A Model Murder

"No matter how abstract the painting, he always signs his name realistically."

"Columbo: Suitable for Framing"

As I do so often, I went into this book without any prior knowledge or even reading the blurb on the back. So I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed at first when I realized this was not a mystery where a breaking wheel was used as the murder weapon...

Yabe Naoki is a curator at a museum, who one day starts chatting with Imura, an office clerk at the same museum. Yabe learns Imura does not have a special interest in art, but he does like mystery fiction, and because the young man also seems to have an inquisitive mind, Yabe decides to confide to Imura the mystery he stumbled upon revolving around the painter Toujouji Kei. Yabe himself learned of the painter when one of his paintings was featured in a small exhibition, and the piece only attracted his attention because the portrait resembled his wife when she was younger. However, that was enough to get Yabe interested in the painter who committed suicide some years ago, and hoping to find more of his work, he decides to contact his widow, who however seems not at all interested in her deceased husband. Toujouji Kei had only been active as a painter for a very short period of time, though he was very active, but he was a relatively minor artist. His widow in fact threw out most of his old paintings because they take up too much space. Yabe decides to contact a few other relatives and friends of Toujouji Kei, who have bought his paintings in the past, hoping to learn more about the artist, and the circumstances behind his suicide. The paintings Kei left behind are full of suggestive imagery, like a girl being licked by a monk-like figure and a woman being tortured on a breaking wheel. Yabe uses his knowledge of iconography to try and explain what must have been going on in Kei's mind when he made these paintings, but Yabe eventually also finds a diary of Kei, where he writes about the night he was invited to a party to celebrate his adoptive father's birthday: in the middle of the night, his father was found murdered in the bathroom, which was locked from the inside, and moments later, a scream follows and they find another guest dead in her (locked) room: she was an art student both Kei and his father knew, and who had recently won an artist award and therefore been invited to the party. Yabe passes his files on the matter to Imura to see if he can figure out the link between Toujouji Kei's paintings and the double locked room murder in Asukabe Katsunori's debut work Junkyou Catherine Sharin ("The Martyrdom of Saint Catherine's Wheel") or as the inner work of the book also says: The Martyrdom of Saint Catherine.

Asukabe Katsunori won the 9th Ayukawa Tetsuya Award in 1998 with this manuscript, which landed him the publishing contract for the book and marked his debut as a professional writer. Last year, I reviewed his Datenshi Goumonkei ("Torture of the Fallen Angels" 2008), a book which had been out of print forever, but late 2023, it received a limited facsimile reprint via Shosen and the bookstore Horindo in cooperation with the original publisher Kadokawa. They reprinted more of Asukabe's work, and my copy of The Martyrdom of Saint Catherine is another of them, created by Horindo, Shosen and original publisher Tokyo Sogensha. It's interesting how these books are really facsimiles of the original books complete with the advertisements for other releases of the original publisher at the end of the book, even though these fascimile reprints are not sold or distributed via the original publisher, but only available through Shosen and the Horindo stores. Anyway, as someone who is interested in the Ayukawa Tetsuya Award winners, as they tend to fit my own preferences in mystery fiction the most, I was glad I was able to secure a copy of this book easily now!

The book can roughly be divided in two halves, the first half focusing on Yabe's inquiries into Toujouji Kei's history and his quest for Kei's paintings, and the second half being the diary of Toujouji Kei himself, writing about the events leading up to, and on the night his adoptive father and the student died under mysterious circumstances. The first half is quite unique due to its focus on Kei's paintings. For Asukabe Katsunori actually painted the paintings discussed in the book. The book opens with four paintings printed in high quality glossy paper, and they really do look good. It's insane imagining Asukabe painting these paintings for a manuscript he couldn't have known for sure would indeed win the Ayukawa Tetsuya Award, especially as the two main paintings are full of suggestive imagery, so it would be weird to just hang them in your house and have visitors wondering about the theme of the paintings. But because Asukabe designed these paintings himself, he can do something you seldom see in mystery fiction. Yabe, as a curator, analyzes these paintings based on iconography, and they allow for some interesting insights into the motives and thoughts of the artist. While of course, "explaining what the artist really meant" is up to interpretation in real-life, because these paintings were made for a mystery novel, Asukabe is able to present rather convincing and entertaining analyses of the subject matter of the paintings, while at the same time being "open" enough to actual sound like plausible artistic interpretations, rather than super-detailed Sherlock Holmes-style deductions. Yabe's analyses in Kei's motivations serve as the perfect background as we move to the second half of the book, where we follow Kei and you slowly start to see how the vague interpretations of Yabe are giving absolute form, as we learn more details of his life.

The second part is based on the diary of Kei Yabe finds, and tells the story of how Kei first got into painting, and how he slowly became better, and more obsessed with the art. His adoptive father was an well-known art critic too, who would also serve as a judge at contests, though the two were never really close and they seldom spoke after Kei's biological mother passed away, though there was no animosity between him and his adoptive father and later his stepmother. The account then builds to the fateful night, when Kei's father celebrates his birthday and several relatives and guests stay for the night: the house actually consists of two buildings connected through a passageway, so there are quite some rooms. In the middle of the night however, Kei's father is found stabbed to death in the bathroom, which was locked from the inside. Everyone in the house comes to see what has happened, but minutes later, a cry follows from the room above the bathroom, and they find the female student stabbed in the neck, with the knife that is later determined to have also killed Kei's father. But how did the murderer kill someone in the locked bathroom, escape it, and kill another person on a different floor without being seen by everyone gathered in the bathroom? On a technical level, the double locked room murder mystery has a better set-up than actual solution, which is relatively simple and relies on quite some coincidence. There is fortunately a bit more meat to the mystery in other parts, and while I do think the clewing is a bit too obvious, I did appreciate Asukabe's efforts in fleshing the mystery out, especially as the mystery part of the book is relatively short (it's really just the second half of the book, as the first part about the paintings can be seen seperate).

However, what I do think the book does really well is finally linking the narrative about Kei's paintings and the iconographical analyses of Yabe, to the murder mystery narrative. Parts of the analyses that were ambiguous at first, turn out to have been clear psychological clues/foreshadowing that explain some of the happenings in the past and parts in Kei's account of the affair take on another light if you realize how he must have felt when painting the discussed works, as interpreted by Yabe earlier. It is surprising how much of the murder mystery can be found reflected in Kei's paintings, and you can clearly see how much of an impression it made on him, but this is only apparent in hindsight, and it creates a very cool effect. It's something you don't really see in mystery fiction often, where the themes are actually visualized. There is of course art-related mystery or thriller fiction. The Da Vinci Code for example does go into the analyses of visual art, but that is not at all comparable to what The Martyrdom of Saint Catherine does, as the latter cleverly hides foreshadowing, clues and themes in the paintings, which are only given form and meaning in the second part, and the two parts do strengthen each other.

So while I don't think one should read Junkyou Catherine Sharin on its mechanical strengths as a locked room mystery, I would definitely recommend it as a highly original and unique mystery story, which uses originally created paintings to tell a type of mystery story you will likely not come across anywhere else, using visual imagery and themes to tell an otherwise prose-foused tale of detection. For that alone, this book is one I will remember for quite some time!

Original Japanese title(s): 飛鳥部勝則『殉教カテリナ車輪』