Paint Me a Murder

Can you paint with all the colors of the wind

"Colors of the Wind" (Vanessa Williams)

I really shouldn't be writing reviews four months after reading the book...

It is around the turn of the century, when Akitsuki Kazumi's father passes away. Going through his belongings, Kazuo finds an old painting of a manor on a cliff, but part of the upper layer has faded away, revealing a hidden painting, of a man being hanged. The family hopes the painting is worth something, but they are told it's not a particularly valuable painting. Despite that, they receive a rather curious offer: a man called Higami Kouichi is willing to pay much more for the painting than it's actually worth, but a Akitsuki family member has to deliver the painting personally, at an address in Yokohama, the international hub of Japan now it has opened its borders at the end of the 19th century. On his way to the address, he gets lost in labyrithine Yokohama, he's found by Shizuka, a maid of Russian descent who works at the Higami residence. He's surprised when he's brought to the outskirts of the town and crosses a suspension bridge to a cliff to find the manor in his painting! Inside, he's welcomed by Higami and five other guests, but one of the men looks exactly like the hanged man in Kazumi's painting. The six men and women clearly form some kind of group, and little by little, Kazumi manages to piece the story together: these people are the Those Who Remain and they are connected through a set of paintings, which all depict this manor on a cliff. Apparently, the paintings together hold a hint that point towards a treasure, and originally, these paintings were owned by the parents of the people present, save for Higami Kouchi, the sole "original" member of the group. With Kazumi's painting here now, the set is complete, but they have no idea how to find the treasure. A storm prevents Kazumi from leaving that night, but the following morning, they find one of them hanging from the balustrade of the stairs of the main hall. The suspension bridge has also been cut, preventing them from leaving the house. However, just as panic starts to take over, the capable maid Shizuka takes over, because she recognizes that this murder was patterned after the painting beneath the upper layer in Kazumi's painting and that the other paintings are likely to be hiding similar paintings too.  However, Shizuka has more than a few plans to stop the murderer from committing more murders in Tsukihara Wataru's Shiyounin Tantei Shizuka -  Yokohama Ijinkan Satsujin Jiken ("The Maid Detective Shizuka - The Yokohama Foreigner's House Murder Case" 2017).

Last year, I read Inugamikan no Satsujin ("The Murders in the Inugami House"), the third novel in this series set in the Meiji Period, focusing on the maid Shizuka, a very efficient, but sometimes rather ruthless woman of Russian descent who appears to be working somewhere else in each book. It was a short book that had some plotting faults, but overall, I enjoyed it as a short read and it had some really interesting ideas regarding mystery tropes (in that book's case: locked rooms and impossible crimes), that however weren't always explored to the fullest because of the relatively limited page count. Still, I definitely wanted to read more of the series, so I decided to go back to the first novel in the series. And in a way, it's a book that is very similar: not without flaws, but at the same time it manages to come up with really original concepts regarding well-known mystery tropes that I had never seen before and overall, it's an enjoyable read.

The theme of this book is the mitate satsujin, murders patterned after something: the nursery rhyme murder is of course a well-known example of this in English language terminology, but the nursery rhyme murder is a bit smaller scope than the mitate satsujin. In this book, the murders are patterned after the hidden paintings, which all depict hanged people, which of course means people are getting hanged. A lot. The upper layers of the paintings all hide a painting of an original member of Those Who Remain being hanged, and while most of them are already deceased (Higami Kouichi being the exception), their offspring look eerily much like their parents, resulting in very creepy murders that look exactly like the paintings. As a trope of course, the nursery rhyme murder and other mitate satsujin are not rare, especially not in Japanese mystery fiction (there's an interesting lecture on the topic in Yamanma no Gotoki Warau Mono by the way!). I personally love them, so I have read/seen a lot of them, but still, Shiyounin Tantei Shizuka really managed to surprise with how it handled the theme.

For seldom have I seen a detective character in mystery fiction be so pro-active in trying to prevent more murders, and also willing to take such drastic measures. The moment Shizuka realizes the first murder was patterned after the painting, she tries to convince everyone that the only way to prevent further murders from happening is to make the "mirroring" fail: what if for example if they'd just burn all the paintings, making it impossible for the murderer to mirror the murders to the paintings or to make the fact they mirrored the murders clear to the survivors? While obviously, Those Who Remain are after the treasure and refuse to take such a drastic measures, it's wonderful to see how Shizuka is able to come up with incredibly resolute ideas in order to make the whole concept of a mirrored murder fail, taking away the reason for the murderer to pattern their murders after the paintings and hopefully the fundamental reason for the murders in the first place. This is a really weird detective novel I wouldn't immediately recommend to those who have never read a mystery novel, but for those familiar with tropes, Shizuka is a really wonderful and memorable character, because she basically tries to fight back against the murderer by systematically attacking the tropes of the mystery genre. Explaining more about her tactics would spoil the book, but I guess you could compare it to "I won't let you kill me, I'll commit suicide!". A lot of the tactics wouldn't make any sense at all outside the mystery genre, but if you recognize the trope, Shizuka's plans are so entertaining to read because yes, she's willing to do anything to make the theme of the novel not work, and that's a wonderfully creepy concept.

That's perhaps why I'm a bit disappointed the book doesn't always make best use of the concept. The book is rather short, and most aspects feel somewhat underdeveloped. Some characters barely speak one single sentence before being killed off screen, and some of the conversations/deductions are written a bit too briefly, making it hard to understand what's meant/the implications of what is said the first time you read a sentence. As I mentioned above, the parts where Shizuka tries to prevent the murderer from committing more murders based on the nursery rhyme trope are the best, but it's here where the writing tries to handle things too swiftly, making it appear there are jumps in logic: this is also why I wouldn't recommend this book to newcomers to the genre, because while someone with knowledge of the trope can keep up eventually, I think sometimes the writing goes through the concept far too briefly, making it rather hard to swallow. The murders are rather "practical", with nothing fancy about them (not really an impossible aspect to them, or some great chain of reasoning needed to see who did it, as it's bascically "everyone could've done it"), and I think it becomes rather easy to guess who the murderer is once you get into the second part of the book, especially if you keep focused on the theme. As whodunnit, this book won't surprise you very much.

Oh, and one last minor disappointment was that the period setting wasn't really utilized here. The setting of Yokohama in the Meiji Period (where most foreigners lived after the international borders were opened after Japan had been mostly closed for 400 years) is super interesting, but you don't see anything of it! The book is about a closed circle situation inside a manor on a cliff and even the historical aspects don't really come alive in this book: while Shizuka doesn't talk about mystery fiction, it's clear to the mordern reader her strategies are based on modern understanding of tropes in mystery fiction, so she feels a bit out of place. So on the whole, you don't really get to see much of the historical setting.

So perfect, Shiyounin Tantei Shizuka -  Yokohama Ijinkan Satsujin Jiken definitely isn't, but at the same time, it's a book I enjoyed reading, because it had such a wonderfully meta-approach to the nursery rhyme murder trope. I think it's a really worthwhile read if you're familiar with that particular trope in the genre, because the book really manages to do tackle the concept from surprising angles through the "the end justifies the means" approach of Shizuka, giving a lot of food for thought about the genre.

Original Japanese title(s): 月原涉『使用人探偵シズカ 横濱異人館殺人事件』