The Clue in the Camera

"And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven."

"Genesis 28:12"

Huh, I seldom do a double review nowadays, and now I have two of them in a row...

Last year, I reviewed a few volumes of Katou Motohiro's manga Q.E.D. iff Shoumei Shuuryou ("Q.E.D. iff Quod Erat Demonstrandum"), which is a sequel series to the original series Q.E.D. Shoumei Shuuryou. You will remember I have written very little about Q.E.D. Shoumei Shuuryou in general: my first encounter with the series was long before I started this blog and I never stuck with it, so unlike Detective Conan and Kindaichi Shounen, I never did reviews of the latest volume as they were released. I've always experienced the adventures of Touma Sou, a teenage prodigy and MIT-alumnus who has returned to Japan to experience a normal high school life, and the athletic and impulsive Mizuhara Kana as reasonably entertaining mystery stories, but never reaching the heights and scale of the other two, more famous series. Anyway, a while back I came across a free multi-volume bundling the first five volumes of the original Q.E.D. Shoumei Shuuryou, so today I'll be doing a double review of volumes 4 and 5 of the original series (not iff). The first three volumes I already read in a faraway past and I don't really feel like reviewing them now, so I decided to jump right into volumes 4 and 5, both originally released in 1999.

Last year, Touma was awarded the first prize by the international April Fools Club for his grand prank, which is also the reason why he's not really looking forward to 1st, April, 1999: he doesn't feel like coming with something this year, but as the defending champion it's expected of him to make a proper effort. As he's thinking about what to do, Touma runs into an old friend from his time in the States: Baum comes from the small developing country the Kingdom of Clavius, where he made it to the honorable position of Foreign Vice-Minister. The Kingdom of Clavius however is in a crisis: the Japanese government has offered development aid funds for economic projects with a tender, and a Japanese company won the bid to provide the technology for a fish farm. By the time Baum realized this company cheated through inside connections to win the bid, it was already too late: the Kingdom of Clavius was duped into buying far too expensive, and too advanced technology, meaning each time there's a problem with the machinery, the local engineers can't fix it themselves and with slow 'support' from the Japanese home company, the fish farm has been producing a lot of dead fish lately. Meanwhile, the development aid is in essence a loan from the Japanese government, so that has to be paid back too despite the not-running fish farm. Baum has now come to Japan a desperate man, as he needs not only force the company to improve their support, but also make them sign a contract for a new mining project. Baum knows the company will try to dupe him and his country again, but is willing to go far to save the future of his country, even 'cheat' by luring his opponents with a 'magnetic monopole'.

1st, April, 1999 is the type of story you don't really see in Detective Conan and Kindaichi Shounen: the swindle story. Series like Liar Game and Kurosagi are all about stories told from the POV of the swindlers (I really should write something about the live-action Liar Game series one of these days...), where you enjoy the thrills of seeing whether the swindler will succeed in fooling their victim or not. In this story, we mostly follow Kana, who tries to help Baum in his effort in psychologically pressuring the Japanese company in signing the new contract by dangling a magnetic monopole in front of them. As we see the events mostly from her side, the reader has a pretty good idea of what is going on and how everyone is trying to fool each other, so really surprising, this story is not. A series like Liar Game is at its best when you know the protagonist is trying to fool everyone, but you don't have an exact grasp on how that's even possible, but it's less of a mystery here. The way the story juggles the pretty serious government-in-debt-and-corrupt-Japanese-industries theme with the light April Fools Club storyline is good though and the ending is pretty funny spy-action stuff.

Jacob's Ladder starts with an enormous chaos happening in Akihabara: something has caused all the traffic lights to jump to green, resulting in multiple heavy traffic accidents (no deaths, luckily) and all traffic in and out Akihabara being stopped to prevent further accidents. Soon after this incident, Touma is visited by his old friend Loki, who is being tailed by... none other than the CIA. Loki explains to Touma that their friend Eva is now being detained by the CIA, as it was determined that the AI she was developing caused the accidents in Akihabara in Japan. Eva works at MIT as a head researcher on artificial life, and she was running an AI that basically simulated life, following four simple principles (cells have to reproduce, cells will look for best location to reproduce, etc.) At first, her simulation of artificial life had reached an equilibrium state, with three cell tribes living in peace: a hunter tribe that followed orders from a leader cell looking for reproductive grounds, a herder tribe that followed a leader cell who themselves led the way in search of reproductive grounds and a farming tribe that gathered around a leader cell and reproduced in their own area. One day however, the hunter tribe attacked the other tribes, and when they tried to fix the AI program, it vanished from their servers. Touma now has to figure out why the AI suddenly broke the equilibrium state and how it ended up in Japan causing all those accidents in order to save Eva.

Err, yeah, this is a really weird type of mystery story. I could imagine it as a Detective Conan movie plot, but even, so it's really unlike what you'd see in Conan and Kindaichi Shounen. In principle, this is a story that should be based on the scientific field of logic, with Touma trying to figure out how the AI could've done what it had done based on the logic rules Eva had set upon the program as its guiding principles (somewhat like the Three Laws of Robotics in Asimov's novels). However, it doesn't really work in this story. Basically, the solution comes down to super-hacking powers and new elements being introduced that override the basic rules Eva set: so it's basically cheating, because apparently the rules can just be ignored. I've read a few of the sequel series to Q.E.D. Shoumei Shuuryou (subtitled iff), and there I've read much better stories built on the premise of logic as a scientific field, where you combine several true rules or conditions to find a contradiction that allows you to logically deduce what happened). Jacob's Ladder has some interesting imagery going on (the titular Jacob's ladder), but as a mystery story, it hardly succeeds.

The Crooked Melody, the first story in volume 5, opens with the famous cellist Hirai Reiji in his country cabin, having just strangled the president of his sponsor company. The new president had been appointed by the bank to help the financially struggling company, and one of the first things the president wanted to do was stop sponsoring something as silly as music. After killing the president in a rage, Hirai quickly makes some calls, making it seem like the president had changed his mind about killing the sponsor contract and that he had left Hirai's cabin in peace. Just before he has time to hide the body outside however, Touma, Kana and her friends arrive at Hirai's cabin: one of Kana's classmates is a far relative of Hirai, and they had arranged to meet him here. The kids arrive and spend some time there with Hirai. Some days later, the president's body is found in his own house and as Hirai was the last one to have seem him alive, he's questioned, but the kids give him a perfect alibi for the time of the murder. The police suspects Hirai could've killed the president in the cabin, but the kids actually saw everything inside the small cabin during their visit: they had visited the bathroom and they had opened the refrigerator, cupboards and the cabinets, and they hadn't come across a dead body obviously.

Touma of course quickly figures out something's wrong, and the crux of the problem lies where Hirai could've hidden the body during the visit of the kids. Strangely enough, the story seems to ignore the fact Hirai could've simply hidden the body outside the cabin. The reader knows this can't be possible, because we see how Hirai's still dragging the body around in the living room when the kids are almost at the front door, but the police, nor Touma can ever know that, so yeah the body could've been hidden in a trash bin outside, and then all the statements of the kids of not having seen the body inside the cabin would've been completely worthless. Touma first points out some small mistakes Hirai made during the kids' visit, eventually arriving at the hiding spot of the body. It's a simple, but effective hiding spot that could've used a slightly better hint though: by changing the angle in a certain panel, you could at least show that that trick was possible, as not all [certain object used to hide the body] can work in that manner. It's a short, not particularly memorable story, but not bad either.

Afterimage of Light starts at a flea market, where Kana buys an old valuable camera for almost nothing. Touma and Kana find some old negatives with five photographs inside, and after developing them find they include some family pictures, so they trace the camera back to a small mountain village where it was initially sold to a pawn shop. They quickly find that the last photograph was taken at the pawn shop itself (when the camera was tested to see if it worked). They also find an old abandoned storage that was in one of the pictures, but as they explore the inside, they find a dead body was hidden inside the plastered walls. What's even more mysterious is that the body had the one and only key to the storage in their pocket, meaning they were plastered in the wall by someone who could not possibly have escaped the storage themselves, as there are no windows and the one door was locked by that one key (Touma, Kana and their companion broke the lock to get inside initially). They learn the storage used to belong to a girl with supernatural powers who could see through walls, though some thought she was nothing but a fraud. They also trace back the three children (now middle-aged adults) who were on the photographs, and Touma and Kana ask a bit about their family history and what their link is to the storage. Eventually, Touma figures out how the body ended up in the wall of a sealed storage and what they have to do with the photographs they found.

I haven't read much of this series yet, but this type of story too I recognize from the sequel series iff, where Touma comes across a story about some mysterious event in the past (the girl who can see through walls), that is also linked to a current incident (often a family tragedy) and him solving a historical mystery/crime based on old testimonies and evidence (in this case, the photographs). The mystery of how the girl managed to see through walls is based on a real phenomenon, so it can be easy to guess how it was done, though there's some really well-done misdirection there. The mystery of the man who was walled up in a locked storage is more interesting, and too has some really well-done misdirection there as to the exact order of events, but it does rely on a lot of coicidences. A bit more hinting as to how it was done would've made this story perhaps a bit more satisfying, especially as the photograph hint is nearly impossible to figure out (even if you figure out what the hint says, you will never figure out what it actually is).

I doubt that volumes 4 and 5 belong to the highlights of the Q.E.D. Shoumei Shuuryou series: both volumes contain a story that is fairly entertaining, but not particularly memorable, and a story that is slightly less well-plotted. So I feel a bit indifferent about these two volumes in general .I noticed that they recently published special Q.E.D. Shoumei Shuuryou volumes with editors like Arisugawa Alice picking their favorite stories, but I'd really appreciate it if someone here can offer some specific volume or story recommendations for either the original series or iff, as I really don't feel like going through all 50+ volumes, though I do want to read more of this series to see what heights it can reach.

Original Japanese title(s): 加藤元浩 『Q.E.D. -証明終了-』第4, 5巻