Sailing In The Sunset

 どこか未だに知らない場所へ迷い込みたくない？　

君といたらもっといいのにな

痛みさえも老いてゆくよう

「涙のイエスタデー」（Garnet Crow）

Don't you feel like getting lost in some unknown place?

It'd be more fun if I'd be with you

Even my pain would eventually go away

"A Yesterday Made Of Tears" (Garnet Crow)

I think the only time I set foot on a sail boat was when I was a kid, at a birthday party of a friend... Now I think about it, I haven't set foot on that many boats in general.

After an eleven-month trip across the seas, Uchida Youichi returned to Japan as a hero, as the first Japanese person to succeed in sailing around the world non-stop on his own. The feat earned him fame, a beautiful wife and a very lucratrive contract to promote a series of consumer yachts. So when the news was reported that Uchida had died in a car accident, people thought of James Dean: here they had a man in the prime of his life, lost in a tragic accident. The discovery by the police that the victim had consumed cyanide before his death though suggests that murder is much more likely than an accident and young police lieutenant Totsugawa is ordered to investigate. Digging into Uchida's life quickly shows that all's not well: he cheated on his wife, he cheated with his sailing record and there were more than a few "fellow" sailors who were very jealous of Uchida. But as Totsugawa dives deeper in the case, he finds that his most likely suspect is also the least likely one, as this man was participating in a sailing contest from Japan to Tahiti during the time the poison was planted on Uchida. Can Totsugawa find out the truth behind this perfect alibi in Nishimura Kyoutarou's Akai Cruiser ("The Red Cruiser", 1973)?

The last Nishimura novel I discussed (Tokkyuu Fuji Ni Notteita Onna), I decribed as precisely what you'd expect from a mass-produced novel. The book, originally published in 1989, showed exactly why Nishimura's able to churn out three, four books a month and have almost 600 books to his name as I'm writing this. It wasn't fun to read at all. It was an uninspired, by-the-numbers tale of "mystery" that really wasn't about anything engaging. I noted that Nishimura's earlier novels were, even if not perfect, at least much more entertaining than that novel. So I decided to go back in the past, to read one of Nishimura's earlier novels, before he became the king of the Japanese travel mystery subgenre, and before his books were nothing more than The Stereotypical Two-Hour Suspense Drama.

This is actually the first book featuring Totsugawa, Nishimura's long-running series about a Tokyo police inspector (and his team) whose cases often involve ingenous faked alibis using train schedules. In Akai Cruiser though, Totsugawa is still just a lieutenant, and the first case through which the readers got to know him wasn't about trains, but about boats! Well, that's almost as surprising as reading the first Perry Mason and discovering he doesn't really do much in the courtroom in that novel either!

The main problem of this book is that it's way too long. I mean, the whole first half could've been condensed in a few pages, and I think the story still would've worked. After the prologue that details how Uchida was found after his car accident, the story decides to spend a lot of time looking at the backstory of the victim and of the various suspicious characters who may or may not have a motive to kill Uchida off. This part takes ages. And is written a bit boring. But okay, all of this is of course perfectly fine if this was a conventional whodunnit. But it isn't. Around the halfway point, you'll realize that the one person who got a lot of attention in the first half, but was ignored because he had a perfect alibi is in fact the most likely candidate for murder. So why devote all that time at pretending like the other people were viable suspects? Sure, there's such a thing like fleshing out characters and backstories, but no way did it need that many pages to do that. It feels like a fake-out, and a bad one too, as when a story decides to devote a lot of attention to a suspect only to pretend he can't possibly be the murderer because his alibi is that he was out at sea competing in a race to Tahiti, of course I'm going to guess that he'll turn out to be the murderer. Had the story right from the start pointed at him as the murder, emphasizing the impossibility of the situation, that'd have made a much more enjoyable story.

You don't even have to go all Crofts by making it an inversed story, but do it like Matsumoto Seichou's Ten to Sen and Jikan no Shuuzoku, by making it clear something fishy is going on, but not revealing what did happen. That'd have been more interesting that a large part of the story turning out to be fairly obsolete.

For the impossible crime angle is, at the core, quite interesting. How was the suspect capable in murdering the victim while also sailing (with two other crew members) to Tahiti? The solution to that conundrum is... workable. It's not mindblowingly brilliant, but fairly engaging (even if based on a story by Matsumoto Seichou, as the murderer confess at the end of the tale). Though I have to say, the murderer had to do an awful lot to succeed with his crime. What he did to commit his murder was ironically overkill.

So Akai Cruiser was not a perfect novel either, but at least I felt Nishimura poured effort in this book. The plot is fleshed out (too much so, at times), the impossible crime is alluring and original and the whole setting of the yachting world is actually quite interesting. Akai Cruiser may not be the best Inspector Totsugawa novel I've read, but it's far from the worst either, luckily enough.

Original Japanese title(s): 西村京太郎　『赤い帆船(クルーザー)』