Crime in the Cards

「麻雀なぞ知らんでも、麻雀まんがは描けるーる！！」

「サルでも描けるまんが教室」

"You don't have to know anything about mahjong to draw mahjong manga!" 

"Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga"

It's actually crazy how I managed to watch a whole series of Akagi without actually understanding mahjong...

After solving a crime that happened at her school, Kamino Suzuko is offered a special summer part-time job as a temporary police detective, giving her the authority to mingle with police investigations. The crimes she gets involved with however all happen to have one common theme: mahjong. For some resaon, she always finds herself at crime scenes that are connected to the famous board game, be it a mysterious poisoning in a mahjong parlor, a tragic death that occurs during a long evening of mahjong or even at the headquarters of one of the biggest mahjong clubs in the country. Suzuko, who's become more and more interested in the game after her first case, uses her knowledge of mahjong to solve each case in the four stories collected in Aoyama Hiromi's manga Chuuren Poutou Satsujin Jiken ("The Nine Lanterns Murder Case", 1997).

2018's Honkaku Mystery Comics Seminar is still a treasure cove for me, as the extensive write-up on the history of mystery manga made me aware of a lot of mystery series I had never heard of. Anyone who decides to read mystery manga will definitely stumble upon Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo, Detective Conan and Q.E.D. Shoumei Shuuryou, but most mystery manga won't even run for a tenth of the length of these series, so it can be difficult to track interesting titles without help. I for one have greatly enjoyed going after comics mentioned in Honkaku Mystery Comics Seminar, and last year for example, I reviewed KYŌ, Puzzle Game ☆ High School and the Father Sakura series.

Chuuren Poutou Satsujin Jiken is definitely a title I would never have picked up if not for the mention in Honkaku Mystery Comics Seminar, as it's quite a unique title. Most manga I discuss here were originally serialized in major comic magazines like Shounen Sunday (Conan), which feature a wide variety of comics aimed a certain demographics. Aoyama Hiromi is an artist however who mainly draws gambling manga and the four stories starring Kamino Suzuko too were serialized in Kindai Mahjong Original: a magazine which obviously is about the gambling game of mahjong. Mahjong is very popular in Japan, both as an analog game as well as an online game, so yep, you can actually publish a magazine that's solely about the game and keep it running for decades. Besides text articles, Kindai Mahjong also features a lot of comics about mahjong, though they often involve other genres too: the Kamino Suzuko series is simply a mystery-themed mahjong series and author Aoyama even admits he had at best read ten mystery novels in his whole life when he started on the series, figuring the mahjong part would cover his weaknesses.

Oh, and as a little note, mahjong is also popular among members of the Kyoto University Mystery Club. Most nights, you'll find people in the club room spending all night playing the game and someone like Ayatsuji Yukito is actually quite accomplished as a mahjong player.

But I should probably mention first that I know extremely little of mahjong. While I have seen the whole live-action drama series of Akagi, I still don't know any of the playable hands in mahjong, and while I recognize Ron and Tsumo as play terms, I don't know when you're able to use them. The four Kamino Suzuko stories however were obviously written for people who do know mahjong well, as it ran in a magazine that was only about the game. So the biggest worry I had going in was that these comics would be incomprehensible to me. But I have to say, while I wouldn't call these comics must-read classics of the genre, they were fairly enjoyable even without a basic knowledge of the rules of mahjong. Each of the four stories is named after a hand in mahjong by the way.

Chuuren Poutou Satsujin Jiken ("The Nine Lanterns Murder Case") introduces the reader to Kamino Suzuko, who is brought in to assist with a poisoning case that occured in a mahjong parlor, during a game of four members of the Mystery Club of M University. The poison is found on the tile the victim picked up, but how could any of the other three students at the table manipulate the game in such a way to have the victim pick up that tile? While the story might be hard to solve on your own if you don't really know mahjong, the plotting is strong enough to keep you entertained: each possibility is slowly elimanted one by one, until it almost becomes an impossible poisoning and whenever the conditions of the game become relevant for the mystery solving, it's explained in a way that someone who hasn't once played the game will understand it. 

Taasuushi Satsujin Jiken ("The Four Great Blessings Murder Case") is just borderline related to mahjong: Suzuko has joined the Mystery Club and is invited by fellow member Tamae to her uncle's place, who runs a pension in a ski resort. Her aunt, a famous illustrator, is there to welcome the group, but after dinner she needs to leave for a meeting on an upcoming release. During the night, the four students and Tamae's uncle enjoy a feverish night of mahjong, but the following morning, they find Tamae's aunt lying frozen to death on the doorsteps. At first sight, it appears she returned to the pension late in the night, slipped on the steps and eventually froze to death without anyone inside noticing the tragedy, but Suzuko suspects something is going, even if the most likely suspect, her husband, had been playing mahjong with the gang all night. This time, the mystery is just barely related to the actual playing of mahjong, so it's fairly doable without any knowledge of the game. While some parts of the mystery seems a bit forced (wait, that was the only way to do that action?), the core plot of how the aunt was killed after everyone saw her off together is certainly not bad and there are even some really clever moments.

Daisangen Satsujin Jiken ("The Three Great Dragons Murder Case") is set in Suzuko's past, showing how she solved her first murder case at her missionary school. A nun discovers Suzuko's friend Mizuho lying beneath the clock tower, apparently having fallen from above. The head nurse soon wants to wrap things up as an accident, but Suzuko thinks there's more to this case: some say Mizuho wanted to commit suicide because she was being bullied by her room mates, but Suzuko also heard Mizuho mutter "Oh, Maria..." as she looked up at the Maria statue in the clock tower while lying heavily wounded on the ground. Suzuko starts an investigation into the bullies of Mizuho, but they are being attacked one by one by a mysterious figure, who leaves mahjong tiles near their victims. One minor clue actually makes very clever use of mahjong, and I wonder if people who know the game would've been more prone to fall for that trap, but overall, this story was the least interesting in the volume, with a murderer with a rather hard-to-swallow plan and a more suspenseful story that however misses the finesse of the earlier stories.

Kokushi Musou Satsujin Jiken ("The Peerless Patriots Murder Case") have Suzuko and a friend visit a reception to celebrate the finishing of the headquarters of the mahjong club El Dorado. They accidentally find themselves in the private quarters of the director of the club, who's having an argument with a prominent member of the club about the future of the club. The two are eventually shoed away, but that same night, after the reception, the father of the club's director is found murdered in the office Suzuko and her friend also visited earlier that evening. While the director himself has a perfect alibi for the time of the murder as he was at the reception, the other man has vanished, and he's the main suspect, but Suzuko suspects there's more to it as an attempt on her life is made. The solution has basically nothing to do with mahjong, but is a clever and also fairly believable trick used by he murderer to make the impossible possible. I think that people used to reading mystery fiction are more likely to think of this trick, but the whole thing is worked out in a competent enough manner.

For a collection of stories by someone who was actually writing a mahjong manga, Chuuren Poutou Satsujin Jiken is a surprisingly competent mystery manga, even if it's never groundbreaking. If I'd actually known mahjong, I might've enjoyed the stories even better, but even without the necessary knowledge, the stories in this volume are plotted well enough to allow the reader to appreciate the mystery writing. I wouldn't say this series is anywhere near an absolute must-read, but keep the title in the back of your head and try it out sometime if you happen to want to read a slightly unique mystery manga.

 Original Japanese title(s):青山広美 『九蓮宝燈殺人事件』