The Mad Mermaid

It was many and many a year ago, 

 In a kingdom by the sea, 

That a maiden there lived whom you may know 

By the name of Annabel Lee

"Annabel Lee"

I seem to have been experiencing the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon regarding the city of Choufu. I recently heard about it (home of Mizuki Shigeru!), and since I see the place appear in all kinds of novels...

Budding mystery novelist Hikawa Tooru is on his way to the Choufu Welfare Hospital, where his old high school friend Ikuta Shun works as a psychiatrist there. On his way, he has a rather weird encounter with someone who seems to hit on him, or perhaps not, but that was not the strangest happening that day. When he arrives at the hospital, he is surprised to see fire trucks parked around there, and when he asks what's going on, he's told shocking news: his friend has died! A fire occured in one of the free offices, which was assigned to Ikuta that day. Inside that office, a burnt body was found, but its face has been rendered completely unrecognizable. Because Ikuta was supposed to be working that time at that office, and he's not found anywhere, the people at the hospital of course assume it was him who died, but both the police and Hikawa are familiar with tropes of detective fiction, and Hikawa in particular wonders whether the body is really that of his friend. But what if the body is not that of Ikuta, whose body is it, and is Ikuta then involved with this person's death? As he asks Ikuta's co-workers about how Ikuta was as a person, since they didn't see each other much any more after high school, he learns Ikuta was indeed always the person he was at school too, but could that have led to his death? Hikawa is determined to learn the truth in Hikawa Tooru's Ningyo to Minotauros ("The Mermaid and the Minotaur" 2002), which also carries the English title The Border-Line Case.

Ningyo to Minotauros is the fourth novel in the Hikawa Tooru series, written by the same author, following the Ellery Queen model not both in this form, but also by how the character of Hikawa Tooru solves the crimes in these books, with a focus on chains of deductions, physical evidence and the conclusions one can make based on them, and eliminating suspects one by one off a list until the last suspect ends up being the murderer. As in previous novels, the crime takes place in a semi-personal circle, with Hikawa Tooru being friends with the (supposed) victim this time, while in previous novels too, his friends and people he worked with ended up being victims and/or suspects. Story-wise, we have some references to earlier novels (including the second one, which was published by a different publisher than the other books), but there's not much of story development here, as Hikawa is still a struggling novelist at this point, still waiting for his first book to be published.

The book starts rather sudden, with just a few moments before Hikawa arrives at the hospital, only to hear his friend (very probably) died in the fire. Shocked by the loss of his friend, Hikawa goes around the hospital, asking Ikuta's co-workers what kind of person he was at the hospital, as Ikuta was a very unique person at high school, one of the few people Hikawa could really get along with, and he wonders whether or how his personality could've led to his death, as he was the sweetest guy around. During his "investigation" Hikawa gets to know several people around the hospital, from nurses to fellow doctors and even some of Ikuta's patients, and they all seem to agree Ikuta was not the kind of person to get himself murdered. Some of the women Hikawa talks to even seem to fancy his old friend, which hurts as hell, knowing he just died so young. Because of previous cases Hikawa got involved with, he also gets fed some confidential investigation information from a friend with the police, which slowly give Hikawa a better idea of what happened before he arrived there. 

As a puzzle however, Ningyo to Minotauros isn't that interesting. Perhaps it's because the setting is very limited, with few characters who were at the hospital at the time of the fire, meaning there are very few suspects, and most of the book is just devoted to Hikawa interviewing people about where they were at that time, with almost no other story developments after the initial scene of Hikawa arriving at the hospital. After that it's just a lot of talk about Ikuta, and occasionally some talk about alibis of where everybody was before the fire. The idea is of course you've got to check whose alibis are actually confirmed and which are just based on the suspect's own testimony (without supporting proof), but this is something Hikawa Tooru has already done in previous books, and each time it just felt... too bland. This focus on timelines is very technical, but it is also told in a very dry manner, and because there are usually few other developments in the story, it all feels very clinical, with little to keep the reader entertained but hoping the next bit of information will be interesting. Previous novels however were a bit lengthier than Ningyo to Minotauros, which allowed for a bit more variation and more insight in the characters, but that is a bit lacking here, especially as a lot of the book is devoted to drawing a portrait of Ikuta, at the expense of the actual (living) suspects. 

There ultimately isn't like something clever or trick behind the arson in the office, and while there's some meta-talk about the unrecognizable corpse, this does not remain a mystery for long as the police just have the body examined and they arrive at a clear answer relatively soon (before the actual conclusion), so the mystery ultimately really revolves around who committed the murder and set the office on fire, and therefore, the matter really just revolves around alibis. While there are a few clever clues that point to the murderer at the conclusion, leading to an interesting revelation about the whole first scene (the final step in determining the murderer is interesting), I still find this the least engaging book of the series until this point. There's just too little really interesting about the mystery and the way it is solved, and I guess there's some interesting talk about gender studies here (hence the Japanese title), but it's not enough to really keep my attention.

As a fan of Queen-esque mysteries, it's a bit of a shame that while on a technical level, Ningyo to Minotauros certainly follows the model in terms of chains of deduction to identify the murderer, the very brief story is told in a rather dry manner, despite the "personal" angle about Hikawa's friend either being a victim, or otherwise involved in the mysterious death, and while the chain shown here would be okay for a short story, it's not enough to carry a whole novel, at least, not the way it is told. One more of these novels to go!

Original Japanese title(s): 氷川透『人魚とミノタウロス』