The Bear Detectives

Look for the bare necessities, the simple bare necessities
Forget about your worries and your strife

"The Bare Necessities" (Phil Harris, Bruce Reitherman) 

While I am not in direct contact with current members of the Kyoto University Mystery Club, as a former member I do still follow their social media. Personally speaking, my favorite activity at the club were the sessions with whodunnit/guess-the-culprit scenarios: these were short mystery stories written by club members which were clearly divided in a "problem" and "solution" part. The idea is that everyone is first handed the problem part, which traditionally ends with a Challenge to the Reader. The participants get about 45~60 minutes to read the story and (logically!) figure out who the culprit is of the story. If you think you know whodunnit, you can discuss that with the author and they'll tell you whether you got it right or wrong, and after the initial session is over, the author hands out the solution parts to everyone. In a way, the stories do tend to be a bit formulaistic in form, often following Queen-style deduction methods to prove who the culprit is (the culprit knew fact X. Y is proven to not have known fact X, therefore they can't be the killer), but it's exactly the type of mystery story I love, and it was great seeing different members using this form to tell different tales. And while these stories remain "private" for the club generally, I still liked seeing the KUMC social media account briefly tweeting about once in a while about how they did this or that story this week, and how it was received at the session.

Because of that, I still remember how last year, the KUMC account posted how one of their members had written a Danganronpa fanfic as a whodunnit scenario. As someone who enjoys the quirky mystery game series, I was of course intrigued by this concept, as at least in the year I was at the KUMC, people always opted for "original" settings (i.e. not based on existing IPs). But as with most of these stories, I assumed I'd never get a chance to ever read it as I wasn't an active member anymore, and you generally only get to read the story the time it's read at a club session. However, a few weeks ago, I learned the author, Kunou Junki, had actually self-published their fanfic late 2023, selling it at doujin markets. Which was cool, but again, I wasn't really in the position to visit those doujin fairs to pick the booklet up. It was apparently received pretty well though, and Atsukawa Tatsumi even mentioned the story in his ongoing column on mystery fiction, praising it as a whodunnit scenario and as a Danganronpa fanfic. But then.... a few days ago, Kunou announced they were finally selling the fanfic via Booth. So I finally got to read it.

Danganronpa FF - Ame no Kigou, Soshite Happy Birthday ("Danganronpa FF - Rain Code, and Happy Birthday", 2023) is set at the aptly Doujin Academy, where a group of students, each being extremely skilled in a very specific field, are held captured by Monokuma, a cute-looking, but horrifyingly sadistic robotic bear who has set up a game of death among the students. If a student kills a fellow student, a class trial will be held, in which the participants must decide (vote) on a culprit. If the students manage to identify the real culprit, the latter will receive "punishment" (be executed) and the game will continue (more of these rounds) until there are two survivors left, who are free to go. However, if the real culprit manages to elude suspicion at the trial, they are the one will be released, and all the rest of the students will receive "punishment". Monokuma has been feeding the fears and desires of the captured students, making some of them desperate enough to want to kill their fellow students in an attempt to escape Doujin Academy, but fortunately, up until now, the remaining students have been able to correctly identify the real culprit each time, allowing the rest to survive while the real culprits have been executed. At the start of Danganronpa FF, about half of the initial group of students is already dead, either having become a murder victim, or having been executed as a murderer.

The story is told from the POV of Yomikura Suzu, the Ultimate Narrator, who has been acting as a kind of Watson to Aizawa Seishun, the Ultimate Detective, who has been the MVP in the class trials until now: not only has he been solving most of the murders, he is also trying to figure out a way to escape from Monokuma's prison. After the latest execution, Aizawa hopes to set a plan in motion that will allow them to go against Monokuma, and he decides to rope in Yomikura as his accomplice. While the gymnasium is closed off during the night (22:00 - 08:00), all other rooms in the school are accessible, and Aizawa has found out the dressing rooms in the corner of the lecture hall, in front of the passage to the gymnasium, do have cameras, but no microphones, and are also completely soundproofed, so he spends the whole night discussing his plans with Yomikura there, assured Monokuma can't overhear them. When they leave the dressing room the following morning however, they are shocked to find two murdered bodies lying in the lecture hall and that they have been penetrated with a spear. There's also a bloody trail leading from the gymnasium, through the passage, to the lecture hall. A new game of life and death begins, as the remaining students need to figure out who the killer is, or else they themselves will be executed.

Save for the occasional pastiche, I generally don't read fanfics, so I have no real idea of what the standard is, but I sure found Danganronpa FF to be a very effective one. It starts already with the great cover art and the next page introduces you to the various school rules of Doujin Academy, which will be a familiar sight to those who have played the original Danganronpa games: there are the general rules that explain under what conditions a student can escape the school, but also rules about the night time, about ownership of student notebooks and even about how many people a killer may kill (as in: you can't just kill everyone and win the game in that way.). Most of the rules are exactly the same as the games, so it really feels like this is a story set in that world, even if we're now at Doujin Academy. While the characters are original, the characters have concepts that would seem to fit perfectly in the Danganronpa world, from the Ultimate Narrator, to characters like The Ultimate Twin, the Ultimate Ninja and the Ultimate Mountaineer. This story is set after half of the cast has already been wiped out, so it's a bit of a shame some characters are only mentioned briefly by name only, and I'd love to have seen more of them (I wonder of Kunou is planning more stories/"chapters" set in this world?). However, I do have to say that for the most part, you don't really need much prior knowledge of Danganronpa to enjoy this story as a tale of mystery: the essentials are explained adequately (especially with the rule book at the start of the booklet) and ultimately, the mystery really revolves around these specific murders, committed at this specific point in the ongoing story, so no knowledge is necessary about what happened before, or what happens later or about Danganronpa in a meta way. In Danganronpa terms: this is a specific chapter, with its own case.

As a pure whodunnit mystery, I have to say I was surprised how dense this was. It's been a while since I did a 'real run' of a whodunnit scenario, so I'll be the first to admit my deductive senses aren't what they used to be, but Danganronpa FF seems about a full step more complex than the usual KUMC whodunnit scenario, making it unlikely anyone could have gotten all the points within the usual session time (though perhaps they held a longer session than usual). So yeah, this is a really deep whodunnit story following the Queen format, where you can logically deduce who the killer is by identifying criteria the killer must answer to, and then figuring out who of the suspects answers to all of those criteria. Some of these criteria are relatively easy to notice, allowing you to cross off some names early, but others are really cleverly done, and I am the first to admit that I wasn't even close to the answer model provided by the detective at the end. There are quite a few (very devilish!) twists and turns in the long deduction process (which is why I think it would have been difficult for someone to solve all of the story during a normal club session), but for Ellery Queen logic-lovers, this is really great stuff  and I love a lot of the logical processes shown in this story (the initial step alone of the long elimination process is already really good!). What is even more commendable is how cleverly Kunou makes use of the Danganronpa setting. A lot of the things pulled off here in terms of logic only make sense in a Danganronpa-inspired world, with the school rules and Monokuma antics and stuff like that. So I really agree with Atsukawa here about Danganronpa FF is satisfying as both a mystery story, and a Danganronpa fanfic.

The third act of Danganronpa FF wasn't originally part of the scenario presented at the KUMC, as after the initial murder problem and the subsequent solution part, we are treated to what is basically an in-depth essay on the Danganronpa games as mystery games. If you have played the games (or you don't care for spoilers at all), there are some interesting points made (ha, I hadn't expected Kunou to quote Morooka's academic work on shin honkaku mystery and games!), but it is certainly a part that 'takes you out of the story', so your mileage on this closing part may vary. This part has no direct influence on the logical parts of the mystery, so you could choose to ignore it if you wish to do so.

At any rate, I did really enjoy Danganronpa FF - Ame no Kigou, Soshite Happy Birthday, as both a really well-plotted whodunnit scenario as well as a mystery story written with a lot of love for the Danganronpa franchise. Danganronpa FF was apparently also a reason why Kunou was asked to pen an original whodunnit story for the Mystery Carnival event of publisher Seikaisha held last week. I haven't read that story, but I do hope I get to read more of Kunou in the story, as what I have read here really makes me curious to what more they can come up with. Hopefully, we'll see more of them in the future!

Original Japanese title(s):　久納淳生 『ダンガンロンパFF　雨の記号、そしてハッピィバースデイ』