The Gymnasium Murder

体育館の殺人 (taiikukan no satsujin, The Gymnasium Murder, 2012) is a mystery novel by AOSAKI Yuugo (青崎有吾, born 1991). The publishers, Sougen Suiri, often have an invented English title on their cover, and in this case it is The Black Umbrella Mystery, which might suggest some similarity to the first Ellery Queen mysteries, such as The Roman Hat Mystery. If that was what they wanted to suggest, the suggestion is certainly warranted. Although the book is a locked room mystery, the style of detection involves a string of deductions around a single object, leading to criteria that narrow the field of suspects, very much in the style of The Dutch Shoe Mystery and particularly The Roman Hat Mystery.

The table tennis club and other sports clubs are using the old gymnasium of their high school. At one end of the hall is a stage, and unusually its curtain is down. When the theatre club arrives for its rehearsal they open the curtain. On the stage is the body of the president of the broadcasting club, stabbed in the back. The investigating police soon stumble on a puzzle: the doors at the stage end were both locked, so that the only exit was through the hall; but the president of the table tennis club claims that nobody had come through from the stage end since the victim entered. Since she had been alone in the gym for part of this time, they soon decide that she must be the killer. High school first year, 柚乃 (Yuno), who overhears their discussion, is convinced that her club president is innocent, and desperately seeks the help of secretive and eccentric schoolboy genius 裏染天馬 (URAZOME Tenma). She finds him in an unused club room, which he has turned into his own apartment and filled with toy figures of anime heroines. Urazome has no interest in school work or anything else except for anime and manga, to which he devotes all his time and money. 

I get the impression that the target audience for this book is young teenagers who have not yet read much mystery fiction. Except for one meta-literary joke about 'fair play', all the cultural references seem to be to anime and manga. Most of these escaped me; but I didn't get the impression I was missing anything of value. They seemed simply part of the thin characterisation of Urazome as an otaku. The emphasis on Urazome's effortless intellectual superiority is another element that reads like something only a book for children would do.

Although the 'fair play' joke I mentioned touches on what some might consider improper misdirection, the mystery is very much fair play. All the elements needed to solve the mystery are presented openly and in many cases their significance is noted in advance of the final explanation. I'm not quite sure how good the reasoning is. There were points in the series of deductions where I thought that obvious alternatives were being missed, while a lot of time was being spent on ruling out possibilities that weren't very likely in the first place; but that's a criticism it probably shares with Ellery Queen's acknowledged classics. I didn't enjoy the deductions here as much as I enjoyed Ellery Queen. I'm not sure if that's because I actually was a teenager when I read Ellery Queen or because there was something slightly lacking here. It felt a little like we were creating Venn diagrams more than reading a story. In Ellery Queen the deductions often lead to a real surprise, and perhaps that was what was missing. 

The school setting felt like a deliberate reversal on the kinds of unusual setting favoured by Ellery Queen and others: a completely mundane world, in which every object, room and role is something everyone is familiar with. A few characters are more like types from popular literature than real people; but the only bit that was really far from everyday life was Urazome. I did slightly feel that a sharper observation of the everyday world might have made even that a bit more interesting.

This sounds a bit negative; but if you like classic puzzle detective stories, this is certainly one to try. I certainly expect I'll try another one in the series at some time. One point I liked was the confidence shown in giving us a full length novel with only one murder. Many writers, including the most famous, almost feel obliged to have at least two (Sayers and Crofts are the exceptions that spring to mind); but there is something pleasing to me when the whole book is about just one crime. 

You can read a different take on the same book at Ho-Ling's blog here.

Coffin of Flowers

YAMAMURA Misa (山村美紗, 1934-1996) was very popular in her day, but has probably faded of late. The last time I looked, few if any of her books were in print; on the other hand they were still the staple of Japanese television mysteries the last couple of times I visited. The television mysteries looked a bit boring, cosy mysteries which succeed by catering to Japanese television's love of sightseeing (mostly within Japan). 花の棺 (hana no histugi, Coffin of Flowers, 1975) certainly fits that pattern, with a series of murders and other crimes taking places in different famous parts of the ancient captial Kyoto. The difference to the world of cosy mystery in England and America is that the mystery still keeps up the golden age enthusiasm for tricks, particulary locked room mysteries and impossible crimes.

The book is the first in the "Catherine" series. Catherine, the daughter of the American Vice President, has recently graduated from university and is visiting Japan for a year, keen to study Japanese flower arranging. The three main schools of flower arranging are each keen to win a pupil who could increase their reputation in Japan and beyond; but Catherine hopes that a woman whose exhibition she had seen in New York will agree to teach her. The woman is a member of the largest of the three schools, but had taken a critical attitude to its leader. Unfortunately nobody seems to know where she is at the moment. When she finally does turn up, it is as a dead body, poisoned near one of Kyoto's temples.

This is one of a series of murders and lesser crimes taking place at regular intervals in the ancient grid pattern of Kyoto's streets. Soon there is another poisoning, this one in a locked Japanese tea house surrounded by untrodden snow. An element of another murder is the disappearance of a car and caravan from a campsite with only one, watched, exit. I wasn't that keen on either of these tricks. The locked room has as boring a solution as you can imagine, and the disappearing caravan feels like an idea for a short story shoehorned into a longer mystery where it doesn't belong.

The biggest surprise about the book is how small a role Catherine plays. For most of the story, the actual investigation is done by the police, who are not incompetent. Catherine appears in some chapters as a witness; but the point of view character here is a young political functionary appointed by his foreign minister uncle to escort Catherine. This looks like the setup for a romance, which is certainly implied by the end of the book; but for most of the book we see very little of Catherine and that mostly without any insight into her character, except as a wealthy and influential American, who knows that people are going to let her do what she wants.

I'm not sure how I rate the book. It reads easily. It has a lot of ingenuity. But the different tricks are neither well developed nor properly integrated into the larger mystery.

Ash Woman

灰の女 (hai no onna, Ash Woman, 1970) is a detective story by TAKAGI Akimitsu (高木 彬光) featuring his series detective, prosecutor KIRISHIMA Saburou (霧島三郎). I reviewed a collection which included one short story featuring Kirishima last year, Return of the Detectives ( 帰ってきた探偵たち, 1992). As with the stories in that collection, the public prosecutor is not quite an armchair detective, but still only involved at intervals in the investigation, most of which is of course carried out by the police. The narrative in this story switches back and forth between one of the suspects in the case (a suspect to the police, that is, not to us) and the investigators (either the police or Kirishima or both together).

SHIGA Sadahiko (志賀貞彦) is planning to leave his job as secretary for shady business owner IWAMOTO Gisuke (岩本義介) and run off with WAKISAKA Noriko (脇坂則子) the wife of the manager of a larger business, for which Iwamoto's company is actually a "tunnel" firm, a secret conduit for dealings they do not want on their own books. But the day after Sadahiko's resignation, Iwamoto is murdered. Noriko is a central witness in the case. She and her cousin had been sitting in the window of a café across from Iwamoto's office when the cousin thought he saw an attack through the window, and the two of them later discover the body. Noriko hides the fact that she had also seen her lover Sadahiko hurrying out of the building shortly after her cousin saw the fight.

Sadahiko however assures her that he has everything in hand and offers a convincing alibi to the police. He had been lured to the office by a false telephone call and had only entered the main workspace, not Iwamoto's private office; and there were witnesses outside to see that that was true. Still, the inspector on the case cannot help suspecting Sadahiko's immense confidence. Could the ash and wire remains found outside one of the office windows be a clue to some kind of trick? Noriko meanwhile, separated from her lover, is filled with panic about the crime and fear that Sadahiko may be the killer, especially when another murder follows.

I added the "locked room mystery" tag to this post, because Takagi treats the first murder as a locked room mystery. In many Japanese locked room mysteries, the holes are so large that they hardly deserve the name. In this case, the locked (or observed) room aspect only comes into play if you find plausible the police's assumption that it would be odd for a murderer to wait in a room until the people who are in the corridor outside have gone away before making his escape.

There are a couple of other implausible elements to the story, but on the whole it is well constructed and clued, with some ingenious elements. The main problem is that the actual killer is far too obvious. The detectives employ Ellery Queen level subtelty of reasoning, while ignoring the plain as day reasons why one suspect is almost certainly the criminal.

The Summer of the Ubume

This not very enthusiastic review will look like a bad start to 2017; but I read this over a month ago, so for me it was more a bad end to 2016. 姑獲鳥の夏 (ubume no natsu, The Summer of the Ubume, 1994) by KYOUGOKU Natushiko (京極夏彦, born 1963) is part of a series centred on the monsters of Japanese folklore, in this case the ubume of the title, a baby destroying spirit created by a death in pregnancy, which has somehow become associated with a bird from Chinese folklore. The detective of the series is an expert on Japanese folklore and he lectures the narrator on this and other subjects intermittently throughout the book.

The narrator, who writes human interest stories for popular magazines, is investigating rumours surrounding a maternity hospital. The son in law of the chief doctor disappeared from a room that was locked on the inside a year and a half ago; and since then his wife's pregnancy has continued despite being long overdue. He discusses the case with his friend KYOUGOKUDOU (京極堂), who takes his name from the used bookshop he runs alongside his second profession as proprietor of a Japanese shrine. Kyougokudou convinces the narrator, by means of destroying his whole conception of himself and the world in a Socratic style interrogation, that such a story should be left alone, but discovering that the missing son in law was a former university friend of the two, he sends the narrator to consult with yet another student friend, telepathically gifted private detective ENOKIZU (榎木津).

By a strange chance, the older daughter of the family at the centre of the mystery has come to consult Enokizu; and soon narrator and various supporting characters are investigating the case. It becomes clear that the narrator himself has some buried memory related to the roots of the tragedy from the days when the son in law first met his future wife. And the rumours surrounding the hospital turn out to be even worse than those we had heard, with suggestions that one of the family's daughters has been stealing and killing the newborn babies of the patients.

I don't think the book has any interest as a puzzle detective story. The locked room mystery has special circumstances which leave a more or less limitless field of possible explanations. For some the attractions of the book may lie in its long conversations philosophising on the basis of amazing facts from popular science (which is sometimes about as scientific as you'd expect these kinds of thing to be) and expounding on Japanese folklore. These are at least bland reading, though they did not feel like a good use of my time. (The oddity of the narrator being so unsettled by this chatter is perhaps lessened by the book's setting in the early fifties.) For others the grotesque horror is presumably the selling point. I strongly disliked this. It reminded me of the forced charnel house horror that John Dickson Carr indulged in some of his weaker books (such as Hag's Nook), but bringing the same approach to pregnancy and childbirth. Now capital punishment or seventeenth century epidemics or whatever Carr might choose are far enough from most readers' lives that he can reasonably fool around with them for our entertainment; but that's not really the case here.

Most people who've read the book seem to have a high opinion of it (and it was 23rd in the 2012 Touzai Mystery Best list of Japanese mysteries), so I'm on my own in this. You can read a more generous review of the book on Ho-Ling's blog here; and you can make your own opinion, even if you can't read Japanese, because (for once) there is an English translation available, by Alexander O. Smith (Vertical, 2009).

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 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 Scream Castle Murder Case

絶叫城殺人事件 (zekkyoujousatsujinjiken, The Scream Castle Murder Case, 2001) is the title story of a collection of six short mysteries by ARISUGAWA Arisu or Alice (有栖川 有栖), first published in magazines between 1996 and 2001.

Arisugawa has two main series, the "Student Alice" series, in which the narrator is ARISUGAWA Arisu, a student and budding detective story writer, recounting the deductions of his fellow student EGAMI Jirou, and the "Writer Alice" series, in which the narrator is ARISUGAWA Arisu, a professional detective story writer, recounting the deductions of his friend, criminology professor HIMURA Hideo. You might guess that the two Arisugawas are the same person at different points in their life; but there are hints in the "Student Alice" series that the "Writer Alice" world is the creation of student Alice, and in the "Writer Alice" narrative that "Student Alice" is a character in the books written by writer Alice. There are far fewer "Student Alice" books; and they include some of real world Alice's best regarded books. Any moment now, you should be able to try one of his best known early works in English translation, 孤島パズル (kotou pazuru, The Island Puzzle, 1989), published by Locked Room International as The Moai Island Puzzle. It makes an interesting comparison with the first Japanese novel from the same publishers and translator, The Decagon House Murders. At first sight the two are very similar (serial murders on an isolated island), but their approach is the polar opposite.

To come back to this collection, like the title story, the others all have titles of the form: [building name] "murder case". This is a very standard title for traditional detective stories in Japan (much like e. g. The White Priory Murders in English). In one of the stories the policeman in charge comments that Arisugawa would call it that in one of his stories, and (narrator) Arisugawa remarks that in fact he never had used such a title. That seems to be true for real life Arisugawa too. In fact there is a deliberate slight discrepancy between the image the title conjures up (like an English country house or isolated mansion murder) and the actual subject matter in the stories.

The first, 黒鳥亭殺人事件　(kokuchouteisatsujinjiken, "The Black Bird Villa Murder Case") is the nearest to the classical setting. Himura and Arisugawa visit the lonely house of an old friend from university. The friend lives alone there with his five year old daughter, having inherited it from an aunt who bought it cheap after the previous owners died in a murder-suicide. Now however, it turns out that the suicide part had been a fake, as the supposed suicide has been found, recently killed, at the bottom of the garden well.

壺中庵殺人事件　(kochuuansatsujinjiken, "The Retreat in a Vase Murder Case") is a locked room mystery. The victim had a cellar study, humorously called "retreat in a vase" after a Chinese folktale about a man who makes his home in a pot which is larger on the inside. The witnesses find the victim hanging from the ceiling, with the only exit (the hatch in the roof) barred from the inside. Most strangely, someone has put a vase on his head.

In 月宮殿殺人事件 (gekkyuudensatusjinjiken, "The Moon Palace Murder Case") Arisugawa takes Himura to see an unusual building he had discovered near the road they are taking, the tower like house built without permission by a homeless man out in the woods from discarded building materials. When they get there though, they find that the building has been burnt and the owner killed.

雪花楼殺人事件　(sekkarousatusjinjiken, "The Snowflake Tower Murder Case") takes place in the shell of a multistorey building, built in real estate speculation as a resort hotel, but then abandoned. A young runaway couple and an older unemployed man are squatting in different parts of the building. The young man has apparently fallen from the roof of the building; but he died not from the fall, but from a violent blow to the head. On the snow covered roof, the only footprints leading to the edge of the roof are the victim's.

紅雨荘殺人事件 (benisamesousatsujinjiken, "The Red Rain Mansion Murder Case") has a murder case somehow connected to a movie filmed in the title house, a romance of which Arisugawa was a fan.

絶叫城殺人事件(zekkyoujousatsujinjiken, "The Scream Castle Murder Case") is the longest story in the book, over a hundred pages. Himura pursues a serial killer, whose murder seems to be connected to a horror video game, in which young women are chased by an unknown killer through the corridors of a castle in which they are imprisoned.

The stories are mostly good, some very good, although the "footprints in the snow" impossible crime was one the least convincing versions I've read, and the solutions to one or two of the better stories were perhaps a little obvious.

The Locked Room the Angel Opened

天使が開けた密室 (tenshi ga aketa misshitsu, The Locked Room the Angel Opened, 2001) is a teenage oriented detective story by TANIHARA Shouko (谷原秋桜子). As the title suggests, it features a locked room mystery.

 Highschool student Minami is trying to save up money with part time jobs. After one of them instead lands her with a massive debt, she is happy to take over the well paid night shift job of a departing neighbour, though she has some doubts when she learns what it involves. An undertakers' does the initial handling of patients who die in a local private hospital (while trying to win customers for the actual funeral service). Minami gets a mobile phone and gets paid even if she is not needed; but if someone dies, then she has to go out (for extra pay) and help move the body.

All goes well enough until her unpleasant colleague is found strangled, and Minami seems to be the only person who could have killed him. Happily she has friends to look out for her, and soon they are on the track of the real killer.

This world Minami lives in is peopled a bit too much by the conventions of popular literature. Her two school friends are an energetic and self confident sporting type and a traditional minded daughter of a wealthy family. Her new neighbour is a handsome and intelligent student, with whom she is on bad terms for no good reason. Her kimono wearing mother is a kindly and domestic figure whom Minami thinks must be protected from the outside world. Any originality in the book comes in the depiction of Minami's part time jobs, particularly the depiction of the undertaking business.

The story and characters are perhaps a bit weak; but it reads easily and agreeably. It approaches the mystery at a fairly leisured pace. We are half way through the book before the crime occurs, although of course some of the elements of the mystery are being prepared at the same time. The actual puzzle could probably fit comfortably into a long short story. 

My kindle edition had a short story with the same characters as an extra, tatta nijuukyuufun no yuukai, 'The twenty nine minute kidnapping'.

Jack the Poetical Private

MORI Hiroshi (森 博嗣) started his career as a novelist with すべてがFになる (subete ga F ni naru, The Perfect Insider / Everything Becomes F, 1996), featuring SAIKAWA Souhei (犀川創平), a lecturer and researcher in a university architecture department, and NISHINOSONO Moe (西之園萌絵), the orphan daughter of a wealthy family, a student in the same department. The story was notable for its daringly unexpected locked room mystery and high technology setting; it won the Mephisto Prize and has been adapted into a manga, a television drama, and most recently an anime series. No-one would deny the daring of its approach to the locked room mystery; but I must admit that I thought the book wrote itself a large blank cheque in the assumptions behind what was plausible both for the characters and for the set up.  

詩的私的ジャック (shiteki shiteki jakku, Jack the Poetical Private, 1997) is a much more conventional detective story in the same series. It too has a locked room mystery, or rather several, as a series of victims are found in locked rooms in different universities, all stripped to their underwear with mysterious marks cut into their skin after death. So, as well as a locked room mystery, this starts looking like a "find the connexion" serial killer mystery. In fact the first two locked rooms are not taken very seriously as a puzzle for the reader, and the links between the various murders are also established early. The final locked room is kept as the main puzzle, although it is really hardly a locked room at all. The attention of the police and the amateur detectives is soon drawn to a drop out student at the university, now a rising pop star. The lyrics of one of the songs on his new album have a strange similarity to the crimes.

Like The Perfect Insider, the book reads easily; but I never felt much engagement with the characters. There was a little more Ellery Queen style deduction in the answer this time. Some of it (as often with this style) was not quite convincing; but there were also parts where Saikawa could offer a plausible, but not considered, explanation for oddities in the various crime scenes. The puzzle aspect of the book was very similar to what one might find in one of the more trick oriented golden age writers.

The book had a puzzle of a different kind. As in The Perfect Insider, Mori provides a list of characters, a very useful feature if you're reading Japanese and have difficulty with name kanji. But in both, the only characters listed are those in universities or research institutes. Other characters, such as policemen or servants, are not listed there. I think the first book did the same thing; and it seems very odd to me. Is there some reason for it?

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 Adventures of Norizuki Rintarou

It's not surprising that the first short story collection by NORIZUKI Rintarou (法月綸太郎) is called 法月綸太郎の冒険 (Norizuki Rintarou no bouken, The Adventures of Norizuki Rinatarou, 1992). Admirers of Ellery Queen, who is a constant presence in Norizuki's books, will recognise the title of the first Ellery Queen short story collection, The Adventures of Ellery Queen (1932). Norizuki's collection is made up of one novella and six short stories, some of them reworkings of stories he wrote as an university student for amateur club magazines.

The novella, 'The Death Penalty Puzzle', is set in the execution room of a prison. Japan is one of the two prosperous democratic countries that still have the death penalty, although it is mostly reserved for multiple murders: there are typically two or three executions in a year. In the story, moments before being hanged, a prisoner is poisoned. The prison governor worries about the public reaction to the crime and asks Superintendant Norizuki and his son, detective story writer and amateur detective Rintarou to quickly identify the culprit. Obviously the motive is the biggest puzzle here, since the victim was about to die anyway; but Rintarou focuses more on opportunity. The story is a strong example of the kind of deduction by elimination familiar from early Ellery Queen. A slight oddity is that the elements on which the deduction are based are not really hidden. Similarly the surprise revelation of the murderer is prepared by hints that are hardly disguised. Even so, I hadn't worked out the answer myself.

I won't describe all the other stories in detail, as working out just what kind of a story it is is part of the interest. Like the short story collections from Doyle through to the golden age, they have a great deal of variety. Some are murder mysteries, and these may be whodunnits, howdunits or something completely different. Others feature minor crimes, "puzzles of everyday life", although the fact that they are not announced as such in advance means that they do not fit so simply into the genre. This is perhaps one of the strengths of the "it doesn't have to be murder" freedom of the short story world. Not every story has to establish a well defined problem near the beginning. Some of them can leave you wondering "just where is this heading?" and the answer can be horror, tragedy or comedy.

One story that does have a clearly defined problem is "The Green Door is Danger", a locked room mystery. The victim was an apparent suicide; but Rintarou becomes suspicious of the widow and tries to find out how the murderer could have got out of a bolted room whose only other exit, the green door of the title, has been sealed fast for many years. I had the right background to make the solution very obvious to me; but I thought it was a very satisfactory version of the locked room genre. It isn't one of the most baffling examples, since, although there is clearly a right answer, the set up would have allowed the murderer a variety of possibilities to create much the same effect. But this is one story where you can decide for yourself, even if you don't read Japanese, as there is a translation by Ho-Ling Wong in the November 2014 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

Of the other stories in the collection my favourite was "The Slasher" (切り裂き鬼). I wish English speaking fans of the classical detective story had a chance to read it.

The Alice Mirror Castle Murder Case

Ten characters gather on a lonely island in winter. Most are detectives invited by the wealthy niece of the owner of the only house on the island, the Lewis Carroll themed Alice Mirror Castle. The niece wants the detectives to search for the so-called Alice mirror that should be in the castle somewhere. Whoever is still alive at the end of their stay can have the mirror. This seems like an invitation to murder. And indeed someone is targeting the other guests, and one by one their number decreases, in a homage to the Agatha Christie classic, And Then There Were None. If this all sounds strangely familiar, there is more than one homage to the book in the world of Japanese mystery. Today's isolated island serial murder is by KITAYAMA Takekuni (北山猛邦, born 1979), 『アリス・ミラー城』殺人事件  (The Alice Mirror Castle Murder Case, 2003).

I'm not going to write much about this one, because I'm clearly not its intended audience. It has a locked room mystery and various crime scene maps and plans; but at the end, none of the explanations for the various mysteries seemed to make sense. The fantastical set up might be considered a warning not to expect too much logic, and the characters do not act like characters in the real world.

You can read the much more enthusiastic reactions of other bloggers here and here. So obviously I'm missing something.

A Kyoto Murder Map

京都殺人地図 (Kyouto satsujin chizu, A Map of Murder in Kyoto, 1980) is a set of short stories by 山村美紗 (YAMAMURA Misa, 1931-1996). Yamamura was a major figure in Japanese mystery in the twentieth century; but my impression is that interest in her books has pretty much faded now. She wrote a lot, and the titles and descriptions give the impression that the books are very formulaic. Before reading the book reviewed here, I pictured her work as something like UCHIDA Yasuo's books, giving more attention to tourism and romance than to mystery. That prejudice was reinforced by the Yamamura Misa TV drama I saw when I was first in Japan, which had a too comfortable "Murder She Wrote" feel to it and featured a lot of Kyoto tourism. I don't know what her other books are like; but if this one is typical, I had the wrong idea completely. The stories are neat little mysteries, with a focus on forensic investigation.

ENATSU Fuyuko (江夏冬子) is a kenshikan (検視官) in the Kyoto police, a high achiever who has reached this position while still in her twenties. When she starts, her male colleagues doubt that a young woman like her is up to the job. The kenshikan has responsibilities a little like a coroner, determining the cause of death where there is any suspicion of unnatural death. As Yamamura depicts it, this is the preliminary stage of any investigation. Enatsu is called out to the suspected crime scene and examines the corpse and its immediate surroundings, to decide whether a police investigation is necessary. This gives the stories a typical structure like this: 1) Enatsu races with her partner Hashiguchi to the crime scene and discovers indications that it was murder and gives a preliminary estimation of time of death; 2) as far as her job is concerned, her part in the case is now over, and other police detectives follow various leads, discovering suspects and clues, but finally run into a dead end; 3) Enatsu has an idea that leads to a breakthrough; 4) the head of the murder squad sets out the police case to the killer.

The first story, 'The Girl Died in a Locked Room' is (of course) a locked room mystery. A teenage schoolgirl is found asphyxiated in the one room cottage in the garden of her parent's house where she lived. Door and window are locked from the inside; and it looks like she has died while sniffing paint thinner. Enatsu notices that she is pregnant and suspects that she has been carefully strangled so as not to leave an evident strangling mark. I'd actually already read this one, in an anthology of locked room mysteries edited by AYUKAWA Tetsuya (鮎川哲也). Locked room mysteries really are a staple of Japanese mystery; and many writers seem to include them more from duty than enthusiasm, with an unoriginal use of some idea seen a hundred times before. This one is not as bad as that; but it's not a classic either.

The next 'The Faked Murder Scene' starts with the discovery of a murdered woman, apparently stabbed by her husband, who is missing; but something about the room where the woman was killed seems odd to Enatsu, although she can't quite place what it is. 'The Missing Spouse' starts with Enatsu on her day off watching  television. The television company has located the runaway wife and husband from two neighbouring houses and is putting on a confrontation, getting the pregnant abandoned wife to beg her husband to return, without success.  The other runaway is not on the programme, having refused to take part. When Enatsu is called away to investigate a woman run over by a train, it turns out to be the missing woman. 'The Flower Message of Daffodils is Death' involves the murder of a flower arranger (a traditional art in Japan, ikebana). 'The Methodical Killer' starts with the police in pursuit of the kidnapper of a five year old kindergarten child; but after the first phone call the kidnapper makes no further contact, and when the child is found dead, it is clear that he had already died before the phone call was made. 'The Drowned Woman' features a woman found dead in her apartment with the water of Lake Biwa in her lungs. 'The Headless Corpse' is the investigation of a dismembered body. 'The Proof of the Bones' involves the search for the unrecovered bodies of Japanese soldiers in Saipan.

The stories generally focus severely on the investigations, without going much into character. A little attention is given to Enatsu's feelings about her work and what she wants from life: the ikebana case brings her into contact with an old friend, now a mother, and makes her think that maybe she too should get married (which in Japan at that time would probably involve giving up her job); although her male colleagues come to accept her, she is not really part of the team. Most of the stories are interesting little mysteries; but they are not fair play, at least not reliably. The reader gets the clues needed to solve the case perhaps half the time; in other cases, the clue is revealed along with the deduction. We are watching people detect, more than detecting ourselves.

Only one of Yamamura's books has been translated into English, 黒の環状線 (1976), translated as The Dark Ring of Murder (1996) by Robert B. Rohmer.

The Chamber of Horus

As you'd expect, most of the books I write about here are Japanese; but as I need to brush up my French at the moment, I thought I'd try one of the books by Paul Halter (born 1956), who is often mentioned as the modern master of locked room detective stories. La Chambre d'Horus (The Chamber of Horus, 2007) is a historical locked room mystery, set in 1911 and featuring one of Halter's series detectives, Owen Burns.

The story features mysteries in three different periods. In ancient Egypt a judge investigates the murder of a local preacher in his hut, whose only exit faced the town square. When he is found beaten to death, no-one had been seen leaving the hut with a weapon capable of inflicting the wounds. In 1811 an Italian adventurer opens the tomb of a pharaoh. The pharaoh is in fact the judge, who had later in life risen to be regent and so buried with pharaonic honours. To the adventurer's astonishment, although the tomb was still sealed when he found it, the mummy is not in its sarcophagus. Instead a pile of discarded bandages lie on the floor beside it. In 1911 archeologists find the adventurer's diary. He had resealed and hidden the entrance to the tomb meaning to return to it later. When they open the tomb, they find that everything is as he had described, except that the mummy is lying properly in its sarcopagus, wrapped in its bandages. One by one the discoverers die from strange causes. When the mummy is sold to a rich London collector, his family fear that he is bringing a danger into the house and consult Burns, who sends his friend Achille Stock to observe on the evening when the mummy arrives. Despite the precautions a new death occurs, a murder in a room bolted from inside with no other exit; and the weapon is found in a different sealed room, in which the mummy had been placed.

The different puzzles in the book are all at least acceptable. One was a pleasing idea, but rather obvious. All of them felt like they would do better as short stories (discarding the puzzle of the tomb). In style and mood the book feels like an early Hammer horror film. The characters have less life than John Dickson Carr's, and in conforming too well to a dull horror film format the situation lacked the originality that Carr's own inventions had. I don't feel any urgency to try another book by Halter. But it it all reads very easily; and isn't long enough to get tedious.

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.

The Confusion of A Aiichirou

This marks a little blog milestone, as it's the hundredth post. Oddly exactly half those posts are in 2013 and half in 2014. Since I only started the blog towards the end of June 2013, my posting in this year has been unimpressive. I'll try and do a bit better next year; but I don't expect to get up to two hundred posts any time soon.

Because the way that Japanese names are converted in European languages can be a bit variable, the first time I mention a name in a post, I mostly try to make clear what part is family name and what part is given name by using the convention of putting the name in Japanese order and putting all letters of the family name in capitals, for instance YOKOMIZO Seishi (generally referred to in English as Seishi Yokomizo). It turns out that there are names where that doesn't help. So let me just say in advance that the family name of the detective in the stories I'm reviewing here is A (亜), and the given name is Aiichirou (愛一郎).

AWASAKA Tsumao (泡坂妻夫) started his career with an A Aiichirou story, one of eight published in magazine form from 1976 to 1977, that were then collected in 亜愛一郎の狼狽 (A Aiichirou no roubai, The Confusion of A Aiichirou, 1978). They are pretty well known among lovers of traditional mysteries in Japan, often compared to the Father Brown stories of G.K. Chesterton. Let me say in advance, they are not nearly as good as the Father Brown stories. I say that, just so that you can have a chance of approaching them without too high expectations; and if you can read Japanese, you should try these, as they make a thoroughly entertaining collection of unusual mysteries. (It is the first of three collections: you can read Ho-Ling's discussions of all three here.)

The hero A is a photographer, specialising in taking photographs of clouds and insects and other natural objects of little interest to most people. At first glance he makes a good impression, as he has movie star good looks and is dressed smartly and with good taste. This impression does not survive long in his company: he is nervous, clumsy and socially awkward. But then his unusual way of looking at things leads him to deductions that those around him could not imagine. This sounds a little forced, as if someone had taken the convention "unimpressive character proves to be brilliant detective" and mechanically added an extra stage "impressive looking character proves to be unimpressive, but then proves to be brilliant detective"; but A's slightly unusual way of looking at things makes a character that goes beyond the summary traits.

The stories generally follow a pattern. The narration is in the third person, but follows the viewpoint of one character. Along with the events that make up the mystery this observer at some point comes into contact with A, and as mentioned is first impressed by his looks, then astonished by his clumsiness, then amazed by his deductions. A's deductions often go so far, that he discovers a crime before we are aware that there is a mystery, or at least before we know that the mystery involves more than a "puzzle of everyday life". Examples of this are the first story, "The Flight DL2 Incident", "The Warped Apartment" and "The Black Mist". In the last, for instance, the puzzle is why someone would engineer an accident that covers a street with carbon dust. Most of the story is a farce, with the shopkeepers on the street losing their tempers with each other. Only A spots that there is something more sinister behind it. Like Ho-Ling, I doubt that a reader could legitimately make the deduction; but it is still a very satisfying mystery. Others involve impossible crimes, a man shot while alone in a balloon that was being observed for the whole period of its flight ("The Skies over Right Arm Mountain"), a village chief on a tropical island found shot dead in a hut observed by the other villagers, the only person with him being his dead wife, who holds the gun ("The God of Horobo"), a mugger found murdered in a car with no footprints leading away through the snow except those of the taxi driver who fled while the mugger was still alive ("Weasel on Road G"), a man in a golden mask shot while standing on the outstretched hand of a giant Buddhist statue with a gun too inaccurate to have a chance of hitting him ("The Golden Mask in the Palm of a Hand"). The last of these is my favourite of the impossible crimes, with ingenious ideas and a good use of A's unusual style of thinking, which often involves imagining himself in the place of others. "The Excavated Fairy Tale" belongs more to the first group, with a writer's odd insistence on retaining misspelling in a fairy tale leading to the discovery of a crime: the route in this case, unsurprisingly, is via code breaking (with an idea quite close to the last code breaking story I read). The storytelling takes a different approach here: the viewpoint character is now an acquaintance of A, and in competition to discover the secret ends up handcuffing A to keep him from getting ahead.

The style of the stories is quite interesting: they seem to be deliberately loosely constructed. You should not expect a single minded concentration on the mystery. Most are humorous, some concentrate on a narrative whose relevance to the actual mystery may prove at best tangential. This makes it easy for Awasaka to introduce his clues, of course; but reading them does not feel like the writer is wasting our time. The experience is more of an agreeable lack of focus.

After School With Mystery

放課後はミステリーとともに (houkago ha misuterii to tomo ni, After School Comes with a Mystery, 2011) is a series of linked short stories by 東川篤哉 (HIGASHIGAWA Tokuya, born 1968). According to the appreciation which is added at the end of the book (a common feature of bunko format books), the stories were first published in a magazine over several years, starting in 2003. As the title suggests, the stories have a school setting. Apparently they are part of a larger series with the same setting (which might explain some things I didn't understand while reading them).

The school is a Japanese high school and the narrator is 霧ケ峰淳 (KIRIGAMINE Ryou), the vice president of the school's Detection Club. The club is devoted not to detective fiction, but to actual detection; and Ryou has business cards printed with "Kirigamine Ryou, Great Detective" on them. (Great Detective is a recognised profession in the world of Japanese detective stories.) In case it's not already obvious, these are youth oriented, comic mysteries. The youth oriented part means that I don't get some of the comedy, which often runs on stereotypes that I'm not familiar with. It may also be the reason that none of the mysteries actually involve murder. They are not "puzzles of everyday life", the Japanese genre of mysteries without a major crime. Almost all the stories involve a serious crime, often attempted murder; but no-one actually dies. This makes it easier for the comedy too.

The balance of comedy and mystery probably comes down more on the mystery side than the Japanese TV drama series "Trick", which is the other Japanese comedy mystery that I'm familiar with (though I've only seen part of it). The parts of the comedy that I got are generally a very old style of joke, including some things that probably go back to the nineteenth century; but I thought they were pretty well handled. Failed jokes can be almost painful for me; and reading Higashigawa, if I never actually laughed aloud, I never felt that a joke fell completely flat.

The mysteries are also very competently managed, without ever quite reaching the point where you would call them brilliant. All of them involve apparent impossibilities: a thief disappearing from a building whose only exit was watched; a victim pushed from an empty rooftop, which could only be accessed by a staircase where a boy was playing a computer game at the time; a strangling in a field with no footprints but the victim's; and so on.

Despite the "Great Detective" business card, Kirigamine is only rarely the detective, sometimes failing, sometimes not even trying to deduce the culprit, being happy to play Watson to various other characters. One expectation I had reading the stories was that the Detection Club would play some role in the book: it seems pointless to make so much of it in the introduction of the narrator and never use it. In fact, Kirigamine is the only character from the club in the book. Presumably, this should be seen as a spin off to other stories which feature more characters and club activity.

If you're looking for fairly modern, light reading mysteries to practise Japanese with, I imagine these would do very well.  Ho-Ling has a lot of posts on Higashikawa, which can give you an idea of his range and point you to other popular books of his. (One warning: if you're thinking of reading this book, you might prefer to read the first mystery in it before reading Ho-Ling's posts on the book.) I certainly expect that I'll try another of his books in due course.

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.

God Save the Queen

森 博嗣 (MORI Hiroshi, born 1957) is a prolific and successful detective story writer, perhaps best known outside Japan for The Sky Crawlers (2002), the basis of an anime film with the same title (2008). I had read one book by him before I started the blog, his first novel すべてがFになる (Subete ga F ni naru, Everything Becomes F or The Perfect Insider, 1996). The first English title is the literal translation, the second is the English title printed on the book. Japanese detective stories often have an English translation of the title on the cover, even when the book itself has never been translated into English. In Mori's case, the English titles are often not literal translations, but a different, new title. The post title is the English title provided for 女王の百年密室 (Joou no hyakunen misshitsu, God Save the Queen, 2000); a more literal translation would be The Queen's Hundred Year Locked Room. Neither of these books has an English translation; but both had a manga adaption, which seems to have been published in a French translation by Soleil Manga. I haven't seen these myself, but the titles are F, The Perfect Insider (2006) and God Save the Queen (2006).

 Saeba Michiru is a reporter (or report writer) in the 22nd century, travelling with his 'partner' Roidy, an android. A navigation system breakdown leaves them stranded, unsure even exactly what country they are in. Luckily, there is a town nearby, one that has lived isolated from the world around it for a hundred years. The town is strangely peaceful, ruled ceremonially by a queen, who is said to be over fifty, but looks as if she is in her twenties. But the town has many oddities; and beyond its own mysteries it harbours a man who has some connexion to terrible events in Michiru's past.

During Michiru's visit, the queen's son is found strangled. As far as Michiru is concerned, he has been murdered, but the town's people see death as sleep and store the bodies in freezing chambers. Only Michiru sees the incident as something to investigate, and gets no helpful answers from the incurious witnesses. The book treats the murder as a locked room mystery, but really that depends on the witnesses and we get no encouragement to treat their answers as trustworthy. Neither the murder mystery nor the mystery of the town and its purpose is pursued in a purposeful way. In the end, the not very surprising answers are simply given to us. (Some incidental mysteries are hinted more subtly and may come as a surprise.) The book is probably best seen more as an extended exercise in melancholy than as a detective story or a work of science fiction.

You can read another blogger's opinions of the book here.

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.