Eight locked room murders in the last review of the eighth month of the year!
It was Mitsumura Shitsuri who was the defendant in the trial in Japan that created the Golden Age of Locked Room Murders in Japan: she was accused of committing a murder, but the police were not able to figure out how the murderer could've committed and then left the crime scene, as it was found locked from the inside. Shitsuri was succesfully defended with the argument that an unsolved locked room mystery was as strong as any alibi: the prosecution being incapable of proving how anyone could've committed the murder and escape a locked room in essence meant every single person on the planet had an alibi. If it was impossible for anyone, why would it be possible for specifically the defendant? This created a rage among would-be murderers to commit their crimes in locked rooms, for that seemed like a perfect defense. This was the perfect breeding ground for locked room murder specialists, both within the police and among private detectives, but also among criminals, where locked room murder consultants became a lucrative business.
Shitsuri's classmate Kasumi this finds himself dragged to the mountains by his childhood friend Yuzuki, as she's looking for New Nessie in the Tama River. the two end up lost in the mountains a little time before dusk, but are fortunately found by Monokaki Camembert ("his mother was a foreigner"), who lives in the nearby Village of Eight Boxes. Because there is no other place nearby where the two can stay, Camembert suggests they come with him to the village and stay in the inn there. To the great surprise of both Kasumi and Yuzuki, they vind the Village of Eight Boxes is actually located inside a gigantic cave, that can only be accessed via a long tunnel, which is guarded during the day and of which the gate is closed during the night. The villages is called like this, because the houses in this village are built like smooth lacquer boxes (you don't need pointy roofs with a drainage system inside a cave where it never rains!). It takes some time for Kasumi to realize Monokaki Camembert is in fact one of the members of the Monokaki Clan: a family of locked room murder mystery authors, Father Fuichirou was the foremost writer of locked room mysteries in Japan, but he recently passed away, leaving a huge fortune to his nine children, who have followed in their father's footsteps, or are trying to. Each of his children specialize in a different kind of locked room mystery novel, like medical locked room mysteries, historical ones, or even hardboiled ones. The family all live here in the village, though their manor is physically seperated from the rest of the village via a chasm in the cave. Kasumi also learns a local festival is going to start that very evening, and it last for about a week, and during that time, it is not allowed for anyone to leave the village, or else an evil spirit will kill them.
This is the third book in Kamosaki's series on the Golden Age of Locked Rooms and The Age of Frenzy of Locked Rooms and by now, the titles have become more and more ridiculous, but I guess that is also the point, which is also exemplified by the fact we are now in the fetishistic age of locked rooms, where the locked room mystery almost takes on a perverted form. For in a way, that is exactly what this book does. The first book featured six main locked room murder mysteries (or otherwise impossible situations), the second had seven of them, and now this third entry has no less than eight of them! And while this was already a problem with the second book, the fact Kamosaki wants to cover so many locked room murder situations in a limited amount of pages, means that on the whole, these books are more about quantitty than quality. That is not to say the ideas behind the locked rooms are bad on their own per se, but there is basically not set-up each time: they stumble upon a murder scene, Kamosaki has just enough space to actually describe how the scene looks like, and perhaps one character might suggest a wrong solution, but then we have Shitsuri who has one look at the crime scene and she can suddenly solve the whole thing, even if the trick is insanely complex and involving multiple steps. There is no real feeling of catharsis when she solves the mysteries, because not enough time is used to actually make it feel like a proper mystery, nor do you feel satisfied by the "logical pay-off" of the solution, because the solution is suddenly sprung upon the reader. So while sometimes the idea behind the locked room mystery can be cool and memorable on its own, it's the execution that lacks, because every murder feels like a descrete point with next to no connection to the other murders.
To be honest, it started out really promising, as the first two murders are the ones that are actually thematically connected, with an interesting conundrum arising when the solutions to these rooms are first suggested. The problem that comes up because of how they are solved is interesting and creates a very fun logical brainteaser. The false solutions proposed here are also far more interesting than the ones we see later, if we see them at all, and it feels like Kamosaki focused a lot of attention to these murders. I think these were among my favorites too in the book, as the synergy shown during this part of the book is what really shows what I think this series should do: have it be meaningful there are so many locked room murders in a closed circle situation, instead of just throwing a bunch of them on a pile. Two others I also liked a lot: one involving the victim having been hanged in a building, but the security system shows nobody entered the building the last 24 hours, neither the victim nor any murderer! The trick might become a bit obvious if I explain a specific point regarding how they found the victim, but the trick itself is original. Another one is one of the most horrifying locked room murder tricks I've ever come across in mystery fiction, and involves the victim having been decapitated in a room while their body had been tied to a table in the room: the mechanics behind how the murderer pulled this trick off are just too terrible to even to think about, and devilishl clever.
The others vary a lot in quality. The combustion murder of the villager for example involves the most crudest of clues, and the "okay, this is silly, but not the good kind of silly" trick has your eyes rolling. There are more murder situations later in the book that are also incredbily silly in concept, but at least those are so silly they become good, even if the execution can be faulted. Others feel more like showpieces of random scientific trivia, while one also feels like a Professor Layton puzzle more than anything. The last 'big' mystery that is solved involves some Queenian logic, which I can always appreciate and something I also noticed in the second volume, but on the whole, Kamosaki is definitely someone who ultimately just wants to show off a lot of locked room murders, that are created via mechanical tricks. He however often does the bare minimum of actually making them relevant to the story or each other. Characters may or may not have a single line of dialogue before they are killed, there's no build in tension because every event feels so seperate from each other and once you're done with the book, you'll have forgotten half of the locked rooms already, because they were handled in such a brief and uninvolved manner.
But again, that is what makes this books a little bit fetishistic, as the title itself also says: the book only exists to flaunder with all the locked room murder situations Kamosaki could come up with, and some of them are really creative on a basic, fundamental level. As you can guess, this also comes back to the motive behind the murders on all these locked room murder mystery authors, and that part I really liked, Interestingly, it reminded me of a certain novel by Kitayama Takekuni, who is also an author who specializes in mechanically constructed locked room murder mysteries, so it's funny how Kamosaki also arrives at a similar "conclusion" regarding locked room murder fiction.
Misshitsu Henai Jidaino Satsujin - Tozasareta Mura to Yattsu no Trick is, unsurprisingly, more of the same after the previous two books. More locked room murders, but beyond that, it's not really that different from them, and while I can recommend this book too to lovers of locked room mysteries, because some of the murders here are really worth reading (no matter how silly they can be at times), but like with the previous books, you do have to admit Kamosaki is mainly about showcasing all these ideas, and they do feel lacking in the way they form a cohesive narrative, and how they are actually presented as "mystery" fiction with clues and a process of logic leading to the solution.
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