Where's My Mummy?

"Everything lost is meant to be found."

"Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life"

To be honest, I wasn't really that enthusiastic about writing last week's post, but as it was about Egypt too, I thought it'd show a nice contrast with this week's book.

Nnwenre no Serdab ("The Sealed Chamber of Nnwenre", 1996) is the third novel written by Komori Kentarou, and deals with an international excavation project in Egypt, in a newly uncovered part of the Valley of Kings with many intact ruins. Because of the scale of the project, several countries are involved with the excavation, with the part handled by Japan being coordinated by Takaoka University and Professor Ashizawa, the leading Japanese authority. Shingou Toshiyuki is a writer for a magazine sent to Egypt to do a reportage on the excavation and on the plane from Cairo to Luxor, he recognizes a familiar face: Miyaji Reika was a college classmate, but now she's working at Jouhou University as an assistant. Jouhou University is a smaller university assisting Takaoka University's excavation project, though Reika's boss Professor Urushibara has a personal rivalry with Professor Ashizawa and keeps complaining anything they'll learn and uncover, will just be attributed to Ashizawa. Due to Jouhou University's small size, their expedition is also sponsored by a publisher: their star mangaka Azusa Miki is going to write a manga with ancient Egypt as its theme, so they were willing to fund Jouhou University's expedition if Azusa Miki could come along. It turns out Azusa Miki is in fact Mikiko, Shingou's college girlfriend, who took their break-up really hard. Mikiko is also joined by her young sister, personal assistant and editor. 

The focal point of the international project is a recently uncovered list of pharaohs, which adds two new unknown pharaohs at the end of the 17th dynasty. Due to politics, short periods of reigns and human error, pharaohs were occassionally omitted or forgotten in later lists, so the discovery of the existence of new pharaohs is of course stunning. Each international team is assigned a location to dig. As the Japanese expedition is led by Takaoka University, they of course get assigned the largest and most promising part of the Japanese allocated spot, while Jouhou University's spot is rather modest. However, when they move an obelisk, they discover the entrance into the tomb of Nekhwenre, the last pharaoh of the seventeenth dynasty on the recently uncovered list, and thus a completely unknown pharaoh. The entrance of the tomb seems completely intact, meaning no grave robbers have been here yet in the many millennia that have passed. However, because Professor Ashizawa is in Luxor, they are not allowed to enter the tomb just yet, to the frustration of Professor Urushibara. That day however, Mikiko's young sister goes missing, and they find her shoe in the tomb entrance. It appears that while playing hide-and-seek, she had gone inside the tomb. The observer of the Egyptian government allows a small group, including Reika, Shingou, and other members of their party, to enter the tomb to look for girl, while the observer himself too joins the search. Inside they come across a completely untouched tomb, which excites the archeologists, but there's no sign of the girl. In the deepest part of the tomb, they find a sarcophagus with a mummy inside it... and a sword stuck through the torso. The mummy is actually a natural mummy, and not a mummy that had actually undergone any treatment, meaning the victim here was stabbed and left to die here in the sarcophagus, and he became a natural mummy. They find scrolls of papyrus, which Professor Urushibara translates: it turns out that pharaoh Nekhwenre was fearing a plot by an enemy, and had originally only pretended to be dead, hiding inside the tomb which was already in construction during his lifetime. But while he writes nobody is inside the tomb, he still greatly fears for his life, and eventually, even states he's about to be killed and he's only allowed to write this one final scroll of papyrus before his death. But how did the killer get inside the sealed tomb, even though Nekhwenre says nobody was there? Meanwhile, the group spreads out in the tomb in search for the girl, but they get killed in strange manners one by one...

If you're wondering why the title says "Nnwenre" and I'm talking about pharaoh "Nekhwenre", that's not a mistake. I was really confused throughout the book too. It gets explained eventually!

I first learned about this book via last year's Misshitsu Mystery Guide, which offered an extensive overview of the development of the locked room mystery by discussing fifty titles in total: 30 Japanese stories and 20 foreign ones. In that book, author Iiki discussed the variety of the locked room mystery, by also including sections that spoiled the books selected and explaining how they add to the diversity within the locked room mystery, and as I found a lot of the picks in the book interesting, I decided to read Nnwenre no Serdab too, as it was one of the few Japanese picks I hadn't read yet.

It's in that context I found Nnwenre no Serdab an interesting read, though it's by no means an even experience, and of the (few) Komori books I have read, I'd say it's also the most uneven. It starts out interesting enough, with the arrival of the Jouhou University party (and Shingou) at Luxor, as they prepare for their part of the excavation, and Shingou also meeting with Mikiko again, who clearly never really got over her break-up with Shingou in university. We get introduced to these relationships before Mikiko's sister goes missing and they try to enter the tomb (with a not so very funny running joke of Shingou constantly bribing the observer of the Egyptian government to allow him to take pictures of the tomb). Once they stumble upon the sarcophagus, the party starts to split up in search of the missing girl, when one by one, they get killed off, even though there shouldn't be anyone besides them in the tomb, the same way pharaoh Nekhwenre wrote he feared for his life and that he was about to die, even the tomb was supposed to be his safe place.

The big gripe I have with the book is that the modern-day killings are not interesting at all. Yes, they all get picked off one by one in the tomb (which is surprisingly large for an underground complex built millennia ago, especially if you compare it to the sizes of hallways etc in the pyramids), but the murders aren't really interesting. While the book tries to pass them off as interesting mysteries and also tries to give them an air of impossibility, it becomes clear rather soon why they are getting killed one by one, and it's hard to imagine how the survivors wouldn''t have noticed who was behind this after the first death, let alone have them all fall for what is basically the same idea over and over again. The human relationships portrayed in the first half of the book are also barely relevant for the modern day killings, making these deaths feel very empty and void of meaning. 

Fortunately, Misshitsu Mystery Guide didn't include Nnwenre no Serdab based on those modern-day deaths. The murder it focuses on, is of course the historical murder: they found the mummy of pharaoh Nekhwenre with a sword in his chest, meaning he was clearly murdered, but Nekhwenre had been faking his own death, and been hiding in his own tomb for the purpose of fooling his enemies. The papyrus scrolls they translated tell them that Nekhwenre was certain nobody was there in the tomb, yet he feared for his life, and in his final one, he even declares he's only allowed to write a last message before he's about to die. Yet when the party enters the tomb, they find clear signs they are the first people to ever enter the tomb after it was sealed. Considering Nekhwenre's own testimony, they just can't figure out how he could've ended up dead, if he had been alone in the tomb and nobody ever broke the seals on the tomb. The solution to this millennia-old locked room mystery is both very simple and clever, but it's really a trick you can only pull off once in your career, and even then, not everybody will be able to pull it off convincingly. I think it works really well here, with some clever foreshadowing, and it's the kind of trick behind a locked room mystery I honestly have seldom seen before, maybe because it is honestly so simple. I have read many locked room mysteries, but I myself at least hadn't come across one before relying on same principle, and I can see why Iiki decided to add it to his overview of the sub-genre, because this book does show off a kind of trick seldom seen. Again, it's very specific variation that is difficult to see implemented elsewhere without feeling like a knockoff, but it's integrated very well with this book's plot, with a very clever set-up that makes the simple solution feel fair, and not cheap.

Oh, and while this was the first book by Komori published by Kodansha, he snuck in a few small references to his previous two books (from a different publisher), with Azusa Miki also working on a manga adaptation of Lowell Jou no Misshitsu, written by Takasawa Noriko (who also appears in Comiket Satsujin Jiken).

Nnwenre no Serdab is certainly not an overall masterpiece of the locked room mystery, and a lot of the book feels almost redundant because how simple and meaningless the modern-day murders are, but the historical murder is certainly interesting, hinging on something on a principle/concept that is not very often used in mystery fiction. It is at the core very simple, but the idea is used really well in this book, with a great set-up to spring the solution on the reader. Not really a book that should go straight to the top of your priority list, but definitely one to keep in mind and try if you're in the mood for something short and interesting.

Original Japanese title(s): 小森健太郎『ネヌウェンラーの密室』 

London Particular

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, 

How does your garden grow?

First game review of the year... I wish it wasn't this game though...

Belgian police officer Hercule Poirot is sent on a mission to London to accompany a valuable painting of Mary Magdalene on its way to a London museum where an exhibit on religious art will be held, with the Mary being the big star. He has to work with Arthur Hastings, a young insurance agent of Lloyd's who is tasked with the same mission, and after meeting each other on the ship to London, they safely deliver the Mary at the museum, in time for the grand opening of the exhibition. During the preview gala however, which has some prominent guests like politicians, theatre stars and big high society names, the Mary is discovered to have been purloined, even though it was kept in a special exhibition room which was kept locked by the curator. Hercule Poirot knows he's merely a guest in London, but can't let this crime go unsolved as a matter of honor and assisted by Hastings, he starts an investigation into the painting's theft in the 2023 video game Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The London Case, available on PC/PS4/PS5/XBox One/Switch.

As the title suggests, this game is a follow-up on 2021's Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The First Cases, a game I experienced as a flawed one. The game built on developer Blazing Griffin's Murder Mystery Machine, featuring gameplay where you gather clues and had to connect said clues to create mindmaps: visualizing the deduction process by having the player manually connect hint a + hint b to arrive at conclusion C. As a mystery game, it was pretty fun, but it was not really a Hercule Poirot game despite Poirot being in the title and this being a licensed game. As the title suggested, it was a prequel, portraying a younger Hercule Poirot when he was still with the Belgian police, but besides a completely wrong time setting (which I can still ignore), the character portrayed as Poirot was... hardly portrayed as Poirot, with few of his characteristic personality traits being mirrored in this younger version, save for some "grey cells" references. His mind for order, neatness and symmetry, references to interests like travelling, the way he speaks to women, his mastery(?) of English, none of these traits were visible in the Poirot in The First Cases, and I was left with a game that just felt really weird. It was with such an ambigious feeling I started with the sequel.

And unfortunately, Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The London Case turns out to be inferior to its predecessor in all aspects.

The Hercule Poirot characterization is still weird, though I had expected that already. Of course, the timeline doesn't make any sense anyway if you go by the books, as the time period is a bit weird considering Poirot should probably much older, and at the very least, in the books he's about twice as old as Hastings which he certainly isn't in this game, so add to that the fact the Poirot in this game still feels far too removed from the actual character, and you still wonder why this is a licensed product. I mean, I get it, Agatha Christie in the title will sell much better, but save for the name, the story and characters really have nothing to do with the actual Poirot series...

At this point, The London Case isn't surprisingly better or worse than the first game, but sadly enough, as a mystery game, The London Case is also not nearly as engaging as The First Cases. On the surface, the game looks similar: you control a young Poirot as you question the various suspects and look for evidence in various locations ranging from a museum,to a church and backstage at a theater,  locations which are presented with an isometric point of view. The clues you gather are automatically stored in Poirot's mind as part of various mind maps pertaining certain themes ("the stolen Mary" "why is X behaving like that"). By connecting certain relevant facts in this mind maps, you're able to generate new insights or questions to ask your suspects, allowing you to progress in the game. Up to this point, The London Case isn't much different from the first game. But the critical issue is that The London Case is infinitely simpler than the first game, to a degree that it's just not enjoyable anymore. While The First Cases also simplified the gameplay of Murder Mystery Machine, I felt that was like nicely cleaning the user interface, but in The London Case, the deductions you're supposed to make are so simple and each map is so limited, you don't really feel the thrill of completing a deduction. There's never an "Aha!" moment when you make a connection, and many of the conclusion you make are often logically barely a step further than the initial hints you started out with. So the mind maps don't feel satisfying anymore to complete, and they were what made these games unique as a mystery games!

After a short prologue and the opening gala at the museum, the game world opens up as you interrogate everyone who had been at the gala, figuring out their alibis for the theft and trying to find hidden connections between everyone, but the mid-section of the game is surprisingly... dull, with a lot of walking to and from a limited amount of locations and even some fetch quests, which combined with the lower difficulty really make this game feel less detective work-focused compared to The First Cases. It doesn't help that the game's strength certainly doesn't lie in its story presentation, with sometimes awkward cut scenes where you always have the feeling like a few lines of dialogue are missing to convey things better.

I played this game on the Switch, and unfortunately, it runs really badly on the Switch for some reason. It's graphically certainly not impressive, but for some reason the loading times on the Switch are horrible, and that certainly didn't help the experience of the middle part of the game, as you constantly have to wait for the game to load each time you go from one location to another. For example: to visit the museum's curator's room, you first need to enter the museum hall (location 1), then move to a different gallery (location 2) and from there enter the curator's room (location 3), but when you want to leave, you have go back the same way, and each time the game takes ages to load each seperate location! And when you have fetch quests where you have to pick up something at location A (which might actually consists of 3 locations) and then go location B (which might be 2 locations) and then go back to A.... the game just isn't much fun to play at a technical level either, and even outside of the awful loading times, the game doesn't run really smoothly.

It's only now I even remember to write something about the story, because there was enough to complain about besides the story. As a Hercule Poirot licensed game, the consumer of course hopes to experience a tale that feels like one of the Belgian sleuth's adventures one way or another. And I guess the cast of characters feel like a Christie story, with many people in the upper parts of society and I can see a museum theft as a Poirot (short) story too, as well as some of the other developments later on, but it does miss a classic Christie twist that feels brilliant, while at the same time remaining simple. Some small thing that forces you to look at things at a different angle, but which explains everything. The London Case doesn't have that: it's a mystery story that at times incorporates tropes we see in Christie's work, and while I wouldn't call the story memorable, it's a tale that theoretically could fit perfectly with the mind map gameplay, but it's just presented in a far too simple manner in term of gameplay, while the presentation is so wonky at times you feel you're missing one or two scenes.

I did like the original The First Cases despite it not being all it could've been, so I had hoped the sequel would improve on that game, but Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot: The London Case somehow manages to be worse in every aspect. Whereas I could recommend the first game, I would recommend you to stay away from this game unless you really want to play a video game with Poirot in its title, because as a mystery game, this game has barely anything satisfying to offer to the player.

The Mummy Case

"Take the Pyramids. Great blocks of useless masonry, put up to minister to the egoism of a despotic bloated king. Think of the sweated masses who toiled to build them and died doing it. It makes me sick to think of the suffering and torture they represent."

"Death on the Nile"

I do hate writing reviews of books I feel so indifferent about...

Asako's father works for the Japanese embassy in Cairo and one day, she visits her father in Egypt. She's picked up by him and first visit a museum, when sudden business pops up and Asako's father says he has to leave her for a bit. He arranges for the wife of a colleague to show Asako around town and promises he'll back in the evening. That night however, Asako is informed her father died in a traffic accident. However, the doctor says his last words were "Canopic jar", one of the objects they had been admiring in the museum. Two years after her father's death, Asako has started working as a teacher at a middle school. During a school trip to Tokyo, one of her students is found dead, seemingly having committed suicide by jumping off the roof of the hotel. However, a classmate tells Asako he had been talking with the victim before her death and she had been talking about Egypt. This reminds Asako that the victim had actually made her own canopic jar during art class. The canopic jar also reminds Asako of the theft of a canopic jar two years earlier, soon after she had returned from Egypt. A special exhibition on ancient Egypt had been held at a museum in Kyoto, and she had visited the exhibition, because her father had been working on the project before he died. However, during the exhibition, someone stole the canopic jar on display and swapped it for an imitation. The man was caught red-handed, but committed suicide by taking a poison pill, and for some reason, the real canopic jar had already been smuggled away out of the museum. When even more murders occur among students, Asako starts to suspect all of this is connected and together with the brother of one of the deceased students, she tries to figure out how her father's death was related to all of this in Yamamura Misa's 1980 novel Egypt Joou no Hitsugi ("The Tomb of the Egyptian Queen").

Yamamura Misa was an extremely prolific mystery writer, whose main themes were women protagonists and Kyoto (and Japanese culture). A lot of her work served as basis for adaptations on television, making her name synonymous for the two-hour suspense drama television special set in Kyoto or perhaps some other touristic destination featuring a dramatic finale with the detective confronting the murderer at a cliffside looking down at the sea. The works I have read of her tend to be on the lighter side, often featuring barely a mystery, though some books like Hana no Hitsugi, were more like the reasonably solid puzzle-focused books I generally read. I don't really remember why I picked up Joou no Hitsugi specifically, I think I saw it mentioned somewhere as being one of Yamamura's more puzzle-focused books and that it featured a locked room mystery.

It wasn't really that puzzle-focused, I soon discovered.

The book was focused on deaths though! It's like every two chapters someone dies off page. This is definitely one of those books that were written more like a suspenseful thriller, with a beautiful woman thrust into an unknown adventure and plot twists every few pages. Asako's father dies in the first few pages of the book, and after that, you learn about the museum theft (also ending in death), the (first) student dies after what is basically the prologue and this is just the beginning, as a lot more murders occur. Yamamura Misa writes pretty cozy mysteries, but she sure doesn't hold back when it comes to killing off characters! Of course Asako soon realizes all these deaths are somehow connected to her father's death, Egypt and the Egyptian exhibition two years ago when the canopian jar was stolen, but in what way?

After a while, I did realize Egypt Joou no Hitsugi was not going to be the kind of puzzle-focused mystery I hoped it would be, so I then decided I'd just go along for the ride. Which was a pretty crazy ride. The story starts in Egypt, but then narrative then returns to Japan, so I thought the story would remain a bit "smaller" in scale, but that was foolish of me: the story encompasses a lot of elements and even takes on the form of an international conspiracy after a while with huge political implications. A lot of that just barely stays connected via coincidences, so it's not really satisfying to read as a properly clewed detective, and the only fun you'll have with this book if you just accept it's a very over-the-top suspense crime novel. Perhaps I shouldn't say strangely enough, but there were parts of this conspiracy plot I did like, like the idea behind what the criminals were, in the end, actually trying to do (even if the execution was rather unwieldy).

There's a locked room murder half way through the story, set in the broadcasting room of Asako's school. The trick however is very simple and basically a variant on ideas you'll have seen elsewhere. At least the one in Hana no Hitsugi felt unique because it was based on Japanese culture so much (in a seperate complex in the garden for tea ceremonies), but this one here felt like on that was just added to fulfill a quotum. 

Interestingly enough, this book was also adapted for television, featuring a different detective. While the series is called Meitantei Catherine, the protagonist is not Yamamura's series protagonist Catherine Turner, the daughter of the former vice-president of the USA who became a freelance photographer in Japan. Because they probably wanted a Japanese actress to star in the show, adaptations of Catherine novels have often featured a new character whose nickname is Catherine: Kiasa Rinko (Kiasarinko -> Catharine). So in this 1999 adaption, it was Catherine who got involved in this case, though I have no idea how faithful the adaptation is (I definitely suspect some aspects of the story were changed or cut completely as Japanese television drama series tend to shy away from such themes...).

Anyway, Egypt Joou no Hitsugi was definitely not the story I really wanted to read. At the same time, I understand that this probably wasn't a book that was intended to be the kind of story I wanted to read. I know Yamamura Misa has written more puzzle-focused books, but as she has written so much and so many of them do feel like paint-by-number mysteries, it's hard to find the gems among her enormous bibliography list. If anyone has recommendations, I'd be glad to hear about them!

Original Japanese title(s): 山村美紗『女王の棺』

The Witch Tree Symbol

Deep into that darkness peering

"The Raven" 

Yes, this is an awesome cover.

Since Ishioka started writing down his adventures with his roommate Mitarai Kiyoshi, he's been making a name for himself as a mystery author, and it's through one of his fans he becomes involved with the mysterious death of Fujinami Surugu. The man was found dead the day after a storm on the roof of his parental home. There were no distinct clues indicating a murder, but why was he found on the roof? Suguru and his wife were living near Suguru's parental home, on the same block, in an apartment building owned by his mother Yachiyo. These buildings stand on Darkness Hill somewhere in Yokohama. In the Edo period, men were being decapitated here and it is said the gigantic true on the block of the Fujinami buildings grew that large because of the blood of the punished. Several decades ago, Yachiyo was married with the British man James Payne, who ran a school here. He was the father of three children, Suguru, Yuzuru and Reona, but when most of them had grown up, he just disappeared to return to Great Britain, leaving his family behind. Since then, Yachiyo and her children have remained here, but now her oldest son has died, and it's certainly not the first tragedy to happen on this block. The gigantic tree standing in front of the house is not only rumored to drink blood, but in the past, dead bodies have in fact been found hanging from the tree, and nobody ever figured out how those bodies ended up there. Mitarai Kiyoshi of course suspects there's more to this than just a cursed tree, so he and Ishioka investigate the case in Shimada Souji's 1990 novel Kurayamizaka no Hitokui no Ki ("The Man-Eating Tree of Darkness Hill").

Shimada made his debut in 1981 with Senseijutsu Satsujin Jiken (AKA The Tokyo Zodiac Murders), which also introduced the world to his astrologist-turned-detective Mitarai Kiyoshi and his chronicler Ishioka. Kurayamizaka no Hitokui no Ki is the fourth novel in the series following Naname Yashiki no Hanzai (AKA Murder in the Crooked House) and Ihou no Kishi. This novel also marked a shift in tone, though the previous one already started that, though less ambitious. Kurayamizaka no Hitokui no Ki shares a lot with the novels that followed it: like books like Suishou no Pyramid, Atopos and Nejishiki Zazetsuki, this book is quite long (a so-called brick book) and it features Mitarai involved in a bigger adventure, even going abroad for some time to do some extra investigation. Also, these books take on a a different storytelling style, incorporating more themes like horror, and narratives-within-narratives where Shimada delves into topics that happen to be interesting him at the time of writing. These books are quite different from the two Mitarai Kiyoshi novels currently available in English, but are actually more "typical" of the series than those two, as Shimada stuck to this mode for much longer.

Because I don't really read these books in order, I already knew Shimada would eventually shift to this style, and in a way, Kurayamizaka no Hitokui no Ki is very predictable because of that. Structure-wise, it is quite familiar in the sense I knew we'd be sidetracking a lot while Mitarai and Ishioka are investigating the death of Suguru on the roof. Initially, the mystery revolves around how Suguru ended up on the roof in the first place, whether it was by his own choice or whether someone else arranged for that. Strangely enough, the reason why the two got involved in this case is quickly forgotten and ignored, but as they investigate the case, the reader is also taken along a trip in history, as Mitarai starts to develop an interest in the history of the school that used to stand at this place, and in the family history of the Fujinamis and their father James Payne. In the meanwhile, more mysterious deaths occur, which are clearly centred around the ominous tree standing near the Fujinami parental house and people start to fear it's really a curse that's doing all of this. 

Personally, I am not really a fan of the slower pace of the Shimada bricks, where Mitarai obviously has some idea of what is going on already, but he wants to delve deeper in the topic, and thus we get narratives-within-narratives detailing creepy histories or other stories. Some might appreciate the creepy atmosphere of the novel, and especially of the tree, better than I did, but I found the story to be slower than it needed to be, which after a while starts to become tiring. Ultimately, there are few "clear" mysteries that occur (like a death) even though this is a long book, and I didn't think the vague "but something feels off..." atmosphere the book was going for was strong enough to keep the plot engaging enough for the page count.

It didn't help my reading experience that even though there are few 'clear/focal' mysteries in the story, the solution to the mysterious deaths isn't... really surprising. Most of them can be seen as a variant on ideas Shimada uses quite often in his work, and therefore can be easily guessed if you have read a few works by him. This book was hardly surprising seen in a Shimada context in that regard. Of course, I don't read his work in order, so that may have "reverse-spoiled" me, but even so, I do feel the solution to the mysteries is a bit weak considering the length of the book, I would have wanted something a bit more intricately planned. While I guess there's also the bigger mystery of how all the incidents are connected to each other, including those that happened in the past like the dead girl found in the tree long ago and even smaller incidents that happened at the school decades ago, I felt that the merits of this narrative were more in its horror-esque implications, rather than as a detective story. Again, I know that is what Shimada was moving towards starting with this book, but his mode of trying to tie a lot of incidents taken place across a long period of time often ends up feeling rather forced and reliant on coincidences, and while the story can feel quite tenseful, it sometimes has trouble feeling like a proper logical puzzle, being more focused on the "feeling" of the mystery rather than the explanation.

There is a short part that is set abroad, which has its own mini puzzle revolving an odd building: I liked the idea behind that mystery, but it felt really detached from the rest of the book, and I would have perhaps liked it better if it had been its own story, instead of a kind of narrative-within-a-narrative.

Kurayamizaka no Hitokui no Ki was thus not really my favorite Mitarai novel. I do think there will be readers who can appreciate this book better than I, as there are distinct horror elements to the story that will perhaps appeal better to others than to me, and when seen as a series work, this book is also important as it marked the shift to a different story style and it also introduces a certain recurring character who you'll often in other books, so some might want to read this in order exactly so they don't get spoiled on who will survive this book to return in subsequent works, but I personally wasn't too big a fan of this one.

Original Japanese title(s): 島田荘司『暗闇坂の人喰いの木』

Requiem of the Golden Witch

The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.

"The Black Cat"

FOMO, FOMO...

After losing his parents in an accident, 13-year old Takuma moves to his mother's home town. She was the oldest daughter of the Daimon family, one of the influentual families in the small, isolated community, but she kept mostly away from her family, and Takuma himself had never visited the family on his mother's side. But now his parents are dead, he's been taken in by his youngest aunt Rei and his grandmother Matsu: Takuma's grandfather Taizou passed away some months ago, and because Takuma's two middle aunts Noriko and Yuuri are married into other families, taking the names of their husbands, the Daimon clan is on the verge of extinction. By having Rei, who had been married previously but is now divorced, adopt her nephew Takuma as her own son, Matsu hopes the Daimon family will continue through Takuma as the last male successor of the bloodline. Takuma, who had always lived in Tokyo, finds his new home extremely hard to adapt to. The town is an eerily closed community, perhaps best symbolized by the fact the local justice authority isn't actually a police officer: the "patrol officer" is a private person (Takuma's uncle), who acts as the local troubleshooter. While the 'patrol officer' will call for the real police if necessary, many smaller problems are handled by himself, and he can even sweep minor deaths under the rug if wished by the persons involved agree they prefer that over contacting the proper authorities. 

While Takuma has found a few friends, and even love interests, by entering the school's Occult Club, he also has made enemies, for no other reason than being Daimon Taizou's grandson. He is in particular being harrassed by the mayor's son and his goonies, who accuse him of being possessed by a devil: apparently, Taizou had been experimenting with summoning devils before his mysterious death. Taizou had been running for mayor too, and rumors say he summoned a devil to kill the mayor's wife and two daughters, who had been walking out on a snowy day, on a path flanked on both sides by a wall of snow. Another person was walking the same way, and saw the three turn a corner, but when this witness did the same, he found the three women decapitated, but with no sign of the murderer nearby. The mayor's son thus blames Taizou, and now Takuma for the mysterious death of his mother and sisters. Meanwhile, Takuma learns the Daimon family holds a curious place in the town's society, as they are also the ones who can perform a local exorcism ceremony, applied when the townsmen think someone is possessed. While Takuma is being accused of being possessed by a devil, he himself slowly sees how the townsmen themselves turn into inhuman devils as mysterious event after event occurs after his arrival, from a fire burning down an important hut for the community, attempts being made on Takuma's life and to a grisly new murder in Takuma's own house. But why is all of this happening and what is the connection between all these incidents? Is it the work of the devil? That is the big question in Asukabe Katsunori's Datenshi Goumonkei ("Torture of the Fallen Angels" 2008).

Datenshi Goumonkei was a book originally published in 2008, but late 2023, the out-of-print book got a limited facsimile reprint via Shosen and the bookstore Horindo in cooperation with the original publisher Kadokawa, which is actually a very rare thing to happen. The original release went for crazy prices, but I assume Kadokawa itself had no intention of re-releasing the book themselves for the moment, so now we have not exactly a private reprint, but it's still not a major re-release of the book. And of course fear-of-missing-out kinda played a role in me getting this book now, though references to John Dickson Carr on the obi, and the fact the book was about impossible crimes, and devils and (fallen) angels did sound very appealing. The facsimile reprint version also comes with a small booklet with an unrelated short story also by Asukabe, whose work I had not ever read before by the way.

What this book really excels at, is atmosphere. The town where Takuma ends up at is really creepy, and with that, I mean the people there. It's a small, isolated town, though still large enough to have a normal town centre with stores, restaurants, gift shops and everything, so not really a mountain village type of isolated place, but the people there do live in a very isolated manner, with their own local customs and beliefs. The fact the place doesn't have an actual police station, and Takuma's uncle simply acts as an appointed "troubleshooter" who at times can even cover up mysterious deaths by making sure the town doctor and everyone else are all on the same page is already a sign of how weirdly the town works, but Takuma himself also notices how incredibly closed-off the people are, always looking at him as the outsider and teachers completely ignoring blatant acts of harrassment towards Takuma. People also don't really tell Takuma about a lot of the town traditions and beliefs until they think it's time, leading to Takuma constantly feeling like a fish out of water, like he's been sent to a town of madmen as the one sane person. The first time Takuma witnesses how his aunt/new mother Rei for example exorcises a woman is horrifying, but the townsmen all pretend like it's normal and even rejoice about the sickening deed. There's something "off" about the people here, almost like they're all cultists or something, and the more time Takuma spends here, the more unsettling it all gets. This culminates in the climax, when half the town appears to go absolutely mad, almost transforming into actual devils as they drive Takuma, who is still trying to solve the mysterious murders that have occured in the meantime, into a desperate corner. As a horror story, Datenshi Goumonkei might not feel completely original, and even in the mystery genre, I'd say something like Yatsu Haka Mura ("The Village of Eight Graves") feels quite similar with its idea of an outsider arriving in an isolated community and things going very wrong, but this book certainly does this very effectively, and at times, it even comes close to feeling like something like Umineko no Naku Koro ni, even though it starts so relatively normal!

I have to say that while I did enjoy the book overall, Datenshi Goumonkei feels a bit disjointed as a mystery novel. The book is brimming with mysterious or curious events and incidents, but a lot of these parts don't really have much synergy with each other, other than "being mysterious and curious". It's not a series of events that occur in this book, but a lot of discrete occurances that all seem mysterious, and... most of them are properly explained, but in hindsight, you do feel a lot of just happened just to scare Takuma and the reader, and there's not really much of a connection between event A and event B. Perhaps the coincidence at play is the work of the devil, but it does make the plot feel a bit overwhelming for the wrong reasons. Takuma at first also isn't that strongly involved in the mysteries, so while you hear about impossible murders and such, Takuma doesn't really actively investigate them at first, so that results in a slow start of the narrative. That said, there are many interesting occurences, from the sudden decapitation of three women five years ago, the mystery of Daimon Taizou's odd museum built like an inverted pyramid in the depths of the forest, to Daimon Taizou passing away recently in his locked study, where he was found with all his bones crushed, to smaller incidents, like an act of arson, Takuma's cousins disappearing closer to the end, and a mysterious empty retirement home found in the forest where a mysterious woman in red is seen by Takuma. Some of these elements are proper mystery plots, while other elements are closer to horror tropes, and some are just there because the author liked it, I guess (the longest chapter in the whole book is an essay on modern horror fiction written by Takuma's friend Fujio for Takuma, and it's really detailed, but also not really relevant to the plot). 

Some parts are honestly only there to be cool, but don't really make sense in the context of a mystery novel. The catastrophic climax of the book for example has some insane (in a good way) scenes that work extremely well for the mood of the book at that point, but when it tries to explain these events later on in a rational way, well, it's barely acceptable (okay.... so that thing is just there...?). And some persons really make weird decisions here... I liked most of the murders though, and while the hinting was usually not really physical clue/action-based, but more based on "in hindsight, I could've guessed X was actually Y" types of revelations/interpretations, the way the murders were clewed did fit the overall atmosphere of the book, with a lot being based on Takuma's own direct experiences. Some of them also have short, but memorable false solutions proposed for them, with one major one being so over-the-top I almost wish it was the real one, because it would really have made this a unique kind of mystery. Still, don't come here hoping for a mind-bending locked room trick or something like that: the focus of the book lies more in somehow trying to tie these events together into a coherent series of incidents (and even then, the book has to almost cheat at times for that to work). Some of the minor mysteries are probably easier to solve: I did like the mystery revolving around the museum a lot, perhaps because I guessed it rather early on, but at the same time, it felt so seperated from the rest of the story, I didn't really understand why it was there. That is the main gripe I have with the book I think when it comes to the mystery, with some mysteries just being there but not really being related to the main plot in any way, as if Asukabe just had several ideas he really wanted to throw in the book, but couldn't really figure out how to make them all relevant.

The book is also touted as a romantic boy-meets-girl-type of story, and in that sense, Datenshi Goumonkei does a good job: Takuma may have trouble adapting to his new home, but he does find himself attracted to a few of the girls at school, and part of why the book feels so creepy is definitely because Takuma is honestly trying to live a normal life in his new home town, despite him being treated as an outsider by so many and all the weird occurences happening around him, and often somehow involving him, making an event like a date, wedged between events where Takuma almost dies, feel very alienating, further giving the whole book a very unsettling atmosphere. This boy-meets-girl plot is a very fundamental element to the book, almost surprisingly so, but it does not "burden" the book at all from a mystery POV.

Overall, I did enjoy Datenshi Goumonkei a lot. It feels a lot like a passion project due to how much is thrown into it, and I think it could easily have been tightened up a bit, but the overall atmosphere of the town slowly showing its true colors is done really good, and it certainly had me hooked from start to finish, even if I found some elements not very strong when viewed on their own. It's certainly a unique read, with a rather slow start, once the modern-day murders occur, things move a lot faster. The book certainly made me curious to reading more of Asukabe's work, and I do hope they have a similar vibe.

Original Japanese title(s): 飛鳥部勝則『堕天使拷問刑』

Secret at Mystic Lake

 "Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water"

"Be Water, My Friend"

First one of the new year!

The one thing I do hate about writing about Japanese translations of Chinese mystery novels is how I always have to look up the readings of each single name in Chinese and how to transliterate them into pinyin, as obviously, in the Japanese translations, they usually simply use the original Chinese characters and transliterate into Japanese pronouncations. It's not a lot of work, but I always have to get that out of the way before I can actually get started on the post...

In the suburbs of Shanghai lies the manor of the Lu family. Their spacious house used to be a state library and is located inside a former park, with a large lake next to the house. While the park and the lake had originally been left open the public when the former family patriarch bought everything, they eventually closed it off. After the patriarch's death, his widow (and second wife) Wu Miao remained the de-facto head of the clan. The sons Lu Ren (son of the first wife) and Lu Yi and Lu Li went their own directions, and still live in the same house with their own families too. Lu Ren in particular was well-known in society, as he was a philanthropist acting as the representative of the Lu family. One chilly winter morning, Lu Ren's grandson found a strange object near the semi-basement storehouse outside. When his father Lu Wenlong realizes his son was playing with an umbilical cord, he immediately goes to the storehouse. However, the entrance to the semi-basement storehouse is below ground level, and the stairs that lead down have been flooded due to the heavy rain the last couple of days. As the stairs lead two meters down and there's tonnes of water blocking the door right now, it has been impossible to open the door the last two days. But wanting to know what is going on, Lu Wenlong borrows a water pump to get all the water away, and when he enters the storehouse, he finds his father lying dead on the dry floor! He's been suffocated, and his mobile phone lies broken on the floor. As you can't suffocate yourself, it's obvious this is a murder, but the odd thing is that Lu Ren's estimated time of death is just one day earlier, so after the stairs had been flooded. Even supposing Lu Ren had gone inside the storehouse himself before the door was blocked by rain water, how did the murderer then get inside to kill Lu Ren, and get outside again? 

When later another member of the Lu clan is murdered in a locked room and another umbilical cord is found, the voice actress Zhongke, who rents a room in the Lu house, becomes terrified and wants to leave Shanghai and quit her job, but that fortunately for her, she is also personally chosen by the popular manga artist Anzhen to become the main voice actress in the upcoming animated adaptation of his most popular work. Anzhen also happens to work for the police as a sketch artist, and has in the past helped solve crimes. Not wanting to lose her, Anzhen declares he will solve the series of murders in the Lu household to relieve Zhongke of her fears. But will it really be so easy to solve this mystery in Sun Qinwen's Lindongzhiguan (2018)?

Sun Qinwen is a Chinese mystery novelist born in Shanghai, who is known as the Chinese king of the locked room mystery. Originally debuting in 2008 with a short story, he continued specializing in the short story format, publishing with the pen name Jiding. It wouldn't be until 2018 when he would publish his first full-length novel with Lindongzhiguan, under his real name Sun Qinwen. I had heard his name mentioned before in the comments of this blog, so I had been interested in his work for some time, but his work was not available in a language I could read (except for one short story translated to Japanese, but only via Kindle). Fortunately, 2023 finally brought us a Japanese translation of this novel: Gentou no Hitsugi ("Coffins in the Cold Winter") was translated by Ai Kousaku, and marks the first time Sun Qinwen got a major release in Japan. And I sure hope more follows.

One thing I immediately noticed was that this was a very straightforward mystery novel, with "obvious" mysteries in the form of locked room murders. You might think this is a strange thing to notice, considering everything I read for this blog is... mystery. However, the last few years, I have read a handful of mystery novels that were originally written in the Chinese language (usually as Japanese translations), and oddly enough, few of them were actually clasically-structured mystery novels. Part of it might be because I had read a few of the Taiwanese Soji Shimada Mystery Award winners: those novels played more with mysteries that were built on intertwining narratives/consciousness/memories of events. That is a reflection of Shimada Souji's own preference, I suppose, as he acts as the final judge for that award and he himself too soon moved away from classically structured puzzle plot mysteries and started focusing a lot more on memory/narrative-focused mysteries. Lu Qiucha's Yuan Nian Chun Zhi Ji was awesome, but very deeply imbedded in classical Chinese philosophy while Chan Ho-Kei's The Borrowed (13.67) was great too, but could differ in tone greatly depending on the story, so Lindongzhiguan in comparison felt very refreshing as a Chinese mystery that really just did nothing but be a classic puzzle plot mystery, focusing on a clear impossible crime. And it was a good one too!

The first murder, in the semi-basement storehouse, is defnitely the most memorable one. The premise of a room that is sealed by water is really cool. And yes, it is a huge design flaw if you have a storehouse to keep food safe so you can survive in times of (natural) crises, but the stairs can get flooded, blocking the door of said storehouse. But anyway, as normal and essential water is for our usual life, it's probably hard to imagine right away how much water is needed to flood a stairs that go two meters down ground level, and the sheer weight that body of water has. But as the storehouse was found dry when Lu Wenlong discovered his father's body, it is also clear the murderer didn't just open the door and let the stairs flood again after committing the murder. The phone that was broken by throwing it on the floor also indicates the murderer had actually been in the storehouse, so how did they get in, and out? The solution could've been hinted at better I think: basically the detectives find something while looking for something else, and that something is a major clue to solving the water locked room. I like the solution though! It is a bit silly, but the right kind of silly because a locked room murder isn't realistic in the first place, and just visualizing it is really funny. Practically speaking, I am not completely sure how feasible this is, but I don't care, this is the kind of imagination I like to see in mystery fiction!

A second murder occuring inside the house, in a bedroom, is relatively simple. Someone is murdered inside their bedroom, while someone else had been sitting in the hallway in front of that room. After a loud cry, the door is unlocked from the inside, and when the witness goes inside the room, they find the victim lying dead beneath the bed, but sees nobody else in the room. The solution is an interesting variation of a trick I have seen somewhere else, but in a completely different context, and used for a completely different purpose. I quite like the idea here, but at the same time, I don't think it works quite well here: the location of a bedroom simply doesn't seem convincing enough for this trick to work, it'd need a different kind of room to really be convincing, I think. I do wonder if Sun Qinwen came upon the idea by reading that one comic I was thinking of, for I do think this is a great example of how to completely transform a trick. Visually, it reminds of that comic, but it leads to a completely different purpose and execution. Like, I can imagine how reading the comic could've jogged Sun's mind to arrive at this different conclusion. 

The third murder is absolutely horrifying when you realize how it was done. Or perhaps, the murder itself is already horrifying, as it involves a decapitated corpse. Outside in the park, next to the lake, were three suspended cabins with glass floors. They were suspended above the lake, to give the feeling of floating above the freezing water and were originally open for rental when the park was still open to the public: most of them were removed after they closed the park, leaving only three for private use. One of these cabins had been dropped into the freezing lake by burning the metal suspension wires with acid. Inside the cabin however, a decapitated man was found. The cabin itself however had been locked with a padlock by someone else, and she swears the victim had been alive and well when she left him there (as part of their SM play), and that she had the key with her all the time. So how could the murderer have gone inside the cabin to murder the victim, and why did they also drop the cabin into the lake? Some of the logistics of this murder seem a bit iffy, but man, I love the main idea of this murder, and specifically, the reason why the victim ended up without his head. Imagining the scene is just terrifying, and incredibly memorable. Again not really a fan of how Sun Qinwen drops hints regarding the howdunnit however, he has cool ideas for locked room murder tricks, but the way he clewes the path to the solution to them often feel like the clues come out of nowhere, or Anzhen asks the police to check something very specific simply because he just happens to think of it, without a real prompt.

The whodunnit aspect becomes more prominent at the end of the book, and it's a mixed bag. Style-wise, Sun Qinwen does seem to follow the Queen school, with a lot of emphasis on deductions surrounding the actions the murderer took at the crime scene, and comparing those conclusions to the pool of suspects. Some of these conclusions are ones we see fairly often in this style of mysteries, so you might already recognize them as "oh, this is going to be used to identify the murderer" as soon as the element is introduced in the story. Not really a big fan of the ones we see more often, though there was a more interesting at the very end, though I like it more for the idea than the actual execution. I think the idea is really cool, but it needed much more robust clewing to feel fair in hindsight. As I read it now, I can kinda see how Sun Qinwen thought he had indicated that clue enough, but even then, it still doesn't feel convincing enough to feel "fair" in hindsight. I also don't think the identity of the murderer works completely. Ultimately, a lot of the plot also depends on luck, especially of having certain characters act in that particular way at that certain time, and the exact dynamics behind some of the locked room murders (the exact things and order the killer did to accomplish the murder) and while I can wave that away one time, each of these murders had a lot of these aspects, so it feels like the plot is constantly giving the murderer lucky brakes just so the mystery could work, rather than the murderer actually planning out an... executable plan with little room for failure. So there is stuff I like when it comes to how the plotting does allow for Queen-like deductions, but not all of it really works, and the identity of the murderer seems to raise a few more questions than answers when it actually comes to the matter of executability.

The book works quite well as an introduction to Sun Qinwen's works by the way. There are some minor references to his other works (thanks, translator's notes!), and we also learn bits and pieces of Anzhen's own past, and how he might be involved in a bigger mystery himself too, it is a great first work to read. The story that ties into the umbilical cords is also pretty awesome, somewhat reminsicent of Mitsuda Shinzou's work in the way it ties into old family ceromonies and things like that, with a touch of horror, though I think it was very underplayed here. It should have been used far more strongly, as it has so much potential!

So on the whole, I did really like Lindongzhiguan. The locked room mysteries shown in this book have exciting elements, which at least do convey to me why Sun Qinwen would be seen as a major locked room murder specialist in China. While I don't think his whodunnit angle in this book works completely, it too has elements that are inspired, so I do hope to read more his work in the future. A short story collection in particular would be very, very welcome!  

Original Chinese title(s): 沁文 "凛冬之棺"