Bury Me Deep

「いやあ、探偵は謎を解くというか、謎を解いたと人を納得させる職業ですけど」

『異世界の名探偵 2 帰らずの地下迷宮』

"No, you see, a detective isn't an occupation where you solve mysteries. It's more about convincing people you have solved the mystery."

"The Great Detective of the Other World 2: The Underground Maze of No Return"

Man, this would make for a cool type of mystery videogame, now I think of it. There aren't really many detective games with fantasy settings. Professor Layton vs. Gyakuten Saiban is an obvious expection and even then, it doesn't really go deep into classic fantasy videogame tropes.

Early this year, I reviewed the first volume of Isekai no Meitantei, which combined the classic puzzle plot detective story with isekai, the highly influential trope currently found in Japanese popular fiction like anime and light novels. It literally means "a different world" and refers to a sub-genre with parallels to works like Alice in Wonderland and The Chronicles of Narnia, usually featuring stories featuring protagonists from Earth who end up in a different world (commonly a fantasy world) by means of teleportation, reincarnation or some other manner. The genre often involves some kind of power fantasy, with the very ordinary human using their memories/knowledge from Earth to their advantage in their new situation/the other world to eventually become the legendary hero/evil overlord/whatever the story is about. The first volume of Katazato Kamome's Isekai no Meitantei didn't stray far from the template when it first showed us the death of an ex-cop with a love for mystery fiction, who then reincarnates as a baby in the fantasy world of Pangea, a world where magic exist. The memories of his life on Earth are retained by Van, who grows up to be a talented magician with a dream of becoming a State Detective. After solving the impossible decapitation case in the first volume, the newly graduated Van became nobility, was bestowed the family name Holmes and appointed to Vice-Captain of the Royal Detective Squad of the Kingdom of Sherck.

Isekai no Meitantei 2 - Kaerazu no Chika Meikyuu ("The Great Detective of the Other World 2: The Underground Maze of No Return") was released early 2020 and is set not too long after the first novel. While Van Holmes is now Vice-Captain of the Royal Detective Squad, his position is still somewhat ambiguous because of his lack of experience, so his captain Geralt the Silent decides to send Van on a special mission to allow him to make a name for himself. Vent Treasure is a self-made noble who made a fortune by providing services and trading with adventurers all around the world of Pangea. Now Vent is gathering a special party of highly skilled adventurers to accomplish a secret task involving a special dungeon. The world of Pangea is riddled with dungeons, mysterious massive structures that have been on the world as long as anyone can remember. Dungeons come in all sizes and forms and feature magic that nobody knows: nobody on Pangea is for example even capable of scratching the walls of any dungeon and most dungeons feature a special Stone of Return at the entrance, which allow people who are synchronized to them to instantly teleport back to the entrance just by thinking of the action (usually used when in danger). The deepest regions of these dungeons often hold great treasures or fabulous divine items with magic nobody in Pangea can replicate, but they are also filled with horrible monsters who attack anyone who dares to enter the dungeon.

Vent has recently become the owner of a dungeon with quite the reputation: it is said that no person has ever reached the deepest chambers of the Underground Maze of No Return, a dungeon which lies deep in the ground. The fact that even the entrance floor features high-level monsters suggests there's something great hidden at the end (monsters become stronger the closer they are to the end of the dungeon), but because the Stone of Return of this dungeon is broken, people can't simply escape if things go wrong several floors down. All people who have tried to clear the dungeon have failed, most of the challengers had to pay with their lives for it. Rumors even have it that there's a special monster in the dungeon called Shadow, who can even kill people inside locked rooms. The mission of the special party Vent has formed is to reach the deepest regions of the dungeon to show it is indeed beatable. The party forms a motley crew, with people like the berserker-type Blood, who once made it to the tenth floor, but couldn't figure out how to proceed, the fire magician Eni, Hunt Treasure (son of Vent) and of course Van, who is added because of his detecting skills. At first, the party seems to make good process, but things start go wrong when they get past the seventh underground floor. First Blood is killed inside his metal sleeping box (he's so paranoid, even of his party members, he sleeps inside a box to protect himself) and later, two other members are assaulted and spirited away even though they sealed themselves in a room for protection by erecting a magic wall. And as these impossible murders continue in the dungeon, the remaining party members start to distrust each other...

I love the premise of this book. The first novel of course established to the reader that the world of Pangea has real magic (and it also put limitations on what magic can do in Pangea) and in order to solve the locked room murder in the first book, you definitely needed to understand how magic worked there. Katazato could've easily written a second book again about a murder that utilizes magic in some clever manner, but he decided to go with a completely different setting that still fits perfectly with the world we have seen before. The dungeons as presented in this book are of course the dungeons we know from table-top RPGs as well as videogames, those magic-filled maze-like structures consisting of multiple floors with countless of monsters awaiting the player, where you solve puzzles and go deeper and deeper until you reach the last room which usually houses the boss of the dungeon as well as some great treasure (and optionally the long cut-scene to push the story forward). They even kill monsters in this novel for loot, which is as game-like as you can get. The dungeons also have gimmicks we know from games. Many videogames feature some object with similar functions like the Stone of Return (Escape ropes etc.) and one of the more interesting gimmicks in this novel are the one-direction-walls: these walls are transparent on one side and a person can pass through the transparent side to get to the other side of the wall, but it is a normal wall on the other side, meaning you can't go back. All of this results in a setting that is insanely unique for mystery fiction, and had me all giddy with delight.

Whereas the first novel focused on one single murder, the second novel features multiple killings (some of them under impossible circumstances), but I have to admit that not all of them are as good as the others. The first murder, of the highly suspicious Blood inside his own mini metal panic room, for example is pretty disappointing in terms of how it was done and the clewing is a bit crude. The murders that happen inside a sealed-off section of the dungeon when two members tried to protect themselves is far more interesting. The idea of a locked room murder, inside a monster-ridden dungeon is highly memorable and the trick behind it is original, making good use of the unique setting of this novel, and while the clewing is a bit shaky at times (the explanation why *that object* was *there* is a bit forced), I do really like how the misdirection was handled, making great use of the characters' understandable oversight. It's definitely an idea that I really can't imagine seeing in any 'conventional' mystery novel, set in the real world. Some later parts of the novel on the other hand feel a bit clichéd and almost unfair, making this overall an uneven experience. I do like the book as a whole, but there are some parts I really don't care for at all.

By the way, I do have to mention the fact that the author Katazato seems to have forgotten this second novel is also supposed to be part of an isekai series. In the first novel, the plot device that Van originated from 'our' world was at least used to ease the reader into the world of Pangea, explaining the rules and limitations of the magic used there and things like that. This ensured that the mystery plot was fair to the reader, as they, together with Van, learned how Pangea worked. Katazato does none of that in this novel. There are maybe two or three stray references when Van compares some object with something from our Earth, but this could easily have been a "normal" fantasy detective, without the backstory of Van being an reincarnation originating from Earth. The fact Van has memories of our world is of no consequence at all in this story, not even as character motivation like the first novel, where Van's love for puzzle plot mystery fiction drove him to become a detective in a world where detectives weren't really necessary and everybody just blamed magic spells that possibly didn't even exist.

Like the first volume of this series, Isekai no Meitantei 2 - Kaerazu no Chika Meikyuu has a very slow start, but when it finally gets to the murders, you're presented with a plot that cleverly mixes the puzzle plot detective with the fantasy genre. I do think the second volume is less consistent than the first volume: less effort is poured into fleshing out the world and its rules to the reader (I recommend starting with the first volume), not all of the murders are as cleverly plotted as the main one and some of the details of the crime seem glossed over and appear only to have introduced to make the crimes more alluring. But I can't deny I absolutely love the idea of a murder mystery set in a classic videogame dungeon setting, and I do think the main surprise sprung on the reader works. I do hope that for the next volume, whenever that will be, will make more use of the isekai plot device, giving purpose to the fact Van originates from our world. Because this second volume might as well be just a fantasy-detective novel with no ties at all to our Earth.

Original Japanese title(s): 片里鴎『異世界の名探偵 2 帰らずの地下迷宮』