The Anguish of Galileo

ガリレオの苦悩 (Garireo no kunou, The Anguish of Galileo, 2008) is a collection of five detective stories by HIGASHINO Keigo (東野圭吾). Higashino is best known in the west for The Devotion of Suspect X; and these stories are the third collection from the same series, featuring the genius physics professor, YUKAWA Manabu (湯川学), who is consulted by his friend KUSANAGI (草薙), a police detective, and Kusanagi's younger colleague, UTSUMI (内海).　I've read two novels in the series and the second collection of short stories,予知夢 (Yochimu, Prophetic Dream, 2000). Utsumi is a new character, who also appears as the main character in the television series Detective Galileo, which started in 2007. In the books the police role is divided fairly evenly between Kusanagi, experienced but stubborn, and Utsumi, who is shown in the typical role in police stories as a woman policeman who has to fight to get her view of the case recognised.

In 予知夢 Yukawa's role was more or less that of armchair (or laboratory) detective, as I remember. (It's several years since I read it, before I started this blog; if you're curious, there's a review here). In these stories, following the model of The Devotion of Suspect X, there is often a more personal and active involvement.

Ochiru (Fall): a woman falls from the balcony of her appartment. It looks like suicide; but Utsumi comes to suspect that one witness is hiding the fact that he was involved with the victim. The witness though has a perfect alibi. He was walking just below the apartment when the victim fell.

Ayatsuru (Manipulate): Yukawa is invited to a dinner by a retired physics lecturer along with other former students. The old man, more or less limited to a wheelchair, lives with his illegitimate daughter. His estranged son by an earlier marriage has also recently moved in and is staying, an unpleasant and unwelcome guest, in a little house in the grounds. If you're familiar with the conventions of the detective story, you'll know that staying in a place like that is basically signing your own death warrant. So it's no surprise when the son is murdered while the guests are gathered together. The daughter was with them, but her father had been taking a rest alone. Still, in his condition he could not possibly have committed the murder.

Tojiru (Close): Higashino uses deliberately unconventional kanji for these stories. The one's used here are actually those for 'Locked Room'; and this is indeed a locked room mystery. Yukawa is invited by a friend to his inn in the mountains. A guest had died mysteriously, either by suicide or accident it seems, falling into a ravine not far from the inn. The locked room is not where he was killed, but the room where he was staying. Before his death was discovered the innkeeper had been puzzled when the guest did not appear for dinner and had looked at his room and found it locked from the inside; but he had had a strong feeling that there was actually nobody in the room. Yukawa is invited to solve this puzzle; but despite inviting him, the friend seems strangely unwilling to cooperate with the investigation.

Shimesu (Show): Utsumi is watching the daughter of a woman suspected of murder. When they see her finding the (now dead) dog that had gone missing from the victim's house, she claims to have discovered it by dowsing. Utsumi is unwilling to believe that she is lying. She had observed the girl using her necklace for divination as she followed her; but is such a thing possible?

Midasu (Throw into Confusion): a serial killer is taunting the police with his claimed undetectable murder method; and he has a particular interest in Yukawa.

These are all competent stories, but not especially interesting. The idea of a locked room mystery without a victim in it is a nice one though.

The Devotion of Suspect X

Mostly the books I discuss, even if they have a translation, are little known in the west. In this case most English speaking mystery readers probably read the book long before I got round to it, since 東野 圭吾 (HIGASHINO Keigo) is one of the few successful Japanese mystery exports, with several of his books now available in translation. In Japan too, 容疑者Xの献身 (yougisha ekkusu no kenshin, The Devotion of Suspect X, 2005) was one of his most successful works, winning the Honkaku Mystery prize and adapted into a film.

The book is part of a series, in which Tokyo policeman KUSANAGI (草薙) consults his old university friend, now a physics lecturer, YUGAWA Manabu (湯川学) for ideas on difficult cases. I've read an earlier short story collection 予知夢 (Yochimu, Prophetic Dream, 2000) and 聖女の救済 (seijo no kyuusai, Salvation of a Saint, 2008). The former is fairly conventional, a set of mysteries with a slight appearance of the supernatural to them. Salvation of a Saint however is an inverted mystery, like its predecessor, The Devotion of Suspect X. Perhaps it would be better to call them semi-inverted mysteries. We know (or at least we are fairly sure) who did the crime; but exactly what they did is still a mystery. As in other inverted mysteries, we follow the story both from the point of view of the detectives and from that of the criminals, with divided sympathies and some unease at the developments.

In The Devotion of Suspect X, the killer is a mother, HANAOKA Yasuko, living with her teenage daughter after divorcing her abusive husband. A threatening visit from him escalates into a fight in which they end up strangling him. (I'm not quite sure what the legal status of the crime would be in England; the events are close to, but not quite eligible for a 'self defense' plea.) They are on the point of calling the police to turn themselves in when their neighbour, maths teacher ISHIGAMI rings the doorbell. He immediately deduces what has happened and offers to help them, if they intend to conceal the crime. When they accept, he takes charge of the situation and sets to preparing a trick to deceive the police.

From the police side, we follow Kusanagi as he investigates the ex-husband's murder, soon closing in on the mother and daughter. By coincidence, the neighbour Ishigami, whom he questions as a witness, turns out to be an old friend of Yukawa. Yukawa is surprised to learn that Ishigami, a mathematical genius, is now a high school teacher and visits him to renew their friendship. Soon the various parties are separately pursuing their suspicions or concealing their guilt. Meanwhile we, like most of the characters, don't know quite what trick Ishigami used; and this is the mystery part of the book.

From Ho-Ling's post about the book, I gather that there was some discussion in Japan about whether the mystery part of the book was fair play. This seems really bizarre to me, because the solution, while shocking, is really very obvious, and pointed to by a variety of hints. It may be that the answer is more obvious if you come to it from reading Salvation of a Saint, since the narrative trickery used to mislead us is much the same. (I hope it's not giving much away to say that in both Higashino uses our insider knowledge of the criminal and their crime against us.) Seeing through the tricks (both Ishigami's and Higashino's) doesn't make the story less interesting, as the mystery is only part of the book. It does make it more painful reading though. You share more of Yukawa's distress as he pursues his friend. I don't notice anyone else claiming to have solved it easily, so if you want a challenge, don't read Salvation of a Saint first. And if you only read one, read this one; it's far the better book.

The Laws of Detection

HIGASHINO Keigo (東野 圭吾, born 1958) is one of Japan's most successful crime writers, and one of the few to have been translated into English. I've read a couple of books in his Galileo series, including 聖女の救済 (Seijo no kyuusai, Salvation of a Saint, 2008, translated 2012); but I didn't want to write about that, as I haven't yet read the book that comes before it, 容疑者Xの献身 (Yougisha X no kenshin, The Devotion of Suspect X, 2005, translated 2011). The book I'm writing about here 名探偵の掟 (Meitantei no okite, The Rules of the Great Detective, 1996) is a short story collection that is only available in Japanese. As the cover perhaps suggests, the stories are parodies of traditional puzzle oriented detective stories. The 'laws' are the literary conventions of  traditional detective stories that govern our expectations of what the stories need to contain. (I feel a bit like Canute here, but I am not going to use the word 'trope' here, because I already knew the meaning it had for two thousand years before the internet decided to give it a new meaning. You can picture me shouting at the internet in ineffective fury, 'That's not what "trope" means', and the internet coolly replying, 'It is now'.)

The great detective of the title is TENKAICHI Daigorou, 天下一大五郎, a name which, I imagine, recalls Japan's most famous fictional detectives, YOKOMIZO Seishi's KINDAICHI Kousuke (金田一 耕助) and EDOGAWA Ranpo's AKECHI Kogorou (明智 小五郎). His cases are narrated by the classic blundering, stubborn police inspector. The narrator tells us in a prologue that the life of a policeman in a detective story is a hard one: until the real detective solves the case, he has to make sure only to chase after the wrong suspects. The stories have much the form you might expect from this: the characters are aware that they are fictional characters playing out the author's plot, sometimes unwillingly when they spot a convention that they don't approve of.

Each story has one major convention at its heart, while noting several lesser conventions along the way. The chapter titles will give you an idea: "Announcing the locked room: the prince of tricks", "The Unexpected Culprit: whodunnit", "Why is the villa isolated? the closed area", "The Last Words: the dying message", "Announcing the alibi: the timetable trick", "'The Flower of Office Ladies Steam Onsen Murder Case': the two hour TV drama", "The reason for amputating: the dismembered corpse", "The Real Trick: ???", "Now or never murder: nursery rhyme murders", "The Unfair Pattern: the rule of mystery", "The Forbidden Word: the headless corpse", "About the Weapon: Means of Murder". The protests and speculations of the characters are humorous reflections on the characteristics of the genre. A western reader who had read a lot of detective stories from the 1930s would find a lot that's familiar, but some things are more typical of Japan.

The emphasis is on humour, but many of the mysteries are constructed as 'fair play' mysteries. The solutions, though, are deliberately far fetched and outrageous, often turning on the particular problems of each type of puzzle.

I certainly found the stories amusing; but I suspect I would have liked them more if I had read them in small batches over time. The humour starts to feel repetitive; and the 'in book' author's determination to leave no shark unjumped in pursuit of surprise endings gives us more outrageous endings than I could handle.

That doesn't sound very enthusiastic, perhaps. But it's a book that anyone familiar with traditional detective stories (including a couple of Kindaichi novels) should enjoy. You can read Ho-Ling's review of the book and its sequel, and of the television drama based on the book, here.