Yes, I know, it's not a bad book that usually results in a bland review. It's just a bland book.
Aibou ("Partners") is an extremely succesful police drama in Japan that's been running since 2000 and by the time this post is published, Season 21 should be entering its final stage.The series is about Sugishita Ukyou and his partner in the two-man unit the Special Orders Unit within the Metropolitan Police Department. Sugishita is a brilliant police detective, but with very strong sense of justice and therefore not always willing to play along with political games within the police organization. Yet, he's too valuable to let go, which is why he is been assigned to the SOU, stuffed away in a small office in police headquarters. Technically, he shouldn't have anything to do unless there's a special order, but Sugishita likes to stick his nose in police investigations all the time nonetheless, unless there's a special order telling him not to. Over the course of the series, several younger detectives have been assigned as Sugishita's subordinate within the SOU, who often form a contrast with the cool-headed Sugishita but work well as a team, hence the title partners. But with a series as long as Aibou, it's of course only natural for cast changes to occur, and Sugishita has seen several 'partners' go throughout the series, starting with his first partner act-before-think Kameyama, followed by the dandy gentleman Kanbe, the hotheaded Kaito and the more conniving Kaburagi.
The first story titled Kage to Taru ("Mist and Barrels") is set in Scotland: Sugishita is in the UK for a holiday and via his B&B, he learns that a small whiskey distillery is going to have a special event in a few days: that distillery has ten barrels of single malt whiskey aging for fifty years, and now they'll be opening the warehouse. Andy McMillan is the current owner of the distillery, but it was his grandfather Paul who came up with the plan to make super mature whiskey, creating five warehouses: one for ten years, one for twenty years, etc. Last year's barrels with whiskey aged forty years was a huge success, so everyone is looking forward to opening the last warehouse, though some are worried. Thirty years ago, Andy's grandfather Paul died in an accident in a warehouse and ten years ago, Andy's father Ian too died after opening the forty-year old warehouse, in a very enigmatic manner as it appeared like he had been stepped on by a giant. This is tied to a local belief that seeing the God of Scotch, a mythological giant, will lead to good whiskey, but will also bring misfortune. And now Andy's son says he saw the giant in the mist himself too recently. Sugishita is invited to witness the opening of the warehouse too, but when it is unlocked, they find one of the barrels has fallen off the rack, upside down. They lift the barrel up, only to find the head craftsman had been stuffed inside the barrel. The poor man is rushed to the hospital, but it is too late. But how did the head craftsman get inside the locked warehouse, inside a whiskey barrel, and what does his death have to do with the death forty years ago?
I don't know much about making whiskey, but I guess the author does, because a lot of the story is about the things that go on at a distillery and how whiskey is made. The story is quite long (much longer than the second story in the book) and deals with several semi-impossible situations, like the death of the head craftsman in a warehouse which has been locked for fifty years and which shouldn't have been opened, and the mysterious death of Ian ten years ago. Sugishita is a Japanese police officer on holiday, so he can't really butt in, but Sugishita wouldn't be himself if he actually cared about that, so naturally, he investigates this tragedy that happened to his hosts. I don't really like the truth behind the body-in-the-barrel death and the locked warehouse on their own to be honest, because it involves people just acting really stupidly multiple times for all of that to work, though I have to admit I am more impressed by the way Ikari (Torikai) manages to tie everything together: he comes up with a convincing reason for why certain things had to happen and is also good in leaving a variety of clues like Andy's young son's testimony about the God of Scotch and him playing with his cat, it's just that the actual "event of the death" isn't quite convincing to me. At least, not the way it is done (perhaps if it had been executed with different details, I would've liked it more). This is one story I'd have loved to see in television form though, as while the trick of the locked warehouse is a bit silly, I can imagine it would at least have been funny to see acted out on screen.
The second story, Kenmun no Mori ("The Forest of Kenmun") is one I really didn't like. It involves Sugishita travelling to Amami Oshima on the reqeust of Kakuta, his old friend and head of the division Organized Crime. A wanted criminal was recently involved in a boat accident on the island and is now being detained in a hospital there with his accomplices, and Sugishita is to escort this Yasuda back to Tokyo. Yasuda and his Chinese henchmen manage to escape the hospital just before Sugishita arrives though, and thus starts a manhunt for the dangerous criminals, who seem to be busy with a certain plan, but nobody knows what it is. In the meanwhile, Sugishita also hears about tourist sighting a kenmun, a local yokai, in the forest, but what does this have to do with the flight of Yasuda? It's one of those stories that's really just about working towards a punchline, which can work for a detective story, but this particular punchline just wasn't that impressive or surprising. I feel like that the idea behind the punchline could have been used as a "normal" focus for a mystery story pretty well, but by making it a punchline to the mystery of what Yasuda is trying to do while on the run from the police, it feels a bit underwhelming.
So on the whole, I didn't like Sugishita Ukyou no Jikenbo as much as I liked the third volume. I think the third volume can be enjoyed even without much knowledge of Aibou, but I think the stories in this first volume are rather bland, so if you don't have any connection with Aibou in the first place, there's very little here to warrant a recommndation. I'll probably still read the second volume, just to see if it's closer to this volume, or the third volume in terms of plotting, but this one is only for the fans.
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