective. He is a recently released prisoner, who had stalked and then attacked his ex wife; and she had been on the team that arrested him. Now, apparently, he is living with other homeless people by the local railway station. Knowing his vengeful disposition she worries that perhaps his reason for being in her neighbourhood was to target her. This fear is reinforced after the arrested man asks to speak with her, and emphasises that, since he is only being held on suspicion, he will soon be out. 

899 ("899", 2007) is more or less an impossible crime story. Firefighters clearing a house which has started to catch fire from its neighbour know that there is a baby in one of the rooms. They hear the baby's voice as they go down the corridor, but when they look in the room there is only an empty cot. With only minutes to go, a panicked search through the other rooms starts.

In 迷い箱 (mayoibako, "Can't Decide Box", 2007) a woman who manages a halfway house for recently discharged criminals feels that her work is worthless and is planning to resign. One last case concerns her, finding work for a man whose drunkenness led to the death of a small girl. She finds a place for him at a local factory, but worries that he may consider suicide as the anniversary of the girl's death approaches.

Not everything works equally well in the stories, but this is a collection that I can enthusiastically recommend. Although exactly what the mystery element is only emerges towards the end, and although the stories do not read like mystery stories, they are carefully and cunningly plotted. The life threatening situations and the lack of a clear puzzle has the reader following the events with alarm and confusion, speculating not just about what is going on, but also about what direction the story is going to take.

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).

Eighteenth Summer

十八の夏 (Juuhachi no natsu, Eighteenth Summer, 2002) by　光原百合 (MITSUHARA Yuri, born 1964) is a hard book to classify. The title story won the Mystery Writers of Japan award in 2002 and a translation by Beth Carey was published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in December 2004; but it is certainly not a conventional mystery. Some of the stories feature crimes, including murder; but all of them are also being pulled the whole time towards the romantic or cosily sentimental. In the best of the stories, this creates a tension in the reader, as they try to work out just how sinister the story is (with the possibility that the answer is "not sinister at all, actually").

The title story is the best example of what I mean. The main character is a school leaver studying to retake his university entrance exams (a common occurrence in Japan). He strikes up acquaintance with a young woman he has seen sketching by the river where he jogs, a freelance illustrator. When he moves into the apartment block where she lives, this starts to look like a story of destructive romantic obsession. Or should we be more interested in the little mysteries of the young woman, in particular the four plant pots with seedlings she has called 'Father', 'Mother', 'Miss' and 'Master'? At the same time the scenes of the teenager's home life feel more like they belong in a cosy family story.

The shorter middle stories, ささやかな奇跡　(sasayakana kiseki "A modest miracle") and 兄貴の純情 (aniki no junjou, "My older brother's pure love") are lighter and more like the genre "puzzles of everyday life" popular in Japan. The difference is that it is not obvious to us until the end where the mystery in the story is. This is particularly true of 兄貴の純, the most lightweight story in the collection, which ingeniously confuses us with its narrator's attitude. In his eyes he is clearly narrating a mystery; but it is one that the reader cannot see.

The final story イノセント・デイズ (inosento deizu, "Innocent Days") is the most conventional in the collection. A teacher at a supplementary school meets a former student and finds that the tragedy that had marked her life when he knew her has continued into adulthood. She and her stepbrother had lost a father and mother respectively before their stepparents' marriage. Then they too died in a tragic accident. Now, the teacher learns that the stepbrother has also died in a recent traffic accident. This is a horrible story of psychological cruelty and revenge; but the narration is probably the least satisfactory of the collection. The story is told as a mystery whose elements are gradually revealed; but as readers we are only being shown the revelations for the most part, and have to put up with a lot of tedious and implausible exposition along the way.

Archie, The Armchair Detective

The classical detective story has always been an unusually genre conscious branch of literature. Even the more straight faced versions are likely to be a little like parody in their readiness to make knowing references to the conventions of the genre. Japanese detective stories are if anything more self conscious than English and American ones. 安楽椅子探偵アーチー (anraku isu tantei āchī, Archie, The Armchair Detective, 2003) by MATSUO Yumi (松尾由美) makes reference already in its title to a convention of classic detective stories, the detective who solves puzzles by intellect alone, without visiting the crime scene, using only the evidence brought to him by others. The name Archie in the title will remind readers of the most famous armchair detective series, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe books, in which Archie Goodwin is the sedentary Wolfe's more active assistant. The Archie in this book, however, is the armchair detective. More than that, he's an actual armchair, solving mysteries brought to him by his eleven year old owner, Mamoru (衛).

Mamoru bought the old armchair with the birthday money given him to buy a computer console, after noticing that the sound of breathing seemed to be coming from it. Having found that Archie is actually sentient, Mamoru mostly sits in a different chair facing him and discusses problems with him. He gives him the name Archie, since he cannot very well address him as "Chair", using the first two syllables of the English word "armchair" (you may be thinking that there's no "chi" in "chair": there is, if you write it in Japanese letters).

The mysteries that Archie solves generally belong to the genre known as 日常の謎, puzzles of everyday life, minor mysteries involving no major crime. There are four more or less independent stories, with some development carried over from one to the other. In the first, the bag that a fellow schoolboy had been making in crafts is vandalised, cut in half, so that the head of the octopus bodied alien he had painted on it is missing. In addition two teachers had been in the room that any vandal would have to pass through, and had seen nothing. Mamoru's friend, NOYAMA Fusa (野山芙紗), a detective story enthusiast, indentifies the case as a "locked room" mystery and a "headless corpse" problem. Detective story fans are often characters in Japanese detective stories, a consequence of the genre consciousness I mentioned earlier. The second story involves another impossible theft, the theft of a flower from the corsage of a young violinist. The third has Mamoru and Fusa investigating what looks like a secret message, chalk underlining of certain letters on a notice in the foreign graveyard in Yokohama, where the stories are set. The fourth breaks out of the pattern with a mystery rooted in Archie's past in wartime Shanghai. This adds elements of historical fiction and science fiction spy story, which is perhaps a bit much for a book that was already combining detective story and fantasy.

Magic Flight

KANOU Tomoko (加納朋子, born 1966) is a writer of 日常の謎 (nichijou no nazo, puzzles of everyday life), a genre of detective stories, where the mysteries are minor events, with no serious crime, often with no crime at all. 魔法飛行 (Mahou hikou, Magic Flight, 1993) is the sequel to ななつのこ (Nanatsu no ko, Seven Children, 1992), which I read some years ago. I didn't feel like rereading it, so I can't write a proper review. The basic set up is of a young college student IRIE Komako, retelling a mystery from a children's book that she's a fan of, her fan letter to the author, which happens to mention some minor mystery she has come across in real life, the author's reply, solving the mystery. So we get two sets of short story mysteries, one (the stories from the book Komako has read) involving a small farmer's young child and his friend, a mysterious girl who solves the puzzles he brings her, the other from the external narrator Komako, whose puzzles are solved by the author she writes to. For a little more detail, you can read Ho-Ling's discussion here. I don't share the view that mysteries need a murder; but I would agree that the stories feel a little too diluted for a mystery fan. They may have had too little ambition as mysteries; but as a narrative exercise, with different kinds of narration, paired related mysteries, and an overarching larger mystery, they certainly deserve admiration. 

The narrator's enthusiastic retelling of the stories from the book within the book was a slight hurdle for me. In real life, we tolerate that kind of thing from good friends; but they generally don't succeed in communicating the qualities of the original in the slightest. If you've ever listened to an acquaintance performing the parts of a classic Monty Python sketch, backtracking here and there, because they've forgotten a favourite bit, you'll know how tedious this can be. Komako's internal narration is not that bad, and of course one feels sympathy for a fan's enthusiasm; but it still felt as though I was looking at the stories of the internal narrative through clouded glass.

The way that the story in ななつのこ develops makes a continuation of this format impossible; and I was wondering where a sequel could go. In 魔法飛行, there are only four stories, each featuring a single mystery. If I remember there were more mysteries in the first book (7 times 2?). So the mysteries here are much longer than those. Komako is now writing to 瀬尾 (SEO, I think: the book doesn't provide furigana for the name), a young man she met in the first book; and sending him accounts of her daily life, written up as stories, but unfinished. Seo comments on the writing and also solves a puzzle in the stories. But then, after each story and Seo's solution of each mystery, there follows what seems to be a letter to Komako from a reader of Komako's stories, written as if to the fictional character Komako. The writer of these letters describes them as letters from a different dimension, and compares him or herself to children writing a letter to Santa Claus or to people who write to Sherlock Holmes. This is an interesting idea and certainly sets the reader wondering where it is heading. These letters from nowhere are the larger mystery of the book, growing darker as the stories progress, in contrast to the generally light tone of Komako's narrative.

The stories also show a greater interest in drama or in classical detective story elements like inexplicable situations than most of those in the first book. The puzzle of the first story is very minor (why would a girl enter different false names in the college lecture attendance register?) and serves more to introduce the major characters and their lives; but the following feature such things as an attempt to save a life, a ghost story of a painting on a bridge of a boy who died in an accident there turning into a painting of a skeleton, and an apparent case of communication by telepathy.

Flying Horse

I've read only a few books in the genre "puzzles of everyday life" (日常の謎), where the mysteries are not major crimes, but the kind of minor puzzles that might happen anywhere. It's a genre that I'd like to like more than I do, since I've always thought that the detective story's emphasis on murder is unnecessary and misses out on a lot of possibilities. Somehow the examples I've read so far don't rise above agreeable, pleasant, not very compelling reading. There always seems to be a slight lack of focus. The problem perhaps is that there's a limit to the amount of energy someone can put into investigating an oddity that they happen to come across. If they have too much curiosity about other people's lives for no good reason, readers may be disturbed rather than entertained. Everyday mysteries with a workplace setting can get around that; but the mystery I'm discussing here, 空飛ぶ馬 (Soratobu uma, Flying Horse, 1989) has characters whose only motivation is curiosity, and, since they aren't pathologically nosy, there is (more or less) no actual investigation, only deduction from the known facts.

The book is the first collection of detective stories by 北村薫 (KITAMURA Kaoru, born 1949), a major figure in the genre. The narrator is a young literature student in her first year at university. The detective is a rakugo teller, SHUNOUTEI Enshi (春桜亭円紫), a former student of one of the narrator's teachers at university. Rakugo is a kind of comic narrative, with a set of traditional stories, where the particular character comes from the way the rakugo artist tells them. Each of the short stories also contains an account of one of Enshi's performances and the story he tells in it. In fact, there are a lot of cultural references: the narrator is an enthusiast for books and rakugo, and deductions may depend, for instance, on the difference between Shakespeare's and Verdi's Macbeth. 

The first story "The Soul of Oribe" looks for the explanation of apparently supernatural knowledge. An old professor had as a small child repeatedly dreamt of a man who had committed seppuku. One day his rich collector uncle clears out his storehouse and brings out a portrait of the inventor of Oribe pottery, the man from his dream. The boy shocks his uncle by asking if this man committed seppuku: he had had no opportunity to see the picture locked away for years in the storehouse.　The second, "Sugar Battle", looks for the explanation for why three women at a teashop would apparently compete to put as much sugar as possible into their drinks. The third story follows the narrator and two friends on an outing in north east Japan: why would someone steal the worthless seatcovers on their car? The fourth, "Red Riding Hood", looks at why a little girl in red would always be seen at the same time alone in a playground. In the fifth, "Flying Horse", a shopkeeper donates the broken horse ride that he used to have outside his shop to a local kindergarten, setting it in concrete in the grounds there. But that night a woman believes it had disappeared, although when she checked the next day, it was there as if nothing had happened.

Anyone expecting a classical mystery is likely to be disappointed here. The stories spend much more time on exploring the narrator's daily life and thoughts about the future than on the mystery. This is most notable in the third story, where aspects of the mystery are prepared early in the story, but the actual mystery only appears in the last few of its seventy odd pages. The solutions are rarely criminal, but they sometimes reflect less happy sides of life; and this in turn becomes material for the young narrator's character development. I must admit that, although I didn't dislike the narrator, her aimlessness was both odd to me and slightly irritating. I don't remember undergraduates in my time being so lacking in interest in where they were going. They may have had a lot of competing ideas; but having none seems very strange to me. The book is the first in a series of six, which follow the character's development (the covers of the sequel show the same figure with slight changes in dress and hairstyle). So perhaps she gets more purpose as it goes along.

Me and the Cat and the Night of the Full Moon

ぼくと猫と満月の夜　(Boku to neko to mangetsu no yoru, Me and the Cat and the Night of the Full Moon, 2008) is a fantasy juvenile detective story by MATSUO Yumi (松尾由美). It was first published as フリッツと満月の夜 (Fritz to mangetsu no yoru, Fritz and the Night of the Full Moon). My edition is a revision of this, which adds a short story with some of the characters of the original novel, 小早川ミツルと消しゴムの謎 (Kobayakawa mitsuru to keshigomi no nazo, "Mitsuru Kobayakawa and the Puzzle of the Erasers").

The narrator Kazuya is boy in the fifth year of primary school (which would make him about eleven). His father, a writer, brings him to the quiet seaside town where the story is set, for  a few weeks in the summer holidays, while he finishes work on the book. Kazuya is an unremarkable boy. His only special ability is running. He seems intelligent, but not especially so. His narration is marked by a tendency to see the other (mostly negative) side of anything he talks about, often noted in little parentheses and afterthoughts. He soon becomes friends with the son of a nearby café owner, Mitsuru, an enthusiastic mystery reader.

Mitsuru is investigating a little local mystery on his own. Some years back a rich and eccentric woman had taken her whole fortune out of the bank. Although she had had no contact with anyone in the days between that and her (natural) death, the money had disappeared. Mitsuru has heard some clues to this fortune and wants to find it, to prevent it falling into the hands of the mayor, who thinks he has a right to it and wants to cut away the wooded hill above the town to build a golf course.

Mitsuru and Kazuya's investigation is helped and hindered by a thief with a hopeless sense of direction, the mayor's bullying grandson, and a strangely intelligent cat with a gold earring in one ear. The cat, Fritz of the original title, provides the fantasy element of the story. But fantasy does not dominate the narrative; and for the most part the setting is a more or less realistic description of a small seaside town.

The book is probably suitable for children around the age of the main characters, although my edition was not generously provided with furigana in the way that children's books generally are. There is no actual violence, although it is sometimes threatened. The first half of the book felt a little underpowered. The various mysteries were all small affairs, and I couldn't see enough of any of them to really feel involved. But towards the middle, the action and the progress of the investigation picks up.

The short story is in the tradition of "puzzles of everyday life". Mitsuru is pressured into investigating why a fellow schoolboy's older sister is secretly buying erasers. Can she be planning to rub out the sketches of her rival in art class? If not, what can she be planning?

Delivery Red Riding Hood

People who like books probably like bookshops too, if only because they have lots of books in them, though I don't suppose anyone feels much affection for the big chain stores whose staff have no idea of the product they're selling. When I visited Japan a couple of years ago, I found the bookshops a little trying. I had brought with me a list of books I wanted to buy; and expected to be able to find them by looking at the alphabetic position of the author on the shelves, probably sorted by genre, as in a German or English shop. That is, in an English bookshop, Agatha Christie will either be under 'Crime Fiction', if the shop has a section for it, or under 'Fiction'. In Japanese shops, the books are arranged by publisher. So if you don't know the publisher (and when I made my list, I hadn't thought to note that down), you can't find the book. I suspect that a reason for this is that Japanese names are problematic even for Japanese readers, and each publisher has a code on the spine with the first letter of the author surname plus a number showing in what order it should go on the shelves. Anyway, if you're making your first trip to Japan and planning to buy Japanese books, take my advice and make a note of the publisher too.

This kind of arrangement makes browsing a bit difficult. For writers to have a chance of attracting the attention of readers just looking at the shelves, it must be much more important than in Europe to have the right publisher. In the afterword to 配達 あかずきん (Haitatsu akazukin, Delivery Red Riding Hood, 2006) by 大崎梢 (OOSAKI Kozue), the editor 戸川 安宣 (TOGAWA Yasunobu) writes that the genre 新本格 (shinhonkaku, "new orthodox detective stories") is particularly associated with Kodansha, while Tokyo Sougensha is the leader in　日常の謎　(Nichijou no nazo, "puzzles of everyday life"). As the name suggests, these are mysteries involving either a fairly minor crime or no crime at all. The Japanese seem to be the first to give the genre a name; but the thing itself has been around for a while. If you count Kleist's Der zerbrochne Krug (1808), you could say that it's older than the detective story. (The play could also be called the first courtroom drama mystery and the first appearance of the "least likely culprit", at least formally.) I remember someone mentioning Asimov's "Black Widowers" stories in this context; they are a good example of the kind of minor or non criminal puzzle characteristic of the form. It's sometimes said that the Golden Age of detective stories marked a concentration on only murder, unlike the Sherlock Holmes stories and other works of the period, which had included a variety of crimes and even mysteries without a crime. This is perhaps more a move to novels away from short stories. The short stories that Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie wrote also feature several crime free mysteries.

配達 あかずきん is a collection of five short stories set in what sounds like a mid sized bookshop in the shopping centre attached to a station. The main characters are full time shop assistant 杏子　(Kyouko), and part timer 多絵 (Tae). Kyouko is an industrious and capable bookseller in her mid twenties, Tae is a few years younger, a law student. They do have surnames, I think; but they are hardly ever used. Mostly they are just Kyouko and Tae, or in conversation Kyouko-san and Tae-chan (because of status, I suppose). Kyouko is always our point of view in the stories, Tae is the detective. The 'cases' generally start as non criminal problems; but a couple of stories in the collection do involve actual crimes, even one quite serious crime. For the most part, though, they take an aspect of bookshop life and use it as a little mystery. In the first story, a customer brings a friend's incomprehensible book order. Finding what he was asking for becomes an exercise in code breaking. In the second, a woman is looking for her mother, who went missing after hearing some children discussing the Genji Monogatari manga in the bookshop. In the third, the magazine the shop delivers to a nearby hairdresser has had an insulting stolen photograph of a customer inserted in it. In the fourth a women is looking for the shop assistant who advised her mother with suggestions for books for her when she was in hospital; but no-one fitting the description works at the shop. In the last, the display for a popular shounen manga is vandalised, perhaps in connexion with accusations on the internet that the work was plagiarised from an earlier doujinshi.

I like the idea of mysteries without a major crime; and I'll certainly read more in the genre. The cases here didn't include any compellingly brilliant deductions; but they are recognisably still mysteries. The emphasis is on a depiction of life behind the scenes of a bookshop. The stories are slightly humorous, slightly sentimental.