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』