Don't you just hate it when they suddenly switch cover styles for a series you've been following for years and the new covers are better than the old ones? It's not like I'm going to buy the re-releases of the older books for their covers, but it still bugs me a bit.
It's been almost ten years since I first read Kishi Yuusuke's The Glass Hammer, which introduced me to the attorney Aoto Junko, who has become well-known as the person you want to retain if you're confronted with a locked room murder. In truth, it's not Junko who solves these cases, but the security consultant Enomoto Kei, whom Junko sees as an neccessary evil and she's often reluctant to call in his services. For while Enomoto's expertise on all things security are undeniably first-rate, she has the very very very strong suspicion that Enomoto is actually a burglar himself and that his talent to break down locked room mysteries is also used to actually break into other people's houses. I've enjoyed the other books in the series a lot, as well as the (excellent!) live-action drama Kagi no Kakatta Heya ("The Locked Room"), which was titled after the third book in the series. In 2017, the fourth book titled Mystery Clock in the series was published, collecting four stories. I usually buy the pocket re-releases which commonly follow a few years after the initial release, so I didn't pick the book up back in 2017. The pocket release finally came late 2020, but in a form I had not expected. Usually when a book is re-released in the bunko pocket form in Japan, it's the 'extended' version despite the smaller format. Besides text revisions, pockets often feature a commentary essay by a mystery writer/critic on the book, and some pocket releases even feature bonus stories not included in the original release. Interestingly, they decided to split up 2017's Mystery Clock into two seperate volumes for the 2020 pocket release. This is a practice that often happens with novels that are too long (part 1, part 2, etc), but I had never seen this done to a short story/novelette collection, and in this case, the two volumes aren't even called part 1 and 2, but each feature their own distinct title, making them complete seperate releases. Which is why I will also discuss them as seperate books in seperate posts now, even though they originally formed one single book.
The problem however is that in order to reach the crime scene, a person has to go through the whole Through the Looking Glass, And What Alice Found on the Other Side exposition and take the stairs at the end of the hall. The exposition is actually an elaborate mirror maze that makes use of trick art (optical illusions) with an Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass theme and while there are multiple routes through the maze, there are two points one has to pass, and there are security cameras here: the entrance is a big 3D sculpture of Humpty Dumpty which has to be moved to gain access to the maze, while there's also a security camera aimed at the see-through corridor at the end of the maze. Nobody is seen on the security footage of these cameras around the time of the murder, but if Enomoto is truly innocent, this means someone managed to go through the maze completely unseen. But how?
Looking back at my review of the drama adaptation, I think I have little much to add to that, because it was a fairly faithful adaptation and I still feel largely the same about the main ideas. The first part of the solution, in regards to how someone could've possibly gone through the Humpty Dumpty-blocked entrance even though the sculpture is never seen moving on camera nor anything else out of the ordinary, is really clever, but it works soooooo much better in a visual format. While you understand the explanation as you read it as prose, being actually shown what was done is not only more impressive, but also more convincing. Also, it's neigh impossible to think of this solution based on just the text, while in the visual format, the problem feels fairer. It's a trick you really have to visually see and I have to admit I was glad I had seen the drama version first. The second half of the explanation of how someone made it out of the maze unseen is clever in the sense that you can actually imagine it being done, but it does rely on the knowledge of the existence of something specific, and if you don't know about it, you're definitely not going to figure out for yourself how someone could've passed through a see-through corridor unseen. Ultimately, Kagami no Kuni no Satsujin has a few very clever tricks that allowed an invisible murderer to pass through the maze, but these ideas also undeniably more about the surprise of learning about some specific concept or piece of technology, and then seeing it applied to a mystery story. If you don't know about them, it's unlikely you'll ever solve the murder yourself.
The same basically holds for Colossus no Kagizume ("The Colossus' Claws"), which is about a mysterious death occuring in the ocean. The Neo Seatopia Project is headed by both the government and Ooyashima Maritime Development to develop new solutions for seabed mining. It operates from an experiments ship in the ocean, with divers doing experiments on the oceanbed. Hotei is the fiancé of Yuri (daughter of the CEO of Ooyashima Maritime Development) and made head of the operation, even though he's not really suited for the job and therefore not liked at all by his former colleagues. One night, Hotei went out for some night fishing, when suddenly his boat was flipped over amidst rising sea foam and when his body was finally found, there were odd scratches across his body. While there were plenty of people on the New Seatopia ship who didn't like Hotei, none of them could've actually reached his boat unseen: some people physically saw how Hotei's boat was suddenly swallowed by the foams with nothing in the vicinity, the sonar system of the experiment ship caught no other boats nearby and the only people "near" Hotei's boat were diving deep below, and because of the medical sensors on these divers as well as the dangers of decompression sickness, none of these divers could've physically gone up to the surface to attack Hotei and dive back again. The only explanation is that a Collosal Squid might've decided to attack Hotei, but fiancee Yuri isn't convinced of that and wants Junko to find out whether Hotei could've been killed by a human.
This is a weird story to rate. It basically falls in the same trap as the previous story, in the sense that it makes clever use of some kind of technology/specific piece of knowledge to make the impossible possible, in this case, allowing someone to approach the victim undetected in the ocean, but the story's hardly going to feel very satisfying if you didn't know about it before (and few people are likely to). It's almost like suddenly being told that flying pigs do exist, and that that allowed the murder to commit the crime. It's a shame, because like the story also points out, this particular trick does result in a very unique moment where it's shown that the person who was most unlikely to could've committed the murder, is shown to be the only person who could've committed the murder as the introduction of that specific piece of knowledge turns everything around.
On one hand, I do think the two stories in Colossus no Kagizume are interesting in the way they use new, modern technology to create solutions to locked room murder mysteries we hadn't seen before, but it feels like it's just too early for them: while the application is clever, as a reader, you feel slightly cheated because the stories keep bringing up concepts that aren't quite common knowledge yet. Kagami no Kuni no Satsujin is the better one of the two, but I'd recommend the drama adaptation over the original story because the trick simply works better in a visual format. The review on the accompanying book to this volume will follow soon.
This looks like another mystery to add to your Alice in Wonderland themed mysteries.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, there's no escaping from it!
DeleteYour final conclusion is an interesting one. Do you think these two stories can actually ripen with age? Because writing a detective story that improves with age and becomes more fair over time is quite an achievement. Whether it was intended or not.
ReplyDeleteI think it's something that plays with any story that uses relatively new technology. Conan uses a lot of new technology, but usually only once they're really well-spread among consumers, so the use there never really feels unfair. I can sorta imagine a world a few years in the future where the first story in this collection feels a lot more fair because more people will know roughly what something is/how it kinda works, but not so for the second, as it's unlikely 'normal consumers' will see much of it in coming years.
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