The Dying Game

「この世界は不思議に満ちている。どんなにあり得ないことでも起こり得る」

『名探偵に甘美なる死を』

"This world is brimming with the unknown. No matter how impossible it seems, anything can happen."

""Delicious Death" for Detectives"

Anyone here reading the manga Delicious in Dungeon by the way? I absolutely love it...

It's the very distant year of 2024 and the world has finally started moving forward again after an unparalleled pandemic called COVID-19 basically stopped the lives of everyone on the world. The last few years, many people were forced to stay at home, but there was one industry that profited from everyone barely getting out of their houses: the video game industry. The VR game industry in particular grew immensely, as the technology allowed people to go outside and explore fabulous locations, without actually going outside physically. One of the major companies to benefit from the increased popularity is Megalodon Soft, best known for its hit open-world RPG Battle Without Honor and the unique detective game Mystery Maker. The latter is of course similar to Super Mario Maker, allowing players to solve murder mysteries in a VR environment, but more importantly allowing players to create their own cases to challenge other players. Especially popular is the real-time versus mode, where one player has to plan and commit a murder in real-time, with other players roaming around on the stage. Once, and if the murderer succeeds in killing off one of the other participants, an investigation phase follows where all the players (including the unknown murderer) are allowed to investigate the scene for clues and question each other. The unique gameplay made Mystery Maker an immense hit, and Megalodon Soft is already working on its sequel, which also includes upgraded hardware: besides the usual VR-goggles and gloves, players can now wear a special feedback suit which can also simulate temperatures and a sensation of pain among others. The suit also synchronizes with the hardware module RHAPSODY, a special seat regulating the VR-environment and it has the advantage of making you not look like a fool in the eyes of the other people i the room while playing a VR game.

As part of the marketing campaign of Mystery Maker 2, Kurata Chiaki, the producer of the Mystery Maker series, plans to invite eight amateur detectives to play a session of the upcoming game within RHAPSODY. The idea is that they'll record everything, both inside the VR world and in the real world, to make a kind of web-series/documentary and show how these amateur detectives tackle a case. Freelance journalist Kamo, who has written on miscarriages of justice, is one of the people invited as an amateur detective, but he is asked a special favor by Kurata: she wants Kamo to become the murderer in their session of Mystery Maker 2. She hopes he can come up with a brilliant murder to fool the other seven detectives and stay undetected himself. Kamo agrees, and is given some time in advance to work with the development team to plan his fictional murders and to implement the things he wants for his plan into the special stage the eight detectives will be playing. Three months later and the eight amateur detectives are brought to a small island. The Megaladon House on this island is of course owned by the company, and they'll be playing the game and recording everything in this private building due to security reasons, as the game is still in development. Among the other guests are a famous private detective, a former police detective who still appears regularly on television as a criminal expert and a high school student detective. And then there's Yuuki, a budding mystery writer who also happens to the cousin of Kamo's wife. But they have only just arrived on the island, when everyone is knocked out by their coffee. When they wake up, they find that the only people inside the Megalodon House are the eight detectives. They find instructions that tell them to wear their personal VR gear found in their room and log-in in their ID-locked RHAPSODY units to come to the VR world.

Inside the VR world, they find themselves in the Doll House, the setting of the murder game Kamo had planned. However, someone has taken over as the Game Master, and it's the same person who is keeping them captured inside the Megalodon House in the real world too. They are informed that the smart watches they are wearing have a poisonous injection installed into them and are advised to obey the game master's orders, especially as these injections are also installed in the smart watches "gifted" to the participants earlier on, and which they have all given to their loved ones, meaning people like Kamo's wife and daughter, and Yuuki's girlfriend, are in danger too. The game master's orders are simple though: the eight detectives are to play a game of Mystery Maker 2 as planned. The Murderer (Kamo) has to try to commit his murders undetected in the Doll House, while the Normal Players have to figure out who committed the murders and how. The game is divided in a Murder Phase, where in principle only the Murderer is allowed to move inside the Doll House to commit his crime (the others are to stay in their room, but are allowed to "fight" back against the Murderer), and an Investigation Phase, where the Normal Players can investigate the murder, while the Murderer of course has to remain undetected by pretending to be a Normal Player too. However, the Game Master makes this virtual game of life and death, one of real life and death. One of the eight amateur detectives is actually an accomplice of the Game Master called the Executioner. If the Murderer is found out by the others, or if a Normal Player makes a wrong deduction, the Executioner will kill them in the real world in the Megaladon House as punishment. Kamo is thus forced to commit murders in the VR world, while in the real world, everyone is on their guard for the Executioner, but it doesn't take long for locked room murders to occur both in the VR Doll House and the real Megalodon House. But who is the murderer? The Game Master has dubbed this game "Delicious Death" for Detectives, which is also the English title of Houjou Kie's Meitantei ni Kanbi naru Shi wo (2022).

 My first post of 2020 was about Houjou Kie's fantastic debut novel Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei ("The Hourglass of the Time-Space Traveller", 2019), and last year's first post was about her second, equally impressive novel Kotou no Raihousha ("Visitors on the Remote Island" 2020). I had hoped that 2022's first post could be about her third novel, but while the previous books were released late fall/early winter, Meitantei ni Kanbi naru Shi wo was released in the second week of January 2022, hence it not becoming 2022's first post. But you guess from my intention to make it the first post, that I had been looking forward to this book. Which is of course because I loved her first two novels. Houjou is a former member of the Kyoto University Mystery Club and also wrote whodunnit stories back then, and it shows in her writing style: these books are pure grand-scale puzzlers, plotted incredibly densely with almost any action, and utterence being a valid piece to the puzzle. While at one hand, you can feel Houjou is really trying to play as fair as possible with the crazy amount of clues laid down, these stories have also been deliciously hard to solve, challenging you to do long chains of reasoning in order to solve the impossible murders seen in her books and personally, it's the style of detective fiction I love best. The other interesting part about her writing is that she loves special settings: her debut novel Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei was a much a fair-play classic puzzler as you can get, but also included the brilliant plot device of time travel, while her second book Kotou no Raihousha cleverly had the characters fight against a true mystery, a being of unknown origins, of which they had to deduce its capabilities and intentions based on its actions and inactions. Houjou managed to write brilliant detectives using original, supernatural ideas, so I was really looking forward to the third novel in the so-called Ryuuzen Clan series, as these books all involve family members of the Ryuuzen clan. Meitantei ni Kanbi naru Shi wo features the both protagonists from the two previous books by the way: Kamo being the protagonist of the first book, and Ryuuzen Yuuki of the second.

Going from themes of time travel and unearthly beings to... a VR game might sound a bit... tame in that regard. Because while the VR-system in this book is slightly more advanced than the things we have now, it's not like the setting is really unusual or "special", because consumers have had access to VR games for years. And while the concept of the closed circle death game, where people are locked up in a location and forced to kill each other while others try to figure out who the murderer is, might not be as popular in detective novels, gamers are very, very familiar with them with popular games like Danganronpa, the Zero Escape series and many, many more about this exact theme (Oh, by the way, I started with The Sekimeiya a while back. It's both very fast, and very slow, so no idea when I'll be done with it...).  And the concept of having special phases for the murders is of course not only familiar for digital gamers (Danganronpa again), but also for real-life board game players who play games like Mafia/Werewolf. So on paper, Meitantei ni Kanbi naru Shi wo might feel not as exciting as Houjou's previous books. Especially not after my over-convoluted summary above!

Because in actuality, the plot of this book gets going surprisingly fast and it basically never stops until the very, very end, keeping you hooked all the way through. Because of the Game Master's rules, the story follows a basic "gameplay loop" of a Murder Phase, followed by an Investigation Phase in the VR World, which will lead to an accusation by one of the Normal Players aimed at who they think is the Murderer within "Delicious Death" for Detectives, while the accused is also given a chance to rebute these accusations. This is followed by a Murder Phase in the real world, where the players are forced to stay in their rooms while the Executioner tries to kill the person who failed in their role earlier in the VR game, which then loops back into a new cycle in "Delicious Death" for Detectives. The eight detectives are given two days to solve all the murders that occur in the closed circles in both in the VR world and the real world (with Kamo, as the Murderer in the game, having an advantage of knowing what happened in the game, but he'll be killed if any of the players figure his crimes out without figuring out those of the Executioner). Because all these phases follow each other and this insane death game keeps on going until the end of the book, Meitantei ni Kanbi naru Shi wo ends up being a very, very densely plotted mystery novel, with accusations, false solutions, clues and foreshadowing constantly flying around. There's the inverted angle for example, as we as the reader know Kamo is the Murderer in the game, but we don't see exactly how he manages to pull off his impossible murders there, so there's plenty of mystery there already, even without considering the other murders committed by the Executioner! Then you have the various characters arguing theories about the murders happening in the Doll House in the VR world, investigations in the locked room murders in the real world, people discussing the reason why they're being held by the Game Master in the first place, and so much more.. And with murders occuring both in the VR world and the real world, this book is truly a treat for those who love solving puzzles.

By the way, I love how the game Mystery Maker is portrayed in this novel. You can clearly tell Houjou is from a generation who grew up playing video games, as the way the game is shown feels so natural to gamers, all the way down to the little things. While the idea of RHAPSODY and VR suits feel a bit "near-futuristic", the actual "game grammar" will feel naturalistic to gamers with little details like having item descriptions for in-game items in your inventory, having save points and floating name markers. The Game Master also immediately rules out the cliched "they were using fake in-game names!' trick that is so outdated now, showing that Houjou is definitely a "contemporary" writer who plays games and is familiar with the cliches of how games in (mystery) fiction are sometimes portrayed. But it's not just the description of Mystery Maker that works; a lot of the ideas in this novel work only because half of the murders are committed inside a VR environment, and there are some brilliant tricks pulled off here! People who have played the Danganronpa games might remember a certain episode that made brilliant use of the game-within-a-game plot device and I'd say it's the same type of idea: some of the things the Murderer (Kamo) and the Executioner pull off are so original in mystery fiction, because they could only have been used within a video game context/world, and yet it makes perfect sense. That is why despite "a VR world" not being a theme as "supernatural" as time travel, Meitantei ni Kanbi naru Shi wo does do a great job at presenting murders that could only have been committed in these special circumstances.

People without experience with video games might find this book a bit too dense because of this though: with murders going on in the real world and the VR world, and having to learning the fundamentals of game grammar, one could say the book can feel a bit overwhelming even at times. I myself had to remind myself to really pay attention to what sections happened in the VR world and which in the real world, because even within one chapter people often have to go back and forth between the two worlds, so the book does require you to really pay much attention, more so than the previous two books, and if you already have trouble adapting to the idea of a VR game,  I can imagine Meitantei ni Kanbi naru Shi wo being a rather hard book to follow. I had to think to the Umezz Collection release of the classic manga The Drifting Classroom, which used different kind of paper depending on whether the narrative was in the present world or the place where the school had been zapped to, or to Shimada Souji's Okujou no Doukeshi, which used different fonts for the four different narratives, but such techniques wouldn't work here as good, as the section cuts are less "clean" with people going in and out the VR world within one chapter multiple times.

But still, personally, I think this book is a banger and certainly one of the best novels I'll read this year. The concept of having murders happening in a closed circle situation in both the game world of Mystery Maker and the real world isn't just a story set-up, it's an integral part of the puzzle plot. There are some great inspired ideas, like having the Normal Players who are killed in "Delicious Death" for Detectives reappear in the game (with a halo!) so they can join the investigation in their own deaths, meaning you have "ghosts" testifying about their own "murder." But you also have small occurances happening in one world that are later revealed to have been connected to incidents in the real world and more connections like these that tie the two worlds together, making this not a book consisting of two seperate halves, but a single story of ambitious scale.  The impossible murders happening here use tricks you are not likely to have seen anywhere else (the big reveal two-thirds in is truly memorable!), made only possible because of the special setting. The false solutions are also great, often very convincing and based on hints you thought were cleverly hidden, only to realize there were even more cleverly hidden hints that disprove those false solutions! For fans of the Ellery Queen-style of reasoning, with an emphasis on fair-play and long chains of deductions based on various clues spread throughout the book, Houjou has never disappointed and she doesn't disappoint in this book either.

In the end, I think I only need to mention two caveats for this book. Yes, this book can become insanely complex due to so much happening, and I also have to mention that it is definitely best read after the first two books in this series, because some of the moments work better having seen Kamo and Yuuki in their own adventures first. But besides that, I think Meitantei ni Kanbi naru Shi wo was another incredibly strong mystery novel by Houjou, one that I'd recommend everyone interested in pure puzzlers. This is the kind of mystery novel I personally love: an ambitious puzzle plot that's packed with clues from start to finish, detectives who throw theories at each other and debunk them, original murders that make good use of the unique setting of the book and long chains of reasoning where you see the detective crossing off each suspect one by one by utilizing every piece of information we've seen until that point until all the loose lines come together at one single point. Few novels manage to make solving a puzzle so fun with such a memorable concept. 

Original Japanese title(s): 方丈貴恵『名探偵に甘美なる死を』