Read the works of a certain author long enough, and you're bound to recognize themes or topics the author likes. Perhaps the author likes to make references to classical literature for example, or they like to address topics like racism or heritage. Some might have a nationalistic tone in their writings, others might just enjoy writing very detailed about the workings of machinery, but whatever it is, the attentive reader will surely, with time, recognize certain topics as being 'typical of that one author'.
Because of this, you sometimes just know that a certain work wasn't just written for the general public to read, but that it was written mostly for the author themselves as the main target. Some books just delve so deeply into certain topics and themes that it seems unlikely that the author was trying to reach a wide audience, but instead that they mostly wrote the book to satisfy themselves. And mind you, that's not a bad thing on its own. Plenty of readers stick with a writer exactly because these people write about themes the reader's also interested in, so novels that are in a way self-indulgent can still appeal to a lot of readers.
Even a coherent summary of the story is hard enough to write because the book feels like it's a few seperate ideas forcefully put together like a Monster of Frankenstein. The book follows a four-chapter structure and it's the first chapter that still makes Alcatraz Gensou like a normal mystery novel, as the reader is brought to Washington D.C. in 1939, where the murdered body of a prostitute is found in a park. The poor victim was hung from a tree, and her nether region was cut open: the horrible murder soon reminded people of Jack the Ripper. A second victim soon follows, and the police is desperate to find the murderer. But the the second chapter suddenly shifts to a scientific paper on gravity and the impossibility of dinosaurs that's basically the same length of the whole first chapter. By the third chapter, we're following an inmate of Alcatraz and the planning of a prison escape, while the final chapter is a fantasy novel where the protagonist ends up in Pumpkinland, an underground kingdom of pygmies where he meets the love of his life.
What Shimada set out to do with Alcatraz Gensou was to incorporate all these themes he had used in previous works in one single work, but the result is a novel that's at the same time too eclectic and too focused: Alcatraz Gensou is about various themes Shimada likes writing about, but also only about that. The tonal shift between the chapters is enormous, so we're talking not about a Monster of Frankenstein made with all human parts, but like a torso of a human, the legs of a horse and tentacles for arms. It's in the epilogue that Shimada sews these radically different parts together with an 'explanation' as to how the four narratives are precisely connected, but it's mostly for show: the connecting tissue is fittingly enough also a theme Shimada likes to write about in his works, but this epilogue is mostly connected to the latter two chapters, so the first two chapters feel very detached and unneccesary for the 'overarching plot' as proposed in the epilogue. Alcatraz Gensou is a mystery novel in a broad sense of the term, but don't start with the book expecting anything conventional or even anything similar to what's available now in English by Shimada, because it's simply not what most people would expect from a detective novel.
By the way, the title Alcatraz Gensou has to be a reference to Pegasus Gensou (Fantasy), the legendary opening song to Saint Seiya, right?
Alcatraz Gensou is a work only Shimada could've written, but I think it's really aimed at a very, very specific target audience, and I certainly am not part of that. As a mystery novel, it's just too chaotic and vague and exactly because this book uses a lot of the themes Shimada used in previous books, there's actually surprisingly little that actually... surprises. It's a book that allowed Shimada to revisit themes he likes, but you'll have to ask yourself whether you like Shimada's underlying themes enough and whether you'll settle for something that is less of a coherent mystery story, and more like a smörgåsbord of ideas.
Um...wow. That sounds...interesting (although perhaps more when reading about it rather than actually reading it!). And I did in fact go "huh" when I read that last part.
ReplyDeleteIn all seriousness, I've been trying to think of a stranger mystery, but I don't think I've come across one. At least, I'm sure I'd remember if I had. I've mentioned that I like "everything-but-the-kitchen-sink" type novels, but this definitely sounds like it exemplifies their potential dark side. You can just toss all the odds and ends lying around your fridge into a pot, and they may all be good in and of themselves, but that doesn't mean that they'll make a good soup!
(Also, the impossibility of dinosaurs??? For a scientific paper, I'd think that that topic would be something of a non-starter... :)
I think that I would have given up on the book midway had I not read some other Shimadas before that tackled similar ideas etc. It's still the book I enjoyed least by him, but at least I can sorta put into context, but if I had gone straight to this from say Tokyo Zodiac or Crooked Mansion, I would be utterly flabbergasted. Now I'm only mildly flabbergasted.
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