Trick and Magic

"You're a wizard, Harry."

"Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"

The cover art kinda reminds me of Vampire Hunter D even though the art style is completely different.

Most knowlege of magic was lost after the medieval witch hunts, and it was only about a century ago when Aleister Crowley and other magicians started conducting serious research on witchcraft in order to recover all the magic that was lost. Magic is a talent you're born with and very few of these natural magicians exist: all of them are members of, and observed by the international organization the Order of Zenith, and at this moment, only six magicians are known to live. But the fundamentals to the workings of magic, research methods regarding magic and many more topics can be studied by anyone, and in the century that has passed since the renewed interest in magic, witchcraft has developed into a proper academic field, with people across the world studying it, even if they can't conduct magic themselves, similar to how not all Literature students actually go on to write books. The existence of magic is undeniable, but not every culture and country has a proper history of magic due the relatively young age of the field and because magicians themselves are very rare. Japan in particular has very little affinity with magic.

Which is why it became big news when it was announced that Jousui University would be opening the very first Magic Faculty of Japan, and not only that, they even managed to rope in one of the six living magicians as a teacher! Narrator Amane is one of the students in the first class of the Magic Faculty, and is placed in a small seminar class with Ririko, Hio, Imina, Rie and Chisato, five girls and best of friends who have been in the same class ever since elementary, going from Jousui Elementary to Jousui Secondary and now all together in the Magic Faculty of Jousui University. The six students are especially lucky, as they are placed in the seminar class taught by Sakyou Shiina himself, one of the six magicians on this world. Shiina can be a bit of a trickster, but he takes things more seriously after a strange threatening message is broadcast during the opening ceremony of the academic year, where a voice calling themselves Aleister Crowley announces that someone here will be chosen as a sacrifice and they are challenged to deduce who the victim will be, and who the culprit is. At first, it sounds like a bad prank, but one day, Ririko fails to appear in class, and when Shiina uses the magic spell Search, they learn she's on the roof of the building. But when they find her there, she's lying unconsciously on the floor, her face horribly mutilated. Luckily, Ririko will survive the attack and Shiina even declares Ririko's face can be saved, but the police are facing a riddle: the staircase security camera shows that Ririko had been the only person to go up the rooftop that day until she was discovered by Shiina and the others, and there are no other ways to reach or leave the rooftop. For a second, suspicion falls on magic, but that is impossible too. Not only is Shiina the only magician around, current knowledge of magic is still nowhere the level of medieval magicians, and many magic spells are currently "Lost Tasks": spells we know once existed, but of which knowledge is gone. Spells that could make this attack on Ririko possible, like levitation or psycho-kinesis, simply don't exist now. So if it is not magic and not a human act, what made this impossible attack possible in Kuzumi Shiki's Tricksters (2005)?

Tricksters is a six-part light novel series from the mid 2000s and as you will have realized by now, it's one of those mystery novels that feature supernatural story elements and people who have been following this blog for a longer time now I absolutely love it when fair-play puzzlers make use of supernatural elements, as many of my favorite reads these last few years have done exactly that. The initial setting might remind you a bit of Harry Potter, because it's about a school setting and magic, but fortunately, you won't be thinking of Harry Potter all the time because ultimately, the concepts are very different here: not only are there only six magicians in this world (who are all being watched by the Order of Zenith), knowledge of magic too is still relatively shallow, with known spells being fairly limited in their range and power. This helps keep the mystery plot fair of course, as you can't get away just by saying a magician did it. The explanation that magic, as an academic field, is similar to Literature and that people can study the topic without actually practicing it themselves, is pretty easy to understand too.  

And it's also clear right from the start this isn't going to be a normal detective story, as the book basically opens with a Challenge to the Reader, albeit an unusual one. "A Challenge from a Magician" tells the reader that in the following six chapters, people will be deceived and tricked in seven different ways, and it's up to the reader to figure out all seven acts of deception. Interestingly, the challenge is about finding out that there's deception going on, and is not explicitly asking you to solve it. Some are pretty easy to identify, like the reader instantly realizes *some trickery* is going on regarding the impossible attack on Ririko even if you might not figure out how it was done immediately, but some of the other deceptions are well... very deviously hidden, and it did add a fun extra layer to the book. Obviously, this focus on trickery is what gave this book its title.

And it's the seven-fold trickery going on that makes this a surprisingly fun read. You'll be through this book fairly swiftly, as it's not particularly long and most of the text consist of dialogue, but the story offers more mystery than just the initial attack on Ririko. After her attack, some other mysterious events follow, but these events still bring the reader (and narrator Amane and Shiina) back to the same questions: why and how was Ririko attacked on the rooftop, and how did the assaillant get away, because it would have been impossible with or without the use of magic. Because this is a detective story that goes through all the effort to introduce a magic setting, I assume very few readers will be surprised that magic is involved in the trickery in some manner, but figuring out how magic is used won't be easy, especially as the book does a good job at setting limitations on the known types of magic and their effective range. The solution to the locked room situation is therefore quite satisfying, as the book never feels like it's actually cheating you, even though it is called Tricksters. That combined with the fact the mystery plot unfolds beyond the initial locked room situation makes this an amusing to read overall. You'll be thinking of the "seven deceptions" all the time and try to figure out where something is not quite right and whether someone is being deceived in some way and these deceptions do intertwine well.

Tricksters is a fun, short read that makes good use of its magic setting to present an original mystery story, and the book also does justice to its title by really trying to deceive the reader in more than one way, having a much deeper mystery plot than you'd initially expect. I initially became interested in this series because I had heard good things about the third entry of this series (Tricksters D), but it was mentioned it was best to read these books in order (or at least one of the first two books), so I started with this one. It certainly got me interested in the rest of the short series, so expect more Tricksters in the future here.

Original Japanese title(s): 久住四季『トリックスターズ』