To Wake the Dead

「わたしの手法は、このルーブ・ゴールどバーグ・マシンのようなものですから」 

『invert 城塚翡翠倒叙集』

 

"For my methods are similar to this Rube Goldberg Machine."

"Invert - A Collection of the Inverted Stories of Jouzuka Hisui"

These covers are gorgeous!

One of my favorite reads of 2020 was Aizawa Sako's Medium - Kourei Tantei Jouzuka Hisui ("Medium - The Medium Detective Jouzuka Hisui" 2019), a brilliant book where the reader was treated to a very unique experience. Jouzuka Hisui is an attractive spirit medium who can channel spirits of the deceased and see flashes of what happened in their last moments. Normally, you'd think that having a medium capable of channeling the victim would be cheating, but Aizawa managed to turn this completely around. For one, Hisui could only see vague fragments of the past, and more importantly, she was quite aware that the police isn't just going to believe her visions, and she knew she'd need to have real evidence to support her supernatural visions. This made Medium an incredibly memorable reading experience: while Hisui's supernatural visions would vaguely in the correct direction, it was still a pure detective novel, meanng that they basically had to reverse-engineer each vision to see how they'd fit the crime scene and still come up with the logical explanation for the vision and find evidence to support whatever Hisui saw. It's like you were only shown a small section of the longer mathematical answer in advance, but you were still required to find all the steps leading up to that part yourself, and you still had to work towards the conclusion to find out who did it and how to prove it. That coupled with a brilliant story structure, made Medium one of the best plotted books I had read in 2020.

So when I learned a sequel had been published, I knew I had to read it. But Medium - Kourei Tantei Jouzuka Hisui had such a unique premise and execution, there was no way Aizawa pull off the same trick again, so I did wonder how this book would work. Though I guess the title gives it away immediately: Invert - Jouzuka Hisui Toujoshuu ("Invert - A Collection of the Inverted Stories of Jouzuka Hisui" 2021) is a short story collection with three inverted mystery stories, where we follow murderers who come up with brilliant plans to hide their crimes, but who suddenly find a mysterious woman in their way claiming to have supernatural powers. At first, they don't believe this woman of course, but when she starts poking around based on her visions and starts coming closer and closer to the truth, these murderers slowly start to realize that even though they may have safeguarded themselves for any earthly obstacle when planning their perfect murders, they may have forgotten to account for the supernatural.

Shifting the focus to the murderers and using an inverted format is actually quite brilliant I thought as I started with this book, as it fits the concepts introduced in the first book perfectly: in inverted mysteries you are also shown large parts of the answer ("how the crime was committed") in advance, but there's still the puzzle left of where the murderer made a mistake and how the detective is going to prove their guilt, so in terms of ideas, this is still very close to what Medium did. And there's the added joy of seeing each new murderer cope with Hisui: of course nobody is going to believe a woman who claims she has supernatural powers and who seems to be 'receiving' signs from the netherside about a crime, but as she starts looking around and voicing her guesses, the murderers realize that while they managed to fool the police, she's actually the only person to come close to the truth. Hisui fits the archetype we know so well from Columbo so well, being a charming, disarming woman who turns out to be much more dangerous than she appears at first. Note that by the time of this second novel, Hisui is already trusted by the police, and with their help, she's able to go undercover each time to approach the person she suspects, and while her visions give her an inital edge, she, like the reader, has to use their powers of observation and reasoning to figure out what the murderer did exactly and how to prove it. This book also takes from the Ellery Queen television show and Furuhata Ninzaburou by the way, for Hisui always addresses the reader directly when she has figured everything out and prepares for the climax of each tale. Also note that this volume does spoil a few of the stories in Medium, so you'll want to read these books in order.

The collection opens with Unjou no Harema which also has the English title Murder on the Cloud. Yoshida Naomasa's legs never quite recovered from the accident partially caused by Komaki Shigehito when they were younger, and Komaki had always felt responsible for that. He always kept at Yoshida's side to help him, but many years later, Komaki finds himself still chained to Yoshida and basically working as a ghost-programmer for Yoshida's software studio. Yoshida definitely has marketing talent, but he is nowhere the programming prodigy he pretends to be. Komaki is, but all the programming work he and his colleagues do is basically put on Yoshida's name, even for projects Komaki himself came up with. Fed up with this, he decides to kill Yoshida for the sake of the company and himself. He creates a fake alibi, pretending to be alone at the office at night working on a server problem during the time of the murder, while in reality, he had killed Yoshida in his apartment and had dressed the scene like Yoshida had slipped and hit his head. The police initially seems to go with this interpretation of the scene, but then a police consultant appears who claims to have supernatural powers, and while as a man of science, Komaki doesn't believe her at first, her visions turn out to point towards the truth.

A very competent, even if slightly unsurprising, inverted mystery story. While the reader isn't shown everything Komaki did and it's slightly technical because Komaki's alibi depends on him working on a server problem that could only be fixed at the office, they can probably make a good guess how Komaki's alibi trickery was done, but Hisui's visions do point out interesting contradictions about the crime scene and it's of course these mistakes that ultimately lead her to the truth. The "final" mistake which ties Komaki to the murder conclusively is clever and something every one will recognize, and yet not think off until Hisui points it out, but it lacks impact. With these kind of stories, you want the murderer making a mistake that seems really big in hindsight, but which they, the detective and the reader missed until that moment. The 'gimmick' at the end in this story would have been perfect as a set-up, but it is at the same time such a small mistake, it makes you feel like "Well, okay, it's pretty normal that someone would miss that."

Houmatsu no Shinpan, or Bubble Judgement, starts with the murder on Tagusa Akio by the elementary school teacher Suezaki Eri at the school. Tagusa, a former employee at the school, had been blackmailing Eri with videos secretly shot inside the restroom stalls at the school, and the man was even selling the videos he had of the children making use of the restrooms. The man was better off dead of course, so she lured him into the school late in the evening, pretending to pay him off. Not suspecting anything, Tagusa was quickly killed by Eri by surprise, who threw him off the building, making it appear like Tagusa had been trying to break into the school by scaling the wall and falling to his death. When a school counselor is appointed to the school to help the children cope with the trauma of the incident, Eri doesn't seem to suspect much, but when the attractive psychologist starts talking about possessing supernatural powers and having friends in the police force, Eri starts becoming suspicious of the woman's movements, and she realizes the woman is slowly, but surely uncovering the truth behind Tagusa's death. The final piece in the chain is nicely hidden in the narrative, so when Hisui points out what mistake Eri made, it's actually quite satisfying despite it being a relatively minor point. In that regard, I think it worked better than the previous story, because the build-up to the reveal was better. The overall story is a bit slower though, as Eri's plan is less complex compared to the one in the first story, and more of the story revolves around Eri slowly seeing through who the mysterious school counselor really is.

It's nearly impossible to not think of Columbo when you think of inverted mystery stories, so most people will quickly recognize the core plot of Shinyou Naranai Mokugekisha, or Unreliable Witness, as it's very similar to the early Columbo episode Dead Weight. Unno Yasunori runs a very succesful detective agency which also has a habit of 'asking for favors' from some of the people they investigate in exchange for silence on the matter, but Sonemoto, one of Unno's employees is about to make everything public, so Unno decides to take matters into his own hands. As a former homicide detective and an experienced private detective, Unno is quite knowledgeable about murders of course, so he kills Sonemoto and dresses the scene to make it seem like Sonemoto committed suicide. For a moment Unno suspects somebody in an opposite building saw him committing the murder through the windows, but figuring there's too much of a distance, he quickly finishes things. And as he had planned, Sonemoto's death is initially investigated as a suicide, but a mysterious woman appears in front of him claiming to have supernatural powers who says Sonemoto's death may not be a suicide. Unno however has contacts with the police and quickly learns that he has to be careful around Hisui and he also learns of the presence of a witness: a female writer living in the building opposite the crime scene had seen someone struggling wth someone else. Realizing that she is the only person who can link him to the crime, he makes contact with her. He's relieved to see she doesn't recognize him at all, but meanwhile Hisui's deductions are getting closer to the truth. Unno realizes that the police investigation can only continue as long as there's a witness who claims to have seen something happening at the crime scene, so he befriends the witness, taking her out for dinner and everything, while also planting seeds of doubt about her testimony, hoping she will withdraw her witness account. Hisui know what Unno's doing, but can she convince a woman who is in love with the murderer?

Definitely the highlight of the volume! Unno is a great adversary for Hisui, as he has inside information about her powers, and is quite knowledgeable about murders. This leads to a cat-and-mouse game that goes back and forth, as both parties try to cover their own mistakes while simultaneously attempting to catch the other on mistakes. This means this story has a lot of threads and little contradictions for Hisui to pounce upon, but Unno always manages to turn things around so he's in the clear again. And there's a "Joker" in this game in the form of the witness who at one hand does want to do the right thing, but who is also in love with Unno and slowly being tempted into doubting her own testimony. As mentioned, this set-up does remind a lot of the Columbo episode Dead Weight, which also had the murderer charm an eyewitness to make her withdraw her testimony, though the conclusion of this story is far more brilliant, with a incredibly clever trap set by Hisui which few people will see coming, least of all Unno. It's a trap that works because it features Hisui and her powers, and someone like Columbo would never be able to pull the same idea off, which makes this a very satisfying end to an amusing read.

On the whole, Invert - Jouzuka Hisui Toujoshuu is never as clever or surprising as our first encounter with Hisui, though that is understandable, as Medium was really an outlier in terms of quality and plotting. Invert is not as clever, but it's still a very good inverted short story collection that makes clever use of the spirit medium plot device by having the murderers first shocked by a claim that they believe can't be true, but then we see Hisui digging deeper into the meaning of her visions, which actually lead her closer to the truth and based on real evidence too, and witnessing this shift from the supernatural to the practical from the side of the murderer is truly suspenseful.  Medium is the better book, but for those who enjoyed that book, I'd recommend Invert too.

Original Japanese title(s): 相沢沙呼『invert 城塚翡翠倒叙集』: 「雲上の晴れ間」,「泡沫の審判」,「信用ならない目撃者」