番外編：The Labyrinth House Murders Released

I probably mentioned it earlier on this blog, but today's finally the day: this is the day Pushkin Press is releasing my English translation of The Labyrinth House Murders (Meirokan no Satsujin) by Yukito AYATSUJI. Or at least, in the United Kingdom, I believe the US release will follow in a few months.

While my English translation of The Decagon House Murders was released via Locked Room International back in 2015, Pushkin Press took over the license, starting first with a revised re-release in 2021, and then following up with the sequel The Mill House Murders in 2023. Fortunately, both Ayatsuji himself and Pushkin wanted me on board again for the sequel and I was glad to hear that they also had intentions of continuing the series, so that brings us to the third book in the series: The Labyrinth House Murders was originally released in 1988 and is set in a rather unique location: the titular house is a genuine underground maze inspired by the myth of the Minotaur and the home of Miyagaki Yotaro, a veteran mystery writer who has been active for decades not only as an author, but also in an editing position where he helps younger authors debut in his beloved genre. As of late however, he has decided to retire, but for his sixtieth birthday, he has decided to invite some of his closest comrades, like writers who debuted under his tutelage and an editor with whom he has worked for a long time. However, soon after everyone has arrived, a shocking death is sprung upon the guests, and they are locked inside the Labyrinth House and are asked to participate in a bizarre competition with deadly results...

The Decagon House Murders was not written as a 'series' book with obvious story hooks or anything like that, which explains why The Mill House Murders, as a sequel, could be read without any prior knowledge of the series. That also holds for The Labyrinth House Murders: while a few references are dropped about earlier cases, the tale itself can be read independently, so there's no real problem if you decide to start with this book.   

Personally, this has always been one of my favorite entries in the series, ever since I read it over a decade ago. This is in part due to the background setting: ever since I was a child, I have loved Greek mythology, so the setting of the labyrinth and rooms named after figures related to the myth of the Minotaur really appeal to me. The floorplan of the titular Labyrinth House is also much more complex than any of the maps we have seen so far: it's a genuine maze and each time you want to move from one room to another, you need to go through the maze. As you read, you'll be looking at the floorplan, and that adds a fun element, kinda like how you'd read The Lord of the Rings and check how everyone was moving while heading for Mordor. But the story itself is also fun: we have a group of genre-savvy characters gathered together, from mystery writers to a critic, an editor and a huge fan of the genre, and the plot plays a lot with that. As for the mystery, it's a really tricky one once again, that has hints hidden in more places than you'd expect.  

Translation-wise, there's something I do want to discuss in due time, but I might wait a little bit longer to get back to that, as it's not something to mention right away on release day! 

Anyway, if you liked The Decagon House Murders and/or The Mill House Murders, please read The Labyrinth House Murders too, and if not... try it anyway! In a way, it's the most "detectivey" book of the three books released until now, so I have no doubt a lot of readers will enjoy this one. And as for more translations of this series? As you can expect, positive reception is the most likely to ensure more translations follow (hopefully by me of course), so it'd be great if you'd pick the book!

Turnabout Memories - Part 13

"I have to go over everything that's happened. I have to remember" 

Another Code R: Journey into Lost Memories

Here on this blog, it's a tradition to look back at the reviews and other posts that were published ths year and highlight a few of them. I usually post this list around Christmas, but as my weekly update day is Wednesday, I figured it'd just post it on the usual day then as it's so close... I'm always months ahead with writing posts, but this particular post I always write in December, because sometimes I schedule in extra posts (like Detective Conan: Black Iron Submarine) and sometimes I end up shuffling the post schedule, so I usually am not sure about what posts I can refer to in this end-of-year post until.... it's the end of the year.  Of course, some of the eligible posts I wrote way back in 2022 already... This year, I managed to read a few out-of-print authors and works I had been eyeing for some time now, so that was fun. I usually don't really plan what to read in a specific year, so even to me, it's a surprise how a year will end for me, sometimes I basically only read books by authors I already now, sometimes I see a rather noticable influx of authors I had never read before. I'm already in the second half of 2024 when it comes to scheduled posts, and I can already tell you there's gold among some of the posts there! I hope you'll all have a fantastic new year and see you back in 2024!

 

The Best Project Outside The Blog! In 2023!

The Mill House Murders 

 

Yes, this is just the self-promotion category! The very first novel I translated was The Decagon House Murders back in 2015, and now, quite some few years later, I finally got the opportunity to work on its sequel, The Mill House Murders. While The Decagon House Murders was originally published by Locked Room International, it is now currently being published by Pushkin Press, so to be honest, I had no idea at first whether they were interested in continuing the series, and whether I'd be in the equation, but fortunately, Ayatsuji himself also wanted me back on board, and I of course loved to come back to the series, resulting in a release by Pushkin Press earlier this year. Last year, I worked on Imamura's Death Within the Evil Eye, which was the first time I got to work on a sequel to a book I also worked on, but The Mill House Murders still remains a bit special, due to its connection to my first translated novel! The translation of the third book in the series, The Labyrinth House Murders, has already been announced, and once again, I had the pleasure and honor of working on it, so I hope readers here will pick it up too next year!

I'd also of course like to point readers here to the Honkaku Discord Server. It's been running for just over a year now, and it's become a nice place to chat about mystery fiction (not just Japanese). Of course, that's not my accomplishment, but that of the members in the server. It's a pretty easy-going server too, so if that sounds like fun, come have a look: https://discord.gg/z3HMSmf8qd

 

Most Interesting Non-Fiction Book! Of 2023!

Misshitsu Mystery Guide

Okay, I haven't read any other non-fiction mystery-related books besides this one, so this isn't really fair, but still, Iiki Yuusan's guide on the locked room mystery is really a must-read for fans of the locked room and impossible crime sub-genre, I think. In the book, the Ellery Queen scholar presents 50 mystery stories (30 Japanese, 20 foreign) that in his mind showcase the diversity that exists within the sub-genre. The book includes very cool diagrams of the crime scenes for each of the stories (so even for stories that originally didn't feature any diagrams), but what is more interesting, is the fact the book consists of two parts. In the first part, Iiki only introoduces the broad outline of the story in question and explains briefly why he thinks the book should be highlighted, but in the second half, he also spoils the solution of each story, and that allows him to freedom to pick entries based on their solution (and not just the trick), and that allows for some really unique picks for this book, like stories that aren't really impossible crimes until you consider the solution, or going with very experimental locked room mysteries. It's a fantastic book that really deserves a read.

Most Interesting Mystery Game Played In 2023! But Probably Older!

The Case of the Golden Idol

 

I've played a fair amount of mystery games this year. Detective Pikachu Returns was highly anticipated by me because I played the original back in 2016(!) already and had been waiting all this time to get closure on the story. A game like Tantei Bokumetsu (AKA Process of Elimination) was a game I had been wanting to play for a long time, due to its unique premise of a mystery game in the format of a SRPG and I finally got around to it because I wanted to play it before the English version was released. Rain Code was of course a game I had been looking forward to, as it was created by the same people behind Danganronpa. These were all games I liked playing in general, but always had points I found frustrating, or at the very least, they had obvious points that could've been improved. In that regard, I'd have to say Unheard was a very nice surprise, as I had very little knowledge about the game when I started with it, but it was a short, but memorable experience. Ultimately, I do think the most interesting mystery game I played this year was The Case of the Golden Idol, which offers deduction-focused gameplay combined with a rather surprising epic story. And yes, I had to quickly write the review of the game last week so I could feature it in this post!

 

Silliest Clue! Seen in 2023!

Morikawa Goten no Inbou ("Intrigue at the Morikawa Manor") (Detective Conan episodes 1050-1051)

 

Sometimes, you just want something silly. Morikawa Goten no Inbou is a two-parter in the animated series of Detective Conan, penned by Yamatoya Akatsuki. Once you see his name, alarm bells should ring, for while he has written an excellent Tantei Gakuen Q anime original with a locked room set in a sunken ship, his output for Detective Conan has been nothing but insane. The dear man also writes for Gintama, which should give you an idea of how silly he can be. In 2020, I choose his Glamping Kaijiken ("The Curious Glamping Incident") as the silliest mystery I had seen that year, and while on the whole Morikawa Goten no Inbou is not nearly as silly, I would say the final clue Conan presents to the culprit when he explains how he figured out that person was the culprit, has to be one of the most insane, and also outright insulting clues ever. No sane person would ever think to use that as a clue in a mystery story, but Yamatoya does. It's something you'd never expect to come, and it's brilliant.

Best Locked Room Epic! Of 2023!

Misshitsu Kingdom (Kingdom of the Locked Room)

 

I am not specifically a fan of the locked room mystery, but this year, I did happen to read three books that all aimed to be an enormous locked room mystery epic. Of the three, Kamosaki Danro's Misshitsu Kyouran Jidai no Satsujin - Zekkai no Kotou to Nanatsu no Trick (The Murder in the Age of Frenzy of Locked Rooms: The Solitary Island in the Distant Sea and the Seven Tricks) has a unique premise, set in a world where murderers know that by using locked room murders, they can't be convicted in a court of law unless the police figure out how they did it (because unless the police can prove how the defendant did it, the impossibility of the crime itself becomes an alibi for every single person) and in this book, we have no less than seven different locked room murders. However, the book is also fairly short, so each room barely gets any time. Kagami Masayuki's second novel Kangokutou ("Prison Island") is a John Dickson Carr-inspired epic of about 1200 pages long, with a series of impossible crimes happening on a prison island isolated from the outside world due to a storm. The extended page count allows Kagami to come up with a very robust setting for most of the locked rooms, and it results in a very epic conclusion where series detective Bertrand explains all the mysteries in hundreds of pages! However, on the whole, I found Tsukatou Hajime's Misshitsu Kingdom the better party. In terms of page count, it's similar to Kangokutou at about 1200 pages, but while Kagami's epic was very closely modeled after John Dickson Carr, Tsukatou uses very Carr-esque impossible crime situations, but at the same time, utilizes Ellery Queen-esque chains of reasonings to drive the plot, and this fusion of these two schools is what really makes Misshitsu Kingdom special in my opinion.

Best Post I Accidentally Deleted And Had To Rewrite Completely!

Kangokutou ("Prison Island")

Kangokutou didn't win in the previous category, but it sure wins here. In over ten years of blogging, never had I accidentally deleted a post I had finished already. I originally read Kangokutou in March of this year, and wrote my rather lengthy review of it soon after that and had the post scheduled for August, but the week before the post would go up, I wanted to change something, and a few wrong keyboard shortcut inputs later, I had accidentally deleted the contents of the post, and allowed the empty post to be saved. Which mean I had to rewrite the whole post from scratch, months after I had read the book in question. And I still think the original version of the post was better, going into more detail into the various crimes that occur in that locked room epic, but alas, we all have to just to be content with the current version of the post.

Best Premise! Of 2023!

Hen na Ie ("A Curious House")

I've read a few books this year with memorable premises. Some were straightforward, but ambitious premises, like the epic locked room mysteries mentioned two categories ago. Some had just inspired settings for the book. Take for example Houjou Kie's Amulet Hotel, a book set at a hotel catering to criminals, allowing for rather unique stories as it's not the usual police doing detective work here, but a hotel detective working for an organization which rather prefers to "clean up" a hotel guest themselves if the guest has violated a house rule to keep things quiet. There are also more fantastical premises I found memorable: In Yonezawa Honobu's The Broken Keel, we have a small kingdom off the coast of Britain that deals with the murder on their king while under attack by immortal Danes, in Kinnikuman Yojigen Sappou Satsujin Jiken ("Kinnikuman: The Four-Dimensional Murder Art Murder Case"), the famous Kinnikuman franchise tackles on the mystery genre by having the superhuman wrestlers entangled in murder cases, and Nitadori Kei's Suiri Taisen ("The Great Deduction War") is basically The Avengers, with detectives with various superpowers gathering to tackle one case. Other memorable reads tackle form: Shirodaira Kyou's Spiral ~ The Bonds of Reasoning 2: The Locked Room of the Steel Gang Boss and its spiritual successor Kannagi Uromu Saigo no Jiken ("The Last Case of Kannagi Uromu") by Konno Tenryuu revolve around presenting multiple solutions based on a past murder (in the latter case, a mystery novel with no clear solution), something Komori Kentarou also does with his incredibly fun Comiket Satsujin Jiken, being about a series of murders happening at Comiket among membeers of a doujin circle, with their latest release being a collection of short stories with their intended solutions to a murder in the fictional series Lunatic Dreamers. But in the end, I think Uketsu's Hen na Ie is still the one that managed to surprise me the most with its premise. Floorplans and diagrams are often an important element in a mystery story (see the also aforementioned Misshitsu Mystery Guide), but never had I seen a mystery story that uses floorplans exclusively to tell its story. While the first chapter is by far the best of the whole book, the idea of making the floorplan the star of the story, instead of a supporting role, was inspired, and the result is a very unique book that despite some flaws is very, very entertaining and memorable.

The Just-Ten-In-No-Particular-Order-No-Comments List

- Amulet Hotel (Houjou Kie)

- Comiket Satsujin Jiken ("The Comiket Murder Case") (Komori Kentarou)

- Hakobune ("The Ark") (Yuuki Haruo)

- Semi-Otoko ("The Cicada-Man") (Nemoto Shou)

- Misshitsu Kingdom ("Kingdom of the Locked Room") (Tsukatou Hajime)

- Sougetsujou no Sangeki ("The Tragedy at the Twin Moon Castle") (Kagami Masayuki)

- Hen na Ie ("A Curious House") (Uketsu)

- Misshitsu Mystery Guide ("Locked Room Mystery Guide") (Iiki Yuusan)

- Meitantei no Ikenie - Jinminkyou Satsujin Jiken ("The Sacrifice of the Great Detective: The Peoples Church Murder Case" AKA The Detective Massacre) (Shirai Tomoyuki)

- Tinker-Bell Goroshi ("The Murder of Tinker-Bell") (Kobayashi Yasumi)

Door to Death

One year ago, I asked about whether anyone knew about any interesting honkaku-focused Discord servers, and as it appeared there wasn't one yet, I decided to open the Honkaku Discord server myself. And today it's been active for exactly one year! At the time, I hoped the server would attract about perhaps thirty members after some time, but to my great surprise, that number was reached much faster than what I had expected, and the Honkaku Server has been a fun place to talk about mystery fiction, from not only Japan, but across the world and in different mediums, from books to games. We've also been doing regular book clubs, even of stories and novels written by fellow members. I haven't really name-dropped the server lately here, so I guess it's about time I do it again, as you're sure to have a great time there if you like chatting about mystery fiction!

Invite link: https://discord.gg/z3HMSmf8qd

I can’t make bricks without clay

Minor service announcement.

I am not sure how many readers here make use of the master list of all the reviews/editorials found in the Library, but if you had looked at the list say the last two, three years, you may have noticed I hadn't really kept it up to date. To be very honest: that was because the list had become a complete mess backstage with bloated HTML and mark-up conventions that usually broke everything every time I wanted to add a new link. My only way out was basically redoing the whole list, or at least, cleaning up everything now to make things easier on myself going forward. And after a lot of time squinting my eyes at the screen cleaning code I have finally done that. I simplified the master list in terms of mark-up conventions so I don't have to play with font sizes and italicizing book titles etc. anymore (meaning there's less chance of me breaking things in terms of page lay-out). I have also simplified the list itself a bit: I have reduced the number of repeated entries as now, adaptations are generally only listed once with the original creator (instead of also being listed a second time in the seperate games/TV/film/theater categories). Authors who I have only read in anthologies also don't get seperate entries anymore, but are only listed in the anthology category. This should make the list less bloated, and easier for me to update because I don't have to enter some entries twice in different categories.

I hadn't updated the list in 3+ years, so there were quite a few notable absentees in the list until yesterday. Imagine, the old list had only one entry for recent favorite Houjou Kie and I had to add like 10 Kindaichi Case Files volumes... Anyway, the update should make things easier if you are looking for a certain book or reviews of a certain author. This blog has been running for 10+ years, so there are quite a number of posts, and hopefully the renewed master list makes it easier to find things. 

(Oh, and as this isn't really a deep post anyway, I might as well point to the Honkaku-themed Discord server again. Have a look around if you want to talk about mystery fiction with other honkaku fans!)

Turnabout Memories - Part 12

"I have to go over everything that's happened. I have to remember" 

Another Code R: Journey into Lost Memories

Another year passes, another holiday season comes, and as per tradition, this is also the time I look back at the reviews and other posts that stood out the most this year and highlight them in a 'not really a list' list post. As I read the reviews posted this year, I noticed a lot of my favorites were all posted in the first half of the year, making the second half seem a bit... boring, though because the posts on this blog aren't actually written and published real-time (sometimes, a post waits for months before it's published, while others I decide to publish the same week), it's more of a coincidence than a trend, I guess.  Anyway, the lists and categories in this post aren't really made after serious deliberation, and are just pointing to a few of the more memorable mystery media I consumed this year, so in case you happened to have missed them the first time, read them now! I'm already well into 2023 when it comes to scheduled posts, and I can already safely say some of those books will definitely end up in my lists of favorites of next year, so I hope readers will be back next year too. Until then, have a good holiday season!

Best Project Outside The Blog! 

Death Within the Evil Eye

 

Yes, this is just the the self-promotion category! Unlike 2020 and 2021, I have only one title to mention here. While the release of The Mill House Murders has already been announced, it won't be released until next year, meaning there's only one big, and I do mean big title to mention here: Locked Room International released IMAMURA Masahiro's Death Within The Evil Eye, the direct sequel to his hit novel Death Among the Undead. Death Among the Undead was a personal favorite, and its 2019 sequel was, almost surprisingly, also a real gem, weaving supernatural themes with a mystery story that still valued logical reasoning above else, resulting in the kind puzzle plot-oriented mystery story I love. This is the first time I got to work on a sequel novel too, so that makes it extra memorable. The release has been very recent, so I guess not many have read it yet, though I hope eventually people will pick it up, because it's really a great mystery novel. And I mean, we all have to read something during the holiday season, right?

 

Oh, and technically a project outside the blog, in the sense that it is not supposed to be directly connected to this blog: I opened a Honkaku-themed Discord server a few weeks ago, so you're welcome there to discuss mystery fiction, including (shin) honkaku stories, with other fans!

 

Most Interesting Non-Review Post! Of 2022!

Higurashi: When They Cry Playthrough Memo

 

Okay, I haven't really made any non-review posts this year... sorry! I'm always reading books, so there's always material for reviews, but I have to admit editorials etc. are the first type of posts to get forgotten whenever it's busy or I am just not in a writing mood. So in the end, the only posts that even fit in this category are my playthrough memos I kept while playing Higurashi: When They Cry. Last year, I did the same with Umineko: When They Cry, writing down my thoughts while playing through the eight episodes of that game and keeping track of how my theories changed with each new episode. Higurashi: When They Cry had a similar set-up with multiple episodes, so it was only natural I would do the same thing. I don't know how many people actually read my notes while I was playing the game, but I still think this is a fun experiment, writing down the theories I play with in my mind while tackling a mystery story of an enormous (and time-consuming) scale. Perhaps I should do this for The Sekimeiya and finally force myself to get past that first part because I know it's supposed to be really good, but it's also really slow...

 

Book I Didn't Really Want to Read But Wanted to Have Read!

Natsu to Fuyu no Sonata ("A Sonata for Summer and Winter") AKA "Parzival"

 

I mentioned the saying "The books you want to have read, but don't want to read" in my review of Maya Yutaka's 1993 novel Natsu to Fuyu no Sonata ("A Sonata for Summer and Winter" AKA "Parzival"), because it was exactly the type of novel it would be used on. This year, there were basically only two novels I read which this saying applied to: Natsu to Fuyu no Sonata and Nikaidou Reito's Majutsuou Jiken ("The Case of the Sorcery King" 2004).  And of course, this all sounds very negative, but these were books I really wanted to read, but of which I knew it was also likely it wouldn't be an easy experience: Natsu to Fuyu no Sonata was often referred to as a catastrophic deconstruction of the detective story in true Maya post-modernist fashion, while Majutsuou Jiken was a very, very long book and the last one I hadn't read in Labyrinth saga in the Nikaidou Ranko series, and in general, the tone and style of the Labyrinth books just weren't really what I liked about the earlier Ranko books. So why did I pick Natsu to Fuyu no Sonata? Easy: Majutsuou Jiken was actually pretty fun to read once I got started, and I ended up enjoying it the most out of the four Labrinth novels. Natsu to Fuyu no Sonata on the other hand was a tricky novel to read from start to finish, and while I am glad to have finished it to know what all the talk was about, I am also glad it's behind me now!

 

Most Interesting Mystery Game Played In 2022! But Probably Older!  

Haru Yukite, Retrotica ("As Spring Passes By, Retrotica") AKA The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story

 

2022 ended with a lot of Nintendo DS reviews, so you'd almost think you had gone back about 15 years. None of those games were really outstanding though, though that was something I already knew: most of these games I played because I have already played so many Nintendo DS mystery adventure games, so I kinda want to play, well, perhaps not all of them eventually, but most of them, so even the less impressive ones. Though I want to highlight Project Hacker and Unsolved Crimes as games with interesting points to them. Some other games that made an impression on me were Lucifer Within Us and the board game Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, but for me, the 'fight' was clearly between Haru Yukite, Retrotica ("As Spring Passes By,  Retrotica"), better known as The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story outside of Japan, and Higurashi: When They Cry, a game I poured a lot of time in. And even then, I knew right away The Centennial Case would win. Created by the director behind personal PSP favorite Trick X Logic, this game utilizes similar game mechanics with a FMV game, resulting in a game that feels like an atmospheric mystery drama, but which really succeeds on showing how a proper whodunnit should be plotted, and how readers (viewers) should combine clues to arrive at hypotheses, and use these hypotheses to solve a mystery. While the individual episodes might not be super complex, The Centennial Case is a great showcase of how to translate a shin honkaku mystery story to the video game medium.

 

This might actually be the first time a game ends up in this category that was actually released in said year...

Best Premise! Of 2022! 

Rouko Zanmu ("Dreams Are All That Remain To The Tiger Who Has Grown Old")

 

Always a difficult category. With premise, I mean the blurb on the back of the book or something similar being enough to really rope you in, regardless of the actual execution.We have Houjou Kie's excellent Meitantei ni Kanbi naru Shi wo ("Delicious Death for Detectives", 2022). of course, which is set both in the real world and in a VR-game similar to a murder mystery Mario Maker. On the other side of the spectrum there's Ashibe Taku's Oomarike Satsujin Jiken ("The Oomari Family Murder Case", 2021), a fantastic historical work that focuses on the fall of the Oomari family and the women of that family as they remain at home while World War II develops: the mystery is one that could only have occured in war-time Japan, war-time Osaka, and has a bit of a Trojan Women vibe. In a similar vein, Kokuroujou ("The Castle with the Dark Prison") AKA The Arioka Citadel Case deserves a special mention too, being a fantastic historical mystery story set during a year-long siege of a castle. An English translation is in the works by the way! Higurashi: When They Cry has a fantastic horror-vibe premise that really becomes creepier with each subsequent episode, and it uses the whole set-up of multiple episodes really good to flesh the whole mystery out, while other note-worthy titles are Haiyuuenchi no Sastsujin (2021) (set in an abandoned amusement park), Dorothy Goroshi (The Murder of Dorothy, 2018), set in the world of the Wizard of Oz and Cinderella-jou no Satsujin ("The Cinderella Castle Murder" 2021), which places Cinderella in the defendant's seat in the murder case of the prince. All premises that sound amazing right away. I ended up with Momono Zappa's Rouko Zanmu ("Dreams Are All That Remain To The Tiger Who Has Grown Old", 2021) however because I thought the wuxia theme was really original, and while it's very close to "conventional" fantasy (and I have read my share of fantasy mystery novels the last few years), I thought the martial arts aspect of wuxia was also very appealing and I was wondering how it'd be incorporated in the mystery, so as a premise, this one earns many points.

 

The Just-Ten-In-No-Particular-Order-No-Comments List

- Meitantei ni Kanbi naru Shi wo ("Delicious Death for Detectives") (Houjou Kie)

- Garasu no Tou no Satsujin ("The Glass Tower Murder") (Chinen Mikito)

- Squid-sou no Satsujin ("The Squid House Murders") (Higashigawa Tokuya)

- Oomarike Satsujin Jiken ("The Oomari Family Murder Case") (Ashibe Taku)

- Haedama no Gotoki Matsuru Mono ("Those Who Are Deified Like The Haedama") (Mitsuda Shinzou)

- Kokuroujou ("The Castle with the Dark Prison" AKA The Arioka Citadel Case) (Yonezawa Honobu)

- Higurashi no Naku Koro ni ("When the Cicades Cry") (Ryukishi07)

- Sekigan no Shoujo ("The Girl With One Eye") (Maya Yutaka)

- Aomikan no Satsujin ("The Murder in the Marine Azure Manor") (Atsukawa Tatsumi)

- Haru Yukite, Retrotica ("As Spring Passes By, Retrotica" AKA The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story) 

The Silent Speaker

In the previous post, I asked about a honkaku-themed Discord server, but while I did get suggestions, it didn't seem there was a specific dedicated server. So err, I think I just created one? I named the server Honkaku, because I don't intend it to be a direct extension of this blog and the posts here, but a general place to talk about puzzle plot mystery fiction from across the world in all media formats, from books to manga and digital and analog games. Though I have to make clear now this is mostly me trying something out as I have never run a Discord server, and to be absolutely honest, I hope the server remains juuuuust small enough for me to manage, but we'll see what happens. If nobody joins, that'll just be the end of things and at the moment, it is really just me in the member list, so it can never get worse than it is now! But if the idea of a honkaku-dedicated Discord server sounds interesting, you'll find the invite link below.

Invite link: https://discord.gg/z3HMSmf8qd

Turnabout Memories - Part 11

"I have to go over everything that's happened. I have to remember" 

Another Code R: Journey into Lost Memories

It's that time of the year again, time for that tradition of making lists for the sake of making lists! Looking back at the reviews posted on this blog this year, I'd say 2021 was a pretty good year in terms of enjoyable mystery fiction. Especially in the first half of the year I seem to have read a lot of really good detectives, and not surprisingly, a lot of them also featured supernatural elements in the plot, though that is definitely not a set condition and the final list at the end of this post also features a few books that aren't about the supernatural. I didn't really write editorials this year though because... I don't really know why. Perhaps I should make up for that next year. Anyway, as always, the categories in this post aren't really serious and I'm just writing as I look at the past posting schedule, but in case you see a post mentioned here you missed the first time, take a look! Oh, the other tradition around this time of the year is that I mention how I'm already ahead with writing reviews and probably somewhere around the summer now... but I haven't really been keeping up with writing my reviews the last few months, so while I have a lot of books I've finished already, my backlog of "reviews done but not posted yet" isn't that large anymore, so I guess I should get started on that too... With a bit of luck I'll have enough reviews done by the end of January to last me well into the second half of the year!

Best Project Outside The Blog!

Death Among the Undead & Death of the Living Dead

Also known as the self-promotion category! Weirdly enough, two of my translations were also published last year, so I sure hope people aren't started to expect two books each year now! Anyway, Death Among the Undead has been a personal favorite ever since I read Shijinsou no Satsujin back in 2018 and after posting my review of the book, I was pleased to see that a lot of readers of the blog expressed their interest in the book. I can safely say that it has been the book that commentators on this blog wanted to see translated in English (or least: those people were the most vocal about it), so it was fun to be able to actually work on a book which so many readers of the blog had been looking forward to. If you haven't read it yet, be sure to do so, because it's a really wonderful puzzle plot mystery that shows realism isn't necessary to have fun and cleverly written detective novel. Supernatural elements have become more and more common in Japanese mystery fiction these last few years, and this book is a great example of the heights it can reach.

Which is basically the same thing I was about to write about Death of the Living Dead. This book is actually on the other end of the timeline, as it was one of the earliest, and certainly best-known mystery novels with a supernatural theme released in the earliest days of the shin honkaku writers. While the theme of the rising dead is shared between Death of the Living Dead and Death Among the Undead, they're ultimately very different books and having read either won't make the other feel less surprising. The focus in Death of the Living Dead is definitely deeper in the sense that it really examines the theme of "death" from a sociological angle, while also serving a very impressive mystery plot that seems overwhelming at first, but manages to tie everything nicely, and surprisingly together. Death of the Living Dead is personally also an interesting project because I already worked on the translation a long time ago, but due to circumstances it only got published now, so it's been a very long wait for me too. I hope readers will enjoy this one too!

One thing I can say for sure: you won't see two translations of me next year with both books having red covers and being about the theme of the living dead!

Most Interesting Non-Review Post! Of 2021!

Umineko: When They Cry Playthrough Memo

Okay, I didn't write many non-review posts this year. I guess the only other one was the write-up I did to celebrate the release of volume 100 of Detective Conan. Doing a "real-time" playthrough of a mystery story and writing down my thoughts/questions/suspicions down before reaching the end is new for this blog however. That said, I really needed to do that for Umineko: When They Cry because each episode is about twenty hours long, and I'm sure I'd have forgotten a lot of details if I hadn't written my initial impressions down immediately after finishing each episode. I'm not sure how many readers here actually bothered to look at the notes I kept, but I thought it was an interesting experiment to also show how people (in this case: me) can approach a mystery story and how they come up with theories. Oh, I was thinking about doing something with similar with Higurashi: When They Cry next year, but I'm not really sure whether that is possible. Could somebody who has played Higurashi tell me whether I could also keep notes and try to solve the mystery beforehand, or is it not really comparable to Umineko in that regard?    

Best Premise! Of 2021!

Rakuen to wa Tantei no Fuzai nari ("Paradise is the Absence of Detectives")

With premise, I mean just having the blurb on the back of the book or something similar being enough to really rope you in, regardless of the actual execution. Mysteries with a supernatural element tend to have an advantage here, but that's definitely not a sure way to rank high on the list here. I enjoyed both Kotou no Raihousha ("Visitors on the Remote Island") and Kyoujintei no Satsujin ("The Murders in the House of Maleficence") a lot for example, but those books actually are about a mysterious, undefined being which you learn more about as you read the book, so the premise of just "something supernatural is attacking the characters" is a bit too vague to *really* pique interest based on the blurb alone. Renkinjutsushi no Shoushitsu ("The Disappearance of the Alchemist") on the other hand is a great example of a premise that sounds simple, but sounds absolutely amazing and really makes you excited to read it, as who doesn't see the potential of a detective story set in a world where they can practise alchemy? But even Mystery Arena, which is set in a realistic world, has a memorable premise, because it's about participants in a game show who all want to solve an on-going mystery story the first, never knowing whether a clue that comes later will mess up their theories or not, even if they sound really convincing at that point in the story. Ultimately, I decided to go with Rakuen to wa Tantei no Fuzai nari because the premise is amazing yet "simple": angels exist and take evil people (murderers) to hell right away. At the same time, the whole idea raises so many questions the reader will learn more about as they read on, so the premise itself is still mysterious enough, even as a simple sentence, it sounds very straightforward. 

Most Interesting Mystery Game Played In 2021! But Probably Older!

Umineko: When They Cry

As I was looking back at the reviews I posted here, I remembered there were also a few mystery games I played this year I hadn't written anything about (yet). Like Jenny LeClue: Detectivú, a cute adventure game where you play the girl detective Jenny... and her writer Arthur Finklestein, who is forced by his editor to commit a murder in the fictional world of Arhurton where his protagonist Jenny has solved (mostly harmless) mysteries all her live. It starts to repeat puzzles in the second half and finishes with a sequel hook which I didn't really like, but it's a fun game overall. Earlier this year I also wrote about how the Switch ports for the Kibukawa Ryousuke games, which were originally released on feature phones in Japan and had been lost media for some years now. I only reviewed the first two entries, but publisher G-Mode has been pumping them out at quite the fast pace, and I've been playing all of them, and some of them are quite good. But they're so short, so I intend to discuss a couple of them in one post some time... in the future.

But back to the mystery games I played this year. Strangely enough, I played two games featuring Hercule Poirot, with one being an interesting mystery game, but without really feeling like Poirot, while the other game was not as inspired as an adventure game, but really succeeded in feeling like Poirot. Root Film was a surprising improvement over Root Letter, and I also enjoyed playing the remakes of the first two Famicom Detective Clubs. And while I usually only play video games, I have to say I was really impressed by the board game MicroMacro: Crime City too, which serves as a very interesting, visual manner to present a mystery. But the game that made the most impression on me was of course Umineko: When They Cry. You usually don't spend 70-80 hours on a mystery game, and while A LOT of that is really long-winded writing, the way Umineko retells a similar-looking story several times to make you find out connections between them is really interesting as a mystery story, and with very meta-inclusions like Red Truths, it certainly is a game worth looking at if you're at all interested in the game-like qualities of a mystery story.

Most Impressive Cover! Seen in 2021!

MicroMacro: Crime City

I usually pick book covers for this category, but I really like the box of this board game, because you can try out the mechanics of this wonderful board game just by picking this box up in the store! The box has a note that says you can already solve a case of the murdered hamburger seller, and if you look closely at the box art, you'll notice there's indeed a dead man on the cover, and by tracing him across the box art, you can find his murderer and see where they went off too, just like in the actual game itself. Technically, this cover art is just a segment taken from the bigger map of MicroMacro: Crime City, but it's a wonderful design that immediately shows you how the mystery solving works in this game even before the purchase.

The Just-Ten-In-No-Particular-Order-No-Comments List

- Kotou no Raihousha ("Visitors on the Remote Island") (Houjou Kie)

- Kyoujintei no Satsujin ("The Murders in the House of Maleficence") (Imamura Masahiro)

- Watson-ryoku ("The Watson Force") (Ooyama Seiichirou)

- Hoshifuri Sansou no Satsujin ("The Murders in the Mountain Lodges beneath the Shooting Stars") (Kurachi Jun)

- Umineko no Naku Koro ni (Umineko: When They Cry) (07th Expansion)

- FBI Renzoku Satsugai Jiken ("The FBI Serial Murder Case" in: Detective Conan 100) (Aoyama Goushou)

- Rakuen to wa Tantei no Fuzai nari ("Paradise is the Absence of Detectives") (Shasendou Yuuki)

- Yuujo no Gotoki Uramu Mono ("Those Who Resent Like The Ghostly Courtesan") (Mitsuda Shinzou)

- Mystery Arena (Fukami Reiichirou) 

- MicroMacro: Crime City (Johannes Sich)

99.9

「まさかここまでとはな」

『名探偵コナン』

 

"I can't believe it has come to this..."

"Detective Conan"

Today is the release day of volume 100 of Aoyama Goushou's Detective Conan, one of the biggest detective franchises to have ever graced this world and while I'll still have to wait for my copy to be delivered, I figured this might be the best occassion to look back on this long, long-running series. It was in 1994 when high school student detective Kudou Shinichi accidentally became witness to a shady deal, got caught by two men of the Black Organization and fed an experimental drug that was supposed to kill him. Instead he was turned into a child and while staying low as "Edogawa Conan" with his childhood friend/love interest Mouri Ran and her private detective father Kogorou (who don't know his real identity), Conan tries to find a way to turn back into his old self and catch the Black Organization, figuring that the easiest way is to secretly help Kogorou solve as many cases as possible, as this will likely bring him on another lead connected to the Organization. More than 25 years later and 100 volumes down the story, Conan still hasn't succeeded in his goal completely, but readers have been treated to more than 300 different mystery stories that have been consistent in quality, with regularly brilliant entries. And I'm just talking about the original comic here! With an arguably even bigger animated series that adapts the comic, but also has original stories and an incredibly succesful series of annual animated theatrical releases, Detective Conan (or Case Closed as it's known in select regions) is commercially probably the biggest active detective franchise at the moment worldwide. 

When I reviewed volume 99 in April, I mentioned that "the special occassion is a great excuse to do a special Conan-themed post" and I got suggestions like a list of Top 10 stories/tricks or at a greater scale, looking at Detective Conan's influence on Japanese mystery fiction in general. But I think the suggestion to look back at when I started with the series and how my thoughts on the series have changed over the years, and how the series itself has changed over these years resonated the best with me. For while I haven't been reading Detective Conan since the very start, I have been with the series for about twenty years now, and it's also been a large part of this blog in general (it's the series with the most tag entries by far!). Heck, this blog probably wouldn't have existed without Conan: it was also the series that introduced me to a lot of mystery fiction, as the individual volume releases include an Encyclopedia of Great Detectives each time that introduces various fictional detectives, both Japanese and non-Japanese, and it were the names I first saw in these entries that got me interested in Japanese (prose) mystery fiction, and now many years later, there's this blog and I even translate these novels myelf. So perhaps it's time for a bit of reminiscing.

I don't remember the exact year, but it was around 2000 that I had my first encounter with the franchise through the second animated film: Detective Conan: The Fourteenth Target, which I still consider one of the best films of the series. It's an excellent introduction to the series, as it incorporates a lot of the recurring characters of the series (at that moment in time), but their appearances are actually heavily tied to the plot, as the film deals with a series of murders on people connected to Mouri Kogorou. The story is a nice serial killer whodunnit (with a very memorable motive for the murders!) that is tenseful and also cleverly connected to the background stories of the main characters, while also having just enough action to really sell the "theatrical release" feel. The film had me hooked, so then I watched the first movie, and from there I started reading the manga, which by that time was already around volume 35-40 in Japan. At the time, the easiest way for me to read Detective Conan, besides scanlations, was either through the French or German releases: German was infinitely easier for me to read than French and with the help of a friend (whom I'm ever grateful to), I found a shop that would actually import German comics for me and once in a few months I'd binge-buy Detektiv Conan volumes. Which incidentally also greatly improved my grades for German at school. Thank you, Conan.

So what was it that captivated me so? For me, Detective Conan: The Fourteenth Target was an eye-opener in the sense that it was the first original animated detective story I had ever seen that actually dealt with murder and death: besides some Sherlock Holmes cartoons and Basil of Baker Street (where there's no death), I had seen none. That combined with the James Bond-esque gadgets and occassional over-the-top action got me hooked, but the manga was more subdued in tone of course. Being a comic serialized in Shonen Sunday, it's no surprise it has clear rom-com roots, but the stories featured in the comic were also quite memorable as detective stories. Early stories like The Piano Sonata "Moonlight" Murder Case brought us to creepy islands with serial murders or to mountain villas with murderers who decapitate their victims. While the earliest stories might not be exceptional by any standard in terms of originality in plot, plots greatly improve after the aforementioned The Piano Sonata "Moonlight" Murder Case, with several brilliant tricks that could have featured in any classic of the genre: the impossible hanging of a monk that only a Tengu could have done is one of the more memorable early entries for example. One notable thing about Conan is of course that it's not always murder, and there are a lot of puzzle/quiz stories, or treasure hunt stories too, which help make the series feel diverse. One important aspect Detective Conan did perfectly since the beginning was the use of visual clewing: the visual format allows for different possibilities than the prose format and mangaka Aoyama's solid artwork has been used very deviously to literally place clues right in front of your eyes, and still you're likely to miss them. Readers who mostly read detective novels might have to adjust to Detective Conan at first, as it's not just the text in the balloons that's important, but also what is shown in a panel and how, but Aoyama's been great at using the visual traits of the medium. This is especially the case when it comes to stories that feature mechanical tricks for for example locked room murders: even complex Rube Goldberg-esque string & needle tricks are shown very naturally and often, the reader is given a better chance at solving these kinds of stories because they have a better idea of the actual layout of a room/building. I have a feeling these more "complex" locked room murders are more prominently seen in "waves": there were a lot of these impossible stories in Detective Conan like after volume 15, and after a few years you'd get a period with fewer of those stories, and then they'd be back for a while again.

One of my favorite aspects of Detective Conan however is that besides "classic locations" like manors, isolated islands and modes of transportation like trains and ships, the series is often very contemporary and urban, and that is also reflected in its mystery plots. This makes Detective Conan one of the most diverse detective series, because it can very naturally go to any setting and it still feels natural. Personally, I love the urban setting of Conan a lot. While the locations in the earliest stories often feel a bit "isolated", you already get a glimpse of modern urban when Conan is confronted with a murder case occuring inside a karaoke box, with people singing and going and out of the room all the time and once the animated series started and the first film was made in 1996-1997, Aoyama knew he had a hit at hand and started to build more on more on the fictional setting of "Beika Town", setting more and more cases in this fictional part of Tokyo. Because of that, we also see more recurring locations and with them, recurring characters. Detective Conan has a gigantic fictional world nowadays, because Aoyama does re-use locations and characters, so a classmate of Ran who's only mentioned in an earlier story might turn up for real another time with a case for Ran's father, or a television director who was a suspect in an earlier story might return in another story involved with the media. It makes the world feel alive, but also allows the series countless of possibilities to bring Conan to a certain setting. A series like Columbo or Murder, She Wrote also feature a lot of diverse story settings, but Conan has an ever wider range, as it also has a lot of stories featuring children. The contemporary, urban setting is also reflected in the mystery plots, which is also an aspect which sets Detective Conan apart. The series started in 1994, and we're now in 2021. The reader will know consumer society has changed drastically. Fads came and went, as did technology. In 1994, few people would have had internet at homes, then we went through dial-up modems on desktops with their iconic dial-up tune, then we got small i-Mode pages on select phones and now probably more than half of the readers of this blog are reading this very article on a mobile device. Unlike most detective series however, Detective Conan is a series that has been serialized from the beginning, being published at a pace of (in theory) one chapter a week. Because of that and the contemporary urban setting, consumer technology has always been a part of Detective Conan and it's a joy to read detective stories that don't pretend like modern technology like mobiles have made a detective puzzle story impossible because old tropes can't be used as-is anymore. Detective Conan embraces whatever modern society considers "the norm" and uses whatever is available to the modern man living in contemporary society to present an entertaining detective story. Tablets, the Internet of Things, smartphones, chat applications: why should a detective story pretend like we don't use these things all the time? In Detective Conan, modern technology is not a "cheat", but used in the same way as "telephones" or "trains" in Golden Age detective stories: the norm and nothing out of the ordinary for both the culprit and the detective. And because Detective Conan is such a long-running story with a rolling time-line (ergo: the story is always set in the same "present", whether it's a story from 1994 or from 2021), it also serves as an interesting reflection of how the world around all of us has changed too, and how it has changed the possibilities for the modern puzzle plot detective story.

I have seen some mystery bloggers approach Detective Conan who seem more familiar with American comics, not realizing that Conan is a serialized, on-going series that is released in chapters. Without that knowledge, the fact that stories are often "cut off" only to continue in the next volume might seem weird, but that's what happens with an ongoing story. For the fact that the series features an ongoing narrative is of course also quite unique for a detective series. Some stories form a set together, like a budding love story between the police detectives Takagi and Sato that develops over the course of several stories involving the Homicide division of the Metropolitan Police Department, while the phantom thief KID appears once in a while in heist stories with an impossible crime element. While the bulk of the cases in this series have no direct relation to the overall main story, Conan's path has crossed that of the Black Organization a lot of times in these 100 volumes and the story has grown to a much larger scale than you'd suspect readin the first volume. The ongoing serialized nature of the series has allowed for some memorable stories that take their time build up foreshadowing/clues. As I mentioned before, when I started reading the manga the Japanese release was around volume 40 and I remember that the Halloween story in volume 42 was one of the biggest events of the series, showing off what Aoyama could do with this format: while on the surface, the story involves a murder case happening during a Halloween party, the reader is also treated to a grand face-off between Conan and a member of the Black Organization, which recontextualized a lot of the events that had occured until then. While the attentive reader might have noticed something had been brewing for the last few years, it was at this point that Aoyama revealed he had been plotting this confrontation for years, hiding relevant clues and information necessary to solve the plot here in various previous stories, even stories that at first sight seemed irrelevant to the overall plot. The way Aoyama showed how he could patiently build a proper detective story over the course of many years was impressive and he'd use this technique more often in the rest of the series, where he'd have larger storylines develop over the course of many years and very different stories. The Scarlet Series in volume 85 for example was the conclusion of a storyline Aoyama had been working on for 7 years, dropping hints and clues now and then and allowing the reader to deduce the thing themselves, but even if you guessed what was going on, it was still incredibly satisfying to see Aoyama pull off the thing succesfully.

As mentioned before though, the series has changed a lot over the course of these years. My first encounter was through the films. While the first one I saw was The Fourteenth Target, the first one I actually saw in Japanese theatres with a friend was The Raven Chaser, which was already more thriller-ish in tone than the early movies. Especially the last ten years, these films have grown out to be (explosive!) action spectacles and the quality of the core mystery plots may vary a lot depending on the year: the mega-hit Zero the Enforcer was very unlike any other Conan film for example, but was a very entertaining political thriller and while The Crimson Love Letter follows the format we know of beloved early films like The Fourteenth Target, Captured in her Eyes and Countdown to Heaven, a film like The Fist of Blue Sapphire was more action-focused. While the manga has seen less drastic changes in tone in general, you can definitely feel changes as you go through the volumes. For example, you'll see more stories that build up the fictional world after volume 20 and after the aforementioned Halloween story in volume 42, Aoyama starts working more often on similar storylines covering several years, using minor stories to drop hints as he builds towards a climax. You're also more likely to see "classic" mystery settings like manors in the woods, small islands etc. in the first half of the series, with more urban stories in the second half of the series. Character popularity also changes, and it's often easy to pinpoint when a character suddenly explodes in popularity, because you'll see a lot of them then, even if they don't really add much to a story.

But that's perhaps the strength of Detective Conan: while the puzzler core with a rom-com tone is always intact, the series has always been quite diverse in what it offers to the reader in terms of style of detective story, offering both a broad selection, but also a selection that changes with time, and if you're a fan of puzzlers, it's likely you will find at least one story, or a set of stories, that will suit your taste. Whether it's inverted mystery stories, cozies, locked room murders, pure whodunnits, howdunnits, stories using modern technology, stories set in isolated, old-fashioned places, closed circles, political thriller, folklore-based mystery, non-lethal crimes or even non-criminal mysteries of everyday life, and anythng you can think of, there's probably at least one story in the manga, or the extended animated universe that will appeal to you. And despite that range, everything still feels like it's part of one Detective Conan franchise, and while not all stories are as strong as others, the quality of the plots is also fairly consistent.

Anyway, this is enough of me reminiscing about what got me first started on the series and why I have been following the series for over twenty years now, and still looking forward to each new release. Many readers of this blog are also fans of the series I know (the Conan posts always attract most commentators), so to celebrate the release of volume 100: what are your favorite Conan stories? What are your Top 10 stories/tricks? What got you into the franchise? Any memorable happening related to Conan? Feel free to talk about anything Conan-related in the comment section, and try to be generous with your use of ROT-13 spoiler tags, as a courtesy to all the readers here!