The Dream Team

“You see what I’m driving at? I’m made to dream the same dream, night after night, night after night—and then—one day the suggestion is too much for me—and I act upon it. I do what I’ve dreamed of so often—kill myself!”

"The Dream"

I still can't help but feel a bit annoyed by how the covers of this series all look so samey. I like the art style, but I wish there had been more variation beyond "Shiina on the cover".

With most practioners of magic being persecuted in the medieval witch hunts, mankind lost both knowledge on magic, as well as the people who were capable of performing it, but for the last century, people have been rediscovering and re-examining magic, which by now has developed into an academic field. There are only six known magicians on the world, but magic can be studied by anyone as an academic theme, the same way not all Literature students actually write literature, but can study about it. Japan however is still merely a "developing" country when it comes matters magic,with Jousui University opening Japan's very first Magic Faculty this very year, though they got a scoop: they managed to employ Sakyou Shiina as one of their teachers: Shiina is one of the six known magicians on the world, who are strictly monitered and managed by the Order of Zenith in London. In the first semester, narrator Amane was picked to be in Shiina's class along the girls Ririko, Hio, Imina, Rie and Chisato who grew up as childhood friends. At the end of the first semester, the annual Jousui University Campus Festival is held. On the first day, Amane and the other girls got involved in a strange incident that kept them captured inside the General Studies A building, but thanks to Shiina, all of that was revolved. The following day, Amane wakes up after a night of drinking with the girls of Shiina's class, but a memory of a dream haunts our narrator: in the dream, someone was being chased by a masked killer down a corridor with classroom: this someone was pinned down and strangled by this masked murderer. Amane actually has experience with dreams of the future before, which all came true, and these dreams were always of the very near future of other people close to Amane. Shiina explains that this is indeed a kind of magic, and that it can be very difficult to go against the future foretold. However, because Amane had been sleeping in the classroom with the other girls when the dream appeared, it is likely the future victim will Ririko, Hio, Imina, Rie or Chisato and furthermore, because they are to go to a masquerade event today at the campus festival, it seems clear the attack will occur then. The group goes to the General Studies A building as planned to participate in the Mystery Club's masquerade event The Castle Masquerade Murder Case: the participants are to solve a murder by looking for clues in rooms in the "castle" (classrooms which have been decorated to function as castle rooms), while wearing cosplay, because it's actually a joint event with the cosplay club. Everyone picks a different costume and starts wandering around the "castle", but Amane has only one goal in Kuzumi Shiki's Tricksters M (2006): to prevent a murder.

This is the fourth book I've read in the Tricksters series and... it's actually the fourth entry! If you've been reading this blog for a longer time, you might remember I actually read the third book, Tricksters D before the second novel, Tricksters L. While I guess most people usually read things in order, I do recommend you to really do that here, as Tricksters M (M stands for "Masquerade") is literally set the day after Tricksters D, during the same campus festival and most of the supporting cast in M also appeared in D (members of the Mystery Club). One new face is Okurina, the brother of Imina, who curently studies magic at the London University of Magic, but has returned to visit the festival and who himself is a former member of the Mystery Club, and he was known as a great detective while studying here.

I enjoyed the first Tricksters: it was a fun to read light novel that used magic in a clever way tell an entertaining and clever mystery story. In Tricksters, magic is still a developing academic field, so the number of possible magic spells are still fairly limited, all with clearly defined limitations, which makes magic as a plot element in a mystery story feel fair. I think as mysteries, L was better than D in terms of how the mystery was constructed (even if it had the bad luck of me reading a book with very similar setting/ideas just before it), though D was certainly more original in what it attemped to do. Tricksters M this time however didn't quite manage to capture me as well, though it does a few things differently on purpose.

The theme of the story this time is precognitive dream, which Shiina explains is indeed real magic and we learn at the beginning what the 'rules' are to these dreams, meaning as the reader, we can safely assume that yes, something is gone to happen during the masquerade. This time, we have Amane trying to prevent a crime from happening, which is an interesting twist. The dream is vague however, and it's based on the little Amane remembers, the reader needs to deduce who is going to be attacked, who is going to be attacked, and where this will take place. One thing I found odd was that there was no floorplan/diagram provided in the book. Early in the story, Amane and Shiina first deduce the attack is likely to going to happen in one of about a dozen candidate classrooms, based on which side of the hallway the door in the dream was, as well as the length of the hallway. As Amane participates in The Castle Masquerade Murder Case and starts poking around to see who would have any motive to attack one of the girls, we learn some other facts that help cross out other potential crime scenes: the problem here is that we don't really have any way to cross out these locations ourselves, we only hear "after the fact" that classroom A was facing a certain way, and therefore not the room of the dream, or that classroom B was out because it was located in the wrong corner or something like that. So this process of finding the real crime scene feels very passive. There is one clever, final clue to determine which room it is of the final few candidates, but again, this would have been so much more convincing as a fair game if we actually had proper floorplans and diagrams (because the way it is done in prose only, the clue feels a bit too weak, so more "supporting" clues would have made it much better).

As for determining who the attacker is and who the victim... I thought this part was a bit weak. I think the idea Kuzumi was going for works well enough as a concept: you have the interesting idea of an "inverted" whodunnit, where you start with knowing there is an attacker, and from there need to deduce about an impending crime, and what Kuzumi ultimately tries to pull off using this concept is fun too as a mystery, as a conventional mystery novel wouldn't be able to pull this off. But the book is very short, and you don't really get to see much of the characters, so none of it feels really surprising, as yeah, of course she's going to be the victim, you hardly hear anything about the other girls! Don't get me wrong, I think the base concept Kuzumi was going for is good, and mystery-wise, really clever things can be done with it, but here it felt rather underwhelming. I do think the things done with Shiina's role in resolving this mystery are clever, almost treading upon Late Queen Problems! This book however does feel lighter on the mystery aspect (the masquerade doesn't even start until halfway into the book!), probably because it's also written to serve as a turning point in the series' narrative: Shiina is clearly grooming Amane to become a detective, and he is being very hands off now and providing very little guidance to Amane. This is reflected in the character of Okurina, who was a great detective himself when he was in the Mystery Club, but who now seems to regret having taken that path, showing Amane a possible future.

Tricksters M also contains a short story set about a flower shop, but it's really short, and doesn't add much (it's also not related to anything, just something to fill out the volume).

So I wasn't a huge fan of Tricksters M: while these books are never really long, I felt the mystery was a bit too light in this volume and while it has cool ideas, I feel like with a few rewrites, it could've been much better, as I think the idea of prophetic dreams and all can be used very cleverly in mystery novels (heck... I translated one!). The next two volumes form one story that serves as the finale of the series I believe, so I will eventually get them too.

Original Japanese title(s): 久住四季『トリックスターズM』