The Creeping Creatures

    月光も　凍てつく森で   

   樹液すする　私は虫の女

「蛹化(むし)の女」（戸川純）

In a forest where even moonlight freezes

I drink sap from the trees / I am an insect woman

The Insect Woman (Togawa Jun)

Before I forget it again: here's the semi-regular "Hey, there's a Honkaku Discord server so join it!" message!  

Mount Otome lies just outside of Shimoyama City and is nearly 2000 meters high. 120 years ago, a man called Kichibei went up the mountain to look for mushrooms, but after making it to one of the higher points of the mountain, he fell off a cliff, but he miraculously survived: he happened to land on a protruding part of the steep rock wall, halfway down the 100 meter fall down to the ground. This ledge was small however, and nothing was growing on it. With no tools available, Kichibei could not climb back up, nor down the steep rock wall. Opposite the ledge was a cliff, and from that point eventually other villagers saw Kichibei was stuck on the ledge on the opposite rock wall, but nobody knew the exact way to the cliff above Kichibei, and there was too much of a distance between the cliff and the ledge to get food and water to Kichibei. Eventually, Kichibei had to survive by eating cicadas landing on the ledge, which didn't help his state of mind: Kichibei eventually jumped off the ledge, thinking he had become a cicada himself.

120 years later, and a duo of illegal loggers on Mount Otome are attacked (fatally!) by a Cicada-Man. Hearing rumors of the Cicada-Man roaming Mount Otome, Furuba, a teacher at Shimoyama Middle School, decides to ask the help of girl detective Sharaku Homura and her Watson Yamazaki "Karate Kid" Yousuke in a matter that has weighed on his mind for decades. Furuba loves mountain hiking, and forty years ago, he climbed Mount Otome. On the way to the mountain lodge, a little building where hikers can rest and buy food, one has to pass by the cliff opposite "Kichibei's Ledge" as it was called nowadays. When Furuba made it to that point however, he noticed a man lying on the ledge and from the way it looked, the man was very much dead. But Furuba also noticed other particular points: two trails of footsteps could be seen in the snow on the cliff above the ledge, both trails leading to the very edge of the cliff. One was obviously of the victim, but the other set of footsteps seemed to suggest someone came up from behind, and pushed the victim down! But both trails only lead to the edge, and none go back into the woods, so where did the attacker go? Furuba also notices a few footsteps in the snow surrounding the victim on the ledge, which he first assumes belongs to the victim, but upon second thought, he realizes the footsteps are in rather odd places and pointing the wrong way. The footsteps thus appear to belong to the attacker, but if so... where did the attacker go, for they are not seen on the ledge? Furuba would eventually get help from the people at the mountain lodge, but he never figured out the mystery behind the footsteps, and unfortunately, by the time the police came, the snow was already gone, washed away by rain. 

Furuba decides to confide this story to Homura forty years later, because the rumors of the Cicada-Man gives him a frightful thought: a Cicada-Man would have been able to simply fly away from the ledge after attacking the victim! Furuba brings Homura and Karate Kid along on another trip to see the ledge for themselves and it so happens the other people who were with Furuba when they found the body forty years ago are also on the mountain today. After a preliminary investigation, the three stay at a small hotel on the mountain, but during the evening, the hotel manager is called by someone calling themselves the Cicada-Man, telling them to check the private onsen (hot spring bath) to find a "nice" surprise. The surprise is a guest who has been stabbed in the back! But the bathroom was completely closed and locked from the inside, making this a locked room murder, Who is the Cicada-Man and why is it killing all these people?

Ever since I first started reading the Sharaku Homura (Sharaku Homura: Detective of the Uncanny) series by manga artist Nemoto Shou in 2018, I've been a big fan of this brilliant, fair-play mystery series. This is a self-published series (a dojinshi) about the adventures of the girl detective Sharaku Homura and her assistant Yamazaki "Karate Kid" Yousuke, combining Scooby Doo/Edogawa Rampo-esque set-ups with villains dressing up in creepy/silly costumes to scare their victims with almost devilishly delicious impossible crimes. Starting 2018, major publisher Bungeishunju (Bunshun) had been making this series available to a wider audience by publishing e-books bundling multiple issues. At the moment, Bunshun has published four volumes with these impossible crime-focused puzzle mysteries, but at the core, this is still a self-published series, so Nemoto Shou has also been publishing newer issues on his own, which eventually will get bundled again probably. Semi-Otoko (2023) or The Cicada-Man is the latest issue in the series, a massive 170-page comic which Nemoto has published on his own Note page (available here). It's also one of the best stories in the series I think, coming quite close (though just not as good as) the phenomenal Hagoromo no Kijo ("The Ogress With the Robe of Feathers").

The story is really long for this series' standards, with a 100 page set-up which introduces three major mysteries (the ledge murder, the bath room murder + one more thing), but there's also a lot of other things going on, and what is definitely the most impressive about this story is how immensely dense it is. A lot is going on, but it never feels boring, nor does the plot meander: basically every single page will be crucial to the mystery one way or another, and it's a sheer delight to read such a mystery-focused story. Had this been a novel instead of a comic, it would definitely be rather lengthy story in order to cover all the plot set-ups, clues, foreshadowing and other brilliant plays by Nemoto. The fact he can make it appear so easy due to the visual medium, is not just because of the medium, but because Nemoto is just that good at presenting his plots in that specific form.

Few mystery stories, regardless of medium, will be this focused on the mystery in fact. Nemoto somehow manages to not only present multiple core mysteries, but also play with fake solutions: characters will not only propose solutions that you as the reader may be thinking about to, but also properly discard them based on evidence. As I mentioned earlier, basically every page will be used one way or another to help the mystery, and it's surprising how many of the panels are also used to provide evidence how certain solutions can't work! Discussing fake solutions and also having proper evidence to prove them wrong has always been a strong point of Nemoto's plotting, but with a story 170 pages long (the part until the Challenge to the Reader is about 100 pages), you can bet he can do a lot more with that. And yes, as per series tradition, there's of course a Challenge to the Reader, for if there's one thing Nemoto likes, it's writing fair-play mystery fiction. As always, you'll come across a lot of page references during the denouement, pointing you back to all the pages where you completely overlooked the clues upon initial reading. A lot of the clues, as per custom, are visual, with some of them really good.

Surprisingly, my favorite part of the story was the locked bathroom murder. While it happens relatively late in the story, and I honestly didn't like the initial reveal of the solution, I became more and more impressed by it as the explanation continued. The trick itself is quite original (though I guess I know a variant on it quite well) and while at first I thought it was a bit unfair, Nemoto soon proved me wrong as yes, he had laid down a lot of clues pointing to that solution (especially visual clues), and I had simply completely overlooked them. And keeping in mind how he clewed the solution, and the surprising solution itself, I think this will be one of my favorite locked room tricks I'll read this year. Another prime example of how mystery fiction isn't just about a solution, but about the path towards that solution. The ledge murder is one that has a trick that feels a bit silly, but I have to admit it was clewed properly and considering the specific conditions, I can imagine it happening like that, so overall a good idea, though on the whole not as impressive as the bath room one, even though the ledge murder is the "main" mystery of the whole tale.  The story has more to offer, and it'll surprise you how very little things that pop up very early in the story, come back at the end in very unexpected ways. I am just repeating myself at this point, but the way Nemoto plotted this tale, not just in terms of "a mystery & solution" but especially in terms of clewing and foreshadowing, is excellent.

So yep, Semi-Otoko is definitely one of my favorite mystery reads of this whole year! I think it'll take a while before Nemoto has done enough issues to make a fifth volume, but I am sure this will be the highlight of that volume! As I said earlier, you can read it for free from Nemoto's site (available here), so be sure to do so!

Original Japanese title(s): 根本尚（札幌の六畳一間）「怪奇探偵 写楽炎　セミ男」