番外編：Death Among the Undead Released

Doing announcements of announcements is like shooting myself in the foot, because I'm always left with nothing to say in the actual announcement... It's common practice to make an announcement of an upcoming major announcement, or at least it's like that in the game industry, but I guess you're not supposed to give away everything during the pre-announcement.

So now that Locked Room International has today published my newest translation of Masahiro IMAMURA's 2017 debut novel Death Among the Undead (original title: Shijinsou no Satsujin), do I have anything to add to my original announcement post not even two weeks ago? No, not really.  Pointing out that Death Among the Undead was an unprecedented monster hit that became the first title in history to conquer the first place in all the major Japanese annual rankings of mystery novels, and that it has since become a multimedia franchise, with a manga adaptation and an excellent live action adaptation would just be repeating myself. Raving about how it introduces a completely original take on the closed circle situation and locked room murder mystery is all I have been doing here ever since I read the book back in 2018. It is the book you need to read if you want to know in what (amazing) state the Japanese mystery novel is now currently, but yes, it's all been said here before.

Though I am really excited the book is out now! I assume most people reading this are regular readers of this blog, so they'll be aware that probably about 85% of the books I discuss here are not available in translation (English or any other language) and it's not uncommon to see comments on articles here where people voice their wishes for a translation. And I can safely say that at least on this blog, Death Among the Undead was by far the most wished-for title. Heck, when I reviewed the third novel in the series released only a few weeks back in Japan, the comment section once again had people wishing for a translation of Death Among the Undead. As it hadn't been formally announced yet by Locked Room International, there wasn't much I could say then though. Anyway, it's awesome that the book is now indeed available in English translation now, and that I got to work on it myself!

Edit: Publishers Weekly's starred review is also up!

For those who have read previous translations of Japanese mystery novels published by Locked Room International, this might be a slightly surprising work. Like Lending the Key to the Locked Room released last year, Death Among the Undead is a fairly recent work, as opposed to the early shin honkaku novels from the eighties Locked Room International did before (not to mention the even older The Ginza Ghost and The Red Locked Room). Death Among the Undead follows the classic tropes of the murder mystery, but at the same time it's unmistakenly a contemporary work, a murder mystery written within the current zeitgeist and presenting familiar-looking ideas in a brand new context. I myself love this book, as it really shows the potential the puzzler mystery story has and that there's stll a gold mine of ideas to be explored for the genre. This Locked Room International version features a special introduction by Soji SHIMADA by the way!

Anyway, I can only hope you'll enjoy the book as much as I did back in 2018! It's such an important work in the context of contemporary Japanese mystery fiction, I really recommend you read it even if the premise of the book sounds a bit... uncanny, because Death Among the Undead is an excellent example of how far the Japanese mystery novel dares to go, and how at the same time it still manages to hold onto our beloved classic tropes and structure firmly. And I'm really repeating myself now, so that's it for today! Enjoy Death Among the Undead!