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』