The Dark Side of the Door

And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door, 

That I scarce was sure I heard you”—here I opened wide the door;

— Darkness there and nothing more.

"The Raven" (Edgar Allan Poe)

Two of the major mystery-related newcomer awards (meaning you get a publishing contract for your entry if you win) in Japan are the Ayukawa Tetsuya Award (publisher: Tokyo Sogensha) and the Mephisto Prize (publisher: Kodansha). Both are popular awards and many who want to write mystery fiction, will try to submit their manuscripts for those awards, as getting published via either of them means receiving a major marketing push and a lot of attention. Of the two, my own preferences correspond best to the Ayukawa Tetsuya Award, which is more focused on puzzle plot mysteries. In a broad sense by the way, so you can have a plot set in a nursing home for the elderly with a lot of real-life experience poured into the story,  but also one of the biggest hits ever that make use of supernatural elements in a mystery story. The Mephisto Prize on the other hand is, by its own definition, not really an award that focuses on mystery fiction per se. The jury are looking for entertainment novels, that span several genres from mystery to horror and much more. That means more variety, but also that a lot of the Mephisto winners aren't the kind of puzzle plot mystery I like to read in the first place. Something like J no Shinwa is really not the kind of novel I usually read and I didn't really like it, some aren't even mystery stories, while books like Clock-Jou Satsujin Jiken and Marumarumarumarumarumarumarumaru Satsujin Jiken are memorable puzzle plot mysteries. But in terms of consistency, I can usually assume a winner of the Ayukawa Tetsuya Award will more often be closer to my own preferences than a Mephisto awardee.

Hikawa Tooru made his debut via the Mephisto Prize in 2000, but interestingly enough, he writes in a mode more commonly associated with the Ayukawa Tetsuya Award. His debut work, Makkura na Yoake or Pitch-Black Dawn as the cover also says, is highly inspired by Ellery Queen and is a pure puzzle plot whodunnit. Like Ellery Queen, his detective character is also named Hikawa Tooru, a young man in his twenties who is hoping to become a mystery novelist. He used to be in a band in university, and the band is going to meet up again for the first time in a few years. Hikawa has been chasing his dream of becoming a professional novelist, doing odd jobs to make ends meet in the meantime, but all his former band members have become full members of the working Japanese society, which is one of the reasons why they haven't really come together again in a while (everyone having their own schedules). Izumi, the oldest and leader of the band who now works at the Suginami-ku Ward Office, arranges for the get-together to be held at a restaurant near his work, and while the place is a bit hard to find, everyone eventually makes it there, with some bringing a +1. After a night of catching up, Izumi says goodbye, as he lives in the neighborhood, while the others hurry to the Suginami Subway Station, as the last train will leave in about twenty minutes. They arrive a bit early though, so they hang about at the otherwise empty station. Some have to go the toilet, others walk around in the station while others wait at the platform. Just a minute before the last train arrives, Matsubara goes back up the stairs to go to the bathroom, but the next second, he cries out in terror, as he discovers the body of Izumi lying dead in the station's men's bathroom. Everyone is utterly baffled, not only by the fact that Izumi has been bludgeoned to death by an art object that had been displayed in the station hall, but because they had said goodbye to him before arriving at the station, and that he shouldn't be at the station at all as he lives in the area. Because the only people at the station, besides three station attendants, were the people at the get-together, it seems likely one of them is the murderer, even if the police can't completely rule out the possibility Izumi might've been killed and robbed of his money in the short time when there was nobody in the station hall when everyone were just still waiting for the train. Hikawa intentionally lies during his questioning to make it seem like someone might've escaped the station while he was waiting for the train and standing near the exits in the main hall, but in fact he knows nobody escaped and that therefore, one of his friends is the murderer and he is determined to find out who it is.

Makkura na Yoake is a surprisingly simple and sobre detective novel considering it's a Mephisto Prize winner, and you can definitely feel the Ellery Queen influence throughout the novel. A lot of the book is devoted to plain investigation and the discussion of possibilities and whether they can discard them, and to be honest, having read it now , I really find it odd this book isn't an Ayukawa Tetsuya Award winner but a Mephisto Prize winner. The murder set-up, while it has a few mysteries about it, is essentially very simple: a murder in the men's bathroom in a subway station and the only people inside, besides the station attendants, all had some kind of (in-direct) link with the victim. Because everyone's memories are a bit vague and it's hard to vouch for each other's alibis, it seems quite a few of them could have committed the murder, but two mysteries remain: why was Izumi in the subway station in the first place, and why did the murderer use the specific murder weapon? For the murderer didn't use the small handy statue to strike Izumi down, but with the flat base upon which the statue stood. The statue is much better suited as a striking weapon compared to the disk-like base, so why did the murderer choose the latter? It's here where the Ellery Queen-flavor becomes the most obvious, as a lot of the book is devoted to discussions about why this weapon was chosen, as well as trying to sort out everyone's positions and a time table until the discovery of the body. And of course, these theories and conclusions are then used to arrive at new conclusions, building whole chains of logic that eventually lead to the murderer.

The situation itself also reminds of the earliest Queen novels, with a kind of public space, but also with a limited cast, and a focus on where everyone was and what they were doing. Hikawa himself as a character obviously isn't early Ellery, especially as he's personally involved in the case, and technically one of the suspects himself too, but you can easily tell who inspired Hikawa.

But even as an Ellery Queen fan, I do have to say the middle part of the book is rather boring. The book tries to help this by telling the story in a kind of And Then There Were None way, with each section following a different character (so the book does not solely follow Hikawa himself). It gives the reader a somewhat more diverse reading experience, as it plays with the idea of you knowing the murderer has to be one of these people you're reading about, but so little happens in these segments. It's basically only Hikawa and fellow member Shiori who genuinely talk about the case, so the segments about any of the other characters just feel like time filler. And while Hikawa, Shiori and the detectives in charge do talk about the various possibilities together, posing theories and also pointing out flaws in each other's ideas, fact remains a lot of it remains rather open to interpretation until later on in the book, so the plot moves very slowly.

Which reminds me, why does the police detective decide to trust Hikawa all of a sudden...? At first they were annoyed with Hikawa's detective playing, but like one chapter later, the main detective decides to trust Hikawa and even feeds him confidential information about the investigation... Hikawa isn't even a renowned mystery writer or anything, he's someone who's trying to become one!

The solution however does remind me once again why I like Ellery Queen-style whodunnits so much. It's these kinds of chains of reasoning that impress me the most about mystery fiction: where the detective use fact A and fact B to arrive at conclusion 1, and combines that with conclusion 2 to arrive at conclusion 3, etc. etc. until lo, you have identified the one single murderer, even though you started with a very, very humble clue. In this case, the way Hikawa arrives at the identity of the murder is truly in the spirit of Queen. It starts with a simple problem, but by focusing on that, Hikawa can use logic to slowly eliminate who it couldn't have been, and finally arriving at who it only could've been. Even though at first, it seemed anyone could've done it. A lot of "side-issues" like motive however are left to speculation and guesses, which are only confirmed because obviously the actual writer Hikawa Tooru wants it to be like that, but the logic itself is sound. The book does feel a bit longer than it needed to be though, and I think I'd have liked it more as a short story, as the deduction itself is great. The book features a second crime in the second half of the book, and while that is fairly simple, I do like the way Hikawa determines the crime is in fact a crime, and not a suicide: this solution hinges on something uniquely Japanese, but also incredibly normal and easy to miss, yet once pointed out, you can't believe you didn't notice it yourself the first time.

Overall, I think that as a debut story Makkura na Yoake is not an outstanding, but still a reasonably consistent mystery novel that is in particular of interest for fans of EQ-style whodunnits. Hikawa would go on writing a few more books, so I'll definitely check them out to see how he further develops. Strangely enough though, Hikawa just suddenly disappeared as a writer. He debuted in 2000 and wrote his last works in 2004, but while he was active on Twitter and last wrote he was moving, he fell silent afterwards and no books have been published since, and his books are also not available as e-books, suggesting perhaps even the publisher can't reach him. For the moment, I have all of the Hikawa Tooru books that also have Hikawa Tooru as the detective, so I'll be discussing them here on the blog eventually.

Original Japanese title(s): 氷川透『真っ暗な夜明け』