Sometimes, people ask in the comments how I find/choose the books I read, and the answer is: I don't really know. I have a tendency to read novelists I already know, and stick with series I know/enjoy, but even then, the question remains how I first got started on them of course. Another matter that often pops up in the comments are people asking me to make lists, as they like to have some kind of guide to find books worthwhile to read, but I have to say, I don't look into lists myself too often, which might also be a reason why I am always very reluctant to make any lists. I think that when it comes to mystery fiction, the fact I like puzzle plot mysteries (i.e. the puzzle element), and not for example "locked room murders/impossible crimes" specifically, is related to my reluctance. People like to make lists of "best locked rooms" and analyze the trickery there, but it's for example harder to really analyze a good whodunnit puzzle plot in the same manner, and there's just so many ways in which a puzzle plot mystery can be pulled off, even outside familiar tropes like impossible crimes/closed circles/etc., so I myself seldom rely on such lists to find whatever to read, and it also doesn't really motivate myself to work on such a list. So how do I find the titles I want to read? Basically, very randomly. Sometimes it's just a title that's mentioned in a review of a book I liked, the other time it's part of a series I already know/writer I already know and the summary sounds interesting, sometimes it's just the title that convinces me to read the summary, other times it's for example through a link to a game or movie I like... I just find titles everywhere and see if they sound interesting.
Disclosure: I translated Shimada's 1985 short story The Running Dead.
The Yoshiki series started out as a way for Shimada to combine the puzzle plot mysteries he liked, with the so-called "travel mystery", a subgenre usually associated with writers like Uchida Yasuo. The travel mystery is, obviously, often about travelling, especially by train and has a distinct touristic angle, with the mystery set in popular tourist destinations/regions often outside the capital Tokyo. Travel mysteries are generally seen as a rather "light " sub-genre within the broader mystery genre. Kisou, Ten wo Ugokasu still has elements of the travel mystery, with a story about a disappearing clown body on a running train in 1950s Hokkaido, but overall, Kisou, Ten wo Ugokasu can be best described as an attempt to fuse the puzzle plot mystery (with travel mystery elements) with the social school of mystery fiction as championed by Matsumoto Seichou, with its emphasis on commentary on social problems. I say attempt on purpose, because I have to say I thought the narrative feels a bit disjointed, with neither side feeling fully realized, and with little synergy between both sides.
The investigation Yoshiki launches into the homeless man's history is the vehicle for the social commentary in this novel. As Yoshiki digs into the man's past, he learns the man has been the victim of great injustice done to him, not only by individuals, but also by the whole system of law and order of Japan itself. A whole lifetime of suffering was forced upon the man at various moments of his life, often without great fault of his own, but simply because people in positions of power at various levels of the Japanese society decided to screw him over. Yoshiki is apparently completely oblivious to a lot of Japanese history, even "recent" periods like during military rule and the immediate post-war period, which may be Shimada's way for Yoshiki to act as a reader proxy, but this part of the story is obliviously not directly "mystery-plot" related, it just paints the background of why the old man ultimately did what he did. The title A Fantastic Thought Can Move The Heavens in that sense means that certain unforeseen or out-of-the-blue events can ultimately lead to big changes anywhere, and in this novel, the homeless man is shown to have been the plaything of a lot of social injustice which, in a chain reaction, brought him to his final destination.
When Yoshiki asks his superior for more time to investigate the homeless man's past, he is asked whether he thinks it'll lead to a different murderer. And Yoshiki is of course aware that nothing will change whether he learns more about the man or not. The man was witnessed by countless of people on the streets as he stabbed the woman. So the mystery of the novel lies not here, but in the why, and most of that is found within the old fantasy-esque stories the old man wrote while he was in prison earlier. Several of his stories are set in the 1950s, in Hokkaido and involve trains, and Yoshiki learns that there was indeed some funny business going on on a Hokkaido train at that time, involving not only the body of a clown who committed suicide in a toilet of a running train and disappeared when the conductor closed the doors for a few seconds and opened it again, but there was apparently another disappearing body on the train, of someone who had been overrun by the train earlier that night and that same train eventually had a big crash and people never found out how that train derailed in the first place. Yoshiki is convinced the old man was involved with those mysterious events 40 years ago and that's the reason why he wrote stories about them and is determined to solve these fantastical crimes. And... I think the reader will be able to solve a lot of them too, because most of the events are rather easy to see through. I think what I think is a shame is that most of the mysteries in this novel feel very discrete, like seperate events A, B and C, and each individual event hsa a rather obvious solution to it. Often mystery writers combine "simpler tricks" together to make events look more mysterious, but in the case of Kisou, Ten wo Ugokasu, I don't think there was really an attempt to do this. The fact all these events occured after another feels a bit forced (not coincidence per se, but still artificial) and the motivation for the culprit to do all of this seems rather farfetched, but ignoring that, the seperate mysteries just feel like seperate, simple mysteries, and it's quite easy to guess how the clown disappeared, to guess where the other body went to, to guess how the train derailed. The fantasy stories by the old man present these events as alluring mysteries, but the moment they are examined by Yoshiki as actual events, they become rather predictable surprisingly fast. Had these events been more intertwined, I think these mysteries could have been more impressive at a technical level, but now they just felt like a string of easy to solve problems.
But like I said earlier, I have a feeling that the more fantasical crimes in the past don't really work well together with the more realistic, socially conscious tone of the narrative revolving around the homeless man's past. Kisou, Ten wo Ugokasu feels like a combination of a lot of ideas and concepts that can work perfectly in mystery fiction, but I don't feel like they work really well in this particular novel. Neither side benefits really from the other side of the spectrum, it's not like the fantastical crimes feel "extra" fantastical, nor the realism "even more realistic" by juxtapositioning the two, it just feels like there were two books here that were crushed together. Personally, I think the tone of the series as seen in earlier Yoshiki novels could easily have worked for books that focused on either side, but this particular book just feels a bit disjointed. So nope, this is not my favorite Shimada novel, nor my favorite entry in the Yoshiki series. People seem in general to be fairly positive about, so your mileage may very well vary.
The concept does sound interesting. Hope there will be more translations of Soji Shimada's work from Vertical after Murder in the Crooked House.
ReplyDeleteP.S. There seem to be duplicate sentences in the second paragraph of the review
Thanks for pointing the repeated sentences out!
DeleteFirst I have to be clear I honestly don't know about any plans Pushkin/Vertical have for the series, but I do wonder where they'll be going next. IIRC, the next book in publication order is a short story collection, so I'm not sure how interested they are. Then you have one book that's basically the same length as the previous two novels, but then you start getting those gigantic thick bricks Shimada started to write... and while the more recent novels are not as long anymore, the tone of the series is very different from the first two novels....