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「The Real Folk Blues」（山根麻衣）

 

With one eye I look at tomorrow 

With one eye I keep staring at yesterday 

 "The Real Folk Blues" (Yamane Mai)

Oh, this reminds me I never finished the Another Code R part of the Another Code Recollection. I loved the Wii original though...

"O" was a serial killer who specialized in murdering people in locked rooms: he was also extremely good at that, as he had nearly killed a hundred people during his career. He made a mistake however when he killed Professor Kiryuu, but left his child alive: the young Kiryuu Touma swore revenge, becoming a detective specializing in O's handiwork. Because Touma remains in the shadows as a detective, the public soon came up with the name "Phantom Alpha". And it was Phantom Alpha who eventually managed to capture "O", just as he killed his 96th victim. "O" turned out to be a man called Migiwazaki Hitoshi and he was soon detained, but not at a prison: he was sent to the laboratory of Kuzumi Chiyo, a former pupil of Professor Kiryuu and a personal friend of Phantom Alpha. Chiyo runs the Kuzumi Brain Laboratory on Akon Island, a remote and highly secured island. Here Chiyo's researching memories, with her end goal being the Pandora Brain, a device that can extract memories of one person and implant them into another person, effectively overwriting one person's identity over another. Because the police can't find proof/explanations for all of the locked room murders O committed, Chiyo and her team of a handful of researchers are to examine Migiwazaki's memories and extract that information about all the crimes he committed from his brain. Migiwazaki is of course held in a heavily secured room, with pressure and biometric sensors making sure he's kept safely inside his prison cell day and night. Phantom Alpha (Touma) visits the island too to witness the experiment. The two nemeses "O" and "Phantom Alpha" have a confrontation over a video connection, but then there's a short power failure. Chiyo has the main computer (on the back-up generator) restore power in the facility, but when the security cameras go on again, they see Migiwazaki's burnt body in his prison cell. Touma hurries to the cell, which was locked throughout the power failure, but there's no doubt there's a burnt body there. But how could anyone have killed "O" like that in a locked room...?

Three years later, a group of university students make their way to the island to stay at the remains of the Kuzumi Brain Laboratory. Three years ago, an incident happened on the island, with four people being found murdered at the lab, including Migiwazaki, and two people (including Touma), missing from the island. There also had been a fire, which burnt down part of the building. The students belong to their university's Mystery Club and managed to arrange to stay for a few nights in the lab with the current owner of the property. As fans of the mystery genre, they are of course excited to stay at an island where such a mysterious incident occured just three years ago, but then murders start to happen here too and they start thinking: what if that Pandora Brain device that was being developed here was in a working state, and what if Migiwazaki's identity survived the murder spree and fire...? Minami Asov's Pandora Brain - Akontou Satsujin(kaku) Jiken ("Pandora Brain - The Akon Island (Identity) Murder Case", 2025) follows mysteries set both in the past and the present as they slowly converge towards one truth.

Minami Asov's first mystery novel Eigoukan Chourenzoku Satsujn Jiken - Majo wa X to Shinu Koto ni Shita ("The Super Serial Murder Case at the House of Eternity - The Witch Chose To Die With X"), released in 2024, was a mystery novel that cleverly used the supernatural device of time travel to bring a complex, but highly enjoyable plot. It was thus not very surprising to learn Minami's second mystery novel too would utilize some kind of supernatural or science-fiction device. Whereas Eigoukan featured in a historical setting, Pandora Brain is most definitely set in contemporary times (with the mystery club students making a lot of references to mystery fiction) and again, unsurprisingly, we thus get a science-fiction device in the form of the titular Pandora Brain, a device that can supposedly copy a person's whole memories (thus their identity) and implant them into a different person, effectively erasing the original persons's identity and overwriting them.

Which is a cool idea on paper, but I have to admit that for a large part of the story, Pandora Brain doesn't spend a lot of time on said device. The story alternates between the past and present narratives, so we follow both Phantom Alpha/Touma and Chiyo as they deal with the mysterious death of "O" in the prison in the high-tech lab and the students as they stay in the ruins of the lab and they get killed one by one. This means the mystery focuses more on the how and why of the locked room murders, rather than focusing on shenanigans with identity copiers. This is a bit of a disappointment, as you also know the device will become relevant later on, but because the plot only starts to pay attention to the titular Pandora Brain relatively late, most of the reveals surrounding this feel a bit underwhelming, as they don't go far as might have been possible, had it been put front and center from the start, rather than in the last third/quarter of the book. What also doesn't help is that the exact workings of the Pandora Brain aren't explained in enough detail, which means some of the things we learn in the conclusion regarding whether the Pandora Brain had been used in these murders or not, feel a bit unfair: some things are more-or-less handwaved, with the reader just being told it can do certain things or how it can't do certain things, which are relevant to the mystery solving, but we weren't really told about these rules until the denouement!

There are more moments where the book showcases good ideas for a mystery, but where the clewing feels insufficient. The direct trick behind the locked cell murder on "O" is fairly simple, but the underlying idea of how it was brought forth is interesting, but feels unfair because again "this is how a certain thing works" isn't explained properly until the explanation. The same for another murder that happens in the past. Again, the direct trick is simple, but the trick can only be done via a principle that is quite interesting on its own and is basically similar to the underlying principle of the "O" murder, but here too the lack of prior explanation hurts the execution. In the present, I think the set-up of the locked room is decent enough, though I think it would've worked better in a visual format, rather than prose. It is at the very end when the plot tightly connects the narratives of the past and present together, explaining why murders happened on the island three years apart, but it's here where the insufficient prior explanation of "the rules" hurt the story, as the idea is interesting, but we are shown various instances of the rules being applied differently, which makes things feel unfair, even though this could have been avoided by giving us more explanation about the rules (and explanations how/when things work differently from the standard application). The ending is bitter-sweet and again, I do think the general ideas in this novel are good, but I found the execution not nearly as neat as Eigoukan.

So on the whole, I didn't like Pandora Brain as much as Eigoukan. It has cool ideas, and I think a lot of readers will like the banter of the characters (especially in the present, with the students), but as a fair-play mystery, I think it could've been better, even if it's far from bad: I just think there was not only the potential for something much more impressive, so much of it was just in reach, so that makes it feel even more disappointing. Still, Pandora Brain isn't a book I would tell you to avoid, as there's plenty of good to be found inside too.

Original Japanese title(s): 南海遊『パンドラ・ブレイン　亜魂島殺人（格）事件』