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.

And then there were five people missing

そして五人がいなくなる (soshite gonin ga inakunaru, And Then Five People Were Missing, 1994) is the first book in the series 名探偵夢水清志郎事件ノート (Meitantei Yumemizu Kiyoshirou jiken nooto, Case Notes of Great Detective YUMEMIZU Kiyoshirou) by はやみねかおる (HAYAMINE Kaoru, born 1964). It's a lighthearted children's detective series, probably aimed principally at children around ten to twelve, although the narrator and her sisters are slightly older (about thirteen).

Yumemizu is the new neighbour of the IWASAKI (岩崎) family. He has moved into the ramshackle western style house next door and hung up a sign saying "Yumemizu Kiyoshirou, Great Detective". The children 亜衣, 真衣 and 美衣 (Ai, Mai, Mii, or I, My, Me, as they write their names) regard this declaration with suspicion; and Ai starts to investigate the detective, calling round on the new neighbour with a gift from her mother. Yumemizu is an eccentric, always dressed in a black suit and sunglasses, mostly lying around reading or sleeping. A former lecturer and self proclaimed great detective, his self confidence is boundless, but somehow hard to credit, even though he shows Ai his card, which reads "Great Detective Yumemizu Kiyoshirou".

"You showed me the card earlier, so never mind that. I mean, tell me what cases you've solved so far."
"Fine." But although Yumemizu's mouth stayed open, no more words came out.
"What is it?"
"I can't remember."
Seeing my suspicion filled eyes, he hurried to defend himself, "It's true. I really have solved any number of difficult cases. But when a puzzle's solved, it's not interesting any more and I just forget them."
Really?

In the end Yumemizu's deductions convince the sisters that he really is a detective; but since "Great Detective" isn't a real title, they end up calling him "Professor".

The first real case comes in the summer holidays. At a nearby amusement park, the performing magician "The Count" (伯爵) makes a young girl vanish from a box suspended on ropes above the stage. When neither he nor the girl reappear, the audience realise that she has in fact been kidnapped. The Count announces that this is the first of five people he is going to make vanish; and soon another three children disappear in impossible circumstances. The figure of the Count is very much like the villain of EDOGAWA Rampo's children's series; but here there is less adventure, more emphasis on the puzzle. The book aims to be a proper classical detective story, though one in a world in which plausibility is not really a criterion. There are a couple of good ideas in the various puzzles (and one nice use of a narrative trick), but most will seem a little obvious. The chief attraction of the book is in the humour, particularly in its eccentric detective and sarcastic narrator.

The Magician of Balloon Town

バルーン・タウンの手品師 (Baruun Taun no tejinashi, The Magician of Balloon Town, 2004) is a sequel to MATSUO Yumi's The Balloon Town Murder (1994). I wrote a post about that a year ago; but I'll repeat the essential background to the series here. Balloon Town is the mocking name given by outsiders to a closed district of near future Tokyo, reserved for pregnant women. Most women in this future prefer to use the artificial wombs that have established themselves as the safer and more convenient way to bring a baby into the world. For those women who reject this, Tokyo has set aside a protected precinct, a kind of town within the town, in which almost all the inhabitants are pregnant women. A little unusual among the other expectant mothers, the amateur detective KUREBAYASHI Mio does not share their slightly cultish devotion to natural motherhood. In the stories in the first book, she solves mysteries brought to her by her policewoman friend, ETA Marina, who finds herself sent repeatedly to investigate crimes in this unusual world.

The stories partly satirise things familiar in our world, in particular attitudes to pregnancy and maternity, by taking them to extremes, partly play with the surreal reversal of norms that the premise permits. Both of these elements are still present, but much more weakly so in the sequel. Eta is visiting another friend from the first book, whose baby is due. When a disk possibly containing sensitive government data goes missing from the hospital room, the only suspects are the other visitors, but none of them have the disk on them and none of them could have got it out of the room. Kurebayashi, whose baby Reo was born at the end of the first book, turns up to solve the impossible crime. As the more experienced Balloon Town insiders spot, she is pregnant again. So she is also on hand to solve the crimes that continue to occur in the town. In "The Balloon Town Automatic Doll", a maker of karakuri dolls (traditional Japanese clockwork dolls that perform surprisingly complex actions like serving tea) is bludgeoned and robbed in front of the camera he was using to record the performance of his two automata; but nobody could have got approached him by the only possible exit without being spotted. In "The Orient Express 15:45 Mystery", a protestor who threw tomatoes at a visiting author vanishes into a fortune teller's booth constructed as a railway carriage; but it seems that none of the pregnant fortune tellers could have been the attacker. In "The Strange Passion of Professor Hanibaru", Eta's investigation of a missing pregnant woman leads her to the woman's psychiatrist, a strange, mesmeric figure, whose enthusiasm for the subject of cooking with placentas perhaps hides something even more disturbing.

As the titles suggest the stories make frequent allusion to detective story literature, sometimes creating a pregnancy or maternity themed version of famous mysteries. The crimes are often relatively minor (there was one murder in the stories in the first book, none in this one). While the satirical element is weaker, more attention is paid to the development of the book across stories. The final story is much longer than the others; and lines preparing us for some of its elements are set up in the earlier stories.

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.

The Apple Orchard Special Train

りんご畑の特別列車　(ringobatake no tokubetsu ressha, The Apple Orchard Special Train, 1989) is a children's book by KASHIWABA Sachiko (柏葉幸子), best known for The Mysterious Town beyond the Mist. Like that, this is a fantasy for young readers. You could put children's fantasy on a spectrum. At one end, you have conventional fantasy stories, much like the post-Tolkien fantasy marketed to adults, which treat a magical world as something real and try to make it plausible. At the other, you have stories like Alice in Wonderland, which put more emphasis on invention and fill their world with deliberately fanciful and absurd creations. The classics of English language children's books would fit on the spectrum something like this: Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, C.S. Lewis's Narnia books, The Hobbit. Like The Mysterious Town beyond the Mist, The Apple Orchard Special Train falls near the middle of the spectrum, a little closer to the "absurd and inventive" end than to the "treat magic like reality" end.

Yuki is a fifth year primary school girl (ten or eleven years old), taking an early evening train home after school and piano lesson; but something seems to have gone wrong.

When he got to Yuki's seat, the conductor said, "Please show me your ticket."

But they never checked tickets on the train ..... Yuki pulled her season ticket out of her pocket. As she held it out, she felt the train taking a curve to the left and looked out of the window. There shouldn't be a curve here. As Yuki pressed her face against the window, she heard the conductor, still standing by her seat, "Not that, the special train ticket."

She turned round in panic, "'Special train?' Do you mean this train?"

The conductor nodded.

"This isn't the normal train?"

"It's the special train," the conductor shook his head.

Yuki felt sure she had checked it was the right train. A little sulkily, she said, "Well, I'll pay the difference."

Resignedly, she took out her purse; but the conductor shook his head, "You can't pay the difference. It looks like you got on the wrong train. You'll have to get off at the next stop."

"Whaaat?" As Yuki cried out in distress, the train clanked to a stop.

"Right, up you get. If you don't have a ticket, you have to get off." He took her arm and pulled her to her feet. The old woman sitting in front of Yuki looked like she felt very sorry for her, but didn't say anything.

"Right. Down you go, down you go," the conductor threw the weeping Yuki out onto the dark platform.

But it didn't say "Special Train", Yuki thought, giving it a reproachful look. What? She looked at the one coach train standing by the platform. When she had got on, there had been ten coaches. ... The train's door hissed shut, a whistle sounded and the train started moving.

"A! Aaa!" Yuki half sighed half cried. The last window of the train opened, Beni and Ryou's faces looked out. When they spotted Yuki, they called, "Go to Merry's place!", "Here's a map. It's a travel agency," and threw a crumpled piece of paper. "You have to go there."

Yuki goes to the place her friends tell her, thinking she can telephone her father to come and get her. Instead, Merry sends her into another world.

The book falls into two parts, an outer frame, in which Yuki wanders into a fantastic world, and a central narrative, in which she has an adventure in the world she has been sent to. Trains and apple orchards only turn up in the outer frame. The world she reaches is one in which everyone except her can do magic; in return, magic does not work on her. Only she can see the ghost like wizard Pekinpo, who had almost been reduced to nothing by the country's king, who had cast a spell so that no-one would remember his existence. Since Yuki is the only one who can see him, she uses his help to win a magic contest and become the companion to the young prince, who must prove his worth by recapturing a stolen piece of magic.

As often in fantasies of travelling to other worlds, the heroine finds new qualities where her character had been lacking before. Yuki sees herself as someone who is too nervous and slow to speak up or act when needed; but faced by the challenges in this world, she is forthright and positively reckless. The adventures are bloodless, and although the characters are often in real danger, the story returns regularly to scenes of comedy or friendship.

Updates

I don't generally bother to announce new translations of books I've reviewed separately; but if you're interested in children's literature, a new translation of one of INUI Tomiko's best books, The Little People in the House in the Tree's Shadow (木かげの家の小人たち), is good news. Pushkin Press are publishing a translation by Ginny Tapley Takemori, as The Secret of the Blue Glass (the title seems to be taken from the French translation, presumably because the Japanese title becomes unwieldy in English). There's a sample here at the Guardian just now (not the best bit to give an idea of the book).

I've added a note to the original post. Although a blog is pretending to be a diary, I do occasionally edit old posts. Mostly it's because I spot a spelling mistake or minor grammatical error. In that case I make the change silently. If it's anything more substantial, I try and make the change more visible, mostly by adding a square bracket with "UPDATE" in it.

The Great Kidnapping: Rainbow Kids

大誘拐 (daiyuukai, The Great Kidnapping, 1979) is a crime novel by TENDOU Shin (天藤 真, 1915-83); and as you can probably guess from the cover, it's a comedy. Although kidnapping is such a horrible crime in real life, it is often used for comedy (the O. Henry story, "The Ransom of Red Chief" for instance, or the Bette Midler film Ruthless People). This one fits into a familiar pattern in kidnapping stories: a victim more forceful than the captors effectively becomes the boss of the gang. Rainbow Kids in the post title is the "English title" added to the book (although it doesn't have an English translation), and refers to the name that the gang give themselves (they call each other by the code names Wind, Thunder and Rain, when they remember). There is a 1991 film of the book, directed by OKAMOTO Kihachi (岡本 喜八).

Three young small time crooks leave prison planning to make some real money. The leader Kenji (健次) is thinking of a kidnapping, to the alarm of the others, who remember horrible news stories of child kidnappings gone wrong. No, he assures them, the target is not a child, but an old woman, YANAGAWA Toshiko (柳川とし子, known as Toji, apparently an old fashioned honorific for a woman running the affairs of  a wealthy family). She is the head of a Wakayama family that controls a vast extent of forest land. Unknown to the kidnappers, they have picked an ideal time, as she has taken it into her head to go for a walk every day through a different part of the Yanagawa lands, accompanied only by her maid Kimi.

When the kidnappers, after various misadventures, finally succeed in capturing her, it immediately becomes clear who is going to be in control, when she insists on them letting Kimi go.  Soon, instead of heading to the hideout they had prepared, they are staying on the farm of one of Toshiko's loyal former servants. Their plans are thrown out much more drastically, when she hears how little (in her opinion) they were planning to ask for ransom. She insists on a huge sum, far greater than any previous ransom; and the gang agree, very unwillingly (how are they even going to carry a sum like that). Soon the case developes into a game of wits between the old lady directing the gang behind the scenes and the wily police chief, who had got his start in life from Toshiko's support when he was a child, and is fiercely devoted to her. As each side challenges the other, the whole of Japan and the world outside are drawn into the spectacle.

This is not a black comedy. There is no violence and no real villains. Most of the characters rise to the challenges presented them. The humour is mostly in the characters (particularly Toshiko, always gentle and courteous, but sure to get her way) and the situation, not so much in actual jokes or comedy set pieces. The tricks that the kidnappers use to outwit the police are reminiscent of the "caper" style of crime file (like Ocean's Eleven), but the book also reminds me a bit of earlier comedy adventures like John Buchan's John Macnab.

The film is very close to the book, in both substance and tone.  The main differences are only simplifications and minor omissions. Occasionally a scene is very slightly more slapstick than the book, but this is rare. One minor difference of tone is the music. Okamoto sets a lot of scenes to upbeat pop music; and this sounds a lot more like 1990 than 1979 to me. It's no classic, but I thought it was a very successful adaption, definitely worth seeing if you get the chance.