The Stolen Show

「へええええ」

『トリビアの泉』

 

 "Wo-----w"

"The Fountain of Trivia" 

I do love quiz programs on Japan, though I am not really a fan of the QuizKnock-type of quizzes often seen on television now... Trivia buzzer quizzes are the way to go! 

Sora and Nanairo are classmates who were both in their school's Quiz Club, but their dreams were shattered last year when they lost in the primaries of the National Quiz Competition, because Sora messed up a simple Alice in Wonderland-related question. It has become a kind of trauma for Sora, which is why she immediately jumped on the news the legendary idol producer Kujirai Keiji had returned from an early retirement and was going to produce a new idol group named Queen & Alice, with quizzes as its theme. With some effort, Sora manages to convince the reluctant Nanairo to send in an application together, so they can continue doing quizzes together. Surprisingly, both are selected for the shortlist of candidate idols. Eight finalists are to gather on Kujirai's private island Hat Island, where the final selection round will be held and filmed for online streaming. Due to the size of the heart-shaped Heart House (Kujirai's home), there will only be a bare-bones team present besides the contestants: a show director and his assistant, vocal, dance and quiz trainers and a cameraman. The contestants all have different backgrounds: some have been auditioning for years to become an idol and see this as a final opportunity, while others come from a music band background as opposed to the quiz background of Sora and Nanairo. The final round will span a few days during which the candidates will compete with each other on dance, singing and quiz segments, with one candidate being sent home each night until the final group has been decided. Things go as scheduled the first day, with one girl being sent home in the evening (a boat has been chartered to come to the island each evening at 20:00 to pick up the loser). The following morning, the remaining girls all gather to take on a new day, but one girl won't get up. When they go check up on her in her room, they find her dead, with the mark of a spade (of a playing card deck) drawn on her sheets and her teddy bear stained in red paint. Did one of the other candidates go so far as to literally eliminate the opposition, or is something else going on? The director wants to phone the police, but he is stopped by Kujirai, who comes up with a crazy idea: he sees this murder as the ultimate quiz, so he announces he will make the candidate who solves this murder an idol. Who will become a member of Queen & Alice in Kaneko Reisuke's Queen to Satsujin to Alice ("Queen, Murder and Alice" 2025)?

Kaneko Reisuke made his debut as a writer in 2024, by winning the Mephisto Prize with his book Shinda Yamada-kun to Kyoushitsu ("Dead Yamada and his Classroom"). He has been quite prolific since, with three book releases in 2024 alone, and another in 2025. Kaneko had been sending in manuscripts for literary prizes for some time while working as an accountant, but it appears his switch to focus more on entertainment-focused awards was the best choice, as winning the Mephisto Prize has allowed him to really let go with his writing output. While he won the Mephisto Prize in 2023 with Shinda Yamada-kun to Kyoushitsu, that wasn't his first attempt at winning the award. In 2022, Queen to Satsujin to Alice had already made it far into the selection process of the award. While it didn't win at the time, they decided to revisit this story in 2025: Queen to Satsujin to Alice was serialized in Mephisto across three installments and saw a standalone book release in November 2025.

I haven't read Shinda Yamada-kun to Kyoushitsu yet, but I believe it's not a pure mystery story: Queen to Satsujin to Alice most definitely is, as the premise should suggest. We have the tried-and-true premise of a murder occuring during a kind of competition, with the contestants having an obvious motive for eliminating one of their rivals, an odd crime scene and of course, this all takes place in a closed circle, on a private island in a weird heart-shaped house. It would be weirder if this wasn't a conventional mystery story! The story is told from two perspectives: Sora, and the contestant Mahiru, who is the oldest contestant at age 24 and knows this is her last chance at ever becoming an idol, even if she knows she's not the best at quizzes, dancing or singing. This creates some welcome variety in narration, with Mahiru definitely feeling much more desperate to succeed, while being evenly envious of her younger rivals, while Sora is still young and much more worry-free. In a way, it feels a bit like those idol audition shows, where you may feel like you want to root for one candidate or another, as they all have very different personalities. The Sora parts are definitely funnier to read for example, as opposed to the more serious and desperate Mahiru parts.

While this is a mystery story, the story is a bit slow to get to the bloody parts, and the first half feels more like a regular idol audition show, with the girls being given various assignments and we see them compete against each other. Because the theme of the new group Queen & Alice (Q&A!) is quizzes, we are given quite a few of them in this first half: some of them ridddles than can be solved fairly by the reader themselves too, though there is also a long segment with a buzzer quiz, where a question is read out loud and the first to hit the buzzer is given the opportunity to answer. Because you can hit the buzzer before the full question has been read, the trick is to anticipate what the full question will be and give the right answer. It's a popular type of quiz in Japan (often seen on television) and it has some parallels with the competitive karuta, but it is a bit hard to make this part truly interesting to read: the questions themselves are mostly about trivia, and while there are valid strategies for these quizzes (listening to the intonation of the reader to guess it's a question that consists of two clauses, or gambling on what the answer could be if you know it has to be one out of two possible answers), a lot of that doesn't work very well on paper. So it feels a bit like you're just reading trivia being read out loud. While these trivia questions do become relevant for the mystery later, it still feels like the least engaging part of the story, even though it should be the "big moment" for the would-be members of the quiz-based Queen & Alice.

After the murder is discovered, Kujirai forces everyone to go along with his reinvented final round of "find the killer": the legendary producer holds so much power he could easily kill the career of everyone both in front and behind the camera with just one word, so nobody dares to go against him. It is at this point the story moves more swiftly (also because the remaining number of pages is rather limited at this point). The mystery of the murder is not very complicated, as it mostly revolves around the question of why the crime scene was made such a mess, with a not very surprising, but still well thought-out answer lying at the end of the thinking process. Interestingly, the solving of this mystery is two-fold, as a completely different line of thought can bring the reader to the motive behind the murder. This part is more substantial in fact, and is thematically better founded in the theme of quizzes of this book, but at the same time, it only points in the direction of a motive, and doesn't show who did it, while the whodunnit part of the solving process point very definitely at one person, so by that time it's not like a motive is really needed (at least, not in Ellery Queen-style mysteries). So it's a bit of a shame the two "routes" to the solution aren't really equal in terms of "worth". I did like a certain later reveal: I had completely overlooked that point and I think the clewing here was really shrewdly hidden!

Not surprisingly, Queen to Satsujin to Alice does look at Japanese idol culture, in this case, at the production side of idols. While I don't think Queen to Satsujin to Alice does anything surprising or radical when it addresses the darker side of idols in its tale (the points it made... are the points you'd expect the book to make when you talk about the darker side of the industry), it is competently woven into the mystery plot, so that at least makes the book feel coherent in its themes.

 Queen to Satsujin to Alice thus takes a few some popular themes from Japanese television (idols, quizzes) and mixes them to create a fairly light and simple, but competently written mystery. I will admit I would have loved to have seen a beefier core mystery plot, but the book was fun to read, so nothing to really complain about. I am interested to see if Kaneko's doing "hard mystery" too though, so I might try out other works by him in the future.

Original Japanese title(s): 金子玲介『クイーンと殺人とアリス』