The Same to Us

「アカレンジャー！ アオレンジャー！キレンジャー！モモレンジャー！ミドレンジャー！五人揃って、ゴレンジャー！」

『秘密戦隊ゴレンジャー』

"Red Ranger! Blue Ranger! Yellow Ranger! Pink Ranger! Green Ranger! Five together, we are the Go-Rangers!"

"Secret Squad Go-Ranger"

My first part-time job was at a nursing home actually. Well, the kitchen of a nursing home.

Mei is a newly recruited caregiver who works at the Azuki Home, a small-scale day nursing home for the elderly. Most of the clients still live in their own places, so they are picked up every morning and brought to the home. At the Azuki Home, everyone is fed and bathed (if the assistance is needed) and of course there's a lot of chatting together and at the end of the day, everyone is brought back to their homes. Occassionally, clients stay for a few nights at the Azuki Home, which was also the case with Himeno Ichirou. At least, that was until he died. One day, everyone in the house is shocked by a loud noise and one of the caretakers checked up on old Himeno in his room, the man was found lying bleeding on the floor. The people of the Azuki Home only learned later that it was already too late when they found the man, but what's even more shocking is the fact that Himeno had not simply fallen from his bed on the floor, but that he had been deliberately hit on the head with something hard. The police naturally starts an investigation, and Mei herself too is interested in the case as a fan of mystery fiction, but both investigations soon stumble upon two major obstacles: the murder weapon can't be found inside the Azuki Home, even though nobody left the premises after the body was discovered and what's more baffling: five aging witnesses in the recreation room say that through the door opening, they saw a man run down the hallway only moments before the body was discovered. While a hanging curtain and some boxes on the floor obscured parts of this fleeing figure, they all had a good view on the man's torso. But all five witnesses claim this suspicious figure was wearing something else! Red, blue, white, black and green: how can five witnesses all have seen five different colors?! Mei's co-worker Haru fancies the grandson of one of the clients who happened to be visiting his grandmother at the time of the murder, but it appears the police vaguely suspects he might be involved, so Haru and Mei work together to figure out who the murderer really is in Senda Rio's debut novel Goshoku no Satsujinsha, which also has the English title The Murderer of Five Colors on the cover.

The Ayukawa Tetsuya Award is awarded each year by publisher Tokyo Sogensha to a promising new and upcoming author: the award includes a publishing contract for the debuting author and due to its focus on puzzle plot mysteries, I myself have greatly enjoyed the award winners: in recent years for example I have read and loved 2019's winner Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei ("The Hourglass of the Time-Space Traveller"), 2017's winner Shijinsou no Satsujin ("The Murders in the Villa of the Dead") and 2016's winner The Jellyfish Never Freezes. So I always keep an eye on the announcement in the fall of each year to see what new author is coming. 2020's winner of the Ayukawa Tetsuya Award however interestingly enough had some similarities with one of the winners of the 2020 Mysteries! Newcomer Award, which is the equivalent award for short stories from the same publisher. You may remember I reviewed Yamato Hironori's short story Kamu Roujin ("The Biting Senior") last year, but that story too was about a small day nursing center for the elderly. It's kinda funny that both winners took on similar themes, even if it's kinda understandable as an aging population is a real-life social problem in Japan. n any case, a nursing home isn't a setting you're likely to associate with murder soon, but last year, we had two award-winning stories that went with such a setting. Author Senda Rio herself actually works (worked?) as a nurse by the way, so I assume that the depiction of the Azuki Home and how everything works is depicted in a realistic way. Save for the murder.

The Ayukawa Tetsuya Award winners I mentioned earlier were all written as fanciful detective stories, with locked room murders in isolated mansions or locations and other familiar tropes, so it took me a bit of time to adapt to the very mundane, realistic setting of The Murderer of Five Colors. The story itself too takes a while get going: while the book opens with the discovery of the body, the sequences after the opening scene are a bit slow as it properly introduces the setting of the Azuki Home and the many related characters and their relations: with the nursing and support staff, clients and visiting family all on scene at the time of the murder, it takes a while to get a good view on who is who and where everybody said they were at the time of the murder. Yet, the set-up is definitely necessary as there's a whole web of human relations that lie at the bottom of the case. The main suspect for example is the grandson of one of the clients of the Azuki Home: he happens to be dating the granddaughter of the victim Himeno, but lately, he's been growing slightly senile and had a one-sided fight with the suspect's grandmother, and therefore didn't like his prospective grandson-in-law at all. There are a few more instances where you need to keep a good eye on who's what to whom, as with all the information you're fed, you could make a pretty complex relationship chart of all the characters.

Things become more interesting once the main problem is presented. The matter of the missing murder weapon is of course also important, but the more baffling puzzle is of course how in heavens five witnesses could swear they all saw the fleeing suspect wearing a completely different color? If it were only two similar colors, like black and blue, you could suppose that some witnesses just didn't have eyes as sharp as the others, but with witnesses saying the suspect was red, blue, white, black or green, who knows which of them is actually right? Due to the contradicting testimonies, it's difficult for the police to pin the crime on any of the people in the Azuki Home at the time of the murder, paving the way for Haru and Mei to find out why their clients all saw a different color.

The five-color problem might sound a bit simple in comparison to the impossible murders we saw in previous Ayukawa Tetsuya Award winners, but the way in which the problem is solved is definitely what I expect from the 2020 winner. Senda manages to provide a convincing, logical explanation to why five different witnesses managed to see five different colors even though they looked at the same man at the same time. While some parts of the explanation might sound a bit familiar or could be easy to guess, it's the combination of all the ideas that manages to make this a great problem of logic: plenty of possible interpretations that a reader is likely to think off are also shown to be incorrect (yeah, it's not color blindness), so while the problem might seem mundane, it's properly worked out to be a truly baffling conundrum. The plot surrounding the murder weapon is less memorable in comparison.

The book has a great conclusion by the way, where Mei confronts her suspect and carefully lays out her deduction before the other party. It's a surprisingly tense confrontation due to some shocking events that occur before the climax, but as things are unrafelled by Mei, you'll learn there was more going on than most readers probably had noticed, and it results in a nice ending to the story, where some scenes suddenly make more sense in hindsight as you learn what their true part in the puzzle was.

Goshoku no Satsujinsha (The Murderer of Five Colors) might not be going for the familiar, classic tropes of the mystery genre and the setting and even the main problem might take some time to get used to, but once you're done with the book, you'll definitely understand why it was the 2020 Ayukawa Tetsuya Award winner. It's a fun story, utilizing an original setting to present a problem that at first seems too simple, but Senda manages to expand on it and really make this a novel-length mystery with perhaps more surpises than you'd initially expect.

Original Japanese title(s): 千田理緒『五色の殺人者』