I walk down the lane
With a happy refrain
Just singin',
Singin' in the rain
"Singin' in the Rain"
Now I think about it, I don't think I have that many books with a bright yellow cover...
The book also carries the alternate English title The Black Umbrella Mystery, which invokes the Ellery Queen spirit the book is indeed going for. In fact, the marketing slogan for Aosaki Yuugo is "the Heisei period Ellery Queen", which should give you an idea about the type of mystery you can expect from Taiikukan no Satsujin. And yes, a black umbrella is of importance to the plot.
Man, I've been waiting for years for the paperback version of this book to be released! Aosaki debuted in 2012 with this book and it caught my attention immediately: it had a very bright and catchy cover (the hardcover and paperback versions have different, but similar covers), the title was a funny parody on Ayatsuji Yukito's Yakata series and Aosaki was a follower of the Queen school of logic and reasoning. Still, if possible I try to get the paperback versions, so I waited until 2015...
And starting with the conclusion: Taiikukan no Satsujin is indeed a great mystery novel in the Queen tradition. Well, a locked room mystery might not seem Queen-ish, but the way the impossible murder is solved is definitely done with our beloved logical reasoning. In fact, I think Taiikukan no Satsujin is a good effort in conciling the logical reasoning type of mystery with the more mechanical type of locked room murders. Genius student Tenma logically deduces when the murder must have happened, the actions the murderer took after the deed and the only method by which the locked room murder must have been completed. The actual method of achieving the locked room murder is a bit disappointing, to be honest, as it felt a bit simple, but nothing but praise for the way with which it is proven that this was the solution, as it is a a great deductive piece of work. And for the fans: there's a proper Challenge to the Reader included!
And I think I've mentioned it earlier, but I have a weakness for mystery novels set at schools. I love the energy and wacky antics in Higashigawa Tokuya's Koigakubo Academy Detective Club series for example and there is a similar atmosphere in Taiikukan no Satsujin. The various students have funny dialogues with each other and the school dynamics come quit alive within the pages of the book. A minor point I have is the amount of students appearing in the story though: while they are actually practically all of them of importance to the mystery, I still couldn't shake away bad memories from the Insanely Homogeneous Student Group of 17(!) from Arisugawa Alice's Gekkou Game. Still, I think Taiikukan no Satsujin shows that juvenile characters doesn't mean juvenile mystery: Taiikukan no Satsujin is probably one of the complex plotted mysteries I've read this year and has the sort of logical complexity rarely seen outside of Japan nowadays.
Aosaki is a very young writer (born 1991) and it shows in his protagonist Urazome Tenma, an anime otaku who secretly lives in the high school. A lot of his dialogue is filled with references to anime and manga and while I am certainly not unfamiliar with those topics (heck, I write professionaly about those topics outside this blog), I have to admit that I didn't get all of the references, especially as many of them seem to refer to more 'recent' anime (I've rather conservative taste in that respect). Anyway, I can easily imagine that the characters in Taiikukan no Satsujin appeal better to a younger public, rather than the people who have been following the genre for more than three, four decades.
Anyway, I enjoyed Taiikukan no Satsujin a lot and I hope the paperback version of the other novels in the Urazome Tenma series follow soon. And as Aosaki is still very young, I am rather curious to see how his style will develop in the following years.
Original Japanese title(s): 青崎有吾 『体育館の殺人』
When Tenma appeared, because I read a novel far more slowly than comic books, the scenes where Tenma acted superior to the cops lasted longer and made me dislike him a bit. But then I was blown away by that incredible deduction where he proved the innocence of Yuno's captain. I miss most of the anime references, but man, I was wrong, Tenma wasn't as annoying and creepy as I have thought. Some of his actions are a bit off (copying a policeman's notes has got to be at least legally sketchy) but again, any disagreement I had with him is blown away by the deduction scenes!
ReplyDeleteWhen reading The Deduction Chapter I can really see why you would love this book. It's literally a lecture, and he wrote down parts of the deduction, and then talks about the evidence for it. He wrote A, explained why, moves on to explaining B, and so on. Beginner readers like me can thus grasp the deduction quite well. It also gives an exciting feeling of closing in on the killer! It's one of the more exciting deduction scenes I've read. The locked-room trick is a bit weak, but well, the main charm is the strong chain of deduction.
All in all, I really enjoyed this book.
I finished reading this book last year, but my interest in Japanese novels died out because of a hard novel that really wore me down.
All the final deduction chains in this series are absolutely great (even if the second one can be very tiring due to the emphasis on timestamps), and it's obvious why his publisher dubbed him the "Heisei Queen" (not knowing of course that only a few years later, we'd be in Reiwa :P). The novels of Arisugawa's Student Alice series do the same too.
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