The Ghost Murder Case

「死霊」殺人事件 (shirei satsujinjiken, The 'Ghost' Murder Case, 1994) is a detective story by IMAMURA Aya (今邑彩), the third in a series set in a police murder investigation department. I'm a little random in my book buying, and I haven't read the first two in the series, so I don't know if I missed anything by starting here.

At the start, the book looks more like some kind of psychological crime story, with a businessman in difficulties thinking of killing his wife for the insurance. Soon however we come to the real mystery, which has a very different character. The businessman, his wife and his partner are all found dead in the businessman's house. Not only that, the businessman, the last to die, had just arrived by taxi and told the taxi driver to wait because he had to get his wallet from inside the house. The taxi driver had had the only exit in view the whole time from when his passenger entered the house until he followed him in after getting tired of waiting. He finds the victim dead, clutching the telephone. At the other end is the wife's sister, who just heard her brother in law say "the dead body came back to life". The wife's body is lying on the bed upstairs with a terrifying grin of fierce triumph on her face. In another room the tatami mats have been pushed aside and the floorboards opened, as though something had dug its way out; and there is dirt under the wife's fingernails.

This grotesque horror story style locked room mystery then merges into an alibi breaking investigation, as the police decide that the two business partners had been planning to kill the wife and had set up alibis for it, also sending a further accomplice to Hokkaido to make it seem that the wife had disappeared there.

This is all very promising, if a bit odd. The definite mismatch of genres in the two types of story, locked room mystery and police procedural is interesting; and the setup is as outlandish as you could want for the former. The series detective Kijima seems like a typical police procedural detective, here partnered with a younger woman, who is characterised by a lighthearted approach to the investigation, rather than the steely determination to succeed in a man's world that the genre expects.

At the end, after another locked room of sorts and the answer to all the mysteries, my feeling was much the same as with other books I've read by Imamura. It was not bad, in some respects very good; but it felt like there was a better book trying to get out with a little more careful work on the plotting. There was certainly too much reliance on coincidence and improbable behaviour from some of the characters.

The Manji Murders

卍の殺人 (manji no satsujin, The Manji Murders, 1989) is IMAMURA Aya's first novel. The manji of the title is the Japanese word for the symbol that in English is best known as the swastika, although the symbolism is different to the Nazi version that comes to mind. The shape is different as well, in that the arms bend counter clockwise. A character in the book says that the other direction brings associations with Nazism in Japan too. The symbolism is fairly irrelevant here, because the sign's only role is as the shape of the house of a rich Japanese family. This is one of those stories written in the boom of "new orthodox" detective stories, that try to recreate the golden age (in this cases also emphasising particularly elements that YOKOMIZO Seishi had favoured): a closed circle of suspects in an isolated mansion; unusual architecture; intrigue centred on a wealthy family; impossible crimes and crimes with a pattern.

The mansion in this case has two branches of a winemaking family, each living in a different arm of the manji of the title, with a common hall in the middle. ANDOU Takumi (安東匠), ｔhe adopted son of one of the families is making his own life as an illustrator in Tokyo and has a new girlfriend HAGIWARA Ryouko (萩原亮子) in the narrator, a translator. The head of the family has summoned him home to discuss marrying his cousin; but he declares that he will give up his place in the family, and travels with his girlfriend to explain his intention to marry her. On the first night in the mansion, Ryouko witnesses a man in the other wing of the mansion strangling a woman. That turns out to be only one of two murders that night, as in a different wing another victim has also been strangled. This is the first of a series of deaths and attacks; and the same pattern of nearly simultaneous victims in different parts of the house repeats itself.

The various crimes involve a series of tricks. For many the characters, particularly Takumi, find a solution to the mystery early on, only to overturn it with a new complication later. A locked room mystery is quickly dispensed with one solution, then another. The plausibility of some of these tricks demands generous readers. The final revelation proves to be a variation on a very familiar trick, but a bold one, and so thoroughly signalled throughout the book that a reader who has not spotted it (I hadn't) will be impressed. This is certainly no classic, but a respectable minor honkaku mystery.

[UPDATE: One point I forgot to mention. I read this in the kindle version, and the various floor plans and family trees in the book were unreadable. Clicking on them made them larger, but equally illegible. If you're thinking of reading this, you'd probably do better with the paper version.]

The Murder at Clock House

I reviewed a novel by IMAMURA Aya (今邑彩) earlier, The Murder at the Broom House (1993). The book I've just been reading, 時鐘館の殺人 (Tokeikan no satsujin, The Murder at Clock House, 1993), is a collection of short stories by the same writer. There are six short stories of varying length. The longest is the title story at ninety pages. Most of the stories are traditional detective stories (more or less), but some are suspense or horror.

The first, 'The Living Dead Murder', features the murder of a writer in his house in Karuizawa. The murderer is also known, a woman with whom he previously had an affair. She too is dead, murdered by her victim and her corpse is sitting in the house. The puzzle is that she died long before he did; and after her known time of death various witnesses had seen her leaving her Tokyo mansion and arriving at the Karuizawa house. The author had fled his attacker and locked himself in the toilet, writing a dying message "Living corpse" on the walls. In the bar "The Living Dead" two crime writers sit discussing the case, watched by the surly and sceptical 'mama' (female barkeeper). I have mixed feelings about this one. It has a lot of ingenious ideas in it, but some of them undermine each other, so that as a puzzle story it could have been far better. Still it's a very clever and playful piece of narrative.

The next, 'Black/White Reversal', takes its metaphor from the game Reversi or Othello, which various characters play in the story. Students from a film history club visit a reclusive old woman and her sister. Both had been actresses, the older one a successful movie star, who retired early after the director who worked most with her had died in a car accident. While visiting, one of the students is murdered. The central trick here is probably rather obvious; and the atmosphere comes to less than one might expect.

'The Murder Next Door' is a suspense story with a twist that you will spot about three pages in.

'That Child, Who is it?' is a ghost story of sorts, the kind of ghost story you might expect a puzzle writer to make, and quite effective (more sad than scary).

'Lover' is a short horror story, and a really horrible one, set in the world of young people living isolated lives in apartment buildings. A failed student studying for entrance exams and working part time is too lazy to put a personalised message on his answering machine. Coming home late at night, he gets a message from a  desperate woman who thinks she is talking to her lover, who evidently left her a false contact number when he left her. Since the student doesn't know who or where she is, he leaves it at that; but the calls keep coming.

The last longest story, 'The Murder at Clock House', has distinct similarities to the first story, making a kind of ring composition. Both make play with the writing of detective stories. In this case, the story is framed by Imamura's account of the editor of a magazine commissioning her to write a "spot the culprit" story for their magazine competition. In a boarding house whose clock loving owner has working clocks all keeping their own private time throught the building, a detective story writer mysteriously goes missing, leaving a note that he can't face his editor who is calling that night. The next day, a snowman is standing in the garden, roughly made, except for the lifelike arms sticking out of the snow. The framing elements are more satisfactory than the actual story to my mind, as the chains of argument in the internal story uses premises and arguments that are hard to accept.

Here and in the novel I wrote about earlier, Imamura seems reliably able to reach a certain level of skill, so the stories are always worth reading; but they also leave some disappointment - the wish to see a better use of the capacity for invention that is so clearly there.

The Murders at Broom House

I've given my own translation of the title of 金雀枝荘の殺人 (Enishidasou no satsujin, The Murders at Broom House, 1993) by  今邑彩 (IMAMURA Aya, 1955-2013). As you can see, the publishers have put their own translation on the cover, The Murder at the Broom House; but the English translations that Japanese publishers sometimes put on their books are not always correct or idiomatic. The style of the cover is something you see quite often on Japanese mysteries: thin, very vertically posed figures with long necks and small heads. I'm not sure if they're all the same artist (this cover is credited to KITAMI Ryuu, 北見隆). The style appears on some more light hearted books; but, particularly in colours like these, you can see how it could fit with books tending more towards the horror end of the mystery genre. This book definitely belongs there. There are few descriptions of horrible events as they happen; but we read with anticipation or awareness that most of the characters are not going to survive.

I actually hate this kind of book. I hate watching people cluelessly bumbling about, unaware of the terrible things about to happen to them, or making obviously bad choices in their pathetic efforts to survive. It helps if the victims show more resourcefulness, or if they are particularly sympathetic, so that we care what happens to them. Neither is the case here. We just look on unwillingly as unpleasant events approach people whose fates don't really interest us.

The book also has the trappings of a ghost story. Unlike most detective stories, one ghost at least seems to be real, and we see things from her point of view in a prologue. Some provisional deductions are also made along the way based on acceptance of the supernatural. Such things of course threaten to undermine the puzzle, especially when the rules of the supernatural are not clear. But the central mystery at least can be solved without recourse to supernatural evidence.

Four cousins gather at Broom House to discuss a mysterious massacre that had occurred a year ago in the same mansion, a German style house that their great grandfather had built in the late Meiji period for his German bride.  Five other cousins had been staying there over Christmas. But they had all died. From the evidence, they seem to have murdered each other and the caretaker, serially (i.e. A was apparently killed by B, B by C, C by D and so on), each by a different method. The windows of the house had been nailed shut from the inside, and were likewise all locked from the inside, as were the doors. This massacre resembled a crime from the early twentieth century, when the caretaker had apparently killed his wife and daughter, before killing himself. In that case too the house had been locked and nailed shut from the inside. Did his ghost hang like a curse over the house, driving the cousins to madness? But the cousins' murder has another pattern, the series of the victims resemble the little goats in Grimm fairy tale that the cousins had made the centre of a game when they stayed at the house as little children. And there is one more mystery hanging over the house, the German great grandmother had disappeared shortly after her marriage, apparently abandoning her new born baby to return to Germany.

The four surviving cousins are joined by a woman who can see ghosts and a passing traveller who works his way into the group by a combination of strange persuasiveness and persistence. With six people in the house the stage seems set for a repeat of the events of last Christmas. And someone is secretly nailing shut the windows of the salon.

There are a range of mysteries here. Attention is concentrated on the earlier murder of the five cousins. As a locked room, I don't think it would rank in the top efforts. I certainly considered the actual solution; but, since we are talking about a mansion, rather than a room, with so many possible exits, it's hard to know what might be possible. On the other hand, it's one of the best examples of making use of the horror aspect of a crime to cover (and then from the other side to deduce) how the crime was committed. There are several other clever aspects to the book. At the end the motive brings us back into horror territory, a nastier variation on one of the most famous Japanese detective stories.

I wouldn't want to praise the book too highly; but it was good enough that I'll certainly try something else by the same writer. You can read another blogger's less enthusiastic reaction to the same book here.