The House on the Cliff

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

"Saturae" 

Huh, guess this is the third Monzen review of this year on this blog within just a few months. Pretty rare for me to do reviews of the same author in such a short period of time.

Back in 2024, the bookshops Shosen and Horindou published a facsimile release of Monzen Noriyuki's Shi no Meidai ("A Proposition of Death", which was technically published as his fourth novel, but can also be considered his first novel (see the post for more about that). A "upgraded" version of this  facsimile release was also offered, as it included a booklet with a completely new, original short story by Monzen himself. Tsukiatari no Ie ("The Building in the Cul-de-Sac") isn't long at about fifty pages (which is usually around the lower page range of most Japanese short stories I read), but the set-up is rather memorable, and I think it deserves a brief discussion here.

he book opens with Ninomiya Seiji, a man in his early twenties, arriving at a small building near the sea, built in a clearing in the woods, only reachable by following an overgrown path from the nearest parking spot through the wood for five minutes. The concerete building, slightly bigger than a shed, was used by ama (free-divers, usually women) as a spot to get dressed, rest, and warm up, but has been long abandoned. Inside, Ninomoya finds his employer, Inuzuka. Ninomiya served time after killing a person, and once he was free, it was Inuzuka who was willing to hire him at his construction firm. Ninomiya owes a lot to Inuzuka, as he only still treated him as a decent human being despite his past, and he wasn't a truly bad person either. That said, Inuzuka isn't a truly good person either, and he's been duping people into far-too-costly reconstruction projects. Ninomiya has stood by his friend's side for a long time, but fearing Inuzuka might go too far with his criminal endeavours sooner or later, Ninomiya wants out. Inuzuka agreed, but Ninomiya had to do one last job for him.

And thus Ninomiya arrives at the building, where Inuzuka explains Ninomiya is to keep an eye on a person, who is being held captive. The building consists of two "rooms": entering the building leads to the larger entrance room. In the back of that room, is a smaller room, which has no windows and can only be accessed via the door in the entrance room. The prisoner is being held captive in the smaller room, which is locked with a key and also barricaded with a heavy, sturdy-looking barricade bar, which is held in place with four metal hinges on the wall and the door itself. Ninomiya is to not communicate with the prisoner at all, whether it's him starting a conversarion or the prisoner, but also not treat him badly.  The task will last for seven days. Ninomiya hasn't quite sized up the situation, when Inuzuka also locks the outer door of the building, meaning Ninomoya himself is also locked up. Inuzuka assures Ninomiya he'll come pick him up in seven days, and that someone will bring food for both Ninomiya and the prisoner twice a day (both the outer door and the inner door have a small door near the ground, meant for air intake, through which food can be pushed inside).

At first Ninomiya adheres to his assignment, not talking to the prisoner and keeping to himself. Food is also properly delivered around noon and the evening, so he has not to worry about being hungry. The prisoner however is surprisingly quiet, which makes Ninomiya wonder whether there is a prisoner inside. Fortunately, after some time he does hear a person inside. As the hours and days pass by however, Ninomiya starts to wonder. Who is the prisoner? Perhaps Inuzuka has kidnapped someone, and making Ninomoya a scapegoat, keeping him prisoner too so he can be the fall guy. Ninomiya starts to wonder out loud and even starts to talk to the prisoner, who very occasionally answers with short replies. Ninomiya also keeps a diary, detailing the little that happens during these seven days.

Seven days later, the murdered bodies of Ninomiya and Inuzuka are found: Ninomiya in the entrance room, Inuzuka's body in the locked room, which is still barricaded.

So we have an interesting two-folded mystery here: why is Ninomiya asked to watch a prisoner, while he's being kept imprisoned in the building himself too, and how come both Ninomoya and Inuzuka end up dead in the house (with Inuzuka being inside the room where the prisoner was). It's a very short story, so　I do think some details should have gotten more attention, but on the whole, I did enjoy this story a lot. The first two-thirds of the story read as a thriller, as Ninomiya starts to get more doubts about the task he has been given by Inuzuka, slowly realizing he might be set-up for some huge crime and trying to negotiate with the prisoner in the room to see if they can get out together. But then we shift to a police investigation after the seventh day, in which we not only learn that Ninomiya was mudered, but that also Inuzuka was found dead in the locked room (and Inuzuka died hours before Ninomiya too). While I have only read Monzen's novels, I was both surprised, and not surprised, to see he included diagrams in this story too: he always makes very detailed diagrams and floor plans for his stories, as he studied architecture and it's often an important motif in his mysteries. One could say the same here, though I wasn't that surprised by the "architectural" deception going on in this story: it was in fact the whole deal about why Ninomoya is being kept captive together with the prisoner that presented a fun mystery. Not completely fairly clewed perhaps, but an interesting, and most importantly, suspenseful plot nonetheless.

As this was written exclusively for the Shosen/Horindou facscimile release of Shi no Meidai, I doubt this would be collected in a short story collection if Monzen would decide to write more short stories in the future. I personally would be interested in his short stories though, going by what Tsukiatari no Ie brought! He apparently has at least three other short stories published, so I might try and see if I can obtain them/get copies of them.

Original Japanese title(s):  門前典之「突き当たりの家」