The Landing Ticket

朝だ始発だ電車が走る

5時半発の埼京線 

遙か遠くの会社を目指し

今日も電車が走る

It's morning /  The first train / The train is running

The 05:30 of the Saikyo-Line

On my way to the company faraway

The train is running today too

「電車で電車でGO!GO!」（Junkie As Machine/Zuntata)

I try to read at least one novel a year (partially) set in the city of Fukuoka. The first review of last year was Gekisou Fukuoka Kokusai Marathon - 42.195 Kilo no Nazo for example. I started with today's book because the summary mentioned Fukuoka as part of the alibi, but sadly enough, the reader doesn't actually get to visit the city themselves and the few mentions to the city are pretty sober. Ah well, I'll still count this as my 'one-in-a-year' as the story, at one point, does revolve slightly around specific Fukuoka geography.

Disclosure: I have translated Arisugawa Alice's The Moai Island Puzzle.

One morning, Yukari receives a call from the police with horrible news: her older sister Megumi (her only living relative) was found murdered in her holiday villa near Lake Yogo, just north of Lake Biwa. Megumi and her husband were to stay there a few days starting the day before, but business had prevented Shinichi from leaving his antique shop, and Megumi, who had arrived at the villa early, would spend the first night alone at the lake. She was murdered the following morning, and the police had discovered her body thanks to an anonymous phone call. Because her life insurance seems rather extravagant, the police and Yukari suspect that Shinichi killed his own wife with the help of his twin brother Kenichi, but the twins have perfect alibis: on the morning of Megumi's murder, Shinichi recalled he had an earlier made business appointment, and he took the Shinkansen train south to Fukuoka to meet with a collector there. Twin brother Kenichi too had been on a business trip that morning, travelling by train all the way up north to Sakata in Yamagata. Both arrived at their destinations in the afternoon, and several witnesses confirm having seen the two men at their respective routes at various points like the station. Yukari confides her suspicions about her brother-in-law with the mystery author Sorachi Masaya, a mutual friend of both Megumi and Shinichi, and Megumi's former boyfriend during college. Together they hire a private detective, who can't seem to find anything suspicious about Shinichi. The investigation runs into a wall until several months later, another body is found at the Lake Yogo villa. Another anonymous phone call leads the police to a body with the head and hands removed. The police is quite sure that the body belongs to either Shinichi or Kenichi, but both men have disappeared and it's impossible to tell which brother the body belongs to.

Magic Mirror (1990) is the third full-length novel by Arisugawa Alice, after Gekkou Game (1989) and The Moai Island Puzzle (1989). It was also his first novel that wasn't part of any series, and while I have read quite a lot by Arisugawa by now, it took me until now to read a non-series work by him. While his first two novels were clearly written in the spirit of Ellery Queen and the school that puts emphasis on logical reasoning, Arisugawa's third outing takes inspiration from F.W. Crofts, Ayukawa Tetsuya and (early) Matsumoto Seichou, being a mystery revolving around uncrackable alibis and an emphasis on time tables. In fact, like often seen in Ayukawa and Matsumoto's work, we actually have real train time schedules featured in this book. It's one of the elements that set Magic Mirror apart from the two earlier novels starring the student Alice, which are patterned after the more fanciful "good old closed circle on an isolated island/area closed off after a volcano eruption" tropes, while Magic Mirror is a a bit more realistic in tone (don't worry, it's still a puzzle-oriented mystery).

The first half of the novel revolves around the attempts of various parties trying to figure out whether Shinichi on his own, or with the help of his twin brother, killed Megumi and by extension, how they managed to have a perfect alibi for the time of the murder. Shinichi seems the most suspicious at first, but witnesses have seen him purchasing a ticket to Hakata Station, buying gifts at the station and he arrived in time at his business relation's place in the afternoon and a similar story holds for Kenichi. A large part of this mystery is solved early on in the novel by one of the characters, though the theory is still imperfect due to the existence of one piece of evidence. Due to that, the character has to abandon their theory for the moment, but this final hurdle is actually relatively easy to solve for the reader. While you can solve it "in a perfect" manner by actually examining the time schedules etc. included closely, I bet most people can instinctively make a good guess about how that piece of evidence was cooked (and check afterwards with the schedules). So this part is a bit easy, because a good part of the trick is already presented to the reader early on, while that last step is not as hard as the story pretends it to be. This murder feels the most 'realistic' in the sense that a lot of the mystery revolves around real time tables of means of transportations and real Fukuoka geography, so if you liked Matsumoto's Points and Lines, you'll feel right at home here.

The second murder, of the unknown decapitated body, is a lot more interesting though. What is interesting about Magic Mirror is that it starts off telling you there are twins involved. Usually, you'd think having twins in a story about a perfect alibi would be very, very cheap. In Magic Mirror, even knowing twins are involved doesn't mean you'll instantly figure out how Megumi was killed, and the plot device of the twins is turned upside down in the second half of the novel, when we are presented with a body which belongs to one of the twins, but you don't know which. This part is a bit more engaging: there's a part where Sorachi is convinced the man suspected by the police must be innocent, so he tries to find evidence to support that man's flimsy alibi of having been drinking at various places on the night of the murder. This part features a small, but nicely foreshadowed trick hidden within the man's testimony about his movements. But the murder on the unknown victim itself also proves to be an interesting murder: it makes fantastic use of the notion of twins, utilizing them in a very original manner to do something. I can't say too much because that would spoil the game, but I really like how the culprit used the fact that Shinichi en Kenichi were twins to completely befuddle the police investigation. I also like the one slip-up the murderer made that forced their hand as a concept, but as it was used here, it did feel like a bit too much coincidence: the murderer would have made a pretty brilliant plan for the murder, but goofed up at rather silly and trivial moments.

I have mentioned this novel before in this blog, as this novel is probably best known for its Alibi Lecture in the penultimate chapter and in my post on taxonomies/typologies/lectures, I made a short translation of the points raised in that Alibi Lecture. The Alibi Lecture is of course inspired by Doctor Fell's Locked Room Lecture, but the funny thing is that this is actually a lecture: Sorachi is invited by a college mystery club to hold a lecture on the Alibi Lecture he wrote in one of his novels, and in this chapter, Sorachi explains the types of tricks used in mystery novels to create a perfect alibi. Like in most novels featuring such trope lectures, it's an implied Challenge to the Reader to see if they can guess what kind of trick this particular novel is using, and perhaps even guess if this book is using a completely new type of solution. The Moai Island Puzzle featured a short Dying Message Lecture by the way. Obviously, both murders use some kind of alibi trick, and I don't consider it really spoilers to say that Arisugawa has of course come up with variations that are original on their own, and like it should be, the Lecture functions as both a solid clue to the reader (as it helps people not familiar with these types of stories), as a clever piece of misdirection (diverting the reader's attention by onlylisting what is seemingly possible, while pointing away from the actual solution).

Usually when I finish a novel, I have a fairly good idea of what I actually think of the story, and that also influences how I write the review. With Magic Mirror, I have to admit I was less enthusiastic about it when I first finished it, but as I am writing this review the following day, I notice I'm a lot more positive about the book now. While I think the final 'obstacle' in solving Megumi's murder is far easier than the book pretends it to be, I find that Magic Mirror does a really good job at utilizing the themes of the perfect alibi and twins in mystery fiction: it poses alluring mysteries to the reader that incorporate the fact we all know twins are involved and the second murder especially is interesting because of that. The result is a novel that keeps up a good pace from start to finish and which should entertain fans of the perfect alibi story.

Original Japanese title(s): 有栖川有栖『マジックミラー』