The Mystery of the Flying Express

“Trains are relentless things, aren't they, Monsieur Poirot? People are murdered and die, but they go on just the same. I am talking nonsense, but you know what I mean."

"The Mystery of the Blue Train"

My version of this book had the first cover, but I had to post that second cover too because it's just too... memorable.

It is a November morning in the lobby of Hotel Soukai in the hot spring town of Wakura on the Noto Peninsula, when a tour guide notices one of her travellers hasn't shown up yet for their upcoming bus trip. She has the front desk call to Mitsubayashi Masase in room 711, but there's no answer, so they go up to wake the woman, who's registered as a housewife living in Yokohama. The bellboy opens the door with the master key, only to find Masae lying dead on the floor. Police investigation soon seems to settle the matter as a suicide: Masae died of consuming cyanide, but the hotel room key was lying besides her in the room, and the master key is kept safe by the manager at all times. There's also a magazine lying on the table, with a passage underlined which seemed to indicate the motive for suicide: a bad marriage. The participants of this tour all arrived on their own at the hotel yesterday, and while most of them had dinner together as arranged by the tour, Masae had chosen to have dinner herself, and it seems like she committed suicide that evening, without ever sleeping in her bed. The police also soon learn she indeed had a very bad marriage with a husband who had been openly cheating on her for years with the same partner and they are very surprised to learn the man won't even travel from Yokohama to Wakura to identify his wife's corpse, stating he's busy with renovating his shop. Instead, Masae's uncle comes, who says he is hardly surprised by Masae's husband's behavior, and he even accuses him of murder, while Masae's half-brother confirms her sister's marriage was dead, though he seems to agree it was a suicide. While the police seems content to wrap things up, news reporter Tanida, head of a kisha club, smells a potential scoop, so he calls his friend Uragami Shinsuke, a freelance reporter and tells him about the death of the beautiful Masae, and how she was found dead in a locked room and how it perhaps could be murder. Uragami takes the job, and together with Miho, a student he helped a while back and has now become a part-timer at the magazine he writes for, the two start digging in the case, but the more they learn, the more impenetrable the locked room, and the alibi of their main suspect is. Is it really suicide, or are they being fooled by an ingenious alibi trick in Tsumura Shuusuke's Noto no Misshitsu - Kanazawa Hatsu 15ji 45pun no Shisha ("The Locked Room in Noto - The Dead Leaving Kanazawa at 15:45", 1992).

Tsumura Shuusuke was a writer who for twenty years long, worked on  The Black Report, a long-running series which fictionalizes real-life incidents. In 1982, he became a novelist with the recommendation of Ayukawa Tetsuya, and two years later, he wrote his first novel starring the freelance investigative journalist Uragami Shinsuke. I had never read any of his works, but he was fairly prolific, writing about four novels each year until he passed away in 2000 and his work has actually been adapted for television too. I myself first heard about this book via Ooyama Seiichirou's Twitter account, who was quite positive about the work. Based on the style of his book titles and Noto no Misshitsu, it's clear he writes in the travel mystery modus: mysteries set in touristic destinations, and often featuring alibi tricks using trains and other modes of transport. 

 

By the way, I do always have a fondness for diagrams in mystery novels that are clearly hand-drawn. Like sure, diagrams drawn on the computer look slick and are often very clear, but there's a charm hand-drawn floorplans have...

Plot-wise, Noto no Misshitsu is pretty much nothing more or less than you'd expect of a mystery novel featuring a train-based alibi trick, and in that sense, it's hardly a surprising book, but I do have to admit I really liked how the book provides a reason why the detective (Uragami) would start to have doubts about what is on the surface a perfect alibi. Early in the book, it is established that if this was a murder, there are three suspects. Masae's father recently passed away and most of his fortune will go to her. The first suspect is Masae's husband, who is cheating on her and owed his father-in-law money, so now his own wife who might be leaving him, the second is Masae's half-brother, who had swindled a company before and supposedly lives a better life now, but still with money borrowed from his father, and Masae's uncle, who also borrowed money. All three of them seem to have pretty solid alibis, so why would the police, without any real cause, suspect their alibis are fake? I remember how in the film edition of Ten to Sen, the way the police detective suddenly decides to suspect someone who just showed he had a perfect alibi was absolutely hilarious because how forced it was (+ the acting was very stilted), but in Noto no Misshitsu, there's a pretty good justification: Uragami is looking for a scoop, so yeah, he hopes Masae was killed in a locked room and the murderer came up with some brilliant alibi trick, because that's what will sell: he has no guarantees it's actually true, but it does give him a reason to try and dig deeper into everyone's stories than the police would. It's a bit silly of course, but it strangely works.

It doesn't take long for Uragami and Miho to start having doubts about the suspect who claimed he was on board the Twilight Express, travelling from Osaka all the way to Sapporo. I usually try to avoid spoiling too much about a book, but the book literally opens with a time schedule for the Twilight Express and a map of Japan showing which stations it stops at, so at this point, even the book itself doesn't pretend like the other two suspects are viable suspects: yes, we are going to focus on that one suspect who was in the Twilight Express. The man was seen during four different times throughout the trip starting late afternoon until the following morning, from when he got on the train, to during dinner and at arrival, so that seems to prove he was there all the time. Meanwhile, Masae was killed in the early evening in Wakura, and while the Twilight Express does go in the general direction of Wakura, it does not pass the town, making it impossible for that suspect on the Twilight Express to kill her. And then there's of course the locked room, which makes it not only impossible for that particular suspect, but for anyone in general.

The locked room mystery by the way, is not something to really write home about: while the precise set-up of how it was done is interesting in terms of Tsumura actually clewed it, the trick itself is rather trite, and one of those ideas you could imagine someone who'd never even heard of a locked room mystery to come up with. So while the "locked room" is part of the book's title, don't expect much of it. 

As a story focusing on someone with a perfect alibi by being inside a gigantic moving steel box however, Noto no Misshitsu is far more interesting. Mind you, the fundamental idea behind how the murderer managed to create this perfect alibi, while at the same time also committing a murder elsewhere, might not be very surprising: once you know this is an alibi story revolving around a train, it's likely you'll have some idea how it was done. But what Tsumura does do extremely well is... covering his tracks. Like, the basic trick is, on paper at least, very simple, but Tsumura then makes sure the trick actually works by adding little tricks on top of that to hide the main alibi trick, and while it wouldn't be special if it had been only one thing, Tsumura does this so extensively, it actually helps make the main alibi trick really feel like an impenetrable wall. Uragami starts attacking the alibi pretty early on in the book, but each time what appears to be a weak point in the plan, turns out to be covered with a line of defense by the murderer, and it slowly, but surely makes you believe perhaps he's really innocent. While I'm not a huge fan of the main, connecting element that allowed the murderer to create so many walls of defense (it demands a lot of moving parts for this plot work!), I do like how thorough Tsumura was with plotting this perfect alibi: you really can't be sure it's over until it's over, for each time the murderer conjures up a new bunny from his hat. In this regard, you can see how Tsumura had been writing these novels for about a decade by then, so it's a very competently constructed puzzle.

I wouldn't call Noto no Misshitsu - Kanazawa Hatsu 15ji 45pun no Shisha a particularly remarkable example of a mystery novel with an alibi trick, but it is competently plotted and a pretty solid read on its own. It's definitely written by someone who has a lot experience penning such novels relying on train time tables, and I do enjoy reading them once in a while, so I might read more by Tsumura in the future too.

Original Japanese title(s): 津村秀介『能登の密室　金沢発１５時５４分の死者』

To Wake the Dead

Feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin' 

And we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive

"Stayin' Alive" (Bee Gees)

It would have been cool if an iron fan had been used as a murder weapon...

Disclosure: I have translated Arisugawa Alice's The Moai Island Puzzle.

A young teacher is strolling down the beach one morning, when she happens to come across a young man who seems a bit... lost. As she talks with him, she learns the man suffers from acute amnesia: he has no idea who he is, and why he is here at the beach. He has no wallet or any form of identification on him, only carrying a beautiful Japanese fan. The woman immediately notifies the hospital and the police, who start looking into the man's origin. The man turns out to be a gifted artist, skilled at drawing portraits, which of course immediately reminds of the Piano Man. Eventually, the police manage to identify the man: he is Takemitsu Souichi, the youngest son of Takemitsu Housen, a famous artist specializing in Japanese paintings. His father has already passed away, leaving his mother and three siblings, as well as his uncle and aunt. However, Souichi left his home over six years ago and has not been in contact with his family since, and therefore his family is just as surprised to learn he finally resurfaced, but with no memories of his past life. Souichi is taken back to his home, The Genbu House, located in Takaragaike, Kyoto, a Japanese manor which is neighbored by his uncle and aunt. His family, who haven't seen him in over six years, are not sure how to react to his amnesia: his sister for example seems to think the "new" Souichi has a far better, more assertive attitude than the Souichi she knew, while his brother misses "his" Souichi, and his mother seems reluctant to push Souichi too much into trying to retrieve his memories. It is during this time, a murder occurs at the house: Morisawa Yukie, an art merchant who has known the family for many years had visited the house and left, but the next morning, her dead body was found in the annex in the garden where Souichi lived. Souichi himself has disappeared too, as has the Japanese fan, but oddly enough, the annex was locked from the inside when the victim was found, and Souichi's keys are also found inside the house. So how did the murderer kill the merchant in a locked annex, and escape, and where is Souichi? Criminologist Himura is asked for assistance by the police, and he of course brings his good friend Arisugawa Alice along, who has been asked by his editor to write the book The Japanese Fan Mystery.... in Arisugawa Alice's Nihon Ougi no Nazo ("The Japanese Fan Mystery", 2024).

The latest entry in the Himura & Alice series (AKA the Writer Alice series) has an interesting title: when Ellery Queen's The Door Between was first announced to serialize in Cosmopolitan, it somehow was reported in Japan that the story would be titled The Japanese Fan Mystery, and it is a title that has always stuck with Japanese mystery fandom, even though it was not true and there is of course no such Ellery Queen novel. This story starts with Alice being asked by his editor to write a story with that title, and gives him a lot of reference materials on fans, and we first see Alice struggle with all kinds of ideas that involve fans, like locked room murder tricks that use fans. And none of them are really good, to be honest, though that's the joke of course. The actual story is connected to fans because Souichi had a beautifully illustrated Japanese fan in his possession when he was found, earning him the John Doe name "Mr Fan" for a while, but it is a bit of a shame the actual object isn't really "used" in the mystery plot.

The mystery thus revolves around a murder in a locked annex, as well as the mystery of Souichi's disappearance, and the question of why he had lost his memories and what he had been up to in the last six years or so since he ran away from home. That said, it should perhaps be noted that unlike the very mystery-plot-focused books in the Student Alice series (disclosure: I translated The Moai Island Puzzle), the Himura and Alice series usually have more room to be a bit more character-introspective,  and that is certainly noticable in this book, where a major portion of the book is dedicated to hearing the thoughts of all the family members and other related people on Souichi, both how he was as a child to how they think they should approach Souichi now he has lost his memories, and their views on how to move forward into the future. Personally, I have to admit I found the book to be moving a bit too slow, but Nihon Ougi no Nazo will probably entertain people who are into the human drama aspect of someone suddenly disappearing for years, and then coming back as a different man. Some parts are great in characterization, while mystery-wise, you could easily just not have them, and still have the mystery work. I know I am slightly more extreme when it comes to 'minimalist puzzle' mystery fiction, so I assume other readers will find these segments far more interesting (and I wouldn't even say I found them dull, just a bit long).

When the story returns its focus to the questions of who committed the murder in the locked annex, and where Souichi has gone off to now, we are treated to some great deduction scenes we have come to expect from Arisugawa. Interestingly enough, Himura himself does say that while he usually goes for truth borne from the logical inferences based on the evidence, this time we have Himura almost turning things around, coming up with a theory that can be supported by the evidence they have, but which ultimately is difficult to stand indepedently as logical proof, because so much of the background of the case is left in the dark. That said, the way Himura logically shows who the murderer is, is really good. Unlike a really cool locked room murder trick, it's kinda hard to explain "clever" lines of deduction and what makes them so good, but I really like the one here: Himura pushes his deductions to answer a question which seems very trivial at first, but the logical implications of this conclusion allow him to determine who the killer is, and it's this jump from what seems like an inconsequential deduction, to suddenly solving the whole case, is great. Nothing beats the one deduction line from The Moai Island Puzzle, of course (that one is... unbeatable perhaps...), but if you like that one, you're sure to like what Arisugawa does in this one too, though the set-up is far simpler (just a disappearance + one murder). Oh, and don't expect too much of the locked room murder, as always in these Queenian stories, it's more the why that is used in clever ways than the actual how. There is a hidden tragedy that is unveiled as Himura explains how and why the murder was committed, and it is here Arisugawa does a great job at connecting the 'story' of Souichi and his family to the core mystery plot, presenting a sad, ironic tale of death that was lurking beneath the surface.

This story was serialized in Mephisto starting in 2023, so some time has passed since the height of the pandemic, and Arisugawa (the author) does bring it up quite a few times as the story progresses, with little comments how not long ago, they couldn't even just go out to eat normally and things like that. It's interesting how references like these really "date" the Himura & Alice series, and like The Simpsons, shows that these characters (and their surroundings) are "timeless", as they haven't really aged since the first book (46 Banme no Misshitsu) and that came out in 1992 and now they survived the pandemic! Interestingly enough, Nihon Ougi no Nazo is actually touted as the book written to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the series (how many modern mystery series do you know that have been running for so long?!), though its serialization started a bit late. But that is also why this book was released in two versions, one regular pocket, as well as a luxurious hardcover.

I happened to have re-read the first novel a while back, so that made the changes in Arisugawa's style in over thirty years rather obvious, but as a whole novel, Nihon Ougi no Nazo is a far more complete work, with a dramatic tale about a young man who lost his memories, and his family coping with that realization, with a locked room murder mystery forcing everyone to readjust once again. The core mystery, while limited in scope, offers Arisugawa to show off once again how great he is at impressive lines of deduction that start out from seemingly innocent clues but then are nurtured into brilliant logical proofs that point beyond any doubt towards one culprit, but it does take a long while to get there.

Original Japanese title(s): 有栖川有栖『日本扇の謎』

Much Ado About Murder

We that are young 
Shall never see so much, nor live so long. 

"King Lear"

These re-releases by Tokuma have really cool art...

Kaji Tatsuo's Lear-Ou Misshitsu ni Shisu ("King Lear Dies in a Locked Room", 1982) is set soon after the second World War in the ancient capital of Kyoto. Takeshi is a student at the prestigious Third High School, a school affiliated to Kyoto University and which would later be absorbed into it (note that under the old school system, this "high school" basically corresponds to the first years of modern-day university). The students of the Third are highly respected around the city, and due to their superior education, the students also tend to... have interesting characters, resulting in them all calling each other by nicknames. Takeshi, known as Bon to his friends, is roommates with Iba, better known as King Lear (because he's a realist -> riarisuto -> ria -> Lear) and they live together in what is technically just a storehouse: the owner is still storing valuable items there, but wants someone to keep an eye on things out of fear for burglars, so he's having these two students live inside the front part of the storehouse, using them as basically live-in guards. Bon has a part-time job as a Kyoto tourist guide, and after showing a visiting elderly couple around town, and being thanked very generously with a meal, he returns to his home, only to find a fellow student, Bart ("Beard" in German), standing in front of the storehouse: he and another friend had visited King Lear earlier, but he forgot his wallet, and has now returned to get it back, but for some reason, King Lear won't open the door for him, which is very odd, as he called to say he was coming. When they peek inside through the keyhole, they see to their great surprise King Lear is lying motionlessly on the floor. Bon finds his own key and opens the door, but it is too late for King Lear: he is dead. Police investigation indicates he had been injected with a poison in his arm, but there were no signs of resistance on his body, suggesting he was caugh off-guard by someone he trusted and furthermore... the door of the storeroom was locked from the inside and the key was found inside Lear's trouser pockets. This however soon results in Bon becoming the main suspect of the murder: excluding the owner of the storehouse, Takeshi had the only other key in possession, and he actually had a bad relation with King Lear as of late, as they were both in love with the same woman (Bart's Schwester (sister)), though it seems like Bon had been the victor. It doesn't help that Takeshi's alibi of showing a couple around Kyoto can't be verified by the police. Bon's friends don't really believe he's the killer though, so his friends, including people like Reich (rich), Magen (stomach) and Razor start investigating the case too, but are they truly ready for that, for deep down, they do know it is likely the murderer is a person in their circle of friends...

If people thought the characters in The Decagon House Murders were obnoxious by using nicknames like Ellery and Carr: I assure you, the reverse weaboos in this novel who call each other Bart and Magen and each other's sisters Schwester are worse...

Kaji Tatsuo (1928-1990) was a mystery author who debuted in the fifties and kept on writing until he passed away in 1990. Last year, I discussed Kiyosato Kougen Satsujin Bessou ("The Murder Villa in the Kiyosato Plateau"), a novel which managed to surprise me in a way I really hadn't expected, so I knew I would be reading more of his work, something made easier because publisher Tokuma has been re-releasing some of his novels the last few years, and they also happen to feature very nice cover and inner art!

My interest in this book at first lay in the fact it was set around students of the Third High School, so basically Kyoto University: I myself studied for a year at that university, and there are actually still remnants of the Third High School to be found around the main Yoshida Campus. However, for me that was just a 'Huh, that sounds interesting for me personally' thing, but once I started reading this book, I was pleasantly surprised by the way Kaji really focused on the lives of the students. This is for a large part also a story of growth, a story about students who are not quite adult yet and perhaps think too much of themselves as students of Third, but who have lived through a war and now try to build a future for themselves by proving themselves at this school, not only to the outside world, but especially to themselves and their direct peers. This results in some really colorful characters who are full of pride, but who do really show you glimpses into the lives of the respected elite students of Third in Kyoto and it's the interactions between these characters that really drive the plot, as ultimately, this is best read as a tale of mystery focusing on motive, rather than the locked room of the title.

Though I have to say: I do really like the locked room mystery of this novel. The book is split in two sections, one set immediately after the murder on King Lear. Bon (Takeshi) is more-or-less accused of the murder by the police, while his friends, led by Razor (who is one year above the rest) tries to prove Bon is innocent, leading into them coming up with all kinds of potential theories about how the room could've been locked from the inside, and who the murderer could be. At the same time, we get (a lot) of flashbacks to the time leading up to the murder, and we learn how both King Lear and Bon first learn about Bart's Schwester by coming across her photograph, and then the two of them both trying to woe her by visiting her home, under the pretense of  wanting to visit Bart during the holidays. Yes, this is pretty stalkery behavior. The roommates become romantic rivals, which according to the police is a motive for the murder, even though it was Bon who managed to win the sister over, and King Lear who was, for the moment, the loser in the love war (meaning King Lear had a motive to kill Bon, not the other way around). Eventually, a kind of conclusion is reached which points to someone else, but true answers are never obtained and the truth behind King Lear's death remained vague.

The second part of the book is set many decades afterwards, when Bon's son hears about the ordeal his father lived through in the past and he starts to get an idea of how King Lear could've been killed by someone inside a locked room. This part is interesting, because we see Bon in a very different role, and we hear what happened to everyone after the murder: some managed to accomplish their life goals, some ended up completely different and there's a distinct, sentimental tone here, as for some characters, you really wish things would have ended differently.

The locked room murder is thus more like the driving force that changed everyone's lives in this young adult novel, though as I said, on a technical level, the locked room mystery is pretty good. I love how it basically reversed a certain dynamic often seen in simpler locked room mysteries to create something original, and while the concept on its own is very simple, it works great here, especially in this specific setting (old building in Kyoto soon after the war). However, what is even more memorable is definitely the motive behind the murder. While I am not a big fan of some of the workings behind the murder (too many moving parts), the motive is one that really fits these characters attending Third. I wouldn't call the motive completely original in all aspects (it isn't, and it's likely you'll have come across variants of the same idea in other mystery novels), but it is incredibly well-integrated in this tale of mystery, growth, dreams of the future and wanting to escape the shadow of the war, and because of that, Lear-Ou Misshitsu ni Shisu feels like a very complete and balanced novel.

So I was once again very pleasantly surprised by Kaji Tatsuo. Lear-Ou Misshitsu ni Shisu is pretty short, but a very well-balanced mystery novel that will even appeal to non-mystery readers. The setting is original, and Kaji really makes fully use of it, and he has a rather colorful cast of characters to keep the reader entertained too. I am certainly going to read more of him in the future too.

Original Japanese title(s): 梶龍雄『リア王密室に死す』

A Model Murder

"Well, I don't like it! I don't like the whole idea being associated with Wham, Pow and Zap! It just isn't me!"

"The Comic Book Crusader"

Manga adaptations of mystery novels have a long history: in fact, the first third or so of Fukui Kenta's seminal work Honkaku Mystery Manga Zemi ("Honkaku Mystery Comics Seminar", 2018) is solely dedicated to discussing manga adaptations of mystery fiction from both Japan and outside of Japan. While I generally discuss original mystery manga on my blog, I have discussed a few of these adaptations, like  Meitantei Thinking Machine: Kanzen Datsugoku ("The Great Detective The Thinking Machine: The Perfect Escape"), an adaptation by Kuwata Jirou (of Bat-Manga fame!) of "The Thinking Machine" short story The Problem of Cell 13 by Jacques Futrelle and also Kagemaru Jouya's adaptation of Yokomizo Seishi's Yatsu Haka Mura ("The Village of Eight Graves"), a comic adaptation so important it actually made detective Kindaichi Kousuke a household name in Japanese popular culture. Today I want to briefly discuss three other manga adaptations of existing mystery stories, and look at the way they adapt the source material in very different ways.

First up is the manga Ellery Queen no Bouken ("The Adventures of Ellery Queen") by JET, a manga artist who has worked on many adaptations of mystery fiction like a lot of Kindaichi Kousuke novels as well as Sherlock Holmes and Lupin. This manga originally ran between 1994 and 1995 in the magazine Mystery DX and adapts four stories from the same-titled short story collection by Ellery Queen: The Two-Headed Dog, The Bearded Lady, The African Traveller and The Seven Black Cats. It's the art style that might attract attention first: ever seen such a broad-shouldered Ellery? The way panels are laid-out on the page also make it immediately clear JET mainly draws shojo (girls) manga, as it especially reminds me of the 70s shojo manga artists. Anyway, the four stories adapted by JET are not really my favorites from The Adventures of Ellery Queen, so I was a bit surprised by the selection, but I do have to say JET does a good job at doing fairly straight adaptations. Some stories feel a bit drawn out: each story is nearly 100 pages long, but I don't think all of them need all of that space, but on the whole, JET manages to capture all the important points of each story in a good, captivating manner. 

The two animal-themed stories, The Two-Headed Dog and The Seven Black Cats benefit a lot from the horror-style story-telling: The Two-Headed Dog deals with sightings of a ghostly dog near a Cape Cod inn Ellery ends up in, while The Seven Black Cats has Ellery investigating the mystery of an elderly bed-ridden woman who supposedly hates cats, but buys the same kind of black cat every week from the same pet shop. To be honest, both stories are okay mystery stories, but I have always felt they are more like Sherlock Holmes or even Father Brown stories, rather than stories that play to Queen's strengths. The Bearded Lady on the other hand I think is one of the quintessential Queen short stories, dealing with the weird dying message of someone painting a beard over the face of a woman in a painting, The mystery of The African Traveller is in a way a very Ellery Queen-esque story: Ellery teaches a criminology course to a select group of students of three, and he takes them to a live crime scene, giving them the assignment to figure out who did it, with them all going their seperate way to develop their own theories. Of course, they all arrive at different solutions (that being the Queen trope), showing off Queen's plotting skills to build theories based on physical evidence: while this part is interesting, it's the actual murder itself, and the solutions arrived at that are not really interesting on their own. As said, the manga adaptations do not differ greatly from their source stories, and thus this manga didn't do much to change my mind.

I've got the bunko pocket edition of this manga by the way. There is also a two-volume release as well as as a convenience store manga release, which is actually how I first learned about this manga. Convenience stores sometimes have cheap reprints of older manga that are specifically only sold in convenience stores, printed on a large format and on cheap paper like with manga magazines. I spotted the manga while on a trip with the Kyoto University Mystery Club, but didn't buy it then because it wasn't convenient for me to drag a big magazine with me at the time... but the problem with convenience store manga is that they disappear very quickly from the distribution system and unlike normal manga, they usually don't really appear in the used market. But I am glad I got the bunko version, as this is printed on better paper and it even has a color splash page!

And now we go from a faithful adaptation, to not-so faithful adaptations: Tsunoda Jirou, a mangaka best known for his occult-horror manga like Kyoufu Shimbun (Newspaper of Horrors) adapted three of Yokomizo Seishi's Kindaichi Kousuke novels, being Yatsu Haka Mura ("Village of Eight Graves"), Inugamike no Ichizoku ("The Inugami Clan") and Akuma no Temariuta ("The Devil's Handball Song", released in English as The Little Sparrow Murders"). The original plan was actually to release seven of these adaptations by Tsunoda, but plans were changed, so we only have three. And I only read the latter two, as I haven't found the Yatsu Haka Mura adaptation yet. I first learned about these adaptations a while ago, when I came across the original releases of these manga in a used book market... only they were selling for a price I couldn't justify to myself considering their state: with the paper all yellowed and with those rusty stains. Fortunately, I managed to find good bunko versions of Inugamike no Ichizoku and Akuma no Temariuta relatively soon afterwards. However, I was hugely surprised once I actually started reading them. And that was not only because the stories were set in contemporary times (the seventies), nor the fact that Kindaichi didn't look at all like he's described in the book (more like a bookish professor here).

No, it was because Tsunoda surprisingly injected a lot of his occult-horror mangaka DNA in these adaptations, creating very original takes on these Yokomizo classics and making them feel that more creepy.  Yet, the core plots remain intact. So yes, Inugamike no Ichizoku is about the awful will left by Inugami Sahei, which leaves his immense fortune to Tamayo, the granddaughter of a family friend, on the condition she marries one of his three grandsons. And if they all die, she will be free to choose whoever she wants to marry. Because this story is now set in the seventies however, an interesting conundrum is created: in the book, the oldest grandson, Sukekiyo, went missing during World War II and the will can't be read until he is found. When he is eventually found, it turns out Sukekiyo was greatly wounded in his face, forcing him to wear a mask (which creates doubts about his true identity). Because this story is set so long after World War II, Tsunoda created a completely different reason for Sukekiyo to be disappear and have his face damaged, and it's a pretty brilliant take: Tsunoda creates a completely new backstory for the Inugami clan, that ties them to Inugami (dog spirit) cults: it is said that the Inugami clan controls dog spirits, which allowed them to amass a fortune, but sometimes, this backfires and one of them becomes possessed by a dog spirit. The only way to get a dog spirit out of the possessed is by driving it away by fire, even if it means killing the possessed person... and that's what happened to Sukekiyo: he was thought to have been posssessed, and while torturing the poor guy, the building caught fire, leading to his disappearance. The way this gives meaning to the Inugami name, and adds a creepy cult backstory using occult powers really makes this feel like a Tsunoda manga and it strangely really fits in this story. Most of the story unfolds similar to the original novel, though the climax is much more... thrilling and it actually makes Tamayo a very powerful character in this manga.

But things really become crazy in Tsunoda's adaptation of Akuma no Temariuta. Yes, Kindaichi still goes to remote Onikoube Village and he's still involved in investigating an old murder case where a swindler err... swindled a good deal of the villlage nearly two decades ago, but this time, the murders aren't committed according to a centuries-old song that one sings while playing a ball, no, this time the murders are based... on the lyrics of a kind of metal band of three women who perform topless. Yep, the titular "Devil's Ball Song" is their hit song, and the three singers actually all hail from Onikoube Village. But while they're back visiting their village, they get killed one after another, following the lyrics of their hit song... This is a very original take on the story: the original novel is about family feuds in small isolated villages, a single singer who managed to escape the village and make a huge career and people being killed after the lyrics of a song long forgotten, but here we have the three potential victims all being fairly friendly to each other, as they form a band together (and I have to repeat: they perform topless and I have no idea why). And yet... the major plot points of the book remain the same: like in the book, there was a swindler in the village many years ago, but here, the swindler was a person in the entertainment (singing) industry, tying back to the band. The three girls may not be presented as members of the "prominent" families of the village, they have created their own importance by being a nationwide popular band. Tsunoda is really good at keeping the actual mystery parts completely intact, even if he changes the looks and feel of the story a lot: in this case the imagery of the band, with creepy dolls and stuff, really suits his occult-horror style. The lyrics of the song are completely original by the way, and they lead to even creepier deaths in the manga than in the book.

Anyway, this was a brief look in manga that took very different approaches to adapting the source material. Personally, I don't think Ellery Queen no Bouken is really worth the trouble reading, unless you are 1) simply interested in all things Queen related and/or 2) interested in seeing a rather attractive Ellery in sometimes funny scenes like kabe-donning his old man. The Tsunoda Jirou adaptations of the Yokomizo Seishi novels on the other hand transform so much about the original work, while keeping the core mystery plots intact, I do feel they are worth a read: they are truly adaptations of those novels, by Tsunoda Jirou, and nobody else could've adapted them in this manner. He really managed to rewrite the stories in a way that respected the original novel, while also playing on his own strengths, resulting in very unique adaptations.

Original Japanese title(s): JET『エラリークイーンの冒険』, つのだじろう『犬神家の一族』,『悪魔の手毬歌』

The Man in the Mirror

"Mirror, mirror on the wall..."

"Snow White"

For a change not writing a review of this series months (years) after reading it...

The Mirror House located in the outskirts of Kamakura belongs to Kurozawa Matsutarou, a wealthy man who has many mistresses. The manor was once the home of the twins Kirika and Sumika and their mother, who was Matsutarou's mistress, but after her death, the house was extended with an identical annex, like a mirror and no less than 48 mirrors of varying sizes were installed in both buildings, giving the building its name. When the twins were still young however, Kirika wanted to end her own life and since then, Sumika has learned to live without her sister, especially as Matsutarou kept telling her to forget about Kirika and live her own life. Matsutarou is not a loving father by any means however, and his interest in his daughters is purely political. While he lets his daughters live with their mothers while young, he has them all moved to the Mirror House when they reach a certain age, as he wishes to marry them off in political marriages, and their stay in the Mirror House is merely temporary until Matsutarou has found the perfect partner for them, regardless of their own life wishes. This has already led to tragedy one time, as last year, one of his daughters chose death rather than being forced such a life. At the moment, Sumika is joined by four of her half-sisters: Mahiru, Kurara, Sachiko and Ruri, as well as five servants. One of them is Shizuka, the half-Russian Mary Poppins-esque personal maid to Sumika who occasionally has a foul (Russian) mouth. Matsutarou only visits his daughters once a year to check up on them and to announce their upcoming marriages, but this year, his visit coincides with a heavy storm, which means three of the usual servants are stuck in town, leaving only Matsutarou, his daughters and two servants in the house. At dinner however, lightning strikes, illuminating one of the mirrors he has given to each of his daughters, and invisible lettering written on one of the mirrors is reflected on the wall, saying "Death". This angers Matsutarou and he retreats for the night, but that night, he is found murdered in one of the mirror rooms, being stabbed in the back, but for some reason he was lying on the floor with his feet towards a mirror and his arms thrown in front of him, almost as if he was trying to flee from a murderer inside the mirror.... With no means to notify the police, can the people in the manor be truly certain no more murders will occur in Tsukihara Wataru's Kagamiyakata no Satsujin ("The Murders in the Mirror House" 2020)?

Spoilers: more people die.

Kagamiyakata no Satsujin is the fourth entry in this series starring the pro-active maid Shizuka who each time works at a different place as a personal maid for young girls. The books sometimes namedrop the places/families she worked for earlier, but the books can all be read indepedently and in any order. They are all fairly formulaistic too: each book is set in the Meiji period, and set inside an isolated house with serial murders happening, and Shizuka's always there to eventually solve the case, but what makes this series memorable, despite some hick-ups, is how Shizuka is used: each time she's confronted with a killer, she not only detects, but tries to find ways to proactively stop the killer by interfering with their patterns and that leads to interesting twist on familiar tropes in mystery, for example when in an earlier novel, Shizuka notices the murders are modelled after a set of paintings, so she proposes to just destroy all the paintings to upset the killer's plans. It's these interactions with mystery tropes that make these books fun to read.

In theory, this book has interesting elements: there's a house with two mirrored sections, there are 48 different mirrors spread across the house, the first victim is seemingly killed by his own mirror image in a mirror and threatening messages are written on mirrors to announce the coming deaths. A lot of it is tropey, but that is the whole focus of this series so it never feels too reliant on tropes. However, of the four novels I have read until now, I do think this entry was by far the weakest.

The main trope of this book is the "murder announcement": the killer writes messages alluding to deaths on mirrors before committing the murders and sure, that's a trope, but... Shizuka doesn't really manage to do something really original with this, she doesn't come up with some outrageous plan to turn this "habit" around and have it backfire on the killer, or propose anything unexpected to counter this. Because of this lack of interplay with the trope at hand, Shizuka feels far more passive than in the other books. Because these books tend to be very short and rather light, Shizuka's actions usually felt as one of the major parts of the mystery, and having this aspect of the tale weakened hurts the overall experience a lot. "Announcing a murder" is just less exciting than a murderer who decapitates people, or tropes like locked rooms or mitate... While a large part of the story does ultimately revolve around the question why the murderer would chose to utilize this device of announcing their murders, the answer arrived it isn't that exciting, and gives us a rather mundane explanation you might have seen mentioned in other novels that don't even explicitly try to play with tropes.

This pattern also carries over to the whole theme of mirrors in this book. Like, cool, we have a building that is mirrored with an annex, and they feature over 40 mirrors installed here and there... but we never get a floorplan of the building, so the whole concept feels criminally underdeveloped! I wanted to see cool clever things with mirrors which become clear once you start drawing lines in the floorplans, not just vague descriptions of where mirrors are placed! The way the mirrors are used for the murders in this book is far from surprising, and also not really well-hinted, so it feels underwhelming. There is a neat twist regarding the theme of mirrors halfway through the book, but the implications it has for the murders feel a bit forced, and ultimately, I feel this is the book in this series that would've benefitted of more page real estate: the book has many ideas that could've been worked out in more detail, but this particular label releases light novels of a certain length (relatively short) and thus the reveal feels not as satisfying as it could've been, as I think more pages to set-up the twist more with more foreshadowing would have made it a bit more impressive.

Kagamiyakata no Satsujin is thus my least favorite of the Shizuka novels until now. It doesn't help the major trope it focuses on doesn't allow for that much original plays, but the murders themselves are also a bit disappointing, with some underdeveloped tricks and while there's one big twist halfway I do like as a concept, that too should have been given more build-up space for maximum effect. At the moment, there's one more volume, so I'll probably read that one too, but I might wait a bit, because this one was quite disappointing.

Original Japanese title(s): 月原渉『鏡館の殺人』

The World's End

"We cannot conceive of a life other than this one - of a life after death. We can visualize only a continuation of what we know. We have no real belief in a God."
"Death Comes as the End"

It's just a feeling, but I have a suspicion a majority of posts on snow-themed mystery stories on this blog are actually published in the warmer half of the year...

As I announced in my review of The Werewolf Murder Case in volumes 14~16 of Kindaichi 37-sai no Jikenbo ("The Case Files of Kindaichi, Age 37"), the plan was to wait until a full story was released before I'd do another review of this series within the Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo franchise, where we follow a now middle-aged Kindaichi Hajime as he gets involved in murder cases despite not wanting to solve mysteries anymore. But then it was announced this series would wrap up last year. So I figured, as stories in this series usually carrying over across multiple volumes, I might as well just wait until the last volume is released to do a review of the remaining volumes. So volume 18 of Kindaichi 37-sai no Jikenbo was released earlier this year... and I completely forgot to get the volume. So that explains why this review is coming now so late after its release. Anyway, volume 16 first starts with the very last chapter of The Werewolf Murder Case, where we learn about the motive for the murders in that case (yes, it's revenge, it's always revenge), but then it's back to business as Hajime's assigned to a new project for his event-organizing company: Hijiri Island, a mountainous island in Hokkaido wants to drive its economic activity by profiling itself as the perfect resort for backcountry/off-piste skiing. Hajime and his subordinate Marin are to check out the place and will be staying in a lodge high up in the mountains, a place only reachable via helicopter. They will be joined not only by someone from the municipality, but also by the backcountry ski team of the skiing club of the Imperial Women's University, a prestigious club whose members often appear in the World Cups. The team always trains here, so they know the grounds well, so Hajime and Marin will be questioning the young women about the mountains in order to develop the place as a resort. Everyone is to stay in a newly built lodge, but the evening they arrive, they find someone has tampered with the heating, and it's slowly starting to become freezing cold inside. 

Fortunately, the old lodge is 500 meters away from the new lodge, and everything should still work there, so they decide to move to the old lodge: the men go first to make sure heating there does work and to carry the kerosene, while the women will follow later with the food supplies. The men have just arrived at the old lodge and starting to prepare for their stay here, when the women in the new lodge use a walkie talkie to contact the men: one of the skiers has gone missing, and there's blood in the hallway. Two of them return to the new lodge, while Hajime and the municipal official stay in the new lodge, but then they discover the body of the missing skier: her head has been cut off, and placed on her lap! When everyone has moved to the new lodge, they learn that their radio is not working and the skis have gone missing, making it impossible to contact with the outside world nor to go down the mountains themselves. By discussing the case, they discover that while nobody has an actual alibi for the murder, as they don't know what time exactly the victim was killed, everyone does have a soft alibi: nobody could've carried the body from the new lodge to the old lodge unseen: the round-trip would've taken quite some time, but nobody was gone for long times/went unseen between the time the victim was last seen alive and the time the body was found. Soon one of the women suggests it's the headless skier: two years ago, a team of skiers got stuck on the mountains when the weather suddenly changed for the worse. Stuck in the cold and with no way to call for help, the team's leader volunteered to ski down the mountain alone to get help. However, after she left, a rescue helicopter found the remaining team members, but the leader never made it off the mountain alive. Only her cut-off head was later discovered: someone had strung piano wire between trees, so when the leader was hurrying down the mountain to get help...  Some say a headless skier is now haunting the mountains, but is this ghost also responsible for the murder, or is this the work of a living and breathing human?

You know, The Headless Skier Murder Case, which spans volumes 16 and 17, has a funny setting. Closed circle settings in this series are often either on an island or somewhere in the mountains... so why not set the story on a mountain, on an island, writer Amagi must've thought. But if this fusion of ideas sounds like he was trying to cook something grand, I'll have to disappoint you, as The Headless Skier Murder Case is a surprisingly simple case, basically revolving around one single trick. The mystery revolves around the fact nobody is ever gone long enough to allow them to carry a dead body and their head to the other lodge and return, which thus gives them all an alibi. This mystery is repeated later, as another dead body is found, this time at the new lodge while everyone was staying in the old lodge. The problem is that it is really just this mystery that drives this story, and the solution is not only a concept we have definitely seen previously in this series, in those stories we ususally get more than just this one idea, so there they can at least benefit from being presented as more difficult puzzles as they are interwoven with other ideas. Here, the problem is presented so bluntly it's nearly impossible to not guess what's going on. The big surprise is actually when the murderer is revealed and they start explaining their motive (yes, it's revenge, it's always revenge), as we learn how this person had been directed by a certain character to commit these murders: while the identity of this person won't be revealed until the next story, I *kinda* suspected who it was, though I thought it would be cheap, and then it turned out it was really that person and now I have no idea how this is going to develop in future series. 

The final volume of this series, The Sealed Space in the Sky Murder Case, starts with Hajime confronting his old nemesis The Puppeteer from Hell, a "crime consultant"-esque character who helps people bent on revenge by supplying them with perfect crime plans. While the Puppeteer has been in prison all this while, Hajime knows the Puppeteer has disciples: they call themselves the Olympian Gods, with the Puppeteer as Zeus the omni-god and Hajime has already encountered and captured a few of them. But after a conversation with the Puppeteer and a hint from his cousin Fumi, Hajime realizes one of the Olympian Gods, Hephaestus, is actually a person near him: he deduces Hephaestus is someone at his work, and that Hephaestus, with the help of another inside person at the company, has been keeping tabs on Hajime, which is why all these murder cases have been happening to Hajime each time he's gone on a business trip. Hajime has a pretty good idea of who Hephaestus's accomplice in the company must be, but the moment he decided to keep tabs on her, she ends up dead: ostensibly via suicide by throwing herself off the rooftop of the company building. She had borrowed the key to the rooftop to water the plants there, and as the key was found in her pocket, the rooftop door was indeed closed/locked and the guard kept the spare key safe, it looks like a genuine suicide, but Hajime knows better: Hephaestus must have killed their accomplice to silence her, and used a "sealed space in the sky" murder trick to challenge Hajime himself. But how could Hephaestus left the rooftop after the murder, as the door to the rooftop was locked (with the victim down below in possession of the key) and no way to reach the surrounding buildings? Hajime knows this is his chance to nab Hephaestus, and narrows the pool of suspects to a handful, but the list includes not only his direct superior, but even his faithful subordinate Marin...

For a story that is mostly about very quickly wrapping things up and features a very simple trick for its main mystery, I have to admit I liked it better than I had initially expected. A lot of the initial chapters is about trying to bring back the whole story about the Olympians back to the foreground again, as it's not been a priority plot element throughout, usually only being mentioned at the end of a case if the murderer happened to be one of the Gods and forgotten again, but here we get a crash-course on the related previous events and a rather cool deduction by Hajime about who he thinks Hephaestus' accomplice is and why. This is the type of hinting and plotting you very often see in Conan, using its serialized format to plant clues within various stories, across a longer period of time, but Kindaichi basically never uses this, with far more compartmentalized storytelling (and very loosely connected stories), so it's cool to see it utilized here. The 'Sealed Space in the Sky" mystery is relatively simple, with rudimentary visual clues and like the previous story in essence a one-trick-pony, but I do like that the focus in fact does not even lie on the howdunnit, but the whodunnit, as we see Hajime then utilize the howdunnit to cross off the suspects of the list, using Queenian logic to identify Hephaestus. This series more often uses a straightforward way to identify the killer (X making certain utterances/doing certain things/in possession of certain things), so seeing a Queenian chain, even if very short, is pretty cool.  The identity of Hephaestus is perhaps not as interesting as the direct aftermath, as the gameboard is reset to lead into the next series. We do get a brief explanation why Hajime swore off solving mysteries long ago, but we don't get the details, but then it's basically off to the next series. And very literally too, as this volume also included the first chapter of the new series: Kindaichi Papa no Jikenbo ("The Case Files of Dad Kindaichi"), in which Hajime has been a father for a few years while running his own detective agency.  Hajime's new client instructs him to go a certain place on a certain date, and because Hajime is a very responsible father and definitely knows what's going to happen whenever he goes to a remote place, he decides to take his son with him and the two find themselves arriving at an old decrepit hotel that's absolutely safe and where no murders will happen...

Anyway, that wraps up Kindaichi 37-sai no Jikenbo. I have to admit, the initial shock factor of seeing a suddenly aged Hajime quickly waned after the realization that storywise, these cases weren't that different from the usual affairs save for a few rare exceptions like stories with a more urban setting. Some ideas never really come to full fruition I think, but as a limited series, it at least had more direction than the 20th Anniversary series or 30th Anniversary series. The last story at least does a lot to make it feel more like a series on its own, so that helps, though I can't feel super excited about the deal of the Olympian Gods basically halting midway, and I'm still not sure what to think about that one character turning out to be one of the Gods too... I guess I'll have to keep on reading the new series to see if Amagi decides to actually end some of these plotlines anytime soon (I mean, I know Conan is long, but at least it has arcs that actually start and end).

Original Japanese title(s): 天樹征丸（原）、さとうふみや（画）『金田一37歳の事件簿』第16~18巻

Trapped in Paradise

"Thou shalt not kill"

Exodus 20:1–17 (King James Version)

I think the first time I encountered the "person who always tells the truth/person who always lies" riddle was in a Super Mario Choose Your Own Adventure book...

Kyouko, Mizuki and Marii all attend the prestigious St. Arisugawa Girls' Academy, a missionary school run by the Vatican in Japan. Technically, the school isn't even located in Japan, for the three inter-connected artificial islands near Aichi are part of the Vatican grounds and there's even a passport check whenever people enter and leave the grounds. The school of course provides excellent schooling and many prominent families want to send their daughters to the place, but St. Arisugawa Girls' Academy is also a unique schooling situation due to its inclusion of detection in its curriculum. The detective is a protected position in today's society, requiring certain qualifications. St. Arisugawa Girls' Academy is the only place that allows students to study the art of detection at the secondary school level before even entering university. Each spring, the St. Arisugawa Girls' Academy always organizes a special excursion for all students, that mixes up students in all years: two first-years, two second-years and two three-years. Each group of six is then sent to a different location where they have to solve a crime. In reality, the crimes they all encounter are role-played by enormous groups of actors and other people in on the game (the Vatican has money). Each group also won't know what's coming until they are confronted with their specific case, as they only get basic instructions to go to their initial start location. While Kyouko, Mizuki and Marii all participated last year too as first-year students, this year they find all three of them in one group, despite that being very unusual as it's usually two students per year: they are also joined by two first-years and two third-years (as usual). The group are given instructions to board a particular chartered bus and find they're travelling through Aichi Prefecture, where Mizuki also hails from (her knowledge of the local dialect helps them actually communicate with the people in the countryside who speak very thick dialect). As they drive through the mountains however, their driver suddenly dies. They initially think this is part of their excursion, having to "solve the murder of their driver", but it turns he's actually dead, and even their school wouldn't arrange for something like that. The girls however decide to walk the remainder to their destination, as they'll fail their excursion if they don't make it in time. On the way however, they all pass out, and by the time the last one realizes they have been drugged, it's too late.

When the girls wake up, they find themselves in a curious place. They are located in what might be best described as a gigantic donut:there's a huge lake, with a strip of land with house and other buildings surrounding the lake, but beyond the strip of land are just gigantic walls: they're in an open spot that's completely surrounded by unclimbable mountains. The girls are also accosted by men in military uniforms, who accuse them of being spies of the empire. After a while, Mizuki manages to puzzle things together: they are in Utsuhaka Village, a small community that lives deep in this open spot in the mountains, and the people here don't know World War II has ended. The people here had isolated themselves from the outside world during the war, and have been living here since in relative peace, but without any knowledge of the outside world. The only exit out of this place was a tunnel through the mountains, but decades ago the military blew the tunnel up, locking everyone inside. Now there's a small unit of soldiers (some are children of the original soldiers) stationed at the former entrance of the tunnel, but unfortunately for the students, it also happens that some of those soldiers have been murdered. As the only outsiders here, it's perhaps only natural the girls are accused of the murder, but as they try to prove their innocence, the girls also realize the people in this village are... devout Catholic Christians: the people here were originally hidden Christians who lived here precisely out of fear of persecution. The girls manage to prove they're also Christians and are saved by Father Lucas. The girls can't explain how they arrived here, as they just passed out and then woke up here, but Lucas can't help them out of this place: nobody has left this place in decades, so all they can do is live out their lives here in service of the community. The girls learn the village is divided in four sections, corresponding to the cardinal directions, each part housing a different wing of the authorities of the village (church, military, doctor, firefighters etc.). The girls also learn everyone in the village has to be a devout Christian, as nobody can afford to be ostracized by the rest of the village (nobody can leave the village, so ostracization means certain death as you can't get by all on your own). And that makes the murder on the soldiers... impossible, because the ten commandments forbid anyone from commiting a murder. The police officer also asked everyone whether they committed the murder, to which everyone in the village said no: nobody can lie due to the commandments (bear false witness), which means nobody committed the murder. However, during their stay in the village, more people are killed, so it's clear somebody's going against the ten commandments, but who? That is the great mystery in Furuno Mahoro's Gururiyoza Satsujin Jiken ("The Gluriyosa Murder Case" 2013).

Gluriyosa is actually the word "Gloriosa" by the way, but then adapted to the Japanese language and then further transformed across time due to accents.

Gururiyoza Satsujin Jiken is the second novel in The Sailor Uniforms & The Apocalypse series, which focuses on the trio of Kyouko, Mizuki and Marii. In this series, the three girls are all better at a different aspect of crime solving, and they always end up dividing the denouement: Kyouko focuses on the whodunit, Mizuki on the howdunnit and Marii on the whydunnit. The books also form one greater narrative, and one of my criticisms of the first novel were indeed that it felt very much as simply the prologue, with many suggestive scenes and episodes which hinted at a greater thing being set in motion, only you don't get to see any of it. That holds too for this second novel, where we again see scenes that suggest there's something big awaiting the three girls and that their training as a detective will be used for something else, but what that actually is, is not made clear here. So that's certainly a thing to remember if you want to start with this series.

People familiar with Japanese mystery fiction will probably quickly recognize this as a kind of parody on Yokomizo Seishi's Yatsuhaka Mura/The Village of Eight Graves, from the name of the village to the way there are 8 great authorities in the village and there's even a duo of elderly twins and some caverns! The setting of a village that still thinks Japan is in the war is pretty interesting, as this is effectively a time travel story. Technology in the village is also outdated, having not seen the enormous developments even in consumer technology, so life is extremely simple here. Which is also what makes the investigation difficult for the girls, as everyone is also quite simple, being quite sure that the ten commandments are enough to prevent anyone from committing murder or from lying, while we as the reader roll our eyes as we see more and more people getting killed. As more people are killed, the girls also notice the murderer might be doing a mitate murder, i.e. murders that are committed following a certain pattern/made to mirror a certain pattern (like nursery rhyme murders), and we even get a whole mitate lecture in this book, which alone makes this a very interesting work to read.

The way the mitate aspect of the mystery was utilized was extremely original by the way, and one of the more memorable examples of this kind of mystery, as it provides a rather novel motive for the murderer to commit to the mitate pattern. I love how the pattern was hidden so brilliantly in the narrative, as most readers would honestly never think of it, but Furuno actually starts hinting at the pattern fairly early on, and it somehow doesn't feel unfair, even if it does demand of the reader to make certain logical steps that might be a bit too far apart. Still, I absolutely love how Furuno used the mitate trope in this novel and how it is woven into the greater story regarding the village.

In a way, this is a kind of isekai mystery, where the detectives find themselves in a world that is not quite like our own, and in this case, the book feels a bit like the riddle where you have people who can only tell the truth, and where there's one liar. The way Furuno expands that idea to a whole village is pretty cool, especially by basing it on the ten commandments, and while near the end, it does feel a bit like a 'logic puzzle' at times, I have to say I was surprised Furuno managed to come up with a fairly convincing way to pull this off and not just write it off as simply 'yes, the murderer lied.'

The solution part of this novel is also enormous, as Kyouko, Mizuki and Marii all get their own, quite sizeable chapters to explain the crimes in terms of their own specific topics (who/how/whydunnit). It's nearly thirty percent of the book that's devoted to the denouement (and the book's not short in the first place), so that gives you an idea of the scale of the tale. I'm still not quite sure how necessary the split in three parts actually is though. Sure, the three girls speak in very different manners and thus explain their parts very differently, but the girls have been together most of the time, and share their information, so ultimately, it feels like a very arbitrary choice to have the three girls each explain things seperately, especially as each of the girls do seem to understand parts of the mystery beyond the scope of their own "responsibilities": it's not like they only figure out their own specific parts, for their stories make it clear they do understand other parts too at least partially (i.e. to explain the whydunnit, for some part you'd to know whodunnit), but for some reason they do only talk about their designated parts. But it's very satisfying to see the three girls tying the many murders since their arrival in the village together in such an epic manner, and there's a lot to love here, as Furuno really makes great use of the very unique setting of Utsuhaka village to carve out a one-of-a-kind mystery.

That said, I do have to admit I found the novel to be far too long, and with the ongoing narrative without real closure, it's not a very accessible book, or at least, I would only recommend this after reading the first one, but that is a lot to ask of someone for example interested in this book mainly for the mitate murders, or the way it uses the liar/truth teller riddle as the core of its mystery.

So there are parts of Gururiyoza Satsujin Jiken that really make it a very memorable mystery novel, as it makes fantastic use of its very unique, isekai-esque setting to explore themes like the mitate mystery and the notion of telling a lie. On the other hand, it is a very long novel too, and a lot of the underlying story is not really explored in detail as it's presented as part of an ongoing narrative. If you read the first book though, I'd definitely recommend this one too, as this one is genuinely the better one of the two, not just as a sequel in a series, but as a mystery novel an sich.

Original Japanese title(s): 古野まほろ『ぐるりよざ殺人事件』

Death in a Ghost Town

"Fire in her eyes, ice in her voice."

"The Mysterious Affair at Styles"

Two Conan-related reviews in a week! Three actually!

Volume 107 of Aoyama Goushou's extremely long-running Detective Conan was released in April to coincide with the release of this year's theatrical release Detective Conan: One-eyed Flashback, as they always ramp up the marketing around this time of the year, timing several releases together. The manga in particular is timed very specifcially with the film release, always featuring a story that is somehow connected to the film, for example featuring the same guest characters or having thematic ties. This does mean that mid-April is usually a hard deadline for the manga, with no room for compromise. Because Aoyama Goushou has been working more slowly in the last decade or so, with the serialization of the manga often taking breaks after a story has been finished, it's been harder and harder to actually fill out a complete volume each time: they can't wait for enough material to be made first, because certain dates do require a release of the manga. And thus volume 107, like previous volumes, cheats a bit by only featuring ten chapters of the manga, instead of the usual eleven, with behind-the-scenes storyboards/rough sketches of the manga used to fill out the page count. As a plus though, this volume features three complete stories, so no stories that are continued from the previous volume or continue into the next.

The volume opens with The Five They Met, where Ran finally recalls how she and Shinichi had met a certain group of five young police cadets when they were young: Shinichi had accidentally broken a faucet in the park with his soccer ball, but they were helped by the cadets. It takes some time for Shinichi to be convinced they are really police cadets, but once that's over, they confide to the five about a strange ghostly adventure they had last night: they had gone to an old decripit house, when they saw fiery fish swimming in a pond, a ghastly snake-like apparation jump out of nowhere, and the owners of the house even took a picture of the children, with a creepy oni face floating behind them. However, once the cadets hear about these strange happenings, they seem to suspect something's not right about the house so they go have a look...

This is one of those stories we have seen very often over the last decade where the focus lies more on the underlying story of explaining how certain characters met, rather than on the mystery plot. So it comes to no surprise that the mystery here is very simple: the question of "how" Shinichi and Ran became witness to all those ghostly appearances depends basically on 'specialist' knowledge or trivia, and that's seldom a really interesting basis for a mystery unless the build-up is really good, and as for the "why", that is pretty easily guessed. Perhaps it's a bit more surprising to the Japanese reader, but considering where I'm from, it was literally the first thought I had because it's not rare at all to see similar news articles where I come from...

The Truth Behind the Fire of the Dead is the story that loosely ties to the 2025 Conan film One-eyed Flashback, as this story is set in Nagano and of course stars the trio of the Nagano Prefectural Police: Inspectors Yamato and Koumei, and detective Uehara. Kogorou, Ran Dr. Agasa and the Detective Boys were going to ski in Nagano, but because Kogorou caught a cold, he and Ran are staying home. Dr. Agasa and the Detective Boys do swing by the Nagano Prefectural Police however, as detective Uehara had prepared some souvenirs for Kogorou to thank him for all he's done in the past for them. The kids get a tour around headquarters, but then run into the Compass Detectives: a group of influencers who check out haunted places, who derive their name from the fact they all have a kanji for a cardinal direction in their family names. Like the Detective Boys, the four members of the Compass Detectives have known each other since their childhood. There were actually five members, but Takehiko, the brother of Nanjou Kaori, passed away three months ago: the five of them were staying in a ski lodge, but while two of them were out for groceries, an earthquake happened, which led to a fire in the lodge. Kitakura Yuuta managed to carry Itou Tamaki out of the lodge, but couldn't find Takehiko. After the fire was extinguished, his remains were found trapped beneath a fallen cabinet. The four Compass Detectives are now visiting the police, because forensics have managed to retrieve the data from Takehiko's smartphone. The Compass Detectives are now heading to the ski resort Hakuryuu, where Takehiko died and are attempting to catch the ghostly apparation "The Fire of the Dead", a local Nagano supernatural phenomenon which claims that if someone thinks hard enough of a deceased person, their spirit can manifest itself in this world as spontaneous fire. The Detective Boys were also going to Hakuryuu to ski, and because Mitsuhiko is a huge fan of the Compass Detectives, they are allowed to watch them film as Itou Tamaki, the star of the channel, tries to contact the ghost of Takehiko. But just as things seem to end in a dud and they wrap up filming, her sleeve suddenly catches fire out of nowhere! At first, they think it could be a fluke, but then strange things happen to the other members too, from smoke appearing out of nowhere to someone's sleeve catching fire while he's driving a car. Is this really the handiwork of a ghost, or is someone playing tricks?

This story unfortunately feels a bit similar to the previous one, with the tricks behind the sudden fires being things that rely mostly on trivia/specalist knowledge. The whodunnit is not very interesting either, as one character seems to be given the most 'suspicious attributes', so even if you don't exactly know how the fires were created, the fact character X has all the "unusual things" the other characters don't have already informs the reader too much. There's a nice subtle visual clue, but that' s not enough to make this an interesting story, nor are the short childhood stories detective Uehara tells to the Detective Boys about her, Yamato and Koumei. The one great scene is the moment Haibara finally gets "even" with Uehara after their first meeting back in volume 65.

The final story, Three Liars and a Fortune is funnily enough the most interesting story mystery-wise, even if it has no important story lore compared to the previous two stories. Ran has noticed her father has been behaving a bit strangely lately and discusses this with Conan. They overhear Kogorou on the phone discussing what to buy as a present for Ran, and it's clear he's speaking with a woman: after jokingly suggesting Kogorou might be having an affair, the two decide Kogorou must just be talking with Ran's mother, but then Eri herself shows up, making it clear Kogorou is talking to another woman. The three decide to tail Kogorou, as he has going to meet the mystery woman in a restaurant, but as they arrive at the station, three men, all holding identical paper bags, bump into each otherand all drop their bags behind Kogorou. The three men all look in the bags to try to find their own, but to their great surprise the bags all contain explosive stuff, and almost literally so: one bag contains a bloody knife and t-shirt, another bag contains a pistol and the third... a large quantity of money bills! The three men all claim the bag with money is their own, and deny they are the owner of either the bloody knife or the pistol. One of the men claims they are an attorney and that the money is actually ransom money, which is why the police can't be involved, so Kogorou takes the three men, and their bags, to a nearby restaurant to determine who is the owner of the money.

While this is a simple 'one out of three' type of story, the premise is hugely entertaining, with all three men obviously trying to claim the money as their own, while wanting to deny to have anything to do with the knife or the pistol. While it is soon determined the blood is fake, and that the pistol is just a model gun, the money still gives the other two men enough of a motive to try and claim it's their money. While determining which men are lying once again relies on trivia, the trivia used are far more commonly known in Japan than the ones seen in the previous stories, so it feels more fair, and even then I feel this stories has more clues than just those bits of trivia. While not one of the best 'one-of-these-three' stories in the series on the whole, I do think it has one of the best set-ups.

Unfortunately, the next volume is scheduled for next spring, so I guess no Conan manga reviews anymore this year... 

To ease the pain, I'll do the same as volume 107 and fill out this post with some fluff, adding another very important Conan-related review: that of this year's McDonalds' Conan tie-up. The Chicken Tatsuta burger is a fried chicken burger McDonalds Japan offers for limited periods, and last year, it was offered in the form of a collaboration with Detective Conan, being sold around the time the 2024 film The Million-dollar Pentagram was released. The collaboration returned this year, with two Chicken Tatsuta burgers being offered simultaneously, the classic one, as well as the Tartar Sauce Namban Chicken Tatsuta. I went for the latter. Like the actual dish Chicken Namban, this fried chicken in this burger is covered in a vinegar-based sauce, which softens the fried chicken a bit, and gives it a tangy bite, which is softened by the creamy (but also slightly tangy) tartar sauce on top. I don't eat fried chicken with tartar sauce that often, but the two go well together and as it's becoming hotter in Japan, the slightly tangy taste of this burger makes it easy to wolf down. The bread they use for the Chicken Tatsuta burgers is also great, soft and fluffy. They are also offering a McFizz lemonade with Setouchi lemon & yoghurt taste, which is also really refreshing. And the special Conan cup they serve it in has a cool gimmick if you drink all of it!

Anyway, volume 107 of Detective Conan once again continues the trend of the last few years, with Aoyama not being able to do a full-time serialization of the manga anymore, resulting in almost all stories having some kind of connection to the overall storyline/focused on revealing backstory lore, with the mystery plots taking a backseat and becoming more and more reliant on random trivia. Which aren't ingredients that result in a medicore story per se mind you: volume 100's The FBI Serial Murder Case in a way relied a lot on trivia too, but that was one of the best cases in the last decade. But that one too is already 4 years old... I can understand why Aoyama tries to make every other story more "important" to reward long-time fans, if he's tied to this publication schedule, but I have to admit I'm getting disappointed some of the films are getting more interesting mystery-wise than the manga...

Original Japanese title(s): 青山剛昌 『名探偵コナン』第107巻