At Bertram's Hotel

 "There's no place like home"

"The Wizard of Oz"

Semi-regular "Hey, there's a Honkaku Discord server so join it!" message!   

Ishinomori Shoutarou's HOTEL manga is pretty fun too by the way, if you're into fiction about the going-ons in a hotel!

The Amulet Hotel is, at first sight, an ordinary hotel, consisting of a main building, and an annex nearby. But, upon closer sight, one might notice the annex isn't quite ordinary after all. The annex is only open for special members, and if you look around the building, you might notice some peculiarities, like there only being one single entrance, and not even an emergency exit. The underground parking lot is also seperated from the parking lot of the main building, and for all intents and purposes, it appears that the annex runs seperate from the rest of the Amulet Hotel. And in fact, it does. For the annex of the Amulet Hotel serves a very, very special kind of clientele: criminals. The annex of the Amulet Hotel is a safe haven for criminals: here they can stay safely, and whenever they need something, they only need to ring reception, and within hours, you'll have a weapon delivered to your room, or even have a dead body disposed off. The Amulet Hotel is a world of its own, but it also has its own rules, and every guest is expected to abide by the iron rules: 1) one is not allowed to cause damage or harm the hotel and 2) One is not allowed to harm or murder someone on the hotel grounds. These rules ensure that even the biggest of rival criminals can stay safely here in the hotel together without having to worry about being ambushed, but of course, sometimes, people, especially criminals, don't follow the rules. But if someone violates these rules, they are of course not handed over to the police, but the hotel deals with such people in their own terms: the incident will be covered up, but the person who violated the rules will of course be "dealt with" accordingly too, and vanish from the face of the earth. The person responsible for this is Kiryuu, the hotel detective who not only has a very keen mind, but also a history as a feared assassin... In Houjou Kie's 2023 short story collection Amulet Hotel, we follow four crimes taking place in Amulet Hotel, and learn why one should never try to commit a murder there.

Oh, I like this cover a lot, very stylish!

Houjou Kie has been a personal favorite of mine ever since she debuted in 2019 with Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei ("The Hourglass of the Time-Space Traveller"), where she showed off how an old-fashioned, densely plotted puzzler could still work wonderfully with a scifi background. Supernatural and otherwise special background settings are something Houjou also experimented with during her time in the Kyoto University Mystery Club, and it's remained a staple of her work even after her professional debut, ranging from slightly futuristic VR-games, to an unknown being on an island hunting humans down and a supernatural being that lurks in shadows. At first, the idea of a hotel might sound rather tame therefore, but it is still very much in line with Houjou's work: the Amulet Hotel is not a normal hotel, but a world ruled by criminals, and what is normal there, is definitely not normal in a realistic setting, from calling reception to get weapons delivered or having a body incinerated so there's no evidence any more. In the stories of Amulet Hotel, people often have to act a certain way because they are all criminals, and because they can't afford to have the police examine the case. Because the setting is always, in a way, a closed circle (the hotel), and the only authority is Kiryuu (and the hotel doctor), the suspects often act in a way to prioritize self-preservation, which results in very clever puzzlers where characters will act in certain ways you are not likely to see in other stories, in a way similar to how fair play sci-fi mystery stories or stories with magical fantasy stories also have rules that govern how the characters can act.

I had been looking forward to this release, because I had already read the original Amulet Hotel short story back in 2021. I don't know if it was already planned as a series at the time, but the unique setting definitely had potential to carry a whole series, so when I heard a second story had been released (magazine publication), I really had to contain myself and tell myself to patiently wait for a collected release and not buy the single magazine releases. It took a while, but it's finally here! The first story is, as said, Amulet Hotel and I reviewed it back in 2021 and I basically have little to add to that. It is a wonderful introduction to the whole premise of a criminal hotel.When a guest of the Amulet Hotel's annex reports to hotel staff that the door to his room can't be opened and they find out even the owner's master key can't open the door, they are forced to break the door down. Inside, they learn the door had been blocked by a serving cart jammed beneath the door handle. They find a murdered man and an unconscious employee of the hotel in the room. Hotel detective Kiryuu is asked to figure out whether the unconscious employee in the hotel room killed the guest, or whether someone else did and if so, how the locked room was created. Once they know what happened, the culprit will be dealt with accordingly. 

What follows is an insanely densily-plotted mystery story with a lot of ideas stuffed in a relatively low page count, but it works. This is basically a short story variant of Houjou's debut novel Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei, in the sense both are really dense. Amulet Hotel starts out as a locked room murder mystery, but quickly turns into a very amibitious "which of the three" whodunnit puzzler with a lot of clever and sequenced clues. I can't really mention all the ideas here because it'll spoil the experience, but this story could easily have been turned into a full novel, and at no time would it have felt dragging, as there's just so much going in in terms of clewing. The story makes excellence use of the unique setting, forcing characters to act differently compared to a "normal" hotel setting with the proper authorities in charge. Definitely a must-read in my opinion

Crime of the Year no Satsujin ("The Crime of the Year Murder") is touted as "Episode 0" and shows how Kiryuu came to work as the Amulet Hotel's detective. Kiryuu was originally a secretary, and assassin for Douke, one of the biggest names in the criminal world. Known as the crime planner, Douke specialized in drawing up the most brilliant of criminal schemes and have others execute them. Kiryuu was taken in by Douke as a child and taught the ropes as an assassin, and while Douke could be a cold, cruel man, he would at times also show a soft side to Kiryuu. But now Douke has passed away due to cancer, which also means Kiryuu lost the protection Douke offered. However, there is still one job left to perform as Douke's right hand. Every year, at the Amulet Hotel annex, the Crime of the Year award is presented to the person who came up with the most impressive crime. Douke was one of the three committee of judges and thus expected to be present at the ceremony, but now he has passed away, Kiryuu has taken his place at the ceremony. Douke however was not close friends with his two fellow judges. Akashi in particular had been trying to grow his organization at the expense of Douke's organization, trying to win over some of Douke's higher captains. At the ceremony, the three judges and the winner of the Crime of the Year award are expected to drink from a special cup in turn. All four of them are on stage, drinking one after another. But when Akashi drinks after Kiryuu, he suddenly collapses on the stage. The Amulet Hotel doctor is called for, who discovers Akashi was poisoned to death. When Kiryuu's bag is searched and a vial of the same poison is found, the hotel manager immediately points his pistol at Kiryuu, for it appears that Kiryuu violated the rules and killed Akashi on stage. They all drank from the same cup, but Kiryuu handed the cup to Akashi as last, so only Kiryuu could've administered poison in the cup, right? Kiryuu only has a few minutes to quickly sort this impossible crime out before the hotel will take "measures"...

The second story is a lot simpler in design than the first (in fact, the first is by far the most complex story in terms of clues), with a semi-impossible crime, as we know Kiryuu didn't try to poison Akashi, and yet Akashi died after drinking from the same cup Kiryuu and the other two also drank from, and they are all fine. All of them have their tongues stained by the special wine in the cup, meaning they all actually drank from the cup, so how could Akashi have been poisoned? While there were only three suspects on the stage (including Kiryuu), the plot doesn't really take the form of a normal which-of-the-three, as it solely focused on Kiryuu trying to at least find a way to prove the possibility someone else could've poisoned Akashi. The story does once again make interesting use of the unique setting (the poison for example, was earlier simply ordered via room service) and a lot of the tension comes from knowing that the police will never come here. While the basic trick behind the impossible poisoning is fairly simple, I think Houjou does succeeds in making it an entertaining story with a few more twists and turns that make use of the Amulet Hotel to serve a few more surprises beyond just the poisoning itself.

Ichigensan Okotowari ("No First-Time Guests") is about Seto, who really needs to break into the Amulet Hotel annex, despite not having a member card. He is however a criminal, though just a very low-level pickpocket, member of the group Kerberos. He grew up together with childhood friend Aria as brother and sister, as their parents abused and neglected them. Seto ended up a pickpocket to make a living, but eventually, it turned out Aria was the illegimate child of a rather wealthy person, who passed away. Aria became his heir, but one condition: she was not allowed to monetize anything of the inheritance until she became twenty (she'd get an allowance and school money via a fund during that time). When a "friend" Kiba borrows a unique key chain, Aria didn't think too much of it, but when that "friend" then transferred money to her account for that key chain, she realized she had been deceived: by making it seem she had sold the key chain to him, Kiba could now blackmail her. Seto decides to steal the key chain back, but just as he's going to strike, he sees Kiba taken away by a group of people. He follows them to the Amulet Hotel annex, where he spots Yamabuki, a high-ranking criminal in one of the "parent" groups of his own Kerberos. He's holding the key chain, which makes Seto realize Yamabuki is behind all this. A lawyer is going to check Aria's belongings in a few hours, so Seto has to get inside the hotel, but that is impossible without a member card. Or is it? He tries to find a way inside the impenetrable fortress, but that's a neigh impossible task, especially if there's a hotel detective roaming around...

A different kind of story, and quite fun to read! About 3/4 of the story is about Seto trying to get inside the hotel, and while it's not a pure puzzler at this point, you do see him logically trying to deduce where the weak spots in the security could be, with Kiryuu occassionally popping up to throw him out. Time ticks however, and eventually, a shocking reveal is made by Kiryuu to Seto about Yamabuki, which changes the dynamic completely, as now Seto not only has to find the key chain in time, but also make sure he's not accussed of breaking one of the hotel's rules. The nice thing is a lot of little clues to the grand conclusion are hidden throughout Seto's attempts to break in, where he listens in staff members and realizes how weird the Amulet Hotel really is. The story is quite different in that it's not straightforward murder mystery this time and a lot of the tale does hinge on the twist surprise at 3/4 of the story which changes the dynamics, so I can't talk too much about it, but as a change of pace, especially with a character who is not really part of the hotel's usual clientele, this is a fun story.

Titan no Satsujin ("The Murder of the Titans") is by far the longest story in the collection, and revolves around a meeting with the Titans: the main investors in the Amulet Hotel. These people are called The Seven, though due to some deaths (the life expectancy of a criminal is not high), there are only five now. The meeting is held each five years at the hotel, and this year consists of The Weapons Smuggle King, the Gamble King, the Drug King, the Swindle King and The Shadow Accountant. The meeting is held on the fifteenth floor, which is usually kept sealed. The Titans of the criminal world here discuss the future of the hotel, but this year, things are different: one of the Seven, Kasai, wants to have the hotel closed after his wife and daughter passed away at an incident that occured here. Morioka, the owner of the hotel, desperately wants to keep the hotel open, so a heated meeting is expected. All the people attending the meeting have to go through a body scan and their belongings are also scanned through an X-ray scanner, to make sure nobody brings any metal (weapons) inside the floor. Kiryuu and the hotel manager stand guard outside in the hallway, while the meeting between the Titans is being held. After the break however, Kiryuu and the manager are called inside, for an incident has happened: Kasai was found lying dead inside the anteroom. The others went looking for him when he didn't return to the meeting room after their break, and found him dead. And not just dead, but stabbed in the chest with a knife. But how could anyone have brought a knife inside? Everyone was scanned for metal, and before the meeting started, the floor had also been cleaned (by... crime scene cleaners hired by the hotel) and scanned with metal detectors. It appears only one person could've brought a metal knife inside: Morioka, the owner of the hotel, who has a prosthetic leg and could've smuggled a knife within his leg. Now Kiryuu is forced to "deal" with the owner of the hotel in order to uphold its rules, but is this really the truth?

A long story, but also one with a lot of twist and turns. The story basically has a two-tier structure, as some way in the story, we learn in the past, another incident happened at a Titans' meeting, which is what prompted the current X-ray scans. As an impossible crime, it's quite nice, though some of the clues feel a bit underdeveloped: there's one thing you kinda need to deduce to really get on the way in the long line of reasoning necessary to solve this case, but I thought that part was a bit hard to guess without proper set-up. From there though, you'll see all the puzzle pieces fall nicely in place, and due to the dual puzzle structure, there's a lot of surprises waiting for the reader. I think the basic idea behind how the knife was smuggled into the room was good, but a bit simple, but the way it was actually hidden in-universe is pretty clever. Overall a good impossible crime story that once again makes more sense exactly because it takes place in the Amulet Hotel and not a normal hotel.

Houjou Kie has not disappointed me until now with her works, and Amulet Hotel is no exception. While this time, we have no "blatant" supernatural/fantasy setting, the Amulet Hotel's annex still provides a very unique background setting with its own unique "culture" and "rules" that make it different from a conventional story setting, and it is used cleverly to present attractive mystery plots that are often surprisingly densely clewed relative to page count. You know, I'd love to see a television or anime series based on this world, it's really made for it! Kinda like Odd Taxi, with the story following all kinds of people involved with the hotel, be it hotel detective Kiryuu or just guests. Kiryuu by the way is a great series detective, and quite different from Kamo/Yuuki from Houjou's main series (the Ryuuzen clan), due to a criminal background as assassin, and definitely being a grey character in the Amulet Hotel itself too. Definitely one of my favorites for this year!

Original Japanese title(s): 方丈貴恵『アミュレット・ホテル』: 「アミュレット・ホテル」/「クライム・オブ・ザ・イヤーの殺人」/「一見さんお断り」/「タイタンの殺人」

The Case of the Creative Crime

「月に代わっておしおきよ」

『美少女戦士セーラームーン」

 "In the name of the moon, I'll punish you!"
"Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon"

I have only been to an anime/manga fan convention once in my life actually, and that was mostly as a panelist/sitting at a booth. Though I guess sitting at the booth at the November Festival of Kyoto University selling the Kyoto University Mystery Club annual magazine was a similar experience, even if that wasn't an anime convention...

Just before Professor Tsukihime passed away after a suspicious accident, he confided to his daughter Rin that he and his people at the Tsukihime Science Laboratory had been working on a suit called the Amplifier, which powers up the wearer. Professor Tsukihime had been working on four sets of suits in order to battle the evil Shadow Empire and their leader Schatten, but he has one final hope: Rin was actually one of the four girls who were selected to wear the suit, being completely compatible with its specifications. Vowing to avenge her father's death and to carry on his mission, Rin manages to find the three other girls who were selected to don Amplifiers, and helped by their allies at the Tsukihime Science Laboratory and Colonel Fester, an American army man and friend of Professor Tsukihime, the Powered Quartet has been succesful in fighting off attacks by the mysterious Shadow Empire. But one evening, while everyone is relaxing, the alarms go off at the Tsukihime Science Laboratory. Rin immediately transforms in her powered form, but learns that the "intruder" was only a dummy. She quickly goes Saki's room, which is right next to her's, to check up on Saki, but is shocked to find Saki, in powered form, lying on the floor with a dagger in her back. But the intruder was a fake, so who could've killed Saki? Rin is even convinced she never heard anyone come up the stairs until she found Saki, and the only people on this floor were Saki, their friend Colonel Fester and Rin herself. Is there a traitor within the Tsukihime Science Laboratory....?

That is the big cliffhanger of volume 6 of Lunatic Dream, a succesful sci-fi bishojo sentai mystery novel series by Takasawa Noriko, of which an anime adaptation has recently started airing. Takasawa was originally a mystery novelist, and Lunatic Dream certainly has mystery-elements too, as shown by the shocking cliffhanger, and that's also the reason why the members of the dojin circle A Large Teashop have been a fan of the series too. In an earlier dojinshi (fanzine/self-published book) published by the group, they challenged each other to predict what would happen in the coming volumes of Lunatic Dream, and some of them got really close, so it is decided that for the upcoming summer Comiket, the world's greatest anime/manga/game convention, they'll do a similar book. The upcoming volume 7 will be the final volume of Lunatic Dream, so their new book Wish Upon The Moon will feature stories by each of the members of A Large Teashop where they'll try to predict how Saki's murder in the Tsukihime Science Laboratory will be solved and also how Lunatic Dream will end. On the hot summer day that is August 17, the members of A Large Teashop make their way to Harumi, where Comiket is held. As sellers, the members all arrive early at the convention site, preparing their booth, but also to swing by the special booth of the printer, as they had Wish Upon The Moon delivered straight to Comiket. But when they unpack the box and check the books, they find the final few pages of the book have been swapped with one new page, which says "Everyone who worked on this book shall be killed.", signed by "The Shadow". Every printed copy of their book has this page, but they have no idea how this page got there, as they checked each and every page to see if there were no swapped or missing pages, before handing it in at the printer's weeks ago. They obviouly can't sell Wish Upon The Moon as it is now, so they are forced to rely on stock of older books. Because some of the members also have their own personal booths, the group scatters once the regular visitors are admitted inside, with enormous crowds (often in cosplay!) flowing inside the various convention buildings. But after a few hours, a dead body is found inside one of the bathroom stalls, and the victim turns out to be one of the members of A Large Teashop. News of this hasn't really spread yet, when another member at her own personal booth is poisoned and drops dead and this isn't the end of it... Who is killing the members of A Large Teashop during Comiket, and how are their deaths related to their predictions about Saki's murder in Wish Upon The Moon? The answer lies in Komori Kentarou's Comiket Satsujin Jiken, or as the cover also says: The Comicket Murder Case (1994). And yes, the cover says Comicket, probably because an official English spelling hadn't been decided yet at the time.

Comiket Satsujin Jiken is the debut work of Komori Kentarou, though it might not have been in a different imeline. Over ten years ago, I read Komori's Lowell-jou no Misshitsu ("The Locked Room in the Castle Lowell"), also a book with a comic book background, and in the afterword of Comiket Satsujin Jiken, it is mentioned that Lowell-jou no Misshitsu actually made it to the final selection round of the Edogawa Rampo Prize (which is a prize which involves the publication of an unpublished book). So Lowell-jou no Misshitsu had almost been Komori's debut work and was in fact published after Comiket Satsujin Jiken as his second book. Anyway, in our timeline, his debut work is Comiket Satsujin Jiken, and in a way, it does feel like one. For this book is absolutely packed with ideas, and you can tell Komori just wanted to do everyhing he wanted to do in this book, and as a complete package, the book has a lot of interesting elements to it.

I have to say that I didn't know much about the book before I got started on it: it was just the idea of a murder mystery occuring at Comiket that really atttracted me. I have never been to Comiket, but anyone who has been interested in anime/manga/games for some time will at some time have heard about the world's largest fan convention. In particular, Comiket is a fan-driven convention with a focus on fan-created content, mostly dojinshi, or self-published fanzines and comics (usually based on existing IPs) or for example self-published video games. It's of course also well known for all the cosplay going on. I haven't much experience with anime conventions myself, having only done a panel once and hanging around while waiting for my panel, so never really been there as a "regular visitor", but still, the idea of a murder mystery at a fan convention just sounded a lot of fun, as booths, cosplay, the crowd and all of that provided a lot of potential.

So imagine my surprise when Komori didn't only use that, but added a whole story-within-a-story. Two of them, actually. First Komori come up with the fictional novel and anime series Lunatic Dream, a bishojo sentai series in the vein of Sailor Moon, which of course provides us with the in-universe murder of Saki in the Tsukihime Science Laboratory, which seems impossible at first sight, or at least inexplicable (only Rin, Saki and Colonel Fester were upstairs, but suppose Fester was the murderer... why would he do that under those circumstances?). In Wish Upon The Moon, the seven members of A Large Tea Shop all wrote something short where they try to explain the murder of Saki. The result is a kind of The Poisoned Chocolates Case-type of fanzine. We get to read all of the contributions of the seven members, and they all tackle the problem differently. Some really see it as a mystery story to be solved and try to build a very tight theory based on the clues in a formal essay, others are less interested in the mystery and more in the characters, leading to "normal" fan fiction that serve as character studies that focus on motive. The highlight is perhaps the solution that is completely written as a parody of Kokushikan Satsujin Jiken, complete with all the pedantic talk! Because the initial situation of Saki's death is only explained very briefly and you as the reader don't know much about Lunatic Dream, it's not really the intention of the author for the reader to guess all these possible solutions to Saki's murder (a lot of information about the series you'll only first hear mentioned when applied to a theory), but it's fun to see how these different members all try to come up with something different to the problem, and also utilize completely different writing styles and angles. None of the solutions to Saki's semi-locked room murder are really impressive or memorable on their own, but it's fun seeing the members of A Large Teashop having fun with the idea, and it's really catchy. What is also fun is that Wish Upon The Moon is really ncluded within Comiket Satsujin Jiken. The main narrative of Comiket Satsujin Jiken is actually printed on the pages in double columns, while the chapters of Wish Upon The Moon are printed like normal, clearly seperating the Wish Upon The Moon part from the rest of the book, and Wish Upon the Moon also includes fan art of Lunatic Dream and other typical fanzine parts. The book of Comiket Satsujin Jiken also has a different Lunatic Dream cover beneath the slipcover, and it's things like this that make Comiket Satsujin Jiken fun to read as a physical book, playing with the covers and the typesetting and all of that!

And then there's the main story of Comiket Satsujin Jiken too! Komori makes great use of the unique setting that is Comiket that arrive at an interesting problem: several members are killed in the span of a few hours and as all the victims are members of A Large Teashop, it is of course suspected the murderer is one of the remaining members, but there is one problem: how could the murderer have commited these murders during Comiket? While basically none of the remaining members have full alibis for every single second, as they'd sometimes wander away from their booth, go buy some dojinshi themselves at other stands or of course just go out to buy something to drink or eat or to use the toilet, none of them were gone for very long, and fact is: you need a loooooooot of time to move around at the convention site once it's open for visitors. In particular, one victim had her own stand on the floor above, but due to the gigantic crowd on the spiral staircase going up, and with rows of customers circling around the stand floor, it would have taken almost 50 minutes for anyone to make their way from the A Large Teashop stand up and back down, and of course, somebody would've noticed if someone had been gone for nearly an hour. This idea of an alibi due to the crowd of Comiket is nicely found, as are other ideas as some members proving their alibi by showing they had been making an illustration in a sketchbook for a customer, again a very typical con thing. Komori wrote this book after his own visits to Comiket (nowadays of course held at Tokyo Big Sight, but this was back when it was held at Harumi a few times), and the place really becomes alive as Komori describes everything at Comiket, from the people manning the booths and preparing for opening, to the visitors doing cosplay and taking pictures to Comiket staff members trying to keep things safe for everyone. A lot of the mystery-related ideas like the alibis and all depend on the unique convention setting, so that's a lot of fun. Not all of the ideas are particularly remarkable (some parts could've been clewed a little bit more I think, like how the trick surrounding the first murder), but Komori manages to tie these ideas to specifically the Comiket setting really well and it's by doing this several times in a row, you do feel that as a whole, the book works as a mystery novel. Other ideas behind how the murderer managed to swap the final pages of Wish Upon the Moon with the threat page or things like the motive work in the context of the book I think, and while not particularly memorable, all of these ideas do really tie in well with the setting. The fact the book actually features photographs of Comiket (from back then) also helps set the mood.

There's also a lot of "general" Comiket talk, as the members of A Large Teashop explain what Comiket is to the police inspector, so you could read this without any prior knowledge of Comiket, though I suspect most people reading this book, or even this review, will at least have heard of Comiket. Funny is the talk about the presence of mystery fiction at Comiket by the way. The book is written early 90s, but there are mentions of things like being able to find dojinshi of Shimada Souji's work, which I think isn't an invention by Komori for this book, but really what was found at Comiket back then, and he very probably means Mitarai X Ishioka smut. Oh, and one final interesting to note: when Comiket Satsujin Jiken was reprinted as a paperback pocket, it was accompanied by a seperate new release: Lunatic Dream was a manga, drawn by the artist who did the cover art of the paperback pocket and written by Komori Kentarou and it was basically the in-universe series Lunatic Dream, now told as a seperate, full story. I haven't read it, but it's supposed to be reasonably fun. There are stories that some book shops back then didn't place this book near the mystery novels though, even though only mystery fans would've known what Lunatic Dream is.

Anyway, Comiket Satsujin Jiken is a book that's absolutely stuffed: a story-within-a-story, multiple solutions to a locked room murder, a full Kokushikan Satsujin Jiken parody, essays, fan art, a series of semi-impossible murders happening at the biggest fan convention in the world, observations on fan culture in the late eighties/early nineties. You can tell Komori absolutely loved working on the book, and that's not just the story of the book, but all the way down to physical traits of the book like double covers and making use of the lay-out to highlight the fanzine within this book. Taking the tricks on their own, a lot of them are quite simple, and some characters do have very little screentime (though you do get to learn them via their contributions to Wish Upon the Moon), but it's Komori's sheer enthusisasm for everything that goes in in this book and the unique setting that really won me over. Definitely worth a read if the idea of a murder case happening at a fan convention appeals to you.

Original Japanese title(s): 小森健太郎『コミケ殺人事件』

The Secret of the Tibetan Treasure

Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. 

"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

Is this... the first non-Japanese mystery novel review of this year? I suppose it is...

Adam Merriweather, wealthy, well-known collector of Tibetan art and artifacts and brother of the equally well-known Tibetan academic Dr. Jed Merriweather, receives a visit by Jack Reffner, who offers him a religious manuscript and an adventurous tale of how he snuck into Tibet, a country normally closed to visitors, how he met a monk on the way back but accidentally swapped bags before being found out and deported out of Tibet. With no way to return the manuscript and out of money, Reffner hopes to sell off this manuscript to Merriweather. While the seller doesn't get nearly as much as he hoped from Merriweather, he still walks away with a cheque, but that's not of much help when he's later found murdered in his hotel room, strangled. A piece of what appears to be a Tibetan scarf puts Lieutenant Mack of the Chicago Police and his friend Theocritus Lucius Westborough, historian and amateur sleuth, points them in the direction of Merriweather. Merriweather admits Reffner visited him, offering the manuscript and we also learn that the lama Tsongpun Bonbo is in Chicago, as some years ago, his path crossed that of Reffner in Tibet: Reffner stole the centuries-old manuscript by Padma Sambhava, and Tsongpun Bonbo wants the manuscript returned to him. Merriweather seems to have some understanding for Tsongpun Bonbo's plight, but he still seems reluctant to immediately return the manuscript, having his assistant Chang, a Tibetan man, work on a quick translation in secret. Lieutenant Mack and Westborough figure Reffner's death has to do with this business as he was killed with a Tibetan scarf, so they concoct a plot to install Westborough in the Merriweather house for the time being, by faking an injury. The Merriweather house has its own museum wing named the Tibetan Room, which is filled with statues and other Tibetan art on the ground floor, and can be looked down upon from the gallery one floor above. It is here when later Adam Merriweather is found dead, but as the doors to the Tibetan Room were locked from the inside and the dust on the gallery balustrade above is not disturbed, nobody could've left the Tibetan Room until Merriweather was discovered, meaning he must have died from a natural death, right? Or was it Tibetan black magic that did him in? The answer is to be found in Clyde B. Clason's 1938 novel The Man from Tibet. 

I read the Dutch translation titled De man uit Tibet by the way, translated by H. Terwynne and featuring rather cool original artwork by C. Boost, both as cover and inside.

I had been wanting to read this book for some while, as it is one of the books featured in Arisugawa's gorgeous book An Illustrated Guide to the Locked Room 1891-1998. I never really read the text accompanying the entry about The Man from Tibet though, as I didn't want to have much fore-knowledge before reading the book, so I only had a small glance at the illustrations of the locked room situation and that was over 10 years ago, so I have to admit I had completely different expectations of this locked room mystery. In hindsight, I guess the title The Man from Tibet should have informed me this wasn't set in Tibet, but because the exterior design of the Merriweather house shown in An Illustrated Guide to the Locked Room somewhat resembled a monastery, and I remembered a floorplan which seemed like a temple art gallery (in fact, it was the Tibetan Room), I always imagined the story was about a locked room murder inside a Tibetan monastery. And the cover art of the Dutch version didn't help much to correct my misunderstanding! With the book starting with an account of a visit to Tibet, even a few pages in, I was still fully expecting someone to talk about an impossible murder happening in Tibet long ago and how it would be solved many years later through discussions.

And speaking of the book starting with a travel account: those are probably the most engaging parts of this book! There are two different accounts of two people getting into Tibet, at the time a closed country, and both stories-within-the-story read as adventurous tales. Of course, this is a book from the thirties, so also cue somewhat dated views on "the Chinese/Tibetans/Japanese/Asians" in general found within these accounts, and even in the real-time parts, though on the other hand, there's also interesting parts on Tibetan religions, both on Buddhist and pre-Buddhist variants, and while a quick look on Wikipedia seems to tell me that historical academic understanding of pre-Buddhist Tibetan religions have changed now, the things said in this book seem to be commonly acccepted when this book was written, so that's nice. So while you have quite a few characters who basically confirm what you might expect an average person may think about Asians back then, there's also captivating (if somewhat dated by academic progress) parts on Tibetan religions in between, and they really set the stage for the murder on Adam Merriweather, set inside the Tibetan room full of statues and other religious artifacts collected by the victim. 

The book is surprisingly "spread-out" in terms of "active" mystery: the murder on Reffner happens rather early in the book, and then you have a very long investigative section where Mack and Westborough try to figure out who would have a motive to kill Reffner, but the Adam Merriweather/quasi-impossible murder doesn't happen until around the 3/4 mark, and obviously, by that time there's little time left to really explore the impossible murder and actually wrap up the mystery. I don't really like the way the Reffner murder is linked to the Merriweather household, as basically the murderer decided to use the most unique item in Chicago (a Tibetan scarf) to kill the victim and accidentally left part of it on the victim, so yeah, while I can accept that the Tibetan scarf is a clue that would only point to a very exclusive club in Chicago in the thirties, it's such a specific clue it feels very artificial. I do like a certain clue regarding the identity of the murderer left on the scene though, which is pointed out by Westborough. The quasi-impossible murder on Adam Merriweather is.... plausible, workable and fairly-clewed, but also not super surprising. It kinda reminded me of Norman Berrow's work: yes, it is a perfectly acceptable solution to a locked room mystery, and there's an actual trick behind and the author went the way to properly leave clues in the narrative and all that.... but it's also a very straightforward trick, and I think one specific clue was too much: it points too obviously towards the solution, and in fact, once a certain word was dropped I was already expecting the murder to be related to that even before the murder happened! I like the idea of how the murderer set-up the whole impossible murder though, and how it explains a lot of other mysteries that occur throughout the story, but there were a few times where I think Clason just... left clues indicating the murderer in rather obvious places because he didn't know how to else resolve the story, leading to things like the scarf and later, a certain disappearing object that is hidden in a rather risky place, and those are little moments where I think that it doesn't make any sense for the murderer to have done that, and it only makes sense from the POV of the author to leave such clues there even though the murderer wouldn't have done that if they have any notion of self-preservation. That said, I think the impossible murder itself, while not featuring a surprising solution, is reasonably memorable due to its unique setting of the Tibetan Room, and it makes good use of what's found in this place to murder Adam Merriweather. 

So The Man from Tibet wasn't exactly what I had expected it to be based on vague, 10-year old memories, but it was still an entertaining mystery novel. The best part of the book remains its original themes, focusing on Tibet, its religions and the art, and the way the Western characters look at those topics and for example the adventurous accounts of people visiting Tibet. As a mystery, The Man from Tibet is on the whole a competently written and plotted one, and while in some aspects, Clason seems to take the easy way out in regards to clewing and the 'main mystery' happens late and is a bit too telegraphed, I think the book on the whole is an entertaining one and worth checking out.

Taken at the Flood

“And the LORD said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation."

"Genesis" (KJV)

Finally moving away from short stories!

Shuuichi is meeting up with his old group friends of his university outdoor activity club for the first time in a few years since they graduated, but because something awkward happened between him and one of his friends, he decides to bring his cousin Shoutarou along too. One of the friends, Yuuya, tells the group about a strange underground complex he discovered when he was in this same area half a year ago and he convinces them to have a look at it together. Yuuya didn't quite remember the exact location though, and it takes them a long time to reach the abandoned spot deep, deep in the mountain forest, where their phones of course have no signal. It is already almost dusk when they arrive at the spot, so they have no choice but to spend the night here, which is also true for family of three they happen to come across: they got lost in the woods hunting for mushrooms. Yuuya shows the group a hidden manhole, with a ladder leading down into a cave. Behind a large rock they find a steel door, which leads inside the rather surprisingly large underground complex, which was apparently built within an existing natural cave, following its natural contours. The underground complex consists of three basement floors, the upper two basement floors consisting of one large corridor with about twenty rooms on each floor, and a third basement floor with fewer, but larger rooms, but groundwater has already flooded the third basement floor. In one of the rooms they find a building plan, and the group learns this secret underground base is called The Ark. Shoutarou and Yuuya share the same suspicions about the place: it was probably an underground hideout built several decades ago by either revolutionaries or some shady cult, though it has been abandoned for a long time, and Yuuya notes nothing has changed since he first came across this place. Fortunately for the group, there's a working generator in the Ark, so they have electricity and lights in here, and are for example able to keep their phones charged, even if they can't communicate with the outside world. As they explore the rooms in the Ark, they not only find a communications room with monitors connected to security cameras aimed at the manhole they came in through and another emergency exit (though that one connects to the flooded third basement floor), they also find a lot of supplies and tools left by whoever used this building in the past, including mattresses and blankets, so Shuuichi, Shoutarou, his friends and the family of three are able to spend the night in the Ark in relative comfort, and it's at least better than having to camp outside.

Of course, that is until in the early morning, they are forcefully awakened by an earthquake. While fortunately, only one of them is lightly hurt by hitting her head, they soon learn they are in a desperate situation: the large rock which had been sitting in front of the steel door leading back to the ladder has been moved by the earthquake, blocking the door! When they go to the second basement floor beneath the entrance and the rock, they find the rock is actually attached to a pulley system, which can be operated by turning a wheel in that room: Shoutarou suspects this was a security measure of the Ark's original users. In times of trouble, they could use the pulley system to first pull the rock towards the door to barricade themselves. Closer examination of the system shows they can actually pull the rock through a hole down to the second basement floor: this was probably designed like that so if the first door was breached, they could pull the rock down one floor below and then block the door to this room, where theres's not only the pulley system, but also the ladder leading down the currently flooded third basement floor. But because the pulley system has to be operated manually, this means the person turning the wheel will be locked up in this room, as the rock will then block this door. But not only is the third basement floor now flooded, the earthquake has caused the water level to slowly rise, and in just about a week, more of the second basement floor will be flooded, which will render the pulley system unusable. This means one of the ten people here shall have to "sacrifice" themselves to save the others: they will have to operate the wheel and pull the rock down to the second basement floor, opening the steel door outside, but locking themselves in the room below. But not only is the water level rising, due to the isolated location of this base, the fact they don't know exactly where they are and there's no phone signal, and it's unclear how long it'll take them to make it back to the civilized world because who knows what the earthquake has caused or whether new earthquakes will occur, it is not certain that the others will be able to get help in time for the person left behind. It is during this stressful time one of them ends up dead: Yuuya is found strangled in one of the rooms while they were all looking for tools that might be useful. Nobody understands why Yuuya was murdered, but they realize that if there's one person who should sacrifice themselves and put themselves in danger in order to save the others, it's the person who just killed someone. But can they figure out who the murderer is in time while imprisoned in this underground base, and can they convince the murderer to repent for the murder and help the others? The deadline is about one week, but the clock is ticking faster and faster in Yuuki Haruo's Hakobune ("The Ark", 2022).

I have never read anything by Yuuki before, but Hakobune caught my attention because it managed to rank into the various major best mystery book rankings for books released in 2022 (technically late 2021 - late 2022), taking first place in Bunshun's Mystery Best 10, second place in the Honkaku Mystery Best 10 and fourth place in Kono Mystery ga Sugoi 2023 among others. The description also sounded interesting, with an underground closed circle situation and the people being forced to find the murderer because they need them to sacrifice themselves to save the others. I also happened to catch people saying here and there the logic behind the solution of the mystery was memorable, and as a big fan of logic-focused mystery stories, I of course had to read this.

So I went in with pretty high expectations, and yeah, I was not disappointed! Though I have to say, this was also because I had heard people saying that you had to be prepared for a very artificial closed circle situation, a very forced way to put the characters in their specific predicement and that's really true. You can easily tell that the whole deal with the underground complex, and especially how the pulley system is set-up with a rock and how the one operating it will have to stay in that room with a rising water level is all just there to put the characters in a very desperate situation, but at no time does it ever feel really natural. Of course, mystery fiction is often incredibly artificial, and not seldom, the curious locations or characters just scream out loud they only exist to faciliate a specific mystery plot, but in the case of Hakobune, I have to say the Ark really feels like one big plot device. You don't really learn much about the Ark itself throughout the book, only that it exists and theories about why it is built the way it is. Also: the dimensions of the Ark are a bit wacky. The whole thing is built inside a natural cave, but still, it's an underground complex with corridors, stairways and rooms (with working electricity), so it can't be that spacious, and yet people can wander around the complex without others really noticing them or hearing them walking around, which is really weird. More murders occur in the book besides the initial one with Yuuya, but while you could argue the Yuuya murder was feasible because nobody expected people to be murdered and they were walking in and out of rooms to find tools, it's extremely odd people could go about relatively silently in this underground base once everyone was aware a murderer was among them. The corridors and rooms really have to really big for that to work, though this complex is supposed to be built by some fringe group. So you do need to accept some things for this book to work.

But when it works, it works! Because they have to choose one of the survivors to operate the machine and pull the rock down, they all believe it's the murderer who should do that (because they have already taken a life; the least they can do is help the others). But as they're cut off from the outside world with limited resources at their disposal, Shoutarou is very fixated on the point of making an air-tight case based on logical reasoning, because there's not really much else they can rely on, being locked up underground. By proving beyond any doubt who the murderer is, they hope to convince the murderer to do the "correct" thing to make amends, while meanwhile, Shoutarou also stresses the fact they are not looking for a scapegoat or trying to pin the crime on the easiest person: they need to know for sure for themselves who the murderer is, or else they'll force an innocent person into locking themselves up in a flooding room and they could potentially cause this person's death if they don't manage to return in time after escaping through the steel door and up the ladder. This does make the first part of the story a bit slow, as there aren't really many usuable clues available yet, and all they can do is wait as the time limit approaches (which does lead to some parts where almost a whole day passes without anything really happening, so it feels a bit hasty at times).

But thing starts to become tenser once you're past the halfway point, with more murders happening and of course the stress slowly building as people start to clash with each other (which is also partially because you also have the family of three who are "outsiders" to the other people), but also long-time feuds starting to flare up. The second murder is especially gruesome, but it is also basically the starting signal for the detectives to really begin their work, as we finally have clues and situations that allow us to make meaningful deductions about the murderer, about how they committed the crime and how their actions will, in a logical manner, eventually lead us to their identity. This culminates in a fantastic denouement scene, just before the deadline as the water keeps on rising. The logical chain used to point out who the murderer is, is quite impressive. While in terms of "events", I'd say there happens less than you'd expect initially and it's not a very long book at any rate either, but there are surprisingly many hints and clues spread throughout the narrative, and some of them are deliciously clever. Objects the murderer used, places they must have visited, all of that is stringed into a surprisingly solid chain of logic, eventually pointing to one and one character alone as the murderer. When it comes to the strenght of the reasoning pointing towards the murderer, I'd say Hakobune is a really strong novel, and definitely a recommended read for those who like Ellery Queen-like mystery novels with long chains of deductions based on the physical evidence and what they say about the actions of the murderer. The way a small hint first leads to a seemingly innocent observation ("Okay, so that clue means the murderer did that. So what?") but then snowballs into something more important until you have a really big indicator of the identity of the murderer is great and I also like how the deduction revolve around certain objects you seem far too seldom in puzzle plot mysteries even though they are so common. The way they are used here is very natural, but cleverly done, and therefore very satisfying. The big climax, after the murderer has been denounced and they are asked to pull the rock down and lock themselves up for the time being so the others can escape and find help is also great, and actually also form a small mystery narrative on their own, as more cleverly hidden clues are used to facilitate this great escape epilogue. The epilogue was certainly the cherry on top of a very cool mystery novel.

But you do have to roll with the initial artificial set-up of Hakobune for it to work. If you can get to that point, you're treated to a very impressive closed circle mystery novel that has a very memorable chain of deduction at the end denouncing the murderer in this unique, almost absurd situation. I can definitely see why it ended up so high on many of the major annual mystery rankings, as it is not only a great mystery novel, but the tense underground closed cricle situation also allows for some cool drama, and it never overstays its welcome. The book definitely has made me curious to Yuuki's other books, so I might explore those in the future.

Original Japanese title(s): 夕木春央『方舟』