"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!
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!
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!
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!
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!
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
