Friday, June 10, 2011

『DRINK ME』

「ある金持ちが鏡をほしがっている。依頼が俺のところに回ってきた。それだけのことだ」
「結局あなたたち探偵の存在は、あなたの云 う『それだけ』のものなのでしょう? シャーロック・ホームズもエラリー・クイーンももういない。彼らが探偵として勝ち得たはずの誇りは、現代において既に失われているのです。姿かたちばかり 彼らに似せた、まるで紙人形のような人たち!探偵たちの終わりを戦争のせいにしますか?時代の流れのせいにしますか?好きなように何かを責めるといいです ネ。でも、これだけは云えるのです。探偵は生きていてはいてかない。死ぬべきなのです。」
『『アリス・ミラー』殺人事件』

"Some rich guy wants the mirror. He came to my place. That's all."
"In the end, 'that's all' is all there is to you detectives, right? Sherlock Holmes and Ellery Queen are no more. The pride they fought for as detectives, has been lost in the modern age. You only look like them in appearence. Like paper dolls! Are you blaming the war for this ragnarok for the detectives? The change in trend? You can blame whatever you want. But I'll tell you this. Detectives shouldn't be alive. They should be dead.", 
"'Alice Mirror Castle' Murder Case"

I think that Alice in Wonderland is the non-detective novel referenced most often here, but I have to confess: I haven't read the book. Nor its sequel. Nor have I seen the Disney films. All I know of Lewis Carroll and Alice derives from writers like Queen and Arisugawa Alice. If you'd ask me about Alice in Wonderland, I could tell you about how it's an awesome source of inspiration for detective writers, but little more.

And of course, the Alice in 'Alice Mirror Jou' Satsujin Jiken ("'Castle Alice Mirror' Murder Case') refers to Alice in Wonderland. A group of detectives is gathered on the island of Erikajima, all with the same objective: to find an item called the Alice Mirror. They reside in the Alice Mirror Castle, a strange castle with mirror-rooms, doors that seem to appear and disappear and various references to Carroll's work. Their search for the Alice Mirror changes into a game of survival, as they start to get killed one after another. From locked room murders (how did the first victim get through the Alice Door, a very small door? Did he drink the shrinking potion?!) to a murder in a gigantic mirror-room and cut-up bodies, the murderer seems to be a connoisseur of classic murders. Which is also shown by a chessboard, with white chess pieces disappearing one after another every time a murder is commited, until there were none.

My first reading Kitayama Takekuni and it was a pleasant experience. As the main players in the novel are all (fairly genre savvy) detectives, the discussions they have on mechanical locked room tricks are very interesting, almost nearing the philosophical. Because all these chesspieces are so genre-savvy, the novel also clearly messes with the reader on a meta-level, and you always wonder how many levels you have to enter in the 'if Kitayma thinks I think that he thinks that I think...' game. The denouement shows that Kitayama manages to pull off hard to do things quite nicely. The locked room behind the small Alice Door is basically a rather gruesome variation on a very widely used locked room trick, but it was done so wonderfully with the Alice in Wonderland references that it manages to impress. What I liked most though was again how Kitayama (the murderer) makes uses of meta-level knowledge and justifies the locked room murder and the cut-up bodies in a way that works.

Thematically, this novel is very much like Ayatsuji's Jukkakukan no Satsujin, and it's certainly nice to read these two as a set. Discussions of the genre on a meta-level have of course been in detectives for ages, but it's nice to see how it develops as an actual field of study and how modern novels build on the knowledge to explore new realms. Once again, this is not a new practice, but it's a bit more rare to see in modern times. Well, it's a staple of New Orthodox novels, but a more global approach to it would be nice too, right?

The only thing I really, really didn't like was the characters' motivation for participating in the game. You'll probably never ever hear me talk about character motivation here again, but it's one thing to have characters that are brought to life to die (in most detective novels), but to have genre-savvy characters brought to life to die is something completely different. The characters know that they'll probably die if they go to the island to look for the Alice Mirror, but go nonetheless. For the money. I think I'd rather have a more nihilistic approach to accompany the dreamy atmosphere that's present anyway: a gathering of detectives who are destined to die, without all the 'we're in it for the money' justification, and without the utterly weird motive of the murderer.

One of these days I really have to read Alice in Wonderland though... 

Original Japanese title(s): 北山猛邦 『『アリス・ミラー城』殺人事件』

5 comments :

  1. I once changed up on a website that listed nearly all the detective stories, inclusive of classic and modern variations of the crime story, that have a Carrollian theme or merely contain references to the story (e.g. Alicesque book title) – and you'd be surprise how many of them were written over the past 100 years. Unfortunately, I lost the link and can't locate the website anymore. But it shows that Alice in Wonderland left its paw prints all over the genre and not just on the works of a specific group of writers.

    And there's no legitimate excuse for not having read the book! It's not that long of a story and you can pick up a perfectly fine reading copy for next to nothing at Het Boekenfestijn. You can even pick between different types of editions!

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  2. I have to admit, I'm drawn to almost anything that has "Alice" in the title or that references it in any way, shape, or form, but sounds like a truly interesting work.

    And indeed, there is no legitimate excuse for not heaving read the original novel. It has left its paw prints on much more than just the detective genre after all.

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  3. @エリ

    Have you read Fredric Brown's Night of the Jabberwock and/or John Dickson Carr's The Mad Hatter Mystery?

    The former is a wonderful, soft-boiled detective phantasmagoria in which reality and fantasy are constantly at odds with one another and the latter is a very atmospheric account of a series of bizarre hat-thefts that end with a murder at the Tower of London!

    Plot wise, it's not one of Carr's best efforts, but a wonderful read nonetheless – especially if you enjoy stories with a Carrollian theme running through the plot. It also involves a lost manuscript by Edgar Allan Poe and the excerpt is a spot-on imitation of the grandfather of the detective story.

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  4. Just one nit-picking first off: Kitayama, not Kitamura (since you wrote it throughout the whole entry).

    One of my neo-orthodox favorites. Loved the locked room and the fact that it's more likely to fall for Kitayamas trap the more you are into classical detective fiction and its specific staples and preconceptions.

    It's certainly true though that the characters are just chesspieces for this plot to work out (they do have their own roles, positions and meta-meanings though) and Kitayama continued this meta-comment in the series' next novel in a slightly different way (puppets); certainly fairly constructed again but still more reasonable as a fictional concept.

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  5. @エリ/TomCat: I know it's an important work, but... but... I just never seem to find the right occassion to read it. Now I'm just hoping that someday, I'll have read enough Alice inspired books to be able to reconstruct the original story myself :P Ellery Queen gave me several poems, this the small door and background information on Carrol, Kingdom Hearts told me about bad level design... oh, wait.

    @mousoukyoku: Oh, thanks! No idea why I did that. With all the weird names in the book (seriously, 无多?), it would be a normal name I'd write wrong ^_~'

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