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 Girl the Dragon Called

竜が呼んだ娘  (ryuu ga yonda musume, The Girl the Dragon Called, 2013) is a children's fantasy by KASHIWABA Sachiko (柏葉幸子), a writer best known for 霧のむこうのふしぎな町 (The Marvellous Village Veiled in Mist, 1975). That and りんご畑の特別列車 (The Apple Orchard Special Train, 1989) that I discussed earlier are towards the more nonsensical or whimsical end of the spectrum of children's fantasy. This book is much closer to the other end of the spectrum, an adventure set in a world in which magic is real, much like a fantasy written for adults. Visits from our world to the magic world are more likely to be found towards the "nonsense" end of the spectrum. This might be because part of the interest of such books is the strangeness of their nonsense world, and an observer from our world can react appropriately. In The Girl the Dragon Called, the heroine Mia belongs to the world of the story. Even so, readers want a character who experiences the world as something new along with them. Mia  can do that because she comes from a valley cut off from the rest of the world, the home or prison of "wrongdoers" and their descendants. The only creatures linking the valley to the outside world are dragons which can fly over the surrounding cliffs. Each spring the visit of a dragon has a special significance.

Ten year olds wondering, 'Will I be called by the dragon?' felt their hearts tremble at the thought that if that happened they would be leaving the village for good.

Not just the parents of ten year old children, but the whole village would talk about who the dragon would take this year. Sometimes no-one might be called, sometimes two or three. It was an honor to be called by the dragon.

Mia is an orphan, raised by her aunt, who had herself been taken out of the valley as a child, but then returned as an adult, for some wrongdoing of her own. When the dragon calls Mia, she realises that her aunt had been preparing her to leave all her life. The dragon always brings the children to a place where they are needed; and Mia is wanted in the palace complex of the capital. The remnants of a long past war have left behind a variety of unfinished business, that Mia must help with. She is the new servant in the rooms of the hero of that war, who is now only left as a weeping voice heard at nights.

The book is not constantly serious. There are occasional patches of humour or lighthearted adventure; but there are also episodes showing a dystopian society, and more emphasis on a child's uncertain place in the world and their relation to the adults that should care for them.

Most of the various threads of the plot get a resolution of sorts by the end of the book, so that it makes a self contained novel; but it certainly feels like the door has been left open for a sequel with more of the story.

My Town

NONAMI Asa (乃南アサ, born 1960) is probably best known for her books with police detective OTOMICHI Takako (音道 貴子). The first of those, 凍える牙 (kogoeru kiba, Frozen Fang, 1996) even has an English translation (The Hunter, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter, 2006). ボクの町 (boku no machi, My Town, 1998) is less well known. It's not a detective story, not even a crime novel really, though the narrative includes several crimes. It's the account of one trainee policeman's first apprentice year in a local police mini station (a kouban) in Tokyo.

The young policeman TAKAGI Seidai (高木聖大) is a bit of a misfit in the police world. He has no great natural enthusiasm for the job and would rather be chasing girls. He had left university with no clear idea what he wanted to do and joined the force almost randomly. Even on his first roll call he gets marked out by his superior officers for having a sticker with a photo of his last girlfriend stuck in the back of his police notebook. He still has an ear piercing, and his speech is mostly casual and slangy. (It sounds like the dialect typical of thoughtless slapdash young men in television dramas, the 'su style, you could say; I've never heard this in real life, and don't know if it's a convention or a real thing.) Through his post training apprentice year he gets experience of what the work really demands, often failing to live up to expectations and questioning whether he has made the right choice in joining the police.

The uniformed police don't get much attention in fiction in Japan or the English speaking world, so it's interesting to read a bit about them for a change. The mini police stations in particular are a very Japanese institution. Tourist guides to Japan often advise you to ask for directions there. There aren't enough of them for that to be actually practical for a tourist; but from the novel it seems that giving directions really is a major part of the work. There are crimes too; but they aren't necessarily resolved. As policemen on the beat, the characters have less control over how things work out than a detective. Mostly they can only patrol or wait and hope to run into the criminal. Towards the end, though, a serial arsonist changes the narrative expectations, as Takagi joins the all out hunt to catch the culprit.

The Devotion of Suspect X

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

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

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

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

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

Sky Town 008

空中都市008 (kuuchuu toshi zero zero eito, Sky Town 008, 1968) by KOMATSU Sakyou (小松左京, 1931-2011) is a children's science fiction novel. Komatsu was Japan's most famous science fiction writer, probably best known in the west for 日本沈没 (nihon chinbotsu, Japan Sinks, 1973), which was filmed twice, in 1973 and in 2006. Sky Town 008 got an adaptation too, a 1969 television puppet drama by NHK.

The story is aimed at young children and gives an optimistic view of the world in the twenty first century. The main character is a primary school aged boy Hoshio, whose family (mother, father and younger sister Tsukiko) move to the city. Its name makes it sound like a city in midair; but anyone expecting James Blish style cities in flight will be disappointed. It is a more realistic earthbound city of skyscrapers, differing from those of the twentieth century in the more sophisticated use of the higher levels. Hoshio's new home is many stories up in the air, but is still a proper house with a garden. The houses and gardens wind upwards round the building in a spiral, which allows each to have light.

Each chapter brings a new episode, exporing different aspects of the town and of the world of the future. Hoshio explores the city with his neighbour Ginny (although the setting is Japan, Komatsu imagines a more international country than Japan in the sixties, and many characters are from other countries). They build a robot for a school club project, with the help of a robotics expert they know. The central computer malfunctions causing various mishaps, most amusing, some alarming, for people in the city. They have a school trip to the nearby city under the sea and make friends with an intelligent dolphin.

Most of the episodes are within the realistic mode of near future science fiction, and the kinds of adventures the children are allowed to get into are mostly close to the minor scrapes that a small child could really experience. That means that expectations of a thrilling adventure may be disappointed. There are no bad characters; in fact Hoshio and his family and friends don't even have to deal with any persistently stupid or misguided characters. The only sense in which the book rises to a climax is in saving the most exciting outing, a tourist trip to the moon, for the last chapter. I imagine though, that I would have liked this book a lot if I'd met it as a child. It reminds me strongly of Arthur C. Clarke's Islands in the Sky, which I loved, but which I see is sometimes criticised for the same lack of major tension as Sky Town 008.

 The technological developments Komatsu imagines are based on inventions and research of the sixties. There are footnotes from the original book, explaining where the ideas come from. These make for interesting reading fifty years later. Some predictions are completely wrong. Others are very close to reality, or imagine real developments, but ones which came about in a quite different way to the book.

An Unfortunate Name

I wrote a review of half of the 1982 book Suspicion (疑惑) by MATSUMOTO Seichou a year ago. That was the novella with the book title. Somehow I didn't get round to reading the other half of the book, the novella,不運な名前 (fuunna namae, An Unfortunate Name, first published separately in 1981).The story is an investigation of a famous counterfeiting case from the 19th century, presented as fiction, much like Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time (1951). 

The story's setting is the museum of the old Kabato Prison in Tsukigata, Hokkaidou. The prison was set up as part of the Meiji government's efforts to populate Hokkaidou; the prisoners were to provide a workforce to build the necessary infrastructure. The most famous prisoner was perhaps KUMASAKA Chouan (熊坂 長庵, 1844-1886), arrested for forging Japanese banknotes. The case was notable because three years before Kumasaka's arrest, the businessman FUJITA Denzaburou (藤田傳三郎, 1841-1912) and other leaders of the Fujita group had been taken into investigative custody on suspicion of being the culprits, then finally released without charge. The suspicion had been a major scandal, involving senior politicians, and many have suspected that Kumasaka was a scapegoat, especially as his name was only one letter different from a famous Heian period robber, 熊坂長範 (KUMASAKA Chouhan).

The investigators in the story are three visitors to the prison museum: a freelance writer investigating the case (we see everything through his eyes and thoughts); a retired teacher and passionate defender of Kumasaka's honour; a young woman, apparently a tourist. Although the scene and the modern characters are given a personality, they are really only there to mediate the narration and analysis of the nineteenth century story. The actual case is interesting, but it's not easy reading. In several places we have long excerpts from Meiji era documents and narratives; and even when the modern characters are speaking, they constantly reference outdated and technical terminology. I must admit that I'm a fairly recalcitrant reader for most popular history in general, and this sort of fictional account in particular. I suspect the whole time that the writer is working more like a lawyer advocating a case than a researcher. The status as fiction is particularly problematic when much of the argument is based on a photograph of a forged note in the private possession of the fictional freelance writer.

From the Wikipedia page on Kumasaka, I see that this is not the first time Matusmoto had written about the case. There's a 1964 story 相模国愛甲郡中津村 (Sagaminokuni Aikougun Nakatsumura) which is apparently based on the case (the title is Kumasaka's home village); but I haven't read 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.]