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 Villa Lilac Murder Case

I have a terrible memory for names. I can generally remember what people tell me about themselves, but not the name. Even in Europe that can be a problem. The ancient Romans had slaves whose job was to remind their master of the name and personal details of people they met in the street. Something like that would be useful for people like me today. Without the slavery, of course -- a smartphone app perhaps. Trying to talk Japanese makes that even worse, since you need the name in place of  saying "you".  A practiced memory for names is a real necessity when reading books too. Some names you can work out from the common kanji, others feature unfamiliar kanji or readings that you would need special knowledge to recognise. Mostly the first time a name is used in a book, it comes with furigana. Japanese readers note the reading and keep it in their head for the rest of the book. I note the reading then forget it three pages later. So unless they're called something simple like Tanaka or Ogawa, their subsequent appearances register in my head as "So and so" or "Yama-something" or some wild guess, since the alternative is to hunt back through the book to the page where they made their first appearance.

In the long run I need to improve my memory, somehow. Or else I could stick to reading こころ　and 博士が愛した数式. In the short term, I sometimes replace the bookmark that Japanese publishers kindly provide with a piece of paper on which I can note down the names of the characters as they appear. That works quite well. Actually perhaps the act of writing them down helps them stick in the memory, as I find that quite quickly I don't need to refer to the bookmark unless the character hasn't appeared for a hundred pages or so. If you're learning to read like me, I strongly recommend it.

That said, if you're going to read りら荘事件 (The Villa Lilac Case) by　鮎川哲也 (AYUKAWA Tetsuya), perhaps my notes can save you some time.

園田万平	SONODA Manpei	caretaker of the Villa Lilac
園田花	SONODA Hana	his wife
日高鉄子	HIDAKA Tetsuko	art student
行武栄一	YUKITAKE Eiichi	music student (bass)
尼ﾘﾘｽ	AMA Ririsu	music student (soprano)
牧数人	MAKI Kasundo	Ama's fiancé, music student
橘秋夫	TACHIBANA Akio	music student (piano)
松平紗絽女	MATSUDAIRA Sarome	music student (violin)
安孫子宏	ABIKO Hiroshi	music student (bass)
由木	YUKI	Saitama police (keiji)
須田佐吉	SUDA Sakichi	charcoal burner
堅持	KENMOCHI	Saitama police (keibu)
二条義房	NIJOU Yoshifusa	student, amateur detective
星影龍三	HOSHIKAGE Ryuuzou	amateur detective
水原	MIZUHARA	Tokyo police (keiji)

To be honest, I didn't find it a very enjoyable book. It's an attempt at a thoroughly classical puzzle mystery, first published from 1956-7 and then in book form in 1958. A group of students gather for a break at a villa belonging to their university in the hills north west of Tokyo. One by one they and those around them get killed, until the police are left with hardly any suspects to choose from. It's a carefully plotted mystery, with a lot of tricks and clues. But I think it has some terrible problems.
Firstly, the murderer is much too obvious. Before I was a quarter of the way in I had a rough idea of who the killer was and what was going on. That was less than a hundred pages in, and it's a long book (about 400 pages), so that I had another 300 pages to go. At the end more or less everything I'd worked out or guessed turned out to be right. All this time the police are shown as bumbling incompetents, neglecting the most obvious questions and evidence. The experience is like having to watch someone else play a computer game badly for hour after hour. The real detective is not even mentioned till the last fifth of the book; and we have to read on quite a few pages before he makes an actual appearance. There's the same structure, and the same problems, in a 島田荘司 (SHIMADA Souji) book that I read recently, 斜め屋敷の犯罪 (The Crime of the Slanted Country House), a locked room mystery from 1982, which seems a deliberate attempt to emulate traditional mysteries like りら荘事件. In that case too, the culprit is very obvious; but I at least did not have the solution to the central puzzle (though certain elements of it are obvious, too).

Coming back to Ayukawa's book, the characters were a problem for me too. They are none of them interesting and most are fairly unlikable. A writer has no duty to cater to a taste for likeable characters of course. If you've always wondered, 'What's it like to spend a couple of weeks with dull, unpleasant, quarrelsome people?', you may find it enlightening.

But perhaps my level of Japanese is a problem here. It took me over two weeks to get through this. If it was in English, I would have read it in a couple of days and looked more tolerantly on the characters and the puzzle. You can read another blogger's more positive take on the book here.