When Thieves Fall Out

"When Peter suddenly asked him the question he decided all at once to do the meanest and most spiteful thing he could think of. He decided to let Lucy down.”

"The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe"

When I went to study in Japan for a longer period for the first time, I was still relatively early in my language studies, but I ended up in a program for international students with a noticable difference in the level of Japanese proficiency of the students, some having clearly much more experience with the language than I had at that stage. One friend in particular was very advanced and was even using his time to find a job in Japan. In Japan, there is the mechanism of "periodic recruiting of new graduates": companies hiring the newly graduated around the same period of the year. Companies have a preference for newly graduated, so basically all students start doing job interviews in their third years because otherwise, it'll be too late. Often, they have to pass several rounds of tests and interviews, and if you make it all to the end, you will be offered a naitei or promise of employment for the following year, if you actually graduate in your fourth and final year at university. So students in their final year often already know at the start of the academic year in April where they'll be working next April, and they'll start together with other newly graduated. Anyway, my friend actually did try out dozens of companies, doing tests and interviews and everything, and did actually get employed in Japan during his enrollment in our language program, which was pretty amazing in my eyes: we might have been put in the same program and been doing the same classes, but at that stage I certainly wasn't proficient enough in Japanese to even pass the first test round, let alone actually be offered a job!

And of course, the recruitment sessions of big, famous companies attract the largest numbers of students, and it's usually also very difficult to make it to the next round with these companies. So the six students who made it to the final round of the recruitment process of the pioneering IT company Spiralink are absolutely thrilled to be here, and of course all of them hope to be offered a job. While students hunting for a job have usually trained for tjhe different kinds of tests and interviews they might undergo during the recruitment processes of various companies however, these six students had not expected the form of their final test: a group discussion. The six are informed they have a month to learn to work as a team, and they'll be holding a group discussion one month later. The decision on who will be hired depends on their performance at the group discussion, but it's even possible that all six of them will be hired if they all do well. As everyone had expected a direct interview with a recruiter as the final round, the six are somewhat surprised, but given the free culture of Spiralink, they see the merits of this form and they decide to have a few get-togethers to get to learn each other and to prepare for the group discussion, as the six hope that all of them will be hired by Spiralink. The six are all quite different people, some the typical moodmaker, others more suitable as the leading type, but they get along surprisingly well and they all seem convinced they can all make it through this last round together. Until shortly before the discussion, they receive a mail from Spiralink saying that due to the economical situation, they can only recruit one person this year and the new assignment is that they have to decide together in a group discussion which of the six is the best candidate. 

The sudden assignment change makes the six students now six rivals, all wanting the one job at Spiralink. On the fateful day, the six gather in a meeting room. The candidates are left alone here, free to discuss which of them should have the job, while HR is viewing observing this discussion through cameras. The six students decide to hold several voting rounds, giving everyone a fair chance to argue their own case, but early on, the find a mysterious envelope in the room. When they open the envelope, they find six other envelopes inside, one addressed to each of the six students When they open one, they are shocked to find a note that accuses one of them of being a murderer, complete with newspaper articles and photographs about an incident the student had never mentioned to the others. It's at that moment they realize: these envelopes hold dirt on all of them, and somebody must have done to this to improve their own chances at getting the job at Spiralink. Asakura Akinari's Rokunin no Usotsukina Daigakusei ("Six Lying Students" 2021) presents a rather original mystery: which one of these six students is trying to screw over their fellow recruit candidates?

With all that talk about harmony being a virtue in Japanese culture and how the individual has to adapt to the group, there's a lot of competition going in Japanese culture, with entrance exams to get into the best high schools and universities and of course students basically fighting, through their performance at tests and interviews, for a limited number of jobs at the best companies. Having a mystery about a recruitment process is therefore perhaps not incredibily surprising or out of nowhere, but I sure hadn't read a mystery novel about this before, so Rokunin no Usotsukina Daigakusei does win a lot of points with me for that, because it's such an integral part of Japanese culture now, but it's not used very often as a focal point in mystery fiction. With all that competition and rivalry going on around age 20 to basically secure a job that may very well influence how the rest of your remaining life will go, you can definitely imagine some people willing to act rather desperately to make sure they'll be the one with a job at the end of the day. It's a great setting that will resonate with a lot of readers that are familiar with how recruitment works in Japan, but I think that if you aren't really familiar yet with the concept. Rokunin no Usotsukina Daigakusei will provide for an entertaining, and informative read.

For the most part, Rokunin no Usotsukina Daigakusei will not feel like any "normal" mystery novel due to its unique setting and problem, as there's no clear crime or really a mystery going on. Somebody has collected dirt on all of them and placed the evidence/accusations in envelopes in the meeting room, but the focus of the story revolves for the most part on the human drama, on seeing people you thought you knew being exposed as being something different. I think the marketing of this book also focuses partially on it being a work of entertainment, and you can easily imagine this being adapted as a television show or film (in fact, there is already a manga and I think there's also a stage play). The questions of who did it, why and how they are going to find out are obviously not "clearly defined" mysteries like you'll see in conventional mystery stories, with people investigating alibis or how the murderer could hold of a special weapon or something like that. In fact, early parts of the story might feel a bit repetitive, as it's just accusations going back and forth ("you must have done this, you knew you'd never stand a chance!"), without any real evidence.

The merits of this book as a mystery story however come at play in the second half of the book, set some years later after the group discussion, and when all six of them have moved on in their lives. One of the six (former) students decides to look into the incident again, as new discoveries have led them to believe things weren't as they believed they were at the time and it is at this point, revelations are finally made that clearly make this a detective novel. Little comments or actions that occured during the group discussion years ago suddenly take on a completely different meaning, and there are quite some moments that are really satisfying: there's surprisingly enough quite some misdirection going on in the group discussion segment of the book, even though the story seems really straightforward at first, and one has to give it to author Asakura for hiding some really nice surprises in that scene. Innocent remarks turn out to be pretty clevered foreshadowing, and apparent contradictions are revealed to have perfectly innocent explanations. Some of these mysteries are not really for the reader themselves to solve though, I feel and ultimately, I think the way they finally arrive at the "culprit" and their motive is a bit more straightforward than I would have wanted: considering all the various lines of misdirection and foreshadowing going on in this book, I had expected a few more "stages" in the line of reasoning pointing to the culprit, but overall, I think Rokunin no Usotsukina Daigakusei is an entertaining piece of mystery fiction that probably has more to offer to the mystery fan than you'd initially expect. And the book does really delve into the theme of periodic recruiting of new graduates, connecting all strands of its storylines to this main topic.

Rokunin no Usotsukina Daigakusei will not immediately satisfy those looking for a tightly-plotted puzzle mystery where you have to figure out how a locked room was created or where you have to follow a clue to its logical conclusion in twenty steps, but as a work of fiction, it has a very wide appeal that goes beyond the mystery-reading audience, while actually providing quite some interesting elements for the devoted mystery reader too. There's some clever foreshadowing and clewing going on, and the setting of the recruitment interviews as a "crime scene" is quite inspired, resulting in a very suspenseful read that is likely to be remembered due to its unique angle.

Original Japanese title(s): 浅倉秋成 『人の嘘つきな大学生』