So I met Norizuki twice in my life, and the first time something funny happened (though Norizuki probably didn't realize it), though the Mephisto editor-in-chief sure did and he was a huge help to me...
Norizuki Rintarou's series about the adventures of the fictional writer/amateur detective Norizuki Rintarou and his father Inspector Norizuki finally gets a new volume later this month in the form of Norizuki Rintarou no Fukaku, which also has the English title The Unawareness of Norizuki Rintarou on the cover. The contents of the four-story-volume was recently announced and it turns out I already read half of the stories included. While the final story is an original tale written especially for the volume, I have already reviewed the first two stories in the book: Higisha Shibou ni Yori ("Due to the Death of the Suspect") and Shinritekikashi Ari ("Stigmatized Property") were both originally written as part of guess-the-culprit anthology projects, where the first part of the story would be published and then readers would have time to write in their solutions, before the second half of the story would be published. I read these stories when the volumes collecting these stories were published and enjoyed both of them as fair-play stories where we get to see Norizuki's logic-based puzzles in their full glory.
Pater Norizuki is investigating a rather kooky case and as always, he ends up discussing the case with filius Rintarou to see if the writer has some ideas. Komiyama Michiyo, an elderly, wealthy woman was found murdered in her own home: the woman ran several succesful businesses and was always staying in hotels during weekdays for all her business obligations, though she made it a rule to return home for the weekend: she was discovered dead on a Monday. While at first it seems like a robbery ending in death, the fact the murderer actually managed to switch off the security cameras and evade all the cameras in the neigborhood seems to suggest the "thief" had very detailed knowledge about the victim's house, its security measures and thus would have known the busy woman was seldom at home during the week: so why would a genuine thief would have picked the weekend, when the woman was always at home? This alone would just make for an ordinary case, but things took a weird turn when Suzumura Shigeki, an office employee who has made it a habit to jog in the evening after work, made a report about having found the body of a dead woman in the park he always visits: an elderly woman had died recently there due to dehydration, and it was at that same spot he saw an elderly woman collapsed on the ground. At first he thought it was another case of dehydration and tried to wake the woman up, but she was clearly dead and her arms had been tied with zip ties, indicating a crime. As he was out jogging, he didn't have his phone with him and had to report from the nearest public phone. When he and a patrolman returned to the park however, they found no trace of the woman, though it was clear someone had been lying at the place Suzumura saw the body. When he described the face of the woman however, it turned out to be the face of...Komiyama Michiyo, a woman who was already dead by then!
The spooky story reminds in a way of the classic, award-winning An Urban Legend Puzzle in this same series and indeed, while this story does not feature an actual, well-known urban legend/ghost story, the story does start as a genuine scary story, told as the experience of an "unnamed" office worker (Suzumura) who dreams of jogging at night and then running into a ghostly face of a woman and later, Suzumura testifies he'd been seeing that woman in his dreams long before he stumbled the dead body in the park. But ghosts and prophetic dreams can't be real....right? Of course, this is an experiment in logical deduction as are all of the Rintarou short stories and indeed, Rintarou does offer a very logical solution to what happened. As many of the Rintarou stories go (especially those with Rintarou and his father just discussing a case as armchair detectives), the story's cleverness lies in how the story is presented to the reader in terms of how every element is connected, and Rintarou then using clever questions to steer the reader (and his father) towards a subversion of the original presentation, showing how everything had been connected in a different manner in reality. This is also executed satisfactorily in this tale, and while some elements do feel a bit too familiar if you've read a healthy amount of the Rintarou short stories, Tsugi wa Anta no Ban da yo is a pretty solid entry in the series.
It's not a very long story, so there's not much more I can talk about without giving away too much. Looking at the already available three stories that will be included in the upcoming Norizuki Rintarou no Fukaku volume though, I think these were all really solid short mystery tales, with of course the first two being pure guess-the-culprit puzzles seperated in a "problem" and "solution" part, while Tsugi wa Anta no Ban da yo is a bit more open, but feels more unique with its ghost story set-up . I do have to admit that now that I have read three of the four stories, it's likely I won't be picking up a copy of Norizuki Rintarou no Fukaku right away on release just to read that one final original story.. Oh well, I'm sure I'll get to it eventually.
No comments :
Post a Comment