Sleeping Murder

"Uh, Jennifer, um, I don't know how to tell you this, but I... you're in a time machine."

"Back to the Future: Part II" 

I assure you: this book is more entertaining than the cover might suggest. 

In a not-too-distant future, mankind is preparing for a once-in-a-lifetime experiment. Nay, a once-in-a-millenium experiment. A private company is preparing to place seven people in a state of cryogenic sleep for a thousand years. The seven are to enter their sleep in special pods called tegmines. They are set to awaken one millenium later. To ensure their safety for all that time, the pods are placed in a special shelter in the mountains: the doors can only be opened from inside and because it's impossible to tell what will happen in a millenium, food and other supplies are also stored in the shelter, in case future researchers can't reach the shelter swiftly once the experiment ends and the seven awaken, allowing the seven to survive for some time on their own. 

And so, in the very-distant-future, Kuran, a former teacher who lost his wife, wakes up to find all kinds of tubes attached to his body, which he removes before he gets out his tegmine. As he watches the others do the same, he remembers how the members of the team had only met three days (+ 1000 years) ago before they entered their sleep. While six of the people were selected from a pool of people who signed up for this, one of them, Iriya is actually one of the researchers who worked on the project herself. One by one, they wake up: Kuran, Iriya, Shiina, Kuroe, Maruko and... then they notice the seventh person doesn't wake up from his sleep. As they examine his tegmine, it turns out it had ceased operation over a hundred-and-fifty years ago. They open the device, only to find a dead Shimon inside. Only, it doesn't look like he died because his tegmite stopped working, it's the knife in his back that probably killed him. The discovery immediately confuses everyone in the shelter: who could've killed Shimon, and why? Because the shelter can only be opened from the inside, it seems logical to assume the murderer must be one of the six others. The problem however is that a tegmite can't be operated from within the pod itself: even if Shimon and his killer happened to awaken a hundred-and-fifty years ago through chance, his murderer wouldn't have been able to get back in the tegmite again to freeze themselves again. For some reason, there's been no contact from the outside world yet, so the six prepare to wait for a few days, but when they go look for food supplies, they find the mummified body of a boy in the storeroom. His head has been bashed in, so they can't even tell whether it's someone they know, but this raises more questions: this boy wasn't in the shelter a millenium ago when it was sealed, so how did they get in, when did they get in, and how were they killed? The AI in the shelter's computer has been programmed to summarize all important news of the last millenium for once the experiment ends, so the six read up on all the major events, which includes a declining population and states forcing their population to move into concentrated areas, which may explain why there's been no contact yet. However, for some reason, there's a blank in the records: a period of about 125 years, between the last 15 years and 140 years, is completely missing, with no information whatsoever. They decide to explore the "future" world outside the shelter themselves, but what they find is not quite what they had hoped to see in Asane Juuji's Sennen no Whodunnit ("A Millenial Whodunnit", 2025).

A book that knows it has a cool premise so it doesn't even wait to hit you right with it: within the first 10 pages or so, you already know people had been kept in a cold sleep for a millenium and that once they wake up in their closed shelter, one of them has been murdered and that it's technically an impossible murder too: the reader knows right away they're dealing with an impossible murder, set in a closed circle situation and in the future too. It's a great set-up for an interesting mystery and while the story might not develop exactly the way most mystery fans will expect it to go, the book still ends up as  a fun sci-fi mystery. 

While the book starts right away with the mystery, the murder of Shimon actually isn't that important early on in the book for the very obvious reason that the six time travelers have more things to worry about. The experiment has apparently been succesful, but why has nobody come to welcome them into the future? Why is there no contact with the researchers who, together with future generations, were supposed to look after Karan, Kai, Iriya, Shiina, Kuroe, Maruko and Shimon? While knowing Shimon's been murdered, and there's an unknown dead boy in the shelter does disturb everyone, the priority now is to contact the outside world. Shimon's death being put lower on the priority list is also one that stems from the initial conclusions of the six that Shimon's death might not have anything to do with them personally: they didn't know each other until three days before the experiment started, Shimon was killed 150 years ago, and none of the other six could have been awake to kill Shimon and then go back into their pods, because they'd need someone outside to operate the pod (even supposing the existence of an accomplice, how could they have coordinated with an accomplice who lived over 800 years after they were frozen?). So the first half of the book or so seems more focused on discovering the world together with the six survivors.

After learning from the AI's summary of world events that most of the world's populations have been moved to concentrated areas due to declining populations, the survivors guess they have been forgotten and that the future humans must be located far away: their shelter was built deep in the mountains in a rural area a millenium ago, so if they want to go to the area where Tokyo used to be, they'd probably need to travel on foot for over ten days. Initially, they explore the area surrounding the shelter and occasionally find signs of where humans used to live. However, their discoveries lead to more questions. For example: why did they find so many skeletons lying in hospital beds in a nearby clinic, and why can't they find any 'contemporary' written records anywhere? As they slowly explore a larger area around the shelter, they find more pieces of a puzzle they didn't know they were working on, changing the focus of this tale from a "closed circle" mystery to an ontological mystery. Slowly but surely, a certain post-apocalyptic vibe creeps up on you, especially as the human history as the survivors know it has a 'blank period' for some reason, which started about 140 years ago.

As a mystery novel, the book does a good job at balancing the micro-level mystery of Shimon and the John Doe's murders within the shelter and the macro-level mystery of why there's no contact from the outside world. The whodunnit of the murders is given a whole new dimension if you factor in a millenium has passed. Early on, there's the matter of the survivors discussing Shimon's murder, and saying it happened 150 years ago already, but because they have also learned people in the future live much longer than in the time they knew, the murderer might actually still be around: something that would've been impossible with the common sense of their time. At the same time, the "futureness" of the story is kept fairly low-level, with the shelter apparently being far removed from future human civilization. These murders take a bit of a backseat in the middle part of the book, but they are of course addressed at the end, especially as we do learn there's a connection between their deaths and the bigger mystery of why the outside world is the way the survivors find it. The time-span of a millenium is used in a clever way to expand the problem of the whodunnit in a way most mystery novels can't and while Sennen no Millenium does weaves its sci-fi mystery tale using threads that may seem familiar from scifi and mystery fiction, author Asane also makes sure to clean up his threadwork and cut out excessive loose threads: it's a polished work, with story developments coming at just the right moments, clues and foreshadowing that are well-thought out and ultimately an overarching plot that is memorable, even if some of the twists feel a bit 'author-convenient'. While the direct motive for the murders is based on a reason that is probably a bit larger in scale than you'd expect at first, and coincidence is still alive one millenium later, but on the whole, it all holds together.

Though one does have to squeeze their eyes a bit to accept everything in this novel. Sennen no Millenium is not hard sci-fi by any means and at times, you do feel like Asane might not grasp the full length of a whole millenium completely. Just considering how much the world changed between AD1000 ~ AD2000, it does sometimes feel like the time period Asane describes is much shorter. Even supposing a certain language survived for a millenium, it's extremely unlikely two speakers a millenium apart would be able to immediately and quickly understand each other... Which also reminds me: early in the book the survivors read the AI's monthly synopsis of the world's major news for the last millenium to get an idea of what world they ended up in and... are you serious why are you reading a monthly synopsis do you know how much happens every month especially in a time like this how long would it take to read a millenium worth of that!!

Overall, I found Sennen no Whodunnit to be an enjoyable read. It's fun sci-fi mystery entertainment that might not be as 'hard' or completely fleshed-out in the way some readers might want it to see, but Asane uses his setting to create an amusing mystery that reads a lot like a mini-series. While as a mystery, some elements might seem familiar, I think Asane does a great job at implementing those ideas for this specific story and setting.

Original Japanese title(s):  麻根重次『千年のフーダニット』