Death Takes a Dive

 (KICK) ルール破りの(JUMP) 悪の超人

さあお遊びはココまでだ！

(ATTACK)ラスト５秒の(FIRE)逆転ファイター

俺は炎のキン肉マン

炎のキン肉マン（串田アキラ）

 

(KICK) Those cheating (JUMP) Evil supermen

No more playing games now!

(ATTACK) I'm the fighter who turns things around (FIRE) In the last five seconds

 I am the blazing Kinnikuman

"The Blazing Kinnikuman" (Kushida Akira)

 

 I'm always interested if a non-mystery series tries to do a mystery story, even if often, the result is not likely to be a particularly original story. But it's always fun to see how an existing fictional world is used to tell a puzzle plot mystery story, especially if the original work is far removed from the mystery genre in the first place, allowing for surprising mix-ups.

So I was both surprised and interested when earlier this year, it was announced there'd be an original mystery novel set in the world of Kinnikuman! Kinnikuman (Or also known as Muscle Man) is an extremely long-running comedy action series by the duo Yudetamago, about an alien prince Kinnikuman who wants to become a superhero, and eventually becomes an intergalactic wrestler, fighting with and against other crazy super-powered wrestlers both good and evil. I don't know the series very well, but it's very well-known in Japan, and at a time, its popularity was also seen in schools with the collectible Kinnikuman Erasers (Kinkeshi), small erasers in the shapes of the many, many, maaaany wrestlers from the series. At any rate, it wasn't a series I'd immediately associate with the mystery genre, but that was what made the announcement so interesting, so I eventually picked up the book Kinnikuman Yojigen Sappou Satsujin Jiken ("Kinnikuman: The Four-Dimensional Murder Art Murder Case", 2023), written by Oginuma X and supervised by original creators Yudetamago. The book starts with the arrival of Meat on the planet Earth: Meat is the best friend of Kinnikuman and his chief vassal, but Kinnikuman, who is now king of the planet Kinniku, has gone missing. Meat suspects his loafing king has returned to Earth yearning for the old days and he first swings by Kinnikuman's old Earth home, where he stumbles into Kinkotsuman. a rival wrestler who also heard rumors Kinnikuman had returned and came here to pick a fight. Meat and Kinkotsuman decide to work together to find the missing Kinnikuman and start looking in other places where he could be, mostly locations where other super-powered wrestlers are likely to be, but each time they run into a mysterious murder. Meat is certainly not among the strongest wrestlers, but he has a brilliant mind, and he is determined to solve each crime if it brings him closer to finding his king.

My first reaction: huh, this is a licensed book in the Kinnikuman franchise, and Kinnikuman isn't even the focal character of the book? I mean, the book is about his disappearance, so the title character barely appears in it!

As mentioned, I am not very familiar with Kinnikuman, but I do know the wrestlers in this series are really, over-the-top super-powered beings, with abilities like flight, teleportation and superhuman strength, so I was instantly interested to see how those kind of powers would be used in a puzzle plot mystery. That said, I was also worried my little knowledge of the series might be an obstacle in terms of being able to enjoy the book, as it is obviously mainly aimed at fans of Kinnikuman, and not general mystery fans. So how does it fare?

Well... let me start right away with the message I can't really recommend this book to just general fans of mystery fiction with no interest in Kinnikuman whatsoever. It drops too much on the reader with minimal context, and while I could still understand it, there was a lot I knew would be more interesting if I knew about these characters and their powers better. It doesn't help that this book mainly has Meat as the protagonist (and not title character Kinnikuman) and it is clearly more a 'for the fans' book. The book has an prologue, and epilogue and four stories for Meat to solve, but each story introduces "new" characters for the reader, which the fan is likely to recognize immediately from the main series, but each story does only the bare minimum to introduce each character, so everything feels very rushed, and characters start to blend together really quickly because some of them have barely five lines before Meat starts explaining whodunit.

In the four chapters, Meat and Kinkotsuman encounter different murders and a theft during their search for Kinnikuman, prompting Meat to solve them quickly because he is in a hurry to find the king. The murders themselves are fairly mundane, but things quickly become crazy when you learn what kind of powers each of the involved wrestlers have, from opening interdimensional wormholes to being able to basically stop time. But this isn't only true of the suspects, but also of the victims, who often have outrageous powers too. So in the end, we do have "normal" mysteries in the sense that the victims and murderers were "equal" in power, only due to the fact everyone has a different range of powers, it can be difficult to figure how each crime was committed. And here we have the main problem of the book that is connected to what I said above: you see, the book has pretty interesting murder set-ups that make good use of the various powers established characters have, using them in original ways to come up with impossible crimes, but because the book is so short and has to rush through every story, each story simply has not time to properly set the stage and tell a story. I have a feeling each story needed to be at least twice as long to properly introduce each suspect, explain their specific powers and play about with pointing fingers at the suspects and thus have a more satisfying tale of detection. As the stories are told now, they may be sufficient for someone who knows who say Buffaloman is and what his personality and power range is, but here it feels a non-fan reader is always two steps behind. So sometimes, things feel unfair, even though they really shouldn't feel as such as they could've been explained and set-up more properly if each story had been longer, instead of presenting new information in the conclusion of each case to the reader. 

In the story The Key of 10 Million for example, Meat has to protect a jewel from being stolen by the phantom thief wrestler Lupine, only for the thief to succeed, but solving this case requires some information that probably makes perfect sense for a Kinnikuman fan, but not for me, and it is only explained in the conclusion. Other stories like the title story The Four-Dimensional Murder Art Murder Case and The Revived Victim have good ideas here and there that make good use of the powers of these super-powered wrestlers, but they are explained so poorly they barely feel fair. The final story, The Junikukan Hotel Murder Case, has actually a brilliant, and absolutely horrifying trick, but it really needed at least double the amount of pages to really set-up the whole ordeal and play around with the suspects. The whole book has moments like these, that show the writer does know how to write a mystery story with these characters in the world, but for some reason, they didn't enough necessary meat to the core plot.

So as mentioned in the beginning, Kinnikuman Yojigen Sappou Satsujin Jiken is mostly interesting for existing fans of Kinnikuman, who want to see their familiar characters used in what is essentially an original and adequately written mystery short story collection. For those with basically zero knowledge of the series however, it's written far too hastily, making it feel more unfair than it actually needs to be, as a lot of the problems I have with the book are not with the plots themselves, but more with it being too brief on a lot of relevant topics. The book might be interesting to read if you're fan of shounen battle manga, and want to see how for example a series like Saint Seiya might also work as a mystery story, but otherwise, I think you can safely skip this one.

Original Japanese title(s):おぎぬまX（原）、ゆでたまご（監修）『キン肉マン 四次元殺法殺人事件』