Who Framed Roger Rabbit

"Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!"

"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a great film by the way.

On a not so normal day in Kyoto, the young burglars Masaya and Juri sneak into the apartment of Asami, a simple employee at a clothing store. The two chat as they steal some ice cream from Asami's refrigerator and go through her stuff, when the phone rings. Listening to the voice mails, the two burglars learn that Asami has not been to work today, which both troubles and worries her co-workers. It turns out that Asami has been abducted by an underground human trafficking organization and that their men were actually watching Asami's apartment while Masaya and Juri were there, as the organization's MO involves leaving fake traces to make it seem like Asami had gone off somewhere on her own. What the organization doesn't know is that the two young burglars can take care of themselves quite well, and they decide to think of a plan to save Asami and destroy the organization, with the help of Shinohara, a new member of the organization whose girlfriend had become a victim of the organization too. Meanwhile, the reader is also introduced to events that occured one year earlier in Shanghai. A prodigy gambler calling himself Robber Rabbit made off with a fortune stolen from the mafia, who in turn sought revenge by hiring a group of assassins to kill the Rabbit. What happened to the Robber Rabbit one year ago and what do his adventures have to do with the antics of Masaya and Yuri in the present? That is the story of Tachibana Yuma's Usagi Goutou ni wa Shinde Morau, which also has the English title of Robber Rabbit Gets Dead (2016).

I guess I'll have to start with disclosing that I know the author Tachibana Yuma, though he wasn't using this pen name then. He was in fact one of the active members of the Kyoto University Mystery Club when I was there too, and an active contributor to the various club publications. There's a tradition that the stories that are published in the annual club magazine sold at the university's November Festival are 'peer-reviewed' by fellow members in the weekly meetings, and I was actually the person who did Tachibana's story of that year. Anyway, he obviously kept on writing (in fact, I remember he was the one who did most of the heavy lifting for the jigsaw puzzle + story Kagami no Kuni no Juunintachi.)  In 2016, he started publishing stories on the website Kakuyomu, where members can upload their fiction and have other people read and rate them. Robber Rabbit Gets Dead was originally published on Kakuyomu, and eventually even won the first Kakuyomu Web Novel Contest in the Mystery category, which resulted in his professional debut as an author when his story was published in the Kadokawa Sneaker label, with some nice artwork by Yoneyama Mai. Obviously, I was interested to see how this book would turn out.

Though I guess I wasn't the main target audience here. Robber Rabbit Gets Dead is, put very simply, a light novel with themes that are quite familiar. The story is told from multiple perspectives, set both in the present and past, and the characters are all somewhat grander-than-life. Prodigy gamblers, young assassins who can have witty banter while fighting each other, seemingly normal household objects used as weapons, secret evil organizations, conversations scenes where every line sounds either like a one-liner or just sentences strewn together to sound cool: I perhaps sound very negative here, but I think the story, while not abnormally original, follows a familiar and popular formula, as seen by popular light novel series like Baccano! and Hakata Tonkotsu Ramens. Rule of cool is what is the most important here, with characters being able to have stylish fights and stylish banter, while killing, stealing or preparing for some kind of heist. The story follows a multitude of characters, from the enigmatic Robber Rabbit and the clingy Juri, to the is-he-really-out-for-revenge? Shinohara and the assassins who fought Robber Rabbit in Shanghai and have now appeared in Kyoto too. As an action-adventure story, Robber Rabbit Gets Dead is a familiar sight.

But Robber Rabbit Gets Dead won in the mystery category right? I mean, I wouldn't have purchased this novel if it had won in some other category. It's here where the novel stumbles. Given that there are two storylines that are told criss-cross (Kyoto in the present and Shanghai in the past) and that the characters in the Shanghai narrative all go by fanciful code names, most readers are likely to guess that there's some connection between the two narratives and that some characters from the past, are now appearing in the present storyline with a different name. Obviously, the mystery plot revolves around surprise reveals about who turns out to be who and how the past and present narratives intertwine. The problem here is that in his attempt to lure the reader in making wrong assumptions about who's who, Tachibana's writing is very likely to simply confuse the reader because a lot is described vaguely on purpose. Some characters share the same descriptions in the narration or it's kept unclear who's talking to who about whom in the narration, but the result is that especially in the first half of the story, it is far more difficult to keep track on who is who than it ever should be. In fact, in the opening scenes of the story, one character is killed, but it was really difficult to make out who actually died. Part of it may be intentional, but at a certain point, it's hard to have a satisfying 'Tadah! gotcha!' if the set-up was hard to follow and you don't even really know what happened in the first place. The confusing narration and the fact there's a lot of information for the reader to swallow in the first half because of the dual narrative makes the beginning of the novel a bottleneck which some might not make it through.

The stories does feature some minor reveals throughout between the fights, that are reasonably well set-up in terms of clewing or foreshadowing (for example when Masaya and Yuri first deduce something's wrong with Asami not appearing at her work and Shinohara's scheme in present day Kyoto), but purely seen as a mystery novel (even if it isn't), Robber Rabbit Gets Dead seems kinda undermine its own surprises by the confusing manner in which it tries to set them up.

Usagi Goutou ni wa Shinde Morau/Robber Rabbit Gets Dead is thus not exactly what I'm looking for in a mystery story. The main focus of the novel lies on the adventures of the charismatic characters with intertwining storylines where everybody looks and acts cool, but when it comes to the mystery elements of the tale, there's just too many parts where the readability suffers because of what Tachibana is trying to do. People who like the earlier mentioned series like Baccano! and Hakata Tonkotsu Ramens will probably get more mileage out of this.

Original Japanese title(s): 橘ユマ『うさぎ強盗には死んでもらう』