The Girl Who Couldn't Remember

Memento mori

The last few years, all my encounters with Kitayama Takekuni were through Danganronpa, whether it being through his spin-off novel series Danganronpa Kirigiri or through his advisory role for New Danganronpa V3. Today, I go back to his Castle series, which is how I was first introduced to him in 2011.

Castle series
'Clock Castle' Murder Case (2002)
'Lapis Lazuli Castle' Murder Case (2002)
'Castle Alice Mirror' Murder Case (2003)
'Guillotine Castle' Murder Case (2005)

Rurijou Satsujin Jiken ("'Lapis Lazuli Castle' Murder Case", 2002) starts in 1989, inside the so-called The Library At The End of the World, a small private library situated outside town on the northern-most tip of the northern Japanese island Hokkaido. One of the few frequent visitors of the library is the eighteen year old Kimiyo, who unfortunately due to a brain tumor only has about a half year of life left. She spends her days here in the library, accompanied by her friends: the two librarians Kirisame and Utamika, and the student Miki. One day, Kimiyo is suddenly spoken to by a new visitor, a man calling himself Kito. He has a rather odd story: he claims Kimiyo and he have already met in a previous life. In fact, he says that they have come across each other countless of times, destined to find each other with each new reincarnation. He claims this is the Curse of the Six Daggers, which each time will attract them to one of the daggers (and indeed, the library has one of those daggers in the storage). Kito says that each new life, Kimiyo and he become lovers, but in the end, one of them always ends up killing the other with one of the cursed daggers. The curse is supposed to originate from the thirteenth century, with their "original" souls being a French lady and her knight. Kimiyo obviously doesn't believe much of the story initially, neither do her friends, but the whole thing escalates in the worst possible manner, when one morning, Kirisame arrives in the library to find Kimiyo lying in a pentagram made out of books, with the decapitated heads of Utamika and Miki hanging in the room. But not only was the room completely locked from the inside, what makes this really baffling is that Kirisame swears Kimiyo wasn't stabbed yet when he saw her lying from outside the room, but she was stabbed by the cursed dagger when he finally made her way to her. Kirisame has no idea what's going on here, until a mysterious androgenous person calling themselves Snowy appears on the scene and declares they will solve this mystery.

Meanwhile, the reader is also introduced to two other time periods visited by this Snowy. In 1916's Germany, a French Second Lieutenant is fighting in the trenches, when one day, he hears of a story of German soldiers suddenly losing their head. He later finds an underground room in the trenches where four decapitated soldiers lie, but after a short fight, he finds all four bodies have disappeared completely from that room, even though there were soldiers on guard in all the passages leading away from that room. Snowy is also a visitor in 1243's France, home of the Lapis Lazuli Castle, inhabitated by Geoffroy on the orders of the House of Toulouse. Geoffroy's daughter, Marie is in love with Rayne, one of the "Six Knights for Marie", a special unit Geoffroy appointed to his daughter. Her mother disappeared several years ago without any trace from the castle, and she has confided in Rayne to investigate it. However, Marie's knights have only started when one night, all six knights disappear mysteriously from the heavily guarded castle too. Eventually, the six decapitated bodies of the knights are found near an upstream lake. But what is odd is that the knights were discovered there the morning after their disappearance, but it takes several days to travel that far upstream. Marie is desperate when Snowy appears to explain how Rayne and the other knights managed to disappear.

Rurijou Satsujin Jiken is the second book in Kitayama's Castle series and the last one I hadn't read yet, but if you go through the other reviews, you might notice that the books do not form one narrative or even share the same world. They are all standalone stories, each set in rather unique worlds with some supernatural elements, with the main connecting tissue being that they all feature castles or manors as their main decor. So you can read them completely independently from each other, in any order. There are some small references shared between them, but nothing major. For example, there is mention of a tale of six decapitated knights too in Guillotine Jou Satsujin Jiken and the titular Clock Castle's official name is actually Geoffroy's Manor. The major similarities between the stories are the castle settings, the emphasis on impossible murders (often featuring some grand mechanical trick behind them) and fantasy/science-fiction elements playing a role in the background. For example, reincarnation in Rurijou Satsujin Jiken is actually real, and yes, Marie from thirteenth century France is really Kimiyo in twentieth century Japan. You have to roll with these ideas in this series, but more about this later.

First: the mysteries. We are presented with three different situations this time, all set in different time periods and quite different, even if they have some thematic similiarities (decapitated bodies). One problem all three situations have is that the set-up for each of them is rather short: Snowy basically appears immediately afer the mystery is presented, and they start deducing right away. The 1989 library murder for example has few good ideas about how the room was actually locked, but you barely get any time to think about it. What is important to note however is that this trick is... really hard to imagine just by reading the explanation. I had to read the text a few times and still didn't really get, but one look at the diagram that followed was enough for me to finally comprehend it, even without the textual explanation. Kitayama's pretty infamous for his rather technical, and mechanically sound construction of locked room mysteries, but I often do need a visual aid to really get it. The trick behind how Kimiyo was stabbed in an instant is a bit shakey, but it's nicely camouflaged and relatively easy to imagine. But still, everything feels a bit hasty.

The 1916's disappearance of the four soldiers from the trenches is the least interesting mystery presented in the novel. The solution itself is a bit mundane, and it doesn't really help that the prose didn't do much to really support the presentation of the mystery: some parts are rather vague, so when the whole thing is explained, you just shrug and think, 'Okay, that could happen if it was like that, but it wasn't really clear in the text.' The disappearance from the knights from the Lapis Lazuli Castle is likely the one to leave the most impression. The concept behind how the bodies actually ended up so far within half a day is basically one of those 'if you happen to know this piece of trivia, you're good and else you're out of luck' which don't do much for me. How the knights actually disappeared from the castle is incredibly obvious once a certain prop is introduced in the story, but it's so wonderfully silly and grand, reminiscent of those early Shimada Souji stories, that I can't help but have a weak spot for it. It's insane, in a good way, and that's actually when this series is at its best.

Back to the reincarnation topic though. While reincarnation is treated as real in this story, and it's also used to spring some surprises on the reader, one might be surprised that it's not really part of the mystery plot proper. Some of the reveals Snowy makes about how reincarnation works and how it influences the plot of this novel come almost out of nowhere, and while they make internally sense, you are never really expected to figure how things work for yourself. Kitayama does use the reincarnation theme for a small, but clever event late in the book, but it almost feels like an extra. For the most part, you just roll with the reincarnation thing, and accept that some events work out this or that way, because of how it is explained within the novel (mostly by Snowy), rather than working the thing out in advance yourself.

Like all the other books in the Castle series, I think I ultimately do like them, but they are also always rather hard to just recommend to people. The science-fiction/fantasy settings can be a bit disorientating for some readers, especially as each novel has a completely different setting and you often feel like you're only reading part of a story, as if you're missing context regarding the rest of the world. This is also true for Rurijou Satsujin Jiken, though I have to say it's perhaps the best at presenting a complete, standalone world compared to the other novels in series. The three impossible situations are a bit hit or miss though as each time, the process set-up-discovery-solution is rather short. Unique however, this book certainly is and overall, I am definitely glad I now read all of Kitayama's Castle books.

Original Japanese title(s):  北山猛邦『「瑠璃城」殺人事件』