"Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade"
What is it with reviews on sex-focused media that also happen to be mystery fiction this month...
Last week, I discussed the newest issue of Nemoto Shou's own mystery comic Sharaku Homura: Detective of the Uncanny. Nemoto is not only a creator of mystery fiction in manga form, but also studies it. He has been briefly discussing various mystery manga on his website, especially those that ended up not getting included in Fukui Kenta's (otherwise extremely comprehensive) Honkaku Mystery Manga Zemi ("Honkaku Mystery Comics Seminar", 2018). Not all of these works are easily available now, of course, but as a fan of the mystery comic format myself, I of course try to read the ones I can find.
Cue the sex scenes! I should probably mention right now that while Marina Mystery File is a mystery manga in the same tradition as Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo and Nemoto Shou's Sharaku Homura: Kaiki Tantei, featuring long series of murders that involve monsters or other seemingly supernatural beings/phenomena, it is also an adult manga, meaning it involves plenty of scenes where characters are having sex (rape at times) or fondling each other or themselves and more of that. The art style is rather mild and you can easily imagine Byakkomaru also doing "straight" comedy manga with this style, so the sex doesn't feel too realistic, but it is certainly something to keep in mind if you want to read this. I am not going to mention it in the write-ups on each story below, but just remember that basically every chapter (most stories are about five or six chapters long) will feature one or more scenes with sexual content, the last one generally being Marina being fondled/touching herself so she can get sexually stimulated enough to get that flash of inspiration that allows her to solve the case.
As mentioned before, the series feels very similar in build up to both Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo and Nemoto Shou's Sharaku Homura: Kaiki Tantei, though in general, the pure murder plots are not as intricately structured as those series. That said, considering Byakomaru is probably more an adult comic artist than a mystery writer, I do have to admit these comics are often reasonably amusing as mystery fiction, though a lot of the tricks seen here will feel familiar. Still, the stories actually follow good build-up and while not all the clues/hints Byakkomaru uses are as convincing as others, on the whole I'd say he actually gets the fundamentals of a proper mystery comic really good and the base stories are usually interesting too, so if Byakkomaru had studied the genre a little bit more while he was working on the series, this could actually have developed into a mystery manga more of us would remember, I think. The manga was released digitally over a decade ago in English by JManga, but that site is already defunct.
The opening story, The Kappa Murder Case, for example, has a great setup: the Japan Mystery Club is visiting a small village near a lake to investigate rumors of a hopping Kappa roaming around: the story goes that centuries ago, a kappa kidnapped a girl and raped her for three days and nights and now that kappa has returned. Which is bad news, as there's a girls' academy near the lake. The day after the club members arrive at the lake, they actually run into the kappa near the lake, and it is holding something gruesome: the head of a teacher of the nearby academy. And that was only the first death, as more people are murdered that seem to have a connection to the school. But why? While the first 'major' deduction of Marina that "proves" the kappa is in fact, not really a kappa is rather boring, there is acutally a pretty good visual clue that involves the identity of the kappa, one that makes very intuitive use of the comic format. Some of the surrounding drama is perhaps not clewed as well and feels rather forced, but this is actually not a bad story to begin with.
The Spirited Away Murder Case has Marina and Tooru visiting the Seikouin Girls' School, a Christian elementary school, which is Marina's old school. As they wander around, Marina learns one of Marina's sempai has become a teacher at the school too. But while they are chatting, children start vanishing from the school, prompting the teachers to call in the parents of the missing children. However, while they are searching the school grounds, one of the teachers is found naked and murdered in a room. Marina goes off to bring the husband to his wife, but when they return the room, they find it empty and clean of any blood traces. This puzzles Marina greatly, as she hadn't been gone for that long, but when they later return to the room again, they find two naked women dead in the room. Why are these women being killed, and where have the children gone off to? This one is immediately less interesting as a mystery. The mystery of the disappearing corpse is pretty easy to solve due to the way it is presented, and the trick itself is one you'll often see in these kinds of stories. The mystery of the disappearing children borders on the insane and doesn't belong in a puzzle plot mystery.
Just like the first volume, volume two and three each contain two full stories. The Ghost Mansion Murder Case has the Japan Mystery Club visiting a haunted mansion on a small island. They have only just arrived when they are welcomed by a poltergeist throwing cutlery around and soon afterwards, one of the members is found stabbed with a cross high up the wall. The boat that brought them to the island won't be back soon however, and soon more people are killed one by one, one of them even while they were inside a cabin that had been locked from the inside. This And Then There Were None-esque story gets the vibe perfectly down, though a lot of the happenings feel a bit familiar: the locked cabin murder for example uses a trick which is telegraphed a bit too obvious and there are famous mystery novels that feature the exact same trick (the iteration here can't even be called a variant). The hint pointing at the killer is... okay in theory, as I do have to admit Byakkomaru uses the comic format in a clever way to subtly show how two seemingly similar actions are not the same, which eventually point to the murderer, which would be fine if the murderer wasn't already looking extremely suspicious in this story even without the clue!
The Zashikiwarashi Murder Case is one of the more interesting stories in terms of execution. Marina and Tooru are visiting Kumono, a remote countryside village where Tooru used to live. They are visiting Sayuri, Tooru's childhood friend who suffers from a weak heart and isn't able to leave the village. Her parents are dead and her brother has run away from home, leaving her all alone. Her father however arranged that his fortune would go to the family member who will take care of Sayuri after his death: however, it is up to Sayuri to decide whether she'll go to her aunt or either of her two uncles, who are all very, very eager to get on her good side. These would-be guardians of Sayuri however are being killed one by one, but why and by whom? The who is a question that is easily answered to be honest, especially as the cast is so small in this story, but the story makes brilliant use of the comic format here to create a good suspenseful story. The foreshadowing here really show off that Byakkomaru does know the potential of the visual, comic format in mystery fiction, and he explains pretty well in this volume's afterword what he was going for in this story, and I think he pulled it off very competently! This is one story I would recommend especially if you're going to read this.
The Ghost Photograph Murder Case starts with the death of one of the Japan Mystery Club members. Apparently their death was already foreshadowed by a "ghost photograph": a while back, the club members visited an abandoned hospital which was supposed to be haunted, and one of the photographs taken of the member who died, featured a strange dark shadow covering half of their body. Marina herself hadn't gone on that trip then, but now the club is going once more to investigate this creepy photograph. While they are driving to the hospital, a landslide ends up covering the road behind them, trapping them in the hospital. They eventually go to sleep, all staying in the same large hall, but when they wake up, they find one of them has been strangled to death. But was it by a human, or a ghost...? A human of course. While the overall flow of the story, as in the scene-to-scene transitions, feel a bit unoriented, I do have to say I really like some of the psychological hints introduced in this story. The hint pointing at how the murderer managed to strangle one of the members without anyone noticing, even though everybody was sleeping in the same (spacious) hall and just a few meters away from each other, is actually really good in the context of this manga, and another psychological clue that points to the identity of the murderer, is actually a very clever idea with far deeper (cultural) roots than you'd guess at first sight.
The Snow Woman Murder Case has Marina being invited by her friend Naoko to a ski trip with some more acquaintances: they are staying at the holiday villa of Isaki Fusako at the ski resort. Three years ago, Fusako's son Seijirou got injured while skiing, but he was saved by the people at the piste: the people they have invited to stay at the villa now (+ Marina). They learn that there's a local ghost story of a Snow Woman, who can instantly freeze men and... she then breaks off their penises and runs off with it. That evening, Marina thinks she sees the Snow Woman outside, and the following morning they find... the corpse of Fusako outside, buried in the snow. Who is obviously not a man, so why was she killed? Heavy snowfall prevents them from getting help, and Fusako ends up being only the first of more murder victims in the villa, which seem to be committed by the Snow Woman, as the second murder is actually witnessed by several people, who then see the white Snow Woman jump out of the window as she flees into the snow outside while holding a dildo. This is an extremely daring mystery story, which uses a trick that is both brilliant... and not convincing. While there is good shock value when the trick is revealed, it also instantly raises so many practical questions about how it all works, it immediately makes you wonder if it could work. That said, it does make interesting use of the visual medium once again and I think it's still worth it, even if only for the hilarious image of a Snow Woman running around with a dildo.
The fourth and final volume features three stories which are bit shorter than the usual ones. The Kokkuri-san Murder Case centers around a group of girls in Marina's class, who recently did a session of Kokkuri-san (table turning), which seems to have backfired on them, as the participants are dying one by one. The story seems more focused to tell a thrilling story than be a puzzle plot mystery, and while there's an interesting hint in theory that allows Marina to figure out something fishy's going on and who is the one that stinks, I feel Byakkomaru could probably have used the visual format a bit more to make the clue feel fairer: I think the idea is alright enough (even if limited, but that's also because of the shorter length of the story), but showing it more often would have made it feel more satisfying when the clue is pointed out to the reader.
The final story, The Black Magic Murder Case, is set at Marina's school, and starts with the discovery of a student being stabbed into the blackboard at school, surrounded by satanic symbols. It turns out some of the senior staff at the school are actually in some kind of crazy cult, but then these people are being killed one by one too. The main murder situation is very simple in set-up, and there's not really much of a mystery here in presentation: they find the victim dead in a room, but it was not like it was a locked room or anything. The misdirection falls a bit flat here, and the trick itself relies on what might be the one of the oldest/most cliched locked room tricks that exist: while Byakkomaru does introduce a twist, this twist feels impractical and not likely a trick that would succeed,
Marina Mystery File was oddly enough a series that left me slightly disappointed not because it didn't succeed as a mystery manga: I was disappointed because while my expectations were low, there are genuinely moments that surprised me mystery-wise, and you can tell Byakkomaru is familiar with the genre, so it somewhere I feel like it perhaps could have been much better as a mystery series. It didn't crash and burn, and comes close to being good. Very few of the sexy moments in this series are actually "needed" for the mystery plot, but when they do become relevant in terms of the mystery solving, it works pretty well, and you almost feel like if Byakkomaru had been given some more research time to work out the mystery plots more, this could have been a much better known mystery-cum-porn manga. Now it's just an interesting note in the annals of mystery manga.
This is an interesting thing to insert into the anals -- I mean annals of mystery history.
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