The Unseen Door

 "My thanks! I find the dead no acquisition, And never cared to have them in my keeping."

"Faust" (Bayard Taylor tr.)

I read this book in December, but the book is set during a heated summer, which by the time this review is posted, should be approaching...

Yabusaka Ichirou had a birth defect that manifested in his childhood, affecting the use of his fingers. He however did not give up, and overcame his defect and became the well-known illusionist the Mephisto on Stage. When the condition of his fingers worsened again, he had to give up the mantle and he left Japan for many years, but he managed to recover once again, and is now ready for his great comeback. Young Mikikaze and his older sister Mikiko have become family friends of the Yabusakas in the period since Ichirou, his wife and child have returned to their family home to prepare for his comeback: Mikiko, a writer for the local town magazine, happens to be friends with Ichirou's assistant and sister-in-law Haruka, while Mikikaze, a teenage boy with a very weak heart, is one of the best students at Ichirou's magic school. The Minami siblings are of course invited to the big comeback show of The Mephisto on Stage in a hall in Sapporo, but the great magician has an extra surprise for a small group within the audience: fifty guests are randomly picked based on their ticket numbers to come to the special second half of the magic show, held at Yabusaka's own home, which has a special stage hall. Furthermore, he will show off an incredible piece of escape magic on their way. The Mephisto on Stage has one of his special guests tie his back, another guest has to sign a piece of (frail) Japanese paper tied to the rope, and then he is put inside a coffin, which is locked with a padlock on the outside, with the key being given to another guest. This guest is to hold on to the key, while the guests are brought in a tour bus to the Yabusaka manor, while the tied-up and locked-up Mephisto will be driven to the home by his assistants. He has a microphone on him allowing him to do some small talk while they're being brought to his home, and of course, the idea is that he'll escape from the coffin when the second half of the show starts. 

Mikikaze and Mikiko are among the lucky ones to get invited to the show, and like the other guests they arrive a bit earlier at the house. The other guests are entertained by Mephisto's assistants in the garden, while Mikikaze and Mikiko, as family friends, wait with the rest of the family in the parlor, while the coffin with Mephisto in it is brought to the stage hall in the manor, where he is left alone for the final part of this escape act. The house is also brimming with reporters who are going to write about the big comeback of Mephisto, hanging around in the hallways that surround the stage hall. Speakers are placed in various rooms in the house, allowing everyone to hear Mephisto talking to everyone via his microphone. At first, his escape act seems to go as planned as he chats along, but suddenly, he cries out and then there's no sound anymore. When the family realizes this is not a part of the show, they run to the show hall, but find the double doors locked from the inside, as are the side door and the backstage door. When they eventually break inside, they find an empty stage hall with not a living soul inside. For in the center of the room, stands the coffin, but for some reason, the coffin is now locked from the inside with the padlock. When they open it, they find Yabusaka Ichirou, stabbed in the chest with a stake. The big comeback of the Mephisto on Stage has become the death of the Mephisto on Stage, but it doesn't take long for everyone to realize the whole situation is impossible: the victim was found in a coffin locked from the inside, the stage hall doors were also all locked from the inside, and there were reporters walking around the hallways around the stage hall, so how did the murderer get away without anyone seeing them? This alone seems quite baffling, but it doesn't take long for more locked room mysteries to occur within the Yabusaka manor. Mikikaze is intent on solving the murder of his magic mentor, but will his heart hold in Tsukatou Hajime's Misshitsu Kingdom (2007), which also has the English title Kingdom of the Locked Room on the cover?

Misshitsu Kingdom is a book I had wanted to read for ages, and it was the book that made me really aware of Tsukatou's name in the first place. This book was mentioned in a mook edited by Arisugawa on locked room murder mysteries, and the title and description sounded interesting, but by the time I learned of its existence, the book was already out of print. Besides a random short story, my 'real' start with reading Tsukatou was only two years ago, with Aru Egypt Juujika no Nazo ("An Egyptian Cross Mystery", 2019), followed by the John Dickson Carr-inspired John Dickson Carr no Saishuu Teiri (John Dickson Carr's Last Theorem, 2020). Some of Tsukatou's earlier novels had also been made available as e-books at the time, but his most famous books, like Misshitsu Kingdom, were not available for some reason. But late December 2022, those books were finally put on digital storefronts, so I picked up Misshitsu Kingdom immediately. At the time, I didn't know that this book also stars Mikikaze by the way. Mikikaze stars in Tsukatou's novels with Ellery Queen-inspired titles (Aru Egypt Juujika no Nazo ("An Egyptian Cross Mystery"), Aru Girishia Hitsugi no Nazo ("A Greek Coffin Mystery") and Aru America-Juu no Nazo ("An American Gun Mystery"), but he's older there, having had a heart operation and working as a freelance photographer. In Misshitsu Kingdom, we have a much younger Mikikaze, who still has a very weak heart, meaning he often has to rest between events and his older sister Mikiko always keeping an eye on him, because her young brother's heart could stop beating any second.  

Misshitsu Kingdom is also a very long book, clocking in at 1200+ pages, while most of the Japanese novels I usually read here, have a page count between 300-500, so that's somewhere between at least two-four times as long! And don't worry, that's not 1200 pages spent solely on the triple locked room situation explained above, as there are a lot more locked room mysteries that occur throughout the book, though not all are murders. Though that brings me immediately to what I thought was the interesting part of the story, and definitely the thing that made me love this book. This book is undeniably about locked room mysteries, but also not, and it's the latter part I love. Sounds confusing, so I should explain. To start with the first part of that sentence: this book has a distinct occult atmosphere, with a murder happening inside the house of a magician, a triple locked room murder no less, and the sheer impossibility of this bizarre scene, of a man dressed as Mephisto staked inside a coffin, reminds me of the earlier books with Nikaidou Ranko, with the gothic/occult vibe. This is also seen in some of the other locked room situations, with the murderer seemingly disappearing in an impossible manner from rooms within seconds and it doesn't even take long for Mikikaze to refer to the murderer as the Anti-Mephisto on Stage, as the whole thing feels like theatrical, like a magic act, but used in a way to kill the real Mephisto. How did the Anti-Mephisto on Stage manage to pull of these acts? Well, the funny part is, that isn't really the focus of this book. At least, not the how. Sure, there are segments where we examine the physical evidence, and this allows Mikikaze to solve the various locked room mysteries, and like I have seen in other impossible crime-focused Tsukatou works like John Dickson Carr no Saishuu Teiri and Kiseki Shinmonkan Arthur - Kami no Te no Fukanou Satsujin ("Miracle Inquisitor Arthur - The Impossible Murders By The Hand of God"), his locked room mysteries tend to rely on fairly mechanical tricks. It's a shame the book doesn't feature many diagrams, for I feel some locked rooms would have felt more fair with a better presentation of the situation. But still, for a book that is titled Kingdom of the Locked Room, you'd perhaps be surprised how simple some of the locked rooms are, and I think only two, maybe a third one, are really memorable, and that's often not even because of the technical merits. The way they are hinted, I think most of them are pretty hard to really solve yourself (though again, diagrams would've helped!) and personally, I'm not a really big fan of these mechanical tricks, though I have to say the third locked room mystery has some really good mechanical ideas: there are a lot of moving parts in that situation, but they all serve a specific purpose, and the way they work together is really clever, especially when it comes to the matter of a certain witness.

But what is there to like about the book then? Well, while the locked room mysteries themselves invoke Nikaidou or for example Carr, the segments in between are surprisingly much more like an Ellery Queen story! In a way, this book allowed me to make a connection in my mind between the aforementioned 'impossible crime' focused Tsukatou books I had read, and the three books with Ellery Queen-styled titles with Mikikaze, because Misshitsu Kingdom sits right in the middle, with its focus on locked room mysteries, but also large investigation scenes and discussions that play out like an Ellery Queen novel. Long ago, I reviewed Ooyama Seiichirou's Misshitsu Shuushuuka ("The Locked Room Collector"), a really cool short story collection where Ooyama employed Queenian-type deductions to solve locked room murders. Misshitsu Kingdom does this in a very different manner, where the solving of the locked room murders themselves is still very "technical" similar to Carr or Kitayama Takekuni's work, and while Mikikaze often manages to solve (large parts of) the how of the locked rooms fairly quickly, the investigation then moves to the why. Why did the murderer create a locked room situation in the first place? Why go through all the trouble to create one, and why use this specific trick, and not for example a different one? What merit has choosing this option over the other one, or were there other factors that forced the murderer's hand? The triple locked room murder for example is, in hindsight, surprisingly simple and I can even imagine some people really disliking this solution, but I really like it because the build-up with discussions regarding the why (this was done) are really good, justifying the simple solution. There are also other very Queenian aspects to the mystery: the stage hall of the first murder for example wasn't just a locked room, but for some reason the furniture had been moved and all glass objects in the room had been removed. But why? This is of course the type of mystery you often see in Queenian mysteries (the crime scene with something strange done by the murderer with an unknown reason), but it is certainly not the only Queenian element you will feel throughout the book. There is even the matter or Later Queen Period problems, where Mikikaze starts to suspect the murderer counts on the police figuring certain things about the various locked room mysteries, which makes it almost impossible to guess whether they have found a real clue, or whether the murderer had already counted on the police on finding it. But I love all these Queenian aspects of the book, as it allows for the type of deductions a reader is more likely to make themselves (like I wrote about in this editorial), compared to the 'figure how this thread and needle were used to lock this door from the outside' type of mystery. And of course, these type of deductions are also more interesting in the way they tie to the whodunnit question, as often, Mikikaze will notice things that allow him about the choices the murderer made or the actions they took, to zero in slowly but surely on the murderer.

The Ellery Queen-type of novel, I very much associate with the pure whodunnit, using a chain of deductions to allow you to eliminate the suspects one by one, and identify the one and only murderer. As a whodunnit, I think Misshitsu Kingdom is very much like what I said about the first locked room murder: at first sight, the identity of the murderer is almost ridiculously simple, and again, I can guarantee some people will not like this solution, but I can't help but admire some of the hints laid out to point to whodunnit. I probably missed all of them, but some are really cleverly hidden, though some are really not worth mentioning. For example, the final act of the book basically tells you straightout who the murderer is with the police basically coming across the equivalent of finding camera footage of the murderer buying the murder weapon and smiling at the camera, and that's pretty disappointing, but then Mikikaze starts pointing out other clues we came across throughout the narrative, and a lot of those are really good, hints that seem so obvious in hindsight but which you don't notice beforehand. That said, I don't think the identity of the murderer is hard to guess, but to actually find the corresponding hints Tsukatou laid out is a lot more difficult, though unlike the early Queen novels or for example the Student Alice novels, this isn't really a super long chain of reasoning that allows you to eliminate suspects of a list until you get to the last one, but more like different kind of clues spread across various events that happen to indicate a certain person.

And while the book is really very long, I myself didn't find myself bored with it. Sure, the crime scene focused investigations and the subsequent discussions about why each locked room exists can be a bit slow, but they are always on topic, and never feel dragging, at least, not if you're used to these Queen-esque novels. And because it's quite lengthy, it manages to do quite some interesting things like also addressing the aforementioned Later Queen Period problems, or even fleshing out a backstory for the whole Yabusaka family that eventually becomes relevant to the case and more. For if this book had not been so long, it certainly wouldn't have been able to give as much attention too to the locked room mysteries themselves. For they are presented in full detail, and where for example a book like Misshitsu Ougon Jidai no Satsujin  - Yuki no Yakata to Muttsu no Trick or The Murder in the Golden Age of Locked Rooms - The House of Snow and the Six Tricks may have had six locked room murders, things were really hasty in general, basically just throwing the locked room situation on the table immediately followed by the solution. The extra page count of Misshitsu Kingdom is definitely used well to flesh out most of the important aspects of the book (though some characters seem to have little page-time), so both the mechanical aspects behind the locked room as well as the whydunnit behind it are satisfying reads.

By the way, the book is book-ended by two parts where an older Mikikaze happens to meet one of the characters again, and they mention how the whole crime was like a Showa-era crime. Which is one of the reasons why I mentioned the book felt, at least in terms of appearance, a lot like a Nikaidou Ranko novel, because those books are also inspired by Edogawa Rampo-esque novels, with fiends with names like Golden Mask, the Black Lizard and the Fiend with Twenty Faces who do battle against a young detective. Only those novels were seldom as intricately plotted as Misshitsu Kingdom!

And that's why Misshitsu Kingdom will probably end up on my list of favorites of the year. It manages to mix a lot of elements in a surprisingly good manner and while not every aspect of the story is perfect as a mystery novel, I can't help but admire how well Tsukatou managed to have a book so much about mysterious locked room mysteries and other impossible crimes work so well with a very Queenian set-up and execution. I haven't read that many Tsukatou novels, but I have a feeling this will be the one I will always be thinking of whenever I read one again.

Original Japanese title(s): 柄刀一『密室キングダム』