Finished the Himatsubushi arc from Higurashi: When They Cry and added my thoughts/inferences about that episode (and previous episodes) to the memo page for my playthrough of Higurashi: When They Cry. Himatsubushi was the last of the original Question arc chapters, so what follows now should be chapters that will give answers to the happenings that occured in the previous iterations of the Hinamizawa disappearance & murder cases. I don't know however if this is like Umineko: When They Cry, where the second half of the story still requires you to put some of the pieces together yourself, or whether Higurashi will just show you what actually happened, so at this point, I don't know whether I'll be updating the memo page with my thoughts while reading the Answer chapters (and the other Advanced Story chapters) or that everything will be so obvious I don't really need to comment anymore. At this point, I seem to have settled on a vague idea of what's happening in Hinamizawa, but I guess I'll find out soon how correct, or incorrect, I am.
I don't really get this cover. The protagonist of today's book is often described as cat-like, but this is a bunny, so it's... not him?
Kuchuu Sanposha no Saigo ("The Death of the Mid-Air Stroller") revolves around the mystery of a man having falling twenty meters down to his death in the middle of town. Which on itself wouldn't be much of a mystery, save for the fact that the buildings surrounding the spot where the man fell aren't anywhere near twenty meters high. The closest would be a building of ten meters high, so where did the man came falling down from? While rumors of the "Bird Man" are roaming around, Nekomaru is told by a friend about a dream he's been having, about being to fly and that one day, he dreamt he was flying around town when he flew into a bird and crashed down... As a mystery story and as the opening story of this collection, I have to admit this was a bit disappointing. It's pretty easy to vaguely guess the general direction of the true solution for any reader I think and even then, the logistics and details of the solution Nekomaru proposes wouldn't actually work that way, so the solution, while predictable, doesn't even feel satisfying. The saving grace is that at the end of this book, this story is touched upon again, but even so, I was a bit disappointed with this start.
Yakusoku ("Promise") is a short, but sweet story about the young girl Mayu who usually stays at the park until late because she doesn't want to go home. One day, she sees an middle-aged man in the park, and she strikes up a conversation with him, and he confides to Mayu he too doesn't want to go home. They meet up every day in the afternoon in the park, and the man shows the girl magic tricks, which she loves. He promises her one day to bring a prop the following day to show another magic trick, but the ollowing morning, the man is found frozen to death in the park, having stayed out drinking there in the wintery night. The girl, barely able to read the newspapers, tries to learn more about the man's death and one day, she ends up the park again, where she meets with Nekomaru, who after reading the newspapers, came to have a look himself too. After learning from Mayu the man had promised her he'd return with a magic trick the following day however, Nekomaru realizes there are deeper depths to his death. While this is a very short story, I really like the initial step that eventually leads Nekomaru to the conclusion it was a murder. While the overall plot has Christie-like qualities, hiding a more complex plot than you'd expect from the page count and also revolving around looking at a certain situation from the other way round, the way Nekomaru first focuses on a physical clue he gains from Mayu's story and then starts to build his deductions based on that, comes straight out of Ellery Queen's playbook. While the clue is small, Nekomaru manages to present very convincing inferences based on that one clue, and it's quite impressive how it manages to connect to murder so simply, even though the story itself is very short and minimalistic in set-up.
Umi ni Sumu Kappa ("The Kappa in the Sea") has two young students travelling to the beach hoping to find women... only to find it's off-season. Having nothing better to do, they decide to take a rowing boat tour. Turns out that Nekomaru's only just started with this job and has no experience with the boat: he overturns the boat and the three of them end up on the little island just off the coast. While they can see the mainland from the island, it's just too far for unexperienced people to swim back, so they decide to wait until the owner of the shop notices his part-timer and a boat have disappeared. In order to kill time, one of the students decides to tell a ghost story he had heard from his grandfather, a famous tale in the region where the old man came from. Set centuries ago, it tells about two young friends Takichi and Shigehiko, hailing from the mountains, who travel to the coast to sell and buy goods there. One day they end up on a boat, overturn out and wash up on an island, just like Nekomaru and the two students. And while the mainland isn't that far off, both mountain-bred men can't swim that far. They are then suddenly assaulted by a kappa (a river imp from Japanese folklore) who forces the friends to fight each other: the loser will be ripped into pieces by the kappa, while the winner shall be saved. Takichi throws the fight, and several days later, Shigehiko finds himself washed up on the mainland again, where he tells the story of his friend who sacrificed himself to save him. After hearing this story though, Nekomaru comes up with a rather horrifying interpretation of this folklore story. It's a brilliantly set-up folklore mystery story, that analyzes plot elements from the "supernatural" story and then interprets them in a more realistic way: assuming there was no kappa, how did Shigehiko actually make it back to the mainland, and what happened to Takichi? A great story, that's bound to linger for a while on your mind.
The title 163-nin no Mokugekisha ("163 Witnesses") refers to the number of people in the audience that saw how a stage actor fell down after drinking a glass of wine on stage, during a play. It turns out the bottle of wine (a prop) had been poisoned, but nobody could have poisoned that bottle. The bottle actually had real wine in it, and someone had taken a sip of the bottle before the play started, and from that moment on, the bottle had been on the stage, in view of all the audience. Nekomaru, who was cast in one of the minor roles in the play, however quickly realizes how the poison had been administered into the bottle despite all those witnesses. This story does some good things in terms of misdirection, and the way it uses the timing of when the bottle was poisoned to prove who the murderer is, is pretty good, but the actual method of how the bottle was poisoned isn't that memorable and is basically a variant on a trope often seen in mystery fiction.
The title of The Parasite Museum Murder is based on the Japanese title of Carr's He wouldn't kill Patience, but it's not snakes we find in this museum, but parasites. A freelance writer has been given a very tight deadline to write something about the Parasite Museum, so he decides to quickly visit the free museum, which he finds mostly empty. After receiving the pamphlet from the receptionist, he goes upstairs, where he finds Nekomaru as an early visitor. While they're talking on the second floor, the writer notices a man taking the stairs to go up to the third floor. Later, when they arrive on the third floor themselves however, they find the receptionist lying dead there. But the writer is absolutely baffled, for the woman couldn't be here: the elevator was in repair, and the only person he noticed coming upstairs after he had arrived at the second floor, was another museum employee, so when and how did the receptionist arrive on the third floor? Again a very simple story, that makes use of misdirection that might have worked better in 1994, in Japan, but it might not ring any bells if you're reading it now outside of Japan/Asia. It fell a bit flat for me because of that, because it reads differently in a "modern" context (1994 is not thaaat long ago, but still). The trick is worked out pretty well though with some well-placed clues that support the trick, and I think the misdirection *does* work if you are very, very aware in what time/context this story takes place.
Namakubi Yuurei follows the story of an NHK licensing fee collector, who one day is assaulted by a woman with an ash tray while trying to collect fees at an apartment building. After going to the hospital and complaining about the woman to his friends at a bar, he becomes drunk enough to decide to visit the woman, a certain Akemi, at night to give her a scare. He sneaks back into the apartment building in the middle of the night, making his way to her room, but to his great surprise he finds the door unlocked. He takes a look inside, and finds the woman's severed head lying on the floor. The man is running for his life down the street before he even knew it. Obviously, he's also highly disturbed when he learns that the following day, the torso of a woman is found on the riverbank of the Edo River, and he's convinced it must be the body of Akemi. He doesn't tell the police about his experiences because it'd put him on the scene, but then he remembers he lost his hat that night, and he fears it must be lying in Akemi's room. Later in the day, more parts of the woman are found, and eventually the head is found and identified as Akemi, and the police of course go investigate her room... which they find completely clean and not a single hint of a crime of any kind having happened there, not even a report on a hat being found. The man is utterly baffled, for he is sure he saw Akemi's cut-off head in her apartment that night. Nekomaru, who happens to overhear the discussion the man has with his friends, barges in however, and can easily explain how the man could've seen Akemi's severed head that night in her room even though she hadn't been killed in her room. Again I think it's the clewing that make these stories really good: while the explanation of how the man could've seen Akemi's head in her room that night is simple on paper, it's the way Kurachi manages to move the story in that direction that's done well, with proper hinting that expect the reader to deduce a whole story based on a minor clue, but that give just enough of a hint to lead you to the next hint, which again is just subtle enough to point you to the next clue, etc. In Kurachi's story's, you never have to guess the whole solution based on one clue, but it's always a clue that works in conjuction with other clues, which tell you part of the story and also point you towards another clue, allowing you to fill in the gaps. The plotting is always very deliberate, and can make seemingly simple stories feel very satisfying from a "problem-solving" point of view because it shows a genuine attempt by the author to lead the reader to the solution.
Nichiyou no Yoru wa Detakunai ("I Don't Want To Go Out on Sunday Evenings") reads like a thriller and has the narrator, a young woman, telling about the man she's dating. The man is sweet and she enjoys his company, and they go out every Sunday. Lately however, there has been a series of attacks on women in the neighborhood where the woman's living, so her boyfriend always tries to make sure she's gotten back home safely, and they also call after he's arrived home. But slowly the woman starts to realize that her boyfriend might not always be telling the truth, and she starts to suspect the man's been staying in her neighborhood after their dates... for what reason? The woman confides in her ex-boyfriend and Nekomaru, who seems to interpret her story in a very different way. A Father Brown-esque experience, where a seemingly straightforward, but odd situation can be flipped around to mean something completely different, and where clues that seem to point one way, turn out to be pointing in the opposite direction. It's by no means difficult to guess where this story wants to go, but there are surprisingly many clues supporting the final solution, making it a fairly satisfying read.
The book ends with two short epilogues titled Dare ni mo Bunseki dekinai Message ("A Message Nobody Will Decipher") and Dasoku - Arui wa Mayonaka no Denwa ("Adddendum, Or: A Midnight Call"), which take a look back at the seven stories in this collection, and point towards another, hidden story that's occuring within those stories. It's nearly impossible to notice it until it's pointed out to you because there are barely any hints, so as a mystery story, it's not always really convincing and satisfying, but it's a fun way to connect these stories together. It's definitely worth it to read these epilogues though, as it does show off a technique I had seen in other Kurachi stories too, with stories featuring both an "overt" and "covert" plotline developing simultaneously, with the latter only revealed later and it's interesting to see he already used it in his first book.
So on the whole, I enjoyed Nichiyou no Yoru wa Detakunai. Not all stories are as strong as others, but you can easily recgonize Kurachi's plotting and clewing skills in these tales and some stories, like Umi ni Sumu Kappa and Yakusoku really show off how even a relatively simple plot can be turned into a very satisfying read by clever clewing. The way the book in the ends presents connections between all the included stories, making it feel more like a novel rather than just a collection of random stories, also shows off the plotting skills of Kurachi and I can see how someone who'd start off with this as their debut, would end up writing a great novel like Hoshifuri Sansou no Satsujin. I'll definitely read more of Nekomaru in the future!
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