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.
Showing posts with label travel mystery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label travel mystery. Show all posts
Saturday, 30 September 2017
Saturday, 22 April 2017
Arisugawa Alice's Honkaku Mystery Library
This is half a review. The book is an anthology of traditional detective stories edited by Japanese detective story writer ARISUGAWA Arisu (or Alice), 有栖川有の本格ミステリー・ライブラリー (Arisugawa Arisu no honkaku misuterī raiburarī , Alice Arisugawa's traditional mystery library, 2001). Four of the ten stories are translated from English. I don't think I've read any of them; and I'd rather read them in English if I get a chance. I don't imagine anyone is going to specially seek out this out of print anthology; but for what it's worth the translated stories are Robert Arthur, "The Fifty first Sealed Room", W. Haidenfeld, "The Unpleasantness at the Stooges Club", Bill Pronzini, "The Arrowmont Prison Riddle" and John Sladek, "By Unknown Hand".
First "Buried Malice" ("もれた悪意 umoreta akui, 1990) by 巽昌章 (TATSUMI Masaaki, born 1957). A successful businessman looks to find the lost son of an early patron, probably adopted by a local family. When two different claimants appear, a lazy detective story writer is engaged to identify the impostor. Then the midwife from the district called to decide is murdered, and the writer has a more serious problem to solve. This is an effective mystery in a light style, often flippant and with frequent jokes about the genre.
"Car Chase"( 逃げる車, nigeru kuruma, 1979) 白峰良介 (SHIRAMINE Ryousuke, born 1955) starts with a midnight car chase, as police try to catch a speeding sports car on the motorway. It leaves the motorway and races through smaller streets, grazing lampposts on the way. Finally it stops outside a clinic. The police who get there moments later follow the driver in and find a bewildered doctor in the corridor. He tells them that a man had just rushed past him into the pharmacy; and there the police find a dead man, who has swallowed cyanide. An interesting opening, but the "spot the culprit" story suffers from being stripped down too far here.
"The Golden Dog" (金色犬, konjikiinu, 1968) つのだじろう (TSUNODA Jirou, born 1936). One of the oddities of the collection, an early manga detective story. Like many young Kindaichi stories it takes the Conan Doyle "Hound of the Baskervilles" model of a decorative and diversionary ghost story as a background to the mystery. The detective Johnny Hirota is another boy detective, but along with the simplified drawing style of the comic, there's nothing in his behaviour or his treatment by other characters to differentiate him from an adult.
The only translation from the anthology that I read is "Life and Death on the Line" (生死線上, seishisenjou, 1990), whose author is recorded in the anthology as 余心樂 (YU Xinle, the same Chinese characters as in the Chinese Wikipedia, which I can't read) but known to the Japanese Wikipedia as 余心楽 (YO Shinraku, born 1948) and to Switzerland (where one of his books is available in his own translation as Die Mordversionen) as Wen-huei Chu. The author is a Taiwanese resident in Switzerland, who studied tourism and related subjects there. It's perhaps fitting that this is a 'travel mystery' set on the Swiss railways, a long alibi story, with one obvious suspect. For some reason I had more trouble than I normally do focussing on the details (despite provision of a rail map of Switzerland and various timetables) and found more interest in the view of Switzerland from Taiwanese eyes, particularly describing the immediate aftermath of the brutal suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.
"Pillar of Water" (水の柱, mizu no hashira, 1980) by 上田廣 (UEDA Hiroshi, born 1905), another travel mystery, this one on Japanese railways. The narration is divided between chapters following the police investigation and letters from a train conductor, who ends up doing most of the police's work for them.
"The Killer is 'Me' ....." (「わたくし」は犯人....., 'watakushi' wa hannin, 1976) by 海渡祐 (KAITO Eisuke, born 1934) starts with the synopsis of a planned inverted mystery. The female "I" character narrates how they plan to kill their lover's evil wife, with a cunning alibi trick. In interspersed chapters, police are investigating the murder of a married woman, who seems to have died in very similar circumstances.
First "Buried Malice" ("もれた悪意 umoreta akui, 1990) by 巽昌章 (TATSUMI Masaaki, born 1957). A successful businessman looks to find the lost son of an early patron, probably adopted by a local family. When two different claimants appear, a lazy detective story writer is engaged to identify the impostor. Then the midwife from the district called to decide is murdered, and the writer has a more serious problem to solve. This is an effective mystery in a light style, often flippant and with frequent jokes about the genre.
"Car Chase"( 逃げる車, nigeru kuruma, 1979) 白峰良介 (SHIRAMINE Ryousuke, born 1955) starts with a midnight car chase, as police try to catch a speeding sports car on the motorway. It leaves the motorway and races through smaller streets, grazing lampposts on the way. Finally it stops outside a clinic. The police who get there moments later follow the driver in and find a bewildered doctor in the corridor. He tells them that a man had just rushed past him into the pharmacy; and there the police find a dead man, who has swallowed cyanide. An interesting opening, but the "spot the culprit" story suffers from being stripped down too far here.
"The Golden Dog" (金色犬, konjikiinu, 1968) つのだじろう (TSUNODA Jirou, born 1936). One of the oddities of the collection, an early manga detective story. Like many young Kindaichi stories it takes the Conan Doyle "Hound of the Baskervilles" model of a decorative and diversionary ghost story as a background to the mystery. The detective Johnny Hirota is another boy detective, but along with the simplified drawing style of the comic, there's nothing in his behaviour or his treatment by other characters to differentiate him from an adult.
The only translation from the anthology that I read is "Life and Death on the Line" (生死線上, seishisenjou, 1990), whose author is recorded in the anthology as 余心樂 (YU Xinle, the same Chinese characters as in the Chinese Wikipedia, which I can't read) but known to the Japanese Wikipedia as 余心楽 (YO Shinraku, born 1948) and to Switzerland (where one of his books is available in his own translation as Die Mordversionen) as Wen-huei Chu. The author is a Taiwanese resident in Switzerland, who studied tourism and related subjects there. It's perhaps fitting that this is a 'travel mystery' set on the Swiss railways, a long alibi story, with one obvious suspect. For some reason I had more trouble than I normally do focussing on the details (despite provision of a rail map of Switzerland and various timetables) and found more interest in the view of Switzerland from Taiwanese eyes, particularly describing the immediate aftermath of the brutal suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.
"Pillar of Water" (水の柱, mizu no hashira, 1980) by 上田廣 (UEDA Hiroshi, born 1905), another travel mystery, this one on Japanese railways. The narration is divided between chapters following the police investigation and letters from a train conductor, who ends up doing most of the police's work for them.
"The Killer is 'Me' ....." (「わたくし」は犯人....., 'watakushi' wa hannin, 1976) by 海渡祐 (KAITO Eisuke, born 1934) starts with the synopsis of a planned inverted mystery. The female "I" character narrates how they plan to kill their lover's evil wife, with a cunning alibi trick. In interspersed chapters, police are investigating the murder of a married woman, who seems to have died in very similar circumstances.
Sunday, 3 April 2016
The Tama Lakeside Murder Case
I don't think I've reviewed anything by UCHIDA Yasuo (内田康夫, born 1934) yet, though I read a couple of his books before I started this blog. He is best known for the Asami Mitsuhiko series, whose hero's job as a freelance travel writer allows Uchida to decorate the mysteries with descriptions of different parts of Japan in which the crimes are set. The title of this book 多摩湖畔殺人事件 (Tamakohan satsujinjiken, The Tama Lakeside Murder Case, 1993) would be absolutely typical of the series, many of which are a combination of place name and "murder case". This is a recognized genre in Japan, the "travel mystery", which gives the reader a combination of guidebook and mystery. The book is actually not in that series, but has strong travel mystery elements, although anyone looking for information on the title setting will be disappointed, as the body found there by a passing jogger ought not to have been there and the pursuit of how the victim got there leads to quite different parts of Japan, in particular to Arita in the north east.
The narration mostly follows the viewpoint of a police detective, KOUCHI (川内), a middle aged man, known to criminals as the demon policeman for his relentless pursuit. He had been too devoted to his work even when his wife and daughter were alive, but after both died early, his work is all he cares about. Currently he is resisting his doctor's advice to have the severe stomach pains he has been experiencing for months properly investigated.
Although the killer seems to have made some effort to make the victim hard to identify, they soon find that he is a Tokyo businessman. His daughter, a beautiful wheelchair bound invalid who resembles Kouchi's lost daughter, soon proves to be more of a detective than the police, making several key breakthroughs in the investigation.
Like many travel mysteries the plot follows a "patient policeman" model, gradually revealing the victim's movements before his disappearance and homing in on a suspect. There is, as often in these stories, only one real suspect, and the interest is in whether the police can break his alibi. Different parts of the puzzle get solved stage by stage until the final confrontation. None of it really got my interest, I'm afraid, neither the mystery nor the human interest story. Uchida is a competent enough writer that you can understand his reliable popularity; but both plot ideas and characters seem very conventional for the most part. And diversions from the conventional were generally unattractive rather than interesting.
The narration mostly follows the viewpoint of a police detective, KOUCHI (川内), a middle aged man, known to criminals as the demon policeman for his relentless pursuit. He had been too devoted to his work even when his wife and daughter were alive, but after both died early, his work is all he cares about. Currently he is resisting his doctor's advice to have the severe stomach pains he has been experiencing for months properly investigated.
Although the killer seems to have made some effort to make the victim hard to identify, they soon find that he is a Tokyo businessman. His daughter, a beautiful wheelchair bound invalid who resembles Kouchi's lost daughter, soon proves to be more of a detective than the police, making several key breakthroughs in the investigation.
Like many travel mysteries the plot follows a "patient policeman" model, gradually revealing the victim's movements before his disappearance and homing in on a suspect. There is, as often in these stories, only one real suspect, and the interest is in whether the police can break his alibi. Different parts of the puzzle get solved stage by stage until the final confrontation. None of it really got my interest, I'm afraid, neither the mystery nor the human interest story. Uchida is a competent enough writer that you can understand his reliable popularity; but both plot ideas and characters seem very conventional for the most part. And diversions from the conventional were generally unattractive rather than interesting.
Friday, 15 January 2016
The Black Trunk
AYUKAWA Tetsuya was a leading representative of the traditional detective story in the decades after the second world war. I wasn't very keen on his The Villa Lilac Murder Case; but 黒いトランク (kuroi toranku, The Black Trunk, 1956) seems to me a real classic of the alibi breaking genre. It is fairly explicitly a homage to Freeman Wills Crofts' classic The Cask (1920), but its complex and ingenious plot makes it a masterpiece in its own right.
The story starts with the discovery of a dead body in a trunk delivered to a Tokyo station from northern Kyuushuu. The addressee has never appeared to collect it, and the address given seems to be a fiction. The sender however is real, a drug dealer in a small Kyuushuu town. Soon the Kyuushuu police are busy trying to trace his movements. When he turns up dead in the Seto Inland Sea, it looks like his suicide puts an end to the story; but his widow is not happy with this and asks an old friend, Inspector ONITSURA (鬼貫警部, Ayukawa's series character), to look into it.
Onitsura had been in love with the widow as a student and had lost out to the man who married her, a fellow student. In fact all the characters in the case were students with Onitsura: both victims, the drug dealer and also the first victim, a widely disliked far right militaristic zealot; and soon two suspects, a nervous artist and a tough minded industrialist. Onitsura soon turns up suspicious activity from a man dressed in blue, who must be the murderer; but it looks as though neither suspect could be the man.
What makes this mystery so good? I think that part of it is the single minded concentration on advancing the plot. In The Villa Lilac Murder Case the mystery remains unsolved until the end only by having incompetent detectives who never notice suspicious behaviour or ask questions every reader has thought of. In The Black Trunk both Onitsura and the local police detective who first investigates are competent. The concentration of the plot is notable. There are only two suspects that matter, and readers will probably quickly pick one of them. You could call this story "The One Red Herring". The characters are not exactly realistic; but they are interesting. Ayukawa allows himself the same freedom as modern drama to let his characters talk much more freely and directly than we would expect. This too helps the story move along briskly.
It must be admitted (as Ho-Ling's slightly less enthusiastic review notes) that there are stretches where the story just feels too complicated. You are asked to keep track of the separate movements of several people and pieces of luggage through the rail and boat systems of Japan from Tokyo to Kyushu over several days. There were certainly points in the story where I had trouble trying to remember what I was supposed to know about the earlier parts of the investigation. Certainly, even if I had made notes, I could never actually solve this in one go; but Ayukawa provides for us there too, I think. The solution proceeds by stages. We make one breakthrough, but find that we are left with a new problem. The reader can at least spot some of the (many) tricks, and as the solution proceeds we get a firmer grasp of the details, leaving us in a good position to solve the final puzzle if we want. Even for admirers of the Golden Age detective story, this is not a book for everyone; but for an admirer of Crofts it's well worth reading.
The story starts with the discovery of a dead body in a trunk delivered to a Tokyo station from northern Kyuushuu. The addressee has never appeared to collect it, and the address given seems to be a fiction. The sender however is real, a drug dealer in a small Kyuushuu town. Soon the Kyuushuu police are busy trying to trace his movements. When he turns up dead in the Seto Inland Sea, it looks like his suicide puts an end to the story; but his widow is not happy with this and asks an old friend, Inspector ONITSURA (鬼貫警部, Ayukawa's series character), to look into it.
Onitsura had been in love with the widow as a student and had lost out to the man who married her, a fellow student. In fact all the characters in the case were students with Onitsura: both victims, the drug dealer and also the first victim, a widely disliked far right militaristic zealot; and soon two suspects, a nervous artist and a tough minded industrialist. Onitsura soon turns up suspicious activity from a man dressed in blue, who must be the murderer; but it looks as though neither suspect could be the man.
What makes this mystery so good? I think that part of it is the single minded concentration on advancing the plot. In The Villa Lilac Murder Case the mystery remains unsolved until the end only by having incompetent detectives who never notice suspicious behaviour or ask questions every reader has thought of. In The Black Trunk both Onitsura and the local police detective who first investigates are competent. The concentration of the plot is notable. There are only two suspects that matter, and readers will probably quickly pick one of them. You could call this story "The One Red Herring". The characters are not exactly realistic; but they are interesting. Ayukawa allows himself the same freedom as modern drama to let his characters talk much more freely and directly than we would expect. This too helps the story move along briskly.
It must be admitted (as Ho-Ling's slightly less enthusiastic review notes) that there are stretches where the story just feels too complicated. You are asked to keep track of the separate movements of several people and pieces of luggage through the rail and boat systems of Japan from Tokyo to Kyushu over several days. There were certainly points in the story where I had trouble trying to remember what I was supposed to know about the earlier parts of the investigation. Certainly, even if I had made notes, I could never actually solve this in one go; but Ayukawa provides for us there too, I think. The solution proceeds by stages. We make one breakthrough, but find that we are left with a new problem. The reader can at least spot some of the (many) tricks, and as the solution proceeds we get a firmer grasp of the details, leaving us in a good position to solve the final puzzle if we want. Even for admirers of the Golden Age detective story, this is not a book for everyone; but for an admirer of Crofts it's well worth reading.
Sunday, 20 December 2015
The Yatsugatake Highland Murder Case
And so I end the record of my literary performances,—which I think are more in amount than the works of any other living English author. ... I find that ... I have published much more than twice as much as Carlyle. I have also published considerably more than Voltaire, even including his letters. We are told that Varro, at the age of eighty, had written 480 volumes, and that he went on writing for eight years longer. I wish I knew what was the length of Varro's volumes; I comfort myself by reflecting that the amount of manuscript described as a book in Varro's time was not much. Varro, too, is dead, and Voltaire; whereas I am still living, and may add to the pile. [Anthony Trollope, Autobiography]
In case the quotation above wasn't enough of a hint, today's book is by the incredibly prolific 西村京太郎 (NISHIMURA Kyoutarou, born 1930). A high production rate is fairly standard for Japanese mystery writers; but Nishimura has written hundreds of books since his first novel in 1964. The Nishimura bibliography on the Japanese Wikipedia lists 557 books authored (up to June 2015) and a few more edited by him. I could devote this blog solely to reviewing his books and I would never catch up in my lifetime. Of course, I don't plan to do that. Including the book I'm discussing today, 八ヶ岳高原殺人事件 (Yatsugatake kougen satsujin jiken, The Yatsugatake Highland Murder Case, 1987), I've now read two books by Nishimura; and the quality seems like my memories of his English counterpart, John Creasey, not unforgivably bad, occasionally rising to quite good.The subgenre that Nishimura is particularly associated with is the travel mystery, which typically features crimes set in some interesting part of Japan, often with an element of alibi breaking, which may involve close inspection of public transport timetables and maps: Nishimura's book covers often feature trains. In The Yatsugatake Highland Murder Case there is no alibi breaking, although the obsessive detail with which Nishimura lists the departures, connections and arrivals of every train a character travels on makes you expect that it must be coming. The other interest of the travel mystery is to satisfy the tourist interest of Japanese readers, who mostly spend there short holidays somewhere in Japan. If you've ever watched Japanese television, you'll know that travel shows are a large part of every evening's entertainment. Here the detective is Nishimura's series detective, Inspector TOTSUGAWA (十津川); but the tourist eye is provided by a travel writer, who grumpily accompanies a young female photographer to a mountain resort in Yamanashi: Yatsugatake of the title is part of a mountain range on the border of Yamanashi and Nagano prefectures.
The tour of the area is interrupted when the two journalists find a dead body in the woods, a famous television actress who had been staying at the same hotel as them. She has been strangled with a black silk ribbon, the same method used to kill two other young and beautiful women in Tokyo. Totsugawa had been investigating these cases and travels to Yamanashi to see if this is part of the series. The ribbon is the same; and a few days later another case occurs, just a few miles away in Nagano prefecture, again discovered by the travel writer and photographer. Can this be coincidence? Unfortunately when we get to the end, we find that quite a few things in the book actually are coincidence. Although the police make deductions or conjectures on the little evidence they have, there is enough that doesn't make sense or is never developed that you might suspect that Nishimura had not worked the exact plot out in much detail when he started.
Thursday, 15 August 2013
Death in Nara by the Sea
Ellery Queen is an important figure in the world of Japanese detective stories. Among modern writers, two in particular show his influence. 法月 綸太郎 (NORIZUKI Rintarou, born 1964) writes stories about a detective story writer NORIZUKI Rintarou, who helps his father, a police inspector, solve cases. 有栖川 有栖 (ARISUGAWA Arisu, or Alice, born 1959, real name 上原 正英, UEHARA Masahide) also has a character with the same name in the detective stories he writes, though in this case Arisugawa is the narrator and also plays the Watson role rather than the detective. The one Norizuki book that I have read had a much more "Queenish" feel than what I have found in Arisugawa books; but Arisugawa too both makes use of favourite Ellery Queen elements (like "dying messages" and elimination of suspects) and also demonstrates allegiance in titles like his first novel, 月光ゲーム Yの悲劇'88 (Moonlight Game, The Tragedy of Y '88, 1989) and his short story collections, which have nation + puzzle titles like the first Queen novels, e. g. ロシア紅茶の謎 (The Russian Tea Puzzle, 1994).
I spoke of Arisugawa as a character in the books; but it might be more correct to say that he is two characters. There are two different series, the Student Alice series that starts with 月光ゲーム and the Author Alice series that starts with The Forty-sixth Locked Room (46番目の密室, 1992). In the Student Alice series, Arisugawa is a law student in the university's detective fiction club, in the Author Alice series, he is a professional mystery writer. The detectives are different too. In the Author Alice series, it is HIMURA Hideo (火村 英生), a lecturer in criminology.
Death in Nara by the Sea (海のある奈良に死す, 1995) is from the Author Alice series and like the more famous 46番目の密室, it concerns the death of another detective story writer. Arisugawa, visiting his publishers for discussions over his new novel, meets fellow writer AKABOSHI Gaku (赤星楽). Akaboshi is just off to "Nara by the Sea" for research, he says. The phrase is one of those "Athens of the North" type expressions used to sell a town, in this case the coastal town of Obama. The next day his dead body is found floating in the sea off Obama. Looking for traces of Akaboshi, Himura and Arisugawa search the area for stories connected with a mermaid, referenced in the title of the book Akaboshi was writing.
46番目の密室 has some metaliterary reflection on the locked room mystery. 海のある奈良に死す might be seen as playing with the idea of the "travel mystery". Travel mysteries are a genre (or perhaps two genres) in Japan. The name is used particularly for stories, set in a tourist destination, where to solve the mystery the detective has to learn about the points of interest of the area. It is also used for stories which depend on travel related alibis. Some stories mix alibi breaking and tourism, as does this one. The main trick is no novelty, but the play on generic expectations perhaps makes it stronger. A second murder has a method which to my eyes is about as realistic as "he killed him using mental death rays".
In sum it's one of the weaker mysteries that I've read. Also, this may be a problem of my Japanese competence, but in the Arisugawa books I have read, the characters don't really come across. It's not just that they're two dimensional. Plenty of detective stories have characters with no depth, who are still at least lively puppets. In Arisugawa many of the characters come across as smaller than life.
I spoke of Arisugawa as a character in the books; but it might be more correct to say that he is two characters. There are two different series, the Student Alice series that starts with 月光ゲーム and the Author Alice series that starts with The Forty-sixth Locked Room (46番目の密室, 1992). In the Student Alice series, Arisugawa is a law student in the university's detective fiction club, in the Author Alice series, he is a professional mystery writer. The detectives are different too. In the Author Alice series, it is HIMURA Hideo (火村 英生), a lecturer in criminology.
Death in Nara by the Sea (海のある奈良に死す, 1995) is from the Author Alice series and like the more famous 46番目の密室, it concerns the death of another detective story writer. Arisugawa, visiting his publishers for discussions over his new novel, meets fellow writer AKABOSHI Gaku (赤星楽). Akaboshi is just off to "Nara by the Sea" for research, he says. The phrase is one of those "Athens of the North" type expressions used to sell a town, in this case the coastal town of Obama. The next day his dead body is found floating in the sea off Obama. Looking for traces of Akaboshi, Himura and Arisugawa search the area for stories connected with a mermaid, referenced in the title of the book Akaboshi was writing.
46番目の密室 has some metaliterary reflection on the locked room mystery. 海のある奈良に死す might be seen as playing with the idea of the "travel mystery". Travel mysteries are a genre (or perhaps two genres) in Japan. The name is used particularly for stories, set in a tourist destination, where to solve the mystery the detective has to learn about the points of interest of the area. It is also used for stories which depend on travel related alibis. Some stories mix alibi breaking and tourism, as does this one. The main trick is no novelty, but the play on generic expectations perhaps makes it stronger. A second murder has a method which to my eyes is about as realistic as "he killed him using mental death rays".
In sum it's one of the weaker mysteries that I've read. Also, this may be a problem of my Japanese competence, but in the Arisugawa books I have read, the characters don't really come across. It's not just that they're two dimensional. Plenty of detective stories have characters with no depth, who are still at least lively puppets. In Arisugawa many of the characters come across as smaller than life.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)