It was funny to see everyone trying film that iconic opening of the Slam Dunk opening theme on the seaside part of the Enoshima Electric Railway when I was there...
The title story UFO Oodoori ("UFO Avenue") for example revolves around an elderly lady living in Kamakura stating that one night, she saw aliens fighting among each other in the mountain on the other side of the avenue she's living at. She mentions this on a television show, and now her son is trying to get her into a retirement home, fearing she might have gone dotty. A little girl living in the neighborhood, who is close to the woman, swears the elderly lady is still completely lucid and doesn't want her to leave, so she travels alone to Yokohama to visit Mitarai, hiring him to find out what happened. Mitarai and Ishioka go to Kamakura, using the Enoshima Electric Railway to visit the lady to interview her on what she saw. When they have a look at the place where the battle supposedly took place, Ishioka is surprised there are indeed signs of something having happened here, as they find big holes in the ground. They also learn that only nights before she saw the aliens do battle in the mountains (wearing space suits, using strange rifles and even a UFO flying nearby), a neighbor, Ono, passed away under curous circumstances. The man had been found dead in his bedroom by his fiancee: the room had been locked from the inside, and for some reason the door and windows had been sealed with tape. Furthermore, strips of tape had been hanging from the ceiling. The man was also dressed rather oddly for a night's rest: he had been found with a helmet on, a scarf around his neck, gloves on his hands and his body completely wrapped up in sheets. Ono turns out to have had a fight with his ex-boss and even attacked his boss with a pipe, but the police couldn't nab him for it. Ono had been afraid for revenge since, but was this the way in which he protected himself from attacks? Or was this get-up defense for aliens? Mitarai becomes more and more intrigued by these events in Kamakura, but is he really after aliens, or is there more behind this?
Spoilers: it wasn't aliens. Not this time.
As always, Mitarai pretty much guesses the solution as soon as he learns the details of the case, with most of the time spent on asking questions to confirm his ideas and to insult and irritate the local police as he accuses them of stupidity and makes vague comments about who to watch out for. and where they can find traces of the truth. The story is fun to read though, with Mitarai and Ishioka meeting a colorful cast of characters despite the novella not being that long. There's also a nice focus on the ancient capital Kamakura and the area surrounding the iconic Enoshima Electric Railway. I happened to have visited Kamamura and Enoshima for the first time in my life earlier this year, of course also riding the Enoshima Electric Railway, which is characteristically integrated, and nearly absorbed into the local environment, with the very narrow tracks often just running just a dozen centimeters away from the surrounding houses. Author Shimada often likes to flaunt with his knowledge of things he researched in his stories (in this case explaining why these houses are so close to the tracks), but it works pretty well here because he keeps it quite modest due to the length of the novella and it of course relates in a certain way back to the mystery. The explanation behind the locked room mystery of Ono's death is not very surprising in a vacuum, but I like how Shimada doesn't use it... in a vacuum: it's only a starting point which then leads to other mysteries handled in this tale which I find more inspiring, with ultimately a very human motive being all of it (that said, what Ono did to protect himself was a bit... odd. You'd think there'd be better and safer ways to accomplish what he needed to do). Then we have the aliens of course: again, just hearing the explanation of what it was on its own isn't really shocking, but I really like how Shimada clewed the set-up and how it all ties together to one big tale, with all the "alien" proof having perfectly normal and rational explanations behind them. Shimada does this too in his other "fanciful interpretation of otherwise explanainable events" stories, but the other stories tend to be novels and there the stories become very convoluted, asking for a lot of suspension of disbelief: the chain of events in UFO Oodoori is far more compact and feels more convincing because of it.
Kasa wo Oru Onna ("The Woman Who Broke Her Umbrella") is a story that has been adapted for television in 2015, and it was in fact the very first time a Mitarai Kiyoshi story had been adapted. I have discussed the special in the past, and I liked it overall: you can find my thoughts here. I still adore the story set-up. Ishioka tells Mitarai about a story he heard on a radio show where they discuss strange happenings and the DJ tries to come up with an answer. A few nights ago, during a rainy night, the listener happened to look outside his window to see an attractive woman in a one-piece dress walking down the road towards a crossing. The woman placed her umbrella on the road and hid herself. When the first car drove around the umbrella, she adjusted its location and this repeated itself until a car had run over the umbrella, bending it completely. She then picked the umbrella up, but then walked back in the direction she came from. The DJ didn't manage to come up with a satisfying explanation for this strange series of events and neither can Ishioka, but armchair detective Mitarai quickly focuses on a few key actions of the mysterious woman and boldly proposes a theory that poses the woman was involved in a serious crime. When they read the local news of where the radio listener was living, they find out there had indeed been a murder in an apartment building nearby.
This is still a fun armchair detective story, where Mitarai comes up with a daring hypothesis involving murder, based on what sounds like the strange, but ultimately innocent story of a woman who broke her umbrella in a roundabout manner. The manner in which Mitarai develops his theory, or at least, show to Ishioka how he did that, by asking Ishioka key questions about the story is great. The Nine Mile Walk format works great for this mystery and you can really feel how it slowly turns into something sinister. After the initial set-up of the story and Mitarai showing his main conclusions, the story actually changes perspectives, as it then follows the woman in question. We learn she has a motive to kill a certain woman, because that woman caused the death of her mother during a bus hijack incident: while it was the hijacker who directly caused the death, it was the completely selfish and unwarranted action of the woman, a bus passenger, who pushed the hijacker to the murder. After learning this fact, the daughter swore revenge for her mother. While this narrative seems to cinch the deal for the reader regarding Mitarai's deductions, the reader is then treated to a surprise, as some facts we learn in this narrative, don't match up to what Mitarai's conclusions pointed to, which adds a new layer to the mystery for us the reader, while logically, Mitarai shouldn't be aware of that, so the question is how they'll then figure out the whole truth in the end.
While the initial set-up of the woman breaking her umbrella is great, the second half of the story that explains the discrepancies between Mitarai's initial conclusions and the truth as the reader knows it, does rely on a bit on coincidences adding up. I'm not sure whether this is the case, but it feels like this second half was only added as an expansion on an original, shorter story, which may add layers of complexity, but also feels forced in some ways, with some plot elements also mirroring the other tale in this collection, which may make it feel repetitive in some manners. The first half of the story is really worth it though and I personally find it one of the more memorable Mitarai novellas.
So taken on the whole, I think UFO Oodoori is a pretty decent collection with Mitarai Kiyoshi. While not reaching the "I'm going to throw this book at the floor while screaming 'no way' in joy" heights of some of the novels, it's a solid showcase of Mitarai in the armchair (or leisurely working) detective mode, with mysteries that seem inexplicable at first but which only a genius like Mitarai can figure out in seconds. I'd say that Kasa wo Oru Onna is the better mystery story of the two, while the title story has the best sense of location.
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