11 Cards

The puzzle detective story is itself a curious thing; and it is not surprising if its writers are often interested in contrivances and curiosities. I don't know of any writer who shows a greater fondness for such things than AWASAKA Tsumao (泡坂妻夫). He was an amateur magician himself and his books often feature such things as stage magic, intricate mechanical toys, codes and word puzzles. Some of them are themselves intricate toys, not just in the mystery, but in the construction of the book. These enthusiasms are already on show in his first full length mystery 11枚のﾄﾗﾝﾌﾟ (juuichi mai no toranpu, Eleven Cards, 1976). The setting is the world of amateur magicians and the story features a book within a book that is a necessary part of solving the mystery.

The amateur magicians' club in the little town of Majiki (真敷) is putting on a show. We see the performances of each of the eleven members. Some go perfectly, some are disasters. At the end comes the worst failure of all. Shimako (志摩子), the young woman who was supposed to appear as part of the final magic trick in which everyone takes part never turns up. The other performers are left standing on stage while the meaner children in the audience start chanting, 'It's gone wrong, it's gone wrong.' After the show, one of them, a police doctor, is called away. When he returns, he is accompanied by two policemen. They have found the missing Shimako murdered in her nearby flat.

Stranger still, arranged around her dead body are a variety of objects, all broken. They all point to one of the stories in a book that one of the club members had written, Eleven Cards. This book forms the central part of Awasaka's Eleven Cards. The stories could be called detective stories, but they are not detecting crimes. They describe magic tricks, each one performed by a member of the club (the same people we have just met in the outer story), either on the other members or in their presence to a different audience. The other club members puzzle over how the trick could have been done, until one of them comes on the answer. The fictional author's prologue emphasises that as he has no powers of invention himself, the stories are taken from what really happened in life.

The final part of the book returns us to the outer story. Several months after the murder the club members are gathered at an international magic convention in Tokyo, where some of them are performing. In the midst of the chaos of the convention, the club members find new clues to the murder.

This is an incredible first novel. As often in Awasaka, not everything works; but the invention and ambition is really impressive, and the trick stories in the middle would be an interesting idea even if they weren't supporting a larger mystery.

Shots exchanged across the Atlantic

This post has major spoilers for Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers and The Greek Coffin Mystery by Ellery Queen. So read no further if you haven't read those yet.

Eugenia

ユージニア (Eugenia, 2005) by ONDA Riku (恩田陸) won the Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 2006. The book describes a mass poisoning and its aftermath over several decades.

The family of a respected doctor in the Hokuriku town of K (which doubtless stands for Kanazawa) are celebrating a major family anniversary. A motorcycle delivery man brings alcohol and juice, saying that it is sent by an old friend of the doctor. When the family and visiting neighbours drink a toast together, all of them, including several children, die, leaving only a servant and the daughter of the family, blind middle school student Hisako.

Ten years later, one of the children who discovered the mass murder, Makiko, then in junior school, now a student, interviews those witnesses she can find about the crime. Her researches result in a book, The Forgotten Celebration, which becomes a bestseller. The book, though, has some oddities that might make you wonder what her aim in writing it was. Now, decades after that book, someone is interviewing the surviving witnesses again. Most of the chapters are a dialogue with one voice (the interviewer's) removed. A few chapters are internal monologues of characters from the present or the past, or told by an external narrator.

As the various narrators contribute, it becomes clear that most people suspect the blind Hisako of having engineered the massacre. The story becomes a kind of horror story, filling the reader with unease about what Hisako, Makiko, and the unseen interviewer are looking for. The story has 'clues' of a sort, marked bits of the narrative which are obviously going to be explained later; but the explanations when they came seemed fairly abritrary (that is I felt the writer could have spared us the clue).

In my case much of the unease was a suspicion that the story was not going to make any sense. And did it? I don't really know, to be honest. The book was something of a struggle to read; and I had lost interest long before the end. Neither the characters nor the narration were really vivid; most were dreamlike, half sedated. The format, in which we frequently switch between speakers, without an indication of the change, was probably more demanding for me, since as a language learner I miss a lot of the subtler clues that a Japanese speaker would pick up on.

Boy Science Detective: The Secret of the Skull

[You may want to check the warning on this blog's translations.] 

 Another translation: this is the third Boy Science Detective story by KOSAKAI Fuboku. Previously we had:

• Preface (and general introduction)
• 1. The Scarlet Diamond
• 2. A Fight in the Dark 
• 3. The Riddle of the Beard

I imagine most children's detective stories prefer to stay with less serious crimes. The Boy Science Detective stories start with an incident that is hardly a crime at all and move on to theft and then in the third story murder. This one goes even further. The murder of children is a crime that writers were a little shy of using in stories that were meant essentially for entertainment; but here we have the murder of a child as the fourth mystery in the series. The only respect in which this is a children's story is that it has a child as protagonist and (as always) the solution is a bit obvious. I hope you won't think that means it isn't worth your time. The answer is obvious, but you might well miss the clues; and the story is an interesting reflection of the state of forensic science at the time.

I've glossed most of the things that need explaining in the translation itself. So I think we can get away without footnotes this time.  I'll put a few links in advance. The Great Kantou earthquake took place on Sep. 1, 1923 and caused massive destruction in Tokyo. The most interesting part of the story is the forensic facial reconstruction which is central to the plot. The late nineteenth century reconstruction of Bach's face was performed by Wilhelm His and Carl Seffner. The detective called Williams that Kosakai mentions seems (from Google) to be Lieutenant Grant Williams, bureau of unidentified dead, Manhattan,  who in 1916 identified a skull found on a farm in Brooklyn as Dominick La Rosa leading to arrest of Giovanio Romano (Brooklyn Eagle Oct 10, 1916). Kosakai probably did not know of another more recent case where Williams had been called in by a former subordinate, Mary Hamilton to investigate a skull found  in Rockland County, N.Y. and had reconstructed the face as a missing girl, Lillian White. Hamilton's investigations lead to a suspect James Crawford, who was also missing at the time, but captured in 1925 after a different crime. 

One last thing: this is a bit spoilerish, but if you don't know how kimonos are worn, you might search out some photographs or prints on wikimedia commons or elsewhere on the internet to get an idea.

The story was first published in 子供の科学 (kodomo no kagaku, Children’s Science) between October and December 1925. It's in the public domain, so you can read the original Japanese on Aozora Bunko, here.

As always, the actual story is after the break. So click below to read it.

For Yoriko

I wrote about NORIZUKI Rintarou's first mystery, Snow Locked Room (雪密室, 1989), not long after I started this blog, and thought it was an impressive start. 頼子のために (Yoriko no tame ni, For Yoriko, 1990) is another well made mystery.

When Yoriko, the seventeen year old daughter of university professor NISHIMURA Yuuji (西村悠史), is murdered, her father writes an account of his determination to find the killer and take revenge. The diary ends where he has successfully hunted down the man he was looking for, a few moments before he himself commits suicide. The suicide attempt is unexpectedly interrupted, leaving Nishimura unconscious in hospital, while the story grows into a major scandal. Suspicions that the first murder had been covered up set local politicians in damage management mode, suggesting an investigation from detective story writer NORIZUKI Rintarou (法月綸太郎), who has a reputation as an amateur detective. Rintarou, reading the father's account, thinks that there really is something to investigate, and takes the case.

Snow Locked Room bore a strong resemblance in its central problem to the Carter Dickson classic, The White Priory Murders, which it referenced in the story. Reading the account above, a reader familiar with golden age mysteries will inevitably be reminded of Nicholas Blake's excellent The Beast Must Die. This time too, Norizuki mentions the book within the narrative. Blake's combination of a narrative of revenge and a detective story is one of his best books; but Chabrol certainly did well to replace Blake's too sprightly detective with a more straightforward policeman in his 1969 film of the book. The deliberate change of tone between the two parts is hard to take. Norizuki the character is a lot more sober than Nigel Strangeways; so this is less of a problem. The story does seem to lose focus a little, however. In particular the conspiracies of the rich and powerful subplot feels like a waste of the readers' time (and I think that after Snow Locked Room, another manipulative, dominating, sexually voracious older woman uses up Norizuki's lifetime allowance for this character type).

I understand Ho-Ling's not very enthusiastic view of the book. It's certainly true that the solid clues are  tenuous and the mystery does not really progress very well in the part between the initial revenge narrative and the explanation at the end. And both clues and deductions only go so far (indeed the better clues only point to something that readers will guess anyway). Many of the final revelations are more a story the author decided to tell than a necessary solution to the mystery. The shape of the story is a little like Ellery Queen's Wrightsville books, though the tragedy is a little more gothic than what Ellery Queen favoured at that time.

Journey in Black and White

黒白の旅路 (kokubyaku no tabiji, Journey in Black and White, 1977) by NATSUKI Shizuko (夏樹静子) is one of the few Japanese detective stories with an English translation. The translation, by Robert B. Rohmer, was published as Innocent Journey in 1989.

Shinjuu 心中 is Japanese for a suicide pact, normally between two lovers. I don't know how common they actually are in Japan, but they certainly feature more in literature than in Europe. Quite often, too, when you read a writer's biography on Wikipedia, you find a double suicide at the end - or even in the middle: DAZAI Osamu seems to have more or less made a hobby of it (the first time, his partner died and he survived, the second time both he and his wife survived, the last time both he and his partner died).

In Journey in Black and White, the student NOZOE Rikako (野添立夏子) works nights as a hostess in a bar. When her lover, failing company president TOMONAGA Takayuki (朝永敬之), asks her to join him in suicide, she agrees, and the two set off to a mountain region. They lie down together in the forest and take an overdose of sleeping pills; but Rikako does not die. She wakes up in the darkness after vomiting the pills and finds Tomonaga dead by her side, but not of an overdose: he has been stabbed.

This sounds very promising; but the book didn't really live up to its promise for me. The intriguing aspect of the initial situation is quickly forgotten; and neither Rikako (who suffers from depersonalization disorder) nor the reader feels much emotional involvement. Instead the story starts on a "fugitive pursuing the real criminal" story. Rikako runs away, then realises that the police will see her as the obvious suspect. She starts investigating to find the real killer before the body is discovered and the police work their way round to catching her. Her investigations soon lead her to Tomonaga's beautiful widow. Meanwhile a young architect is searching for his missing brother in law; and his search too leads him to Tomonaga's house.

This sounds promising in a different way, the start of a Hitchcock-style hectic action adventure, perhaps. But although there is action enough, it never feels very exciting, perhaps because Rikako is so consistently glum.

The other problem is that the mystery is for the most part very, very obvious. There are two major twists, and in both cases it's a safe bet that readers will be hundreds of pages ahead of the characters on them. In general, this is one of those books where the plot only just about survives because the main characters are consistently picking the stupidest choice of action. The book probably has some interest for attitudes to gender in Japan at that time; in some ways it is a little reminiscent of the kind of books Ruth Rendell and others were writing a decade earlier.

Queen Bee

The next YOKOMIZO Seishi (横溝正史) for review is 女王蜂 (jooubachi, Queen Bee, 1952), first published in serial form between 1951 and 1952, following The Inugami Clan. It's not quite as famous a work as that, but it's still one of the better known KINDAICHI Kousuke mysteries, filmed twice, in 1958 and again in 1978, this time by ICHIKAWA Kon (市川 崑), whose films of several of the more famous mysteries are the standard against which others tend to be judged. There have also been five television versions. I think it deserves its place among the better known works. It's a solidly constructed mystery, that holds the readers' interest well, although it perhaps isn't quite so skillful as some of the others at creating an atmosphere of alarm and confusion to give readers' speculative tendencies something to work on.

Gekkin player, A. Farsari (from Wikimedia commons)

Gekkintou (Gekkin Island) is a little island off the Izu Peninsular. It is named after the Gekkin (or Yueqin), a Chinese stringed instrument that (according to Yokomizo) had some popularity in nineteenth century Japan, then fell out of fashion. The Daidouji (大道寺) family is the richest family on the island, but their fortunes have long been in decline. The daughter of the house, Tomoko (智子), has just turned eighteen. She is living with her grandmother, and her devoted former tutor, a woman who had also been her mother's tutor. Now, at eighteen, she is supposed to go to her father's house in Tokyo, accompanied by her grandmother and tutor. Her father is not her real father. He had been one of two students who visited the island when Tomoko's mother was sixteen. Tomoko is the daughter of the other student, who, apparently, fell from a cliff on the island and died. In his place, his friend married Tomoko's mother and took on the family name; but it was a marriage only in name and since then he has lived separately in Tokyo as a very successful businessman. In the house on Gekkin Island there is a building gaudily decorated in Chinese style; and in that building there is a "room that cannot be opened". By a strange coincidence Tomoko has found the key. On the day before her departure she sneaks into the room and discovers, in the dust on a table in the middle, a bloodstained gekkin.

Meanwhile detective KINDAICHI Kousuke (金田一耕介) is one of the people sent to accompany Tomoko and family to Tokyo. An unknown client has asked his lawyer to engage him, because he and others have received anonymous letters threatening a series of deaths if Tomoko leaves the island. The girl, says the letter, is a queen bee, destined to bring death to the males drawn to her, like her mother nineteen years ago. Kindaichi warns that he is no bodyguard, but he starts investigating the earlier case. Soon however, at a hotel on the Izu peninsular where the family are resting on the journey, the first of Tomoko's suitors is murdered. He is soon followed by other victims, most of them men who had been pursuing Tomoko. Will Kindaichi catch the murderer before it is too late? (Of course he won't. Kindaichi only ever solves a case when pretty much every possible victim has already died.)

Most Kindaichi stories are set in one region, generally rural and isolated. In this book, as in a couple of others we change scene several times, first to the hotel on the mainland, then to Tokyo, finally back to Gekkin Island. This gives the story a slightly more modern feeling; but we are still in a fairly traditional environment (e. g. murder at a Kabuki performance). Much of the mystery concerns what happened nineteen years ago. We get a lot of hints throughout the story; but it is only towards the end that we learn what exactly was supposed to have happened then. There is a little locked room mystery for readers to solve. The first Kindaichi novel is one of Japan's most famous locked room mysteries (The Honjin Murder Case), and Yokomizo has quite a few locked room mysteries in the other books in the series; but the three I have come across are much less ambitious affairs than that first one. I did think this one was a good use of special conditions, though. Like Ho Ling (here), I thought that the whole story was in some senses undersupplied with clues. Most readers will probably spot the killer. There is one good reason (beyond conjectural joining the dots) to suspect them; but most of the details of the various murders turn out to be basically irrelevant. Still, the story kept me reading, and the explanation did not leave me feeling cheated at the end.