番外編：Death Among the Undead

After the annual releases of The Decagon House Murders (2015), The Moai Island Puzzle (2016), The Ginza Ghost (2017) and The 8 Mansion Murders (2018),  Locked Room International didn't have a full-length Japanese release in 2019, but last year, two of them were released: Ayukawa's classic locked room & perfect alibi story collection The Red Locked Room and Higashigawa's comedic locked room mystery Lending the Key to the Locked Room. And people who have been following these releases will probably have noticed that the summer is a time to pay attention to, so...

I'm happy to announce that Locked Room International will be releasing Masahiro IMAMURA's debut novel Death Among the Undead very soon and I am even more thrilled that I was the one to translate the work to English. Oh, and to be clear: this is the Japanese cover, the Locked Room International release will have a different cover. Originally published in 2017 as the winner of the 27th Ayukawa Tetsuya Award with the title Shijinsou no Satsujin ("The Murders in the Villa of the Dead"), it was an absolute monster hit in Japan. It became the first title in history to conquer the first place in all the major annual rankings of mystery novels organized by various publishers and has since become a multimedia franchise, with a manga adaptation and an excellent live action adaptation. Honestly, no other mystery novel in recent years managed to make such enormous waves in Japan as this novel. It became the first novel in an on-going series, with the third novel being released just a month ago in Japan. Imamura's debut work is a novel I was absolutely sure was going to be available in English sooner or later, but I couldn't have guessed I'd be the one who'd get to translate the book!

Having heard about a curious threatening note to the university's Film Club, self-proclaimed detective and notorious campus troublemaker Kyosuke Akechi and his assistant Yuzuru Hamura manages to tag along with the Film Club's summer outing, together with the mysterious Hiruko Kenzaki, who is apparently also known in some circles as a gifted detective. The trip brings them to a mountain-side pension overlooking Lake Sabea and the idea is that the members will film a short film in this nature-rich area. During their stay here, the three student-detectives try to learn more about the threats while they help the members of the Film Club with their project, but in the evening, the students are suddenly attacked by a mob of something very unlikely. The group are forced to barricade themselves inside the pension with no hope of escape from this closed circle situation as the beings try to get inside, but then one of the students is killed inside his locked room during the night: at first they suspect one of the beings killed the poor man, but they soon realize that isn't possible and that a human, ergo, one of them must've done it. But how did the murderer manage to get in and out the locked room of the victm, and more importantly, why now, while they're being attacked by those things and don't even know whether they'll survive this!?

I was late to the party myself and read Death among the Undead in 2018, but I absolutely loved it, and the series has become one of my favorite ones in recent years. Imamura managed to create an absolutely unique closed circle situation for a mystery novel and makes excellent use of the concept to present one of the most original mystery you'll read. While initially you might think the concept is more focused on suspense or perhaps even gore, and that it doesn't fit the mystery genre, you'll be surprised at how brilliantly Imamura uses non-conventional elements to create a fantastic locked room murder mystery that is still all about the fair-play, originality and logical reasoning we love about detective fiction. It's a novel you have to read, and I would have said that even if I wasn't involved with the translation (in fact, I've been fanboying about this novel on this blog ever since I first read it).

Anyway, I hope you'll enjoy Death Among the Undead as much as I originally did, or more! As mentioned on the Locked Room International website, due to circumstances there's a product page online already, but the book isn't actually available yet at this moment: I believe it's scheduled to released very soon though so keep an eye on the Locked Room International website to see when it's available for purchase. People who liked previous Japanese releases by Locked Room International will definitely love this one, but the book has a lot of appeal beyond that I think, so I hope the book will also act as a gateway work for a new reading audience to get into Japanese mystery novels! And that's it for today's service announcement. Enjoy Death Among the Undead when it's out!