Trouble Island

Tell me, princess 

Now, when did you last let your heart decide? 

I can open your eyes 

Take you wonder by wonder

"A Whole New World"

I do like this cover art a lot...

The members of the art university club Muse travel to the private island of Kiseki Island for a job arranged for them via a former member of the club, who currently works at a museum. Kiseki Island is owned by the Ryuumon Clan, but the island has been sealed off for three decades now. At the time, before World War II, it was the home of "princess" Ryuumon Yukako, the granddaughter of the patriarch of the clan at the time. She had a gigantic manor built on the island called the Chalk Manor, a smaller version of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia and collected all kinds of art. She entertained a lot of men at her home, who all fell for her beauty and all hoped to take her for themselves. However, one night tragedy struck: the princess was found decapitated in the top room of an adjoining outlook tower, where she had gone alone the previous night. However, the only footsteps left in the muddy ground around the tower, were those of her, and the man who discovered her body the following morning (but who has an alibi for the time of death the previous night). A wax doll of Yukako was also found decapitated in the manor. The house and island had been left sealed since, but now the current patriarch of the clan (Yukako's uncle) thinks it's time to open the island again, perhaps turning the manor into a museum. The members of Muse are to stay for a week in the Chalk Manor to try and create a tentative catalogue of the art treasures inside the manor, with proper museum experts coming later based on their findings. They are brought to Kiseki Island on a boat, which will return in a week for the group of 8 students, plus their supervisor, as well as an elderly couple who worked for the Ryuumons and will now take care of food and washing for them during their stay. During their stay, they are shocked to learn that the Ryuumons are actually related to a woman who had been a member of Muse last year, and who was at the center of a shared traumatic experience to all who had been a member at the time. She has passed away now, but left a will addressed to the members of Muse, telling them that the person who will create the best work of art during their stay here on the island, will inherit the island, Chalk Manor and all the art inside! The members are however very reluctant to follow this will, as their memories with the deceased are very dark, so for the time being, they decide to just focus on their work. But then one of the students dies in a freak accident by falling over a balustrade and being crushed by a lamp.Or was it an accident? For the following morning, the decapitated head of the dead student is found in the dining room, having been placed on a plate. Is there a murderer on the island, or is it one of them? And who can solve this mystery in Nikaidou Reito's Kisekjima no Fushigi ("The Wonders of Miracle Island", 1996)?

While the book seems to make it a mystery who the detective will be, I don't think it really works, especially not now in 2024, as almost every write-up on the book will mention it: yes, this is a book in Nikaidou's Mizuno Satoru series, which is immediately obvious because of the title convention. So yeah, we'll see the handsome, but somewhat geeky detective appear here. The Mizuno Satoru series is divided in two eras, with books set in his student days (with books titled [Something] no Fushigi), and books set after he's become a working member of society (with books titled [Location] Magic). In the first book, Karuizawa Magic, we saw Mizuno working as a travel agent, and Kisekjima no Fushigi was released a year later, as the second book in the series, and it seems Nikaidou basically goes back and forth each time between the two eras when publishing the Mizuno books. This is only the second time I read a book about the student Mizuno by the way: Kikounin (Collector) no Fushigi ("The Wonders of Collectors") is one of the very first Nikaidou's I ever read (I mostly remember it from the in-depth Tezuka Osamu discussions), so it's been basically fourteen years since I last read a book about Mizuno set in this era.

I have read a lot of Nikaidou's work, like all of his main Ranko series, and once you start reading his work, you'll quickly notice he's mainly a howdunnit person. He's great influenced by John Dickson Carr, and most of his works feature locked room murders and other impossible crimes. And that's the reason why I got interested in Kisekjima no Fushigi, because it was touted as the work where Nikaidou focuses solely on the whodunnit for a change! The whodunnit form has never been something I associated with him at all, so this surprising twist really made me curious. How would someone best known for creating impossible crimes, tackle a very different kind of mystery writing, with clues pointing to who the culprit is and the logic leading up to that revelation?

In terms of form, Kisekjima no Fushigi follows a very familiar format, being the closed circle situation on an isolated island, and comparisons with And Then There Were None are of course quickly made, and the closed circle with art students and the surprisingly many discussions on various forms of art remind of Ayukawa Tetsuya's Lila-sou Jiken and Maya Yutaka's Natsu to Fuyu no Sonata. As you can guess, the students are getting killed off one by one, and of course, they suspect the killer is one of them, and they start getting more suspicious of each other as the story develops. As a book focusing mostly on the whodunnit, Nikaidou really doesn't do very much with his trademark impossibilities: there's the decapitation on Yukako in the past, but there's not much beyond that, with most murders being possible to most characters (very seldom people have alibis), so you'll have to look out for very different kind of clues if you want to figure out who did it.

But... there's a reason why we associate Nikaidou with the howdunnit and not the whodunnit, and sadly enough, this book tells us enough. As a whodunnit, Kisekjima no Fushigi really isn't remarkable in any way, and seen purely as a whodunnit, there are quite some spots where the logic leading up to the identification of the culprit is playing very lightly with the definition of the term "logical". The book tries to do an Ellery Queen-style "identification of the culprit" segment, but it seldom really works. The logic behind who could've decapitated the first student, whose body had been laid to rest in the cellar after he had been crushed by the lamp, is a prime example of the weird logic: there's one step eliminating two people from the suspect list that make absolutely perfect sense, but then the other characters on the list are eliminated based on just psychological impressions ("they wouldn't do that because they wouldn't"), in order to arrive at the culprit. Other murders often have this too, where there's a moment of a good idea to show someone couldn't have been the murderer, or that something might not have been the way we assumed, but then other moments in the same process are very sloppy, which makes the whole process of elimination feel not convincing, and by the time we arrive at the identity of the culprit, the moment just doesn't feel triumphant at all as you still have all those questions in your mind telling you "Hey, the way that suspect was eliminated... did that actually make any sense?" The result is a whodunnit that... simply has trouble feeling fair to the reader. You can see Nikaidou tried to play with few familiar tropes in classical 'process of elimination'-style deductions, trying to subvert the tropes, but it just falls flat here.

Art plays a surprisingly big role in this story, with the characters name-dropping a lot of art styles and famous artists in various fields as they explore the mansion and discover all kinds of interesting pieces of art, from stained glass windows to wax dolls (9 wax dolls...) to paintings and vases and more. Knowledge of art is also handy for certain parts of the final deduction, though again, you can see Nikaidou isn't really used to doing fair-play whodunnits, as the knowledge necessary to pick up on the clues as Nikaidou intended, isn't provided to the reader before he points it out. While he talks a lot about art throughout the book, the necessary art-related clues are not discussed in detail, making it impossible to guess his intentions until he does his "Tadah!" trick, pretending like you should've caught that before.

It's funny, because there's the impossible crime set three decades ago, about how Yukako got killed and decapitated even though there were no footsteps of the culprit going to/from the tower, and that part alone has at least a more original take than the rest of the whodunnit plot. Apparently, this part alone was originally a short story on its own, starring Ranko, but Nikaidou wasn't content with it, and eventually incorporated it into the backstory for this book. While it's true that on the whole, it's not really that memorable a locked room mystery, and some might even find it utterly insulting, I did kinda like the explanation to how Yukako ended up decapitated, especially the motive behind the actual decapitation. 

As I was reading the book, I did find it odd a lot of the book's setting didn't seem to correspond to the actual story. Like, there's a whole backstory to Kiseki Island, how people used to believe there were Oni living there throwing rocks at people (Kiseki) and how it got renamed to Miracle (Kiseki) later on, and there are still locations on the island named after Oni... but we never visit those places. And then there's the Chalk Manor,  a smaller version of the Sagrada Familia and the book even opens with a super detailed floorplan of the manor... but it's not actually directly relevant to solving the mystery. It makes no difference whether there's a floorplan or not, it at best just makes it slightly easier to visualize the place. It's almost like the setting was originally created for something else, and Nikaidou just ended up using the place for this story. It's a shame because the Chalk Manor is really designed in surprising detail, with all of the rooms accounted for (even though you barely go there in the book, or they are only mentioned in passing), and I was expecting something much more bigger hiding behind it considering how overwhelming the floorplan looks at first.

So I decided to google to see whether anything had been written about my suspicions, and I ended up on on Nikaidou's own website, and it turns out... well, he didn't write about my suspicions, but he did write something else very surprising. Apparently, the version of Kisekijima no Fushigi that got published, is actually the "B version" of the story. The original "A version" featured a different prologue and epilogue, and these framing devices actually led to a very different type of mystery added on top of the whodunnit plot. Nikaidou and the editor apparently couldn't quite make up their mind which version to publish until the very end, and Nikaidou has posted the alternate prologue/epilogue on his site. While the core whodunnit plot doesn't change, I think the added dimension does at least make the book feel a bit more special than it is now, though I can also understand why they went with the simpler B version, as the tone of the book is very different in the A version, which would have worked better as a completely standalone novel. The A version wears some of its inspiration far more prominently on its sleeve, and I do like it for that, so if you have read this book, I do think it's worth to read the A version too if you have the time, just to see how the book was originally conceived.

But while Kisekjima no Fushigi is certainly a very readable book despite its rather lengthy page count, I wouldn't say this is a must-read by any means, especially as it's certainly not written to play up to Nikaidou's strenghts as a mystery writer. As a pure whodunnit, it takes on the correct form, but at no point is it really a showcase of wonderful logic, nor does it manage to really surprise you with the "shocking" revelation of the culprit. 

Original Japanese title(s): 二階堂黎人『奇跡島の不思議』