Last one of the year!
It is said that more than a thousand years ago, a mysterious girl was born out of one of the hot springs. She grew up and became a beautiful woman, when a dragon started tormentng the region with floods. But with her mysterious powers, she managed to seal the dragon. However, she did not manage to vanquish the monster completely, meaning there were still floods once in four years. After the woman married a human, she gave birth to a daughter Sugaru, who was able to decapitate and defeat the dragon forever with the combined powers she inherited from her heavenly mother and human father. In turn Sugaru's own daughter inherited her mother's name and powers and that tradition has continued until this very moment: Sugaru Village has always been under the control of the Kotosaki clan, and Sugaru is still being worshipped by the villagers as the guardian of the region. This is why the murder case is taken so seriously: the victim Kotosaki Haruna was the oldest daughter of the current Sugaru, and was supposed to take over as the next Sugaru in the future. Mikage's suspicion that the murderer must be someone of the Kotosaki clan is therefore a very serious one, and even with the police's blessing, Mikage's investigation into the murder must be conducted delicately. Initally, Mikage's investigation focuses on the last movements of Haruna, but all the outsiders are shocked to learn that Haruna's father has appointed their second daughter Natsuna (Haruna, Natsuna and Akina being triplets) as the next Sugaru and that she's to start her spiritual training immediately. This worries Mikage, as the motive behind Haruna's murder hasn't been established yet, and as she fears, new murders occur despite precautions. But while she's doing her best to show off that she is really ready to become a detective herself, things spiral out of control in Maya Yutaka's Sekigan no Shoujo ("The Girl With One Eye" 2010).
While I generally do find the books I read by Maya Yutaka entertaining, I don't read them that often for some reason. I think I read his works once every three, four years. This one had been on my to-read list for a long time though, probably since the release? Both the cover and the title had always had a strange appeal to me, being just mysterious enough to really pique my interest. The book also ranked very high (first places) in several of the big annual mystery fiction rankings of the year, so I always wanted to eventually read this book and I guess that over ten years since its initial release, still counts as eventually.
Initial impressions are likely to invoke Yokomizo Seishi's work: a secluded village, a complex family tree with convoluted character relations, and grotesque murders that seem to involve local legends. You wouldn't be wrong, as a lot of these elements do play a very important role in the mystery plot: a lot of Mikage's theories revolve around the motives that could come from the role of Sugaru in the village tradition and how they basically rule Sugaru Village and the whole "small community in the mountains built around one powerful family" screams Yokomizo of course. But in practice however, you're more likely to think of Ellery Queen's work when reading this book. Like the initial scene where Mikage proves Shizuma's (presumed) innocence, this novel features a lot of scenes where Mikage will present chains of deduction based on the physical evidence found at relevant scenes, showing what the murderer must have done and how, and build on those ideas to show which of the family members could possibly answer to the murderer's profile. The book has a lot of these scenes, though they are not always "fair" in the sense that the reader isn't given time to consider the evidence themselves to try to build such a chain of reasoning themselves. Usually, you will hear about the relevant data only for the first time when Mikage's already busy explaining her hypotheses. This isn't bad per se: the hypotheses Mikage builds throughout the novel are entertaining and really clever, but coming up with them yourself can be pretty difficult, and luckily, Maya manages to use the outcomes of Mikage's deductions/her hypotheses for a more interesting thought experiment.
So in the 2003 part, we get a new series of murders (yes, more murders follow) and we are forced to reconsider the deductions we saw in the first part, while at the same time the new murders must be investigated too. The emphasis now lies on the realization that the murderer must be someone who manipulated the evidence to create a false "truth" for the detectives to find, resulting in a trickier puzzler, as Mikage and the reader have now sift to the evidence/testimonies they obtain and consider whether they can just accept the data "as is" or whether the true culprit isn't trying to lead them astray. This leads to a few brilliant moments, where Mikage has to deduce which clues must be true: usually a chain of deduction is based on clues, but here we have Mikage building chains of deductions just to prove whether a clue is true or not, because only then she'll be able to build a chain of reasoning based on that clue! I guess this is your mileage may vary thing, because Sekigan no Shoujo is very technical puzzler, that really focuses on theories and hypotheses and while I love this kind of mystery novel, some might find it a bit too theoretical and too "if he thinks that I think that they think that..."
The book ultimately builds to a conclusion that links the 1985 murders and the 2003 murders together by basically turning everything you had assumed to be true around. While familiarity with Maya's work might make the ending seem a bit predictable, it's a wonderfully set-up ending, with reinterpretation of old clues and new deductions based on things you had assumed to be done and ready already. Theories that seemed to make complete sense the first time are easily reconstructed in something that seems even more logical, even though you had never doubted it the first time. While the build-up to the actual denouement scene is a bit clumsily written, coming out of nowhere seemingly (how could Mikage ever have guessed where a certain person would be?) , the truth that is revealed here is very satisfying, as you basically go over all the events of the whole book (both parts) again and realize so much misdirection had been going on right in front of your eyes.
Oh, and a minor point, but I wish this book had diagrams/floor plans. While not necessary to solve the case, a lot of the deductions do revolve around how people moved or where things were lying in a room, so the complete absence of maps is more noticable than in other books.
So I did enjoy Sekigan no Shoujo a lot. Some might not like the banter between Shizuma and Mikage: while the premise of the book sounds like Yokomizo, the 'friendly fire' banter between the weakly Shizuma and the overly confident Mikage certainly isn't written in the fifties of the previous century. I myself found it enjoyable though, and that combined with the logic-focused plot, I did find this a fun book to read, even if the emphasis is less about letting the reader solve the thing themselves, but more focused on showing the reader the fallability of characters in a detective novel and how people are easily fooled by the murderer, even the detective. Don't read this if you want a straightforward detective, but for those interested in cleverly written puzzlers that do address post-modern themes without giving in to the nihilistic nothingnesss of post-modernism, this is a great read. Maya has not written a sequel in the ten years since the original release, so I assume there won't be one, which is a shame, for I would've liked to see more adventures of Shizuma and Mikage.
