The Gambler's Club

"It's me, Kaiba. And this time, you don't stand a *ghost* of a chance."

"Yu-Gi-Oh!" 

The Kyoto University Mystery Club is a name you'll hear about sooner or later whenever you get into Japanese mystery fiction. It is, in essence, the birthplace of the shin honkaku  (new orthodox) movement in mystery fiction, as the first writers who were actually promoted with the term "shin honkaku" were members of the Mystery Club. Members of the club are all fans of crime and mystery fiction in general and there are quite a lot of members who after graduation find work in related industries, like publishing (editing). I attended the Honkaku Mystery Award ceremony earlier this year and I was surprised to learn so many people there had roots in the KUMC, with a few people even I knew personally from my own time there. But with quite a few well-known alumni who have become established mystery authors, it's no wonder there are also many members who focus on the creative side of mystery fiction, ergo, writing stories themselves. 

Houjou Kie was active as a writer during her time in the club too, but she made her professional debut in 2019 with the stunning Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei ("The Hourglass of the Time-Space Traveller") and she has since become a personal favorite of mine. Since her debut, she has been entertaining her readers with tightly-plotted mysteries that utilize original settings, ranging from murders inside a virtual reality game, a girl teaming with a ghost to solve a murder and a series about a hotel for the criminally inclined. She has also been writing a lot of short stories lately, published in several magazines. The last time I wrote a post tagged short shorts, I discussed two stories by her and funnily enough, this time I will be discussing another short story by her. 

Shoubu no Yukue ("The Outcome of the Match", 2025) was written for a new series of flash fiction titled "5 Minute Labyrinth" in the weekly magazine Shuukan Bunshun ("Weekly Bunshun"). As the story is only about four pages long, you can guess I can't tell you too much about it, but the premise is pretty alluring: the story opens late at night, in a nearly empty bar with only a few regulars hanging around until it's time to close. A woman enters and she starts a wager with the other people in the bar: the bar regulars have to guess whether a new customer will arrive within the next fifteen minutes or not. If they guess right, the woman will pay 30.000 yen, while if they get it wrong, they'll have to treat her on a glass of the most expensive drink in the bar. It turns out the regulars in this bar had already heard about the woman: she has been doing this bet in all the bars in the neighborhood. The regulars accept the bet and start guessing whether it's likely a new customer will come or not, but why is this woman repeating this wager with everyone?

As I said, the story is very short, but Houjou does manage to make it a neat armchair detective experience, with proper hinting available and even surprise twists, all tightly compressed in a few pages. The somewhat sinister ending is also very Houjou-esque, who has been doing these "dark ironic twists" a lot in her Amulet Hotel stories, but you already saw glimpses of anti-hero nuances in her Ryuuzen Clan series. In fact, I could actually imagine the basic idea of Shoubu no Yukue as an Amulet Hotel story with some rewriting. 

And to move on to another Kyoto University Mystery Club member who has made a professional debut: Washuu Takumi is actually a current member of the club, who recently (jointly) won the third iteration Sougen Mystery Short Story Award, which is given by publisher Tokyo Sogensha for the best new short mystery story by an amateur writer. As is usual with these awards, the winners are given a publishing contract for their story, in this case, the stories are published in Tokyo Sogensha's literary magazine Shimi no Techou and as a seperate e-book. Washuu Takumi's story is titled Yuurei Shashin ("The Phantom Photograph"), which starts not long after Anri lost her father suddenly. While reminiscing about her father, her uncle mentions her father loved to take photographs as a hobby, though Anri only has vague memories of that and says she didn't really see him doing photography that often anymore in recent years. They go through her father's study though and find some undeveloped negatives. She goes to a nearby camera shop to have them developed, but one photograph stands out: it is a picture of her father in his study. Nothing wrong with that, but the camera also printed the date on the picture and it is dated on the day after her father died. This is thus not a photograph of a ghost, but a phantom photograph, a photograph that shouldn't exist. But why is there a photo of her father dated the wrong way?

This is a tightly-written mystery with an everyday-life theme: while one can easily come up with a direct reason why the wrong date could be printed on a photograph (wrong setting, battery failure), one wonders how exactly it could have happened. The commentaries of the three judges in the committee on all the finalistsis included and regarding Yuurei Shashin, they note how this is an incredibly complete story, almost unimaginable from an amateur writer. One even wonders how Washuu could develop from this point on. Indeed, the story is very competently written, with a mystery that is, admittedly, a bit too mundane for my own personal taste, but as a story, Yuurei Shashin is very well-plotted, with good clewing for the mystery too and even substantial character development. As a standalone mystery story in a slice-of-life setting, I think it's a very well-crafted tale worth a read.

Oh, in case you missed this post, last year I discussed a Danganronpa guess-the-culprit scenario written by another current member of the Kyoto University Mystery Club. 

Anyway, I just wanted to briefly discuss these two KUMC-related short stories that happened to be published around the same time. It's become easier for me to get hold of these kinds of stories in serial publication, so you might see the short shorts tag used more often in the future too.