Deadly Games

"I know what you're thinking, but those silly riddle crimes are a thing of the past, ancient history that's gone now"

"Riddler's Reform" (Batman the Animated Series)

What is it with cats and covers for mystery-related books in Japan... A lot of anthologies with no connecting story/theme seem to default to cats on the cover when in doubt...

After reading the generally excellent Anata mo Meitantei ("What A Great Detective You Are") anthology earlier this year, I went looking for other similar books, and I soon arrived at Kibun wa Meitantei ("Feeling Like the Great Detective"), which features a few of the same authors. The set-up is nearly identical: this is an anthology originally published in 2006, collecting six stories by as many authors. All six stories were originally serialized in 2005 in the tabloid Yukan Fuji and were pure whodunnits, divided in two distinct parts: the first part being the "problem", where the main mystery (usually a murder) is presented along with all the relevant characters and clues and which ends with a formal Challenge to the Reader. Originally, readers would then have some time to write in their answers, with money prizes awaiting the correct guessers. This book notes for each story the percentage of contenders that got the answer right, which can range from as high as nearly 30% to as low as 1%! Interestingly enough, the pocket release of this book includes an interview with the participating authors, but the authors have anonymized in the text, turning this interview into a "guess who is who" game too! Note that while this book features six stories, I will only discuss five of them here: I already discussed Norizuki Rintarou's excellent Hydra Daijuu no Kubi ("The Tenth Head of the Hydra") when it was later collected in the Norizuki collection Hanzai Horoscope 1 - Rokunin no Joou no Mondai ("Horoscope of Crime 1 - The Problem of the Six Queens").

Glass no Ori no Satsujin ("Murder inside a Glass Cage") was written by Arisugawa Alice and is narrated by a private detective who hasn't seen much business lately. That day, he is visited by an old college friend, Saya, who needs his help: she works at a gym and one of the customers has become smitten with her. So much so he's turned into a genuine stalker: first hanging around the gym after closing time to ask her out, but lately he's found out where she lives and has been waiting for her near her home. Saya's attempt to get the police involved ended with a "But he hasn't done anything yet...", so now Saya wants to know who he is exactly and put a stop to it. The plan is for the detective to follow Saya after she's done with work and confront the stalker when he appears. This part of the plan goes well, but the stalker makes a run for it the moment the detective talks to him, resulting in a chase. The detective loses the man, but as he tries to find his way back to Saya, the stalker appears from behind him, and knocks him out. A few minutes later, he's awakened by Saya. They are discussing what had happened, when a policeman arrives, telling them a man has been stabbed nearby and asking whether they saw anyone suspicious. It turns out the man who was stabbed is the stalker, and eventually, he dies. Police investigation however lead to a curious conclusion. The police arrived almost immediately after the deed happened, confirmed by the fact the detective had seen the stalker (was attacked by him) just a few minutes prior. There were basically only four routes away from the crime scene, each leading  in a different direction (a cross). There were people on all four routes: Saya found the detective on one of those routes, the police box was on another, a man who had been locked out by his wife on another and a noodle stand owner on the last. And yet one of them saw anyone come their way. So where did the stabber go? And if one of the witnesses was the stabber, where then did the knife go, as none of them could've gone far enough to dispose of a bloody knife before the patrol officer stopped them. This is a decent, semi-impossible mystery tale (a disappearing weapon from a closed circle), but it is very one-dimensional, in the sense that it basically hinges on one trick. There are a few hints that point to how the murderer managed to spirit away the knife, but I wish there were more 'steps' in the solution, as this is a very simple story indeed.

Choutsugai no Mondai ("The Problem of the Hinge") by Nukui Tokurou is interestingly one of two stories in this collection that revolve around a narrative within a narrative. We first see how the succesful writer and amateur detective Kisshouin is visited by Katsujima, an old friend who now works as a police detective. Katsujima tells Kisshouin about a curious case the police is having trouble with: five bodies were discovered in a rental home in the woods that day. Three of them had obviously been murdered, two of them had died of either an accident or suicide. A diary was also found penned by one of the women: it details how the five, who belonged to an acting troupe, had rented the place to rehearse an upcoming play. On the first night, one of them fell from the stairs and died. They had no reception on their phones in the woods, and the storm outside prevented them from getting help themselves (and unbeknownst to them, the road further down had collapsed due to the storm), so they were forced to stay in the house longer. However, one by one they got murdered, until the diary stopped. Katsujima now wants Kisshouin to figure out who the murderer is: anything that could precisely identify these five people had been disposed of, and the rental home had been rented by someone under a false name,so this indicates the murderer had planned all of this, but which of the five bodies belongs to the murderer?This is an interesting twist on the And Then There Were None formula, with the question shifting from a simple whodunnit, to guessing which of two (dead) persons is the murderer. Like the Arisugawa story, you could argue this too is based very much on one single idea, but I find the idea here developed much better, with far more hints, and also more subtle hints, that permeate the whole diary part of the story, and also using a multi-stage line of reasoning to lead the reader to notice that one important idea. 

Maya Yutaka's Futatsu no Kyouki ("Two Weapons") stars his series detective Kisarazu Yuuya, who is visited by his 'friend' Tsukigase Naoko, who desperately needs help from the great detective.  And she's sure he won't refuse, as he owes her for setting up a date for him in the past, a date that didn't lead to anything, but the date did provide Kisarazu with a clue vital to solving a case he was working on (so Naoko didn't do anything... but he still owes her).  Naoko's brother Hidenori is a suspect in a murder that happened at the university: while he has an alibi for the murder as he was on the phone with Naoko, the police doesn't trust the testimony of family, which irritates Naoko greatly. Hidenori is one of two "over-doctors" (PhDs who can't get employed) belonging to the Miyamiki research lab of the Kyoto University of Science. The people here research nuclear fusion under the guidance of professor Miyamaki, though few people see a future in their specific research theme, which is also why they don't have that big of a budget. Lately, a new assistant's position opened up though, which had two candidates: Hidenori and... the murder victim. On the fateful day, the victim Ookawara Akira was working at the lab on the top floor of the building, when a man with a full-face helmet appeared: this was quite usual actually, as the lab had regular visits of Shimokoma Aisaku, who believed he had made a breakthrough in his research on nuclear fusion, but also feared "organizations" were after him, so he always kept his face hidden. The helmeted person was seen on security footage entering the lab soon after the victim did, and after a minute or so, was seen leaving hastily, and some other people on the floor saw the helmeted person too. However, it turns out this helmeted man was not Shimokoma, as he had been visiting somewhere completely different. When later Hidenori entered the lab, he found Ookawara dead, having been hit hard on the head. The police soon puts one and one together: someone had disguised himself as Shimokoma to hide their face from the security cameras. While the police hasn't made any arrest yet, they do know the murderer is one of the five Miyakami-affiliated researchers/students who had been present on that floor that day, as they were the only ones with a key to the lab. Hidenori's position in particular is not great, as he had the greatest motive for wanting Ookawara out of the way. What makes this mystery even more puzzling, is the fact the disguise and the murder weapon were discovered outside the university, but for some reason the package had two weapons: the wrench actually used to hit Ookawara, but also a knife. Why did the murderer prepare two weapons?

This is a story I like better as a concept, than the actual execution. It is a bit of a tedious read, with all the witnesses stating when and how they saw the helmeted person move around on the floor (there's a floor plan), and it drags a bit because of that (it is also the longest story in the collection). The solution is well-hinted, and I like the conclusion that derives from the fact they discovered two weapons (of which only one was used), but some elements of the solution I did not like because of how this was originally a story published as a competition: sometimes I can accept certain things to happen in a mystery story if it was published "as is", but if it's explicitly published in two parts (problem/solution), and you are challenging people to send in answers/have prizes available for the correct answers, there are some elements I'd like writers to avoid to ensure the story feels fair. Maya isn't being unfair here, but it's not something I particularly like in these kinds of stories.

Juugofunkan no Dekigoto ("It Happened in Fifteen Minutes") by Kirisha Takumi is set on the Shinkansen bullet train back to Tokyo: Mystery screenplay writer Oogami Tsuyoshi had been visiting Kyoto to work on an upcoming script, but is now on his way home to Tokyo. After buying a beer from the purser, he spills the contents on himself, so he moves to the wash corner to clean himself, but he finds a man in a Hawaii shirt leaning over the sink. As the man doesn't move, Oogami touches the man on the shoulder to see if he's okay, but the man tumbles on the floor. The purser arrives and establishes the man has been hit on the head by something hard, as there's a bloody wound there. It turns out the victim had been a nuisance to more than few people: he had been overly rude to the purser, had hit a trainspotter when he got in the way and had even got into a fight with another rider on the train. So there were more than a few people who might have wanted to hit the man in the head, but which of them did it in the mere fifteen minutes after he was last seen? Like the Arisugawa story, this is a whodunnit story that relies on the howdunnit: the victim's wound was clearly afflicted via something hard (so not someone's bare knuckles), but none of the suspects seems to be carrying something on them that could have done that (or at least, not without it leaving a trace on the item in question). The solution is rather simple, and while Kirisha does add a whole extra, very well-established layer of clues to support that solution, it feels uncessary, as you can easily just intuitively guess the whereabouts and identity of the weapon used, especially after another prop has been introduced in the story. So the solution falls a bit flat, partially because it feels very similar to the Arisugawa story.

Abiko Takemaru's Hyouryuusha ("Castaway") has the most interesting set-up of all the stories found in this collection. A man, wearing a life preserver, is found floating near the shore of an island, with a dinghy floating nearby. The man is pulled on shore by a local and a tourist. The man is alive, but seems to be suffering from amnesia: he can't remember who he is and what he's doing there. They find what appear to be diary pages wrapped safely in plastic hidden inside his life preserver. The pages are apparently written by a manager of the young idols/actresses/singers Saori and Yuuka. The two young women were "cordially invited" to join a small party held on the private island of the entertainment agency's president, accompanied by an influential television producer. However, the true intention of the "party" was so have these girls "offered" to the powerful industry men to "help their career". The manager knew this was going to happen and wanted to prevent this: while Yuuka seemed to be aware of what was going to happen and seem resigned to this, Saori was completely oblivious to what was awaiting her. All the people on the island had their own cabin to sleep in, but it was made clear to the girls they were supposed to be going to the producer and the president's cabins that first night. The manager kept an eye on things, and made sure Saori did not leave her cabin that night. However, the following day the president was found murdered in his cabin. Luck has it the ship's engine broke down too and there are no ways to communicate with the mainland. The diary tells of more deaths occuring after the first one, but that leads to the question: who is the man who was found in the sea and what happened to the rest of the people on the private island? I found this the most memorable story in the volume. It is somewhat similar to Nukui's story, with a story-within-a-story narrative and the problem requring you to deduce something more than just a one-stage "whodunnit": in this case, you are required to figure out who committed the murder(s) on the island, but also who the castaway is. While the reader will go a long way if they deduce a certain fact regarding the murderer, something which might be a bit easy due to the fact the main clue that points to that fact is inserted rather crudely in the story, this is generally a fun multi-layered mystery.

While I think the anthology I read earlier this year was overall better than this book, Kibun wa Meitantei is still generally a very solid whodunnit anthology. I like how there's quite some variety in these stories, from classic closed circle stories like the one by Maya, to more urban settings in Norizuki and Arisugawa's contributions, to meta-mysteries with a narrative-within-narrative shenanigans by Abiko and Nukui. I think I like the Abiko story the best out of the five I read this time (having skipped Norizuki's story this time). I will remain a fan of these pure whodunnit stories though, with clearly defined problem/solution parts, so I'll be sure to check more of these in the future too.

Original Japanese title(s): 『気分は名探偵』: 有栖川有栖「ガラスの檻の殺人」/貫井徳郎「蝶番の問題」/麻耶雄嵩　「二つの凶器」/霧舎巧　「十五分間の出来事」我孫子武丸「漂流者」/法月綸太郎「ヒュドラ第十の首」

To Wake the Dead

Feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin' 

And we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive

"Stayin' Alive" (Bee Gees)

It would have been cool if an iron fan had been used as a murder weapon...

Disclosure: I have translated Arisugawa Alice's The Moai Island Puzzle.

A young teacher is strolling down the beach one morning, when she happens to come across a young man who seems a bit... lost. As she talks with him, she learns the man suffers from acute amnesia: he has no idea who he is, and why he is here at the beach. He has no wallet or any form of identification on him, only carrying a beautiful Japanese fan. The woman immediately notifies the hospital and the police, who start looking into the man's origin. The man turns out to be a gifted artist, skilled at drawing portraits, which of course immediately reminds of the Piano Man. Eventually, the police manage to identify the man: he is Takemitsu Souichi, the youngest son of Takemitsu Housen, a famous artist specializing in Japanese paintings. His father has already passed away, leaving his mother and three siblings, as well as his uncle and aunt. However, Souichi left his home over six years ago and has not been in contact with his family since, and therefore his family is just as surprised to learn he finally resurfaced, but with no memories of his past life. Souichi is taken back to his home, The Genbu House, located in Takaragaike, Kyoto, a Japanese manor which is neighbored by his uncle and aunt. His family, who haven't seen him in over six years, are not sure how to react to his amnesia: his sister for example seems to think the "new" Souichi has a far better, more assertive attitude than the Souichi she knew, while his brother misses "his" Souichi, and his mother seems reluctant to push Souichi too much into trying to retrieve his memories. It is during this time, a murder occurs at the house: Morisawa Yukie, an art merchant who has known the family for many years had visited the house and left, but the next morning, her dead body was found in the annex in the garden where Souichi lived. Souichi himself has disappeared too, as has the Japanese fan, but oddly enough, the annex was locked from the inside when the victim was found, and Souichi's keys are also found inside the house. So how did the murderer kill the merchant in a locked annex, and escape, and where is Souichi? Criminologist Himura is asked for assistance by the police, and he of course brings his good friend Arisugawa Alice along, who has been asked by his editor to write the book The Japanese Fan Mystery.... in Arisugawa Alice's Nihon Ougi no Nazo ("The Japanese Fan Mystery", 2024).

The latest entry in the Himura & Alice series (AKA the Writer Alice series) has an interesting title: when Ellery Queen's The Door Between was first announced to serialize in Cosmopolitan, it somehow was reported in Japan that the story would be titled The Japanese Fan Mystery, and it is a title that has always stuck with Japanese mystery fandom, even though it was not true and there is of course no such Ellery Queen novel. This story starts with Alice being asked by his editor to write a story with that title, and gives him a lot of reference materials on fans, and we first see Alice struggle with all kinds of ideas that involve fans, like locked room murder tricks that use fans. And none of them are really good, to be honest, though that's the joke of course. The actual story is connected to fans because Souichi had a beautifully illustrated Japanese fan in his possession when he was found, earning him the John Doe name "Mr Fan" for a while, but it is a bit of a shame the actual object isn't really "used" in the mystery plot.

The mystery thus revolves around a murder in a locked annex, as well as the mystery of Souichi's disappearance, and the question of why he had lost his memories and what he had been up to in the last six years or so since he ran away from home. That said, it should perhaps be noted that unlike the very mystery-plot-focused books in the Student Alice series (disclosure: I translated The Moai Island Puzzle), the Himura and Alice series usually have more room to be a bit more character-introspective,  and that is certainly noticable in this book, where a major portion of the book is dedicated to hearing the thoughts of all the family members and other related people on Souichi, both how he was as a child to how they think they should approach Souichi now he has lost his memories, and their views on how to move forward into the future. Personally, I have to admit I found the book to be moving a bit too slow, but Nihon Ougi no Nazo will probably entertain people who are into the human drama aspect of someone suddenly disappearing for years, and then coming back as a different man. Some parts are great in characterization, while mystery-wise, you could easily just not have them, and still have the mystery work. I know I am slightly more extreme when it comes to 'minimalist puzzle' mystery fiction, so I assume other readers will find these segments far more interesting (and I wouldn't even say I found them dull, just a bit long).

When the story returns its focus to the questions of who committed the murder in the locked annex, and where Souichi has gone off to now, we are treated to some great deduction scenes we have come to expect from Arisugawa. Interestingly enough, Himura himself does say that while he usually goes for truth borne from the logical inferences based on the evidence, this time we have Himura almost turning things around, coming up with a theory that can be supported by the evidence they have, but which ultimately is difficult to stand indepedently as logical proof, because so much of the background of the case is left in the dark. That said, the way Himura logically shows who the murderer is, is really good. Unlike a really cool locked room murder trick, it's kinda hard to explain "clever" lines of deduction and what makes them so good, but I really like the one here: Himura pushes his deductions to answer a question which seems very trivial at first, but the logical implications of this conclusion allow him to determine who the killer is, and it's this jump from what seems like an inconsequential deduction, to suddenly solving the whole case, is great. Nothing beats the one deduction line from The Moai Island Puzzle, of course (that one is... unbeatable perhaps...), but if you like that one, you're sure to like what Arisugawa does in this one too, though the set-up is far simpler (just a disappearance + one murder). Oh, and don't expect too much of the locked room murder, as always in these Queenian stories, it's more the why that is used in clever ways than the actual how. There is a hidden tragedy that is unveiled as Himura explains how and why the murder was committed, and it is here Arisugawa does a great job at connecting the 'story' of Souichi and his family to the core mystery plot, presenting a sad, ironic tale of death that was lurking beneath the surface.

This story was serialized in Mephisto starting in 2023, so some time has passed since the height of the pandemic, and Arisugawa (the author) does bring it up quite a few times as the story progresses, with little comments how not long ago, they couldn't even just go out to eat normally and things like that. It's interesting how references like these really "date" the Himura & Alice series, and like The Simpsons, shows that these characters (and their surroundings) are "timeless", as they haven't really aged since the first book (46 Banme no Misshitsu) and that came out in 1992 and now they survived the pandemic! Interestingly enough, Nihon Ougi no Nazo is actually touted as the book written to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the series (how many modern mystery series do you know that have been running for so long?!), though its serialization started a bit late. But that is also why this book was released in two versions, one regular pocket, as well as a luxurious hardcover.

I happened to have re-read the first novel a while back, so that made the changes in Arisugawa's style in over thirty years rather obvious, but as a whole novel, Nihon Ougi no Nazo is a far more complete work, with a dramatic tale about a young man who lost his memories, and his family coping with that realization, with a locked room murder mystery forcing everyone to readjust once again. The core mystery, while limited in scope, offers Arisugawa to show off once again how great he is at impressive lines of deduction that start out from seemingly innocent clues but then are nurtured into brilliant logical proofs that point beyond any doubt towards one culprit, but it does take a long while to get there.

Original Japanese title(s): 有栖川有栖『日本扇の謎』

Dead Justice

Where do we go from here?  

When does the end appear?

"Once More With Feeling" (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

The focus of this blog is mystery fiction in the broad sense of the word, so I also look at media beyond just books. Most people are of course also familiar with television or film, but of outside of books, the most-often featured media here tend to be manga and video games, because I generally consume a lot of those forms of entertainment, also outside the mystery genre. In the many years since I started this blog, I've written about a lot of mystery fiction, but the musical tag has one that's always been rather rare here: there just aren't that much mystery musicals, and even fewer that don't actually you to go to the theatre yourself, as few of them are actually made available as home video or streaming after the theatrical run.

The two mystery musicals I have discussed in the past were adaptations of the Gyakuten Saiban/Ace Attorney game franchise, produced by the famous Takarazuka Revue: the Takarazuka Revue is an all-female musical theatre based in the city of Takarazuka which has been around since 1913 and is a household name in Japan. The Revue's shows are extravagant, fabulous shows that bring its audience to an other world where everyone looks like they stepped out of a classic shojo manga and sings and dances every few minutes. Besides original pieces, the Takarazuka Revue also does adaptations existing IPs like the aforementioned Gyakuten Saiban musicals, but they also have done musicals of famous action manga like City Hunter and Rurouni Kenshin (and in the anime, Kenshin is voiced by a former Takarazuka actress!). For the mystery fan, the Takarazuka Revue also has interesting titles in its repertoire, like a Sherlock Holmes musical.

Yuurei Deka ~ Sayonara suru, sono mae ni ("The Ghost Detective - Before We Say Farewell") is a Takarazuka musical which was originally performed in March 2021 and based on the 2000 novel Yuurei Deka ("The Ghost Detective") by Arisugawa Alice (disclosure: I translated Arisugawa Alice's The Moai Island Puzzle. ). Note that I haven't read the original work, so I can't say how close this adaptation is to the source material, though I am going to guess the elaborate dance and singing scenes are not found in the novel. The story starts at a local police station, where all the detectives are working hard on the case of the murder of a co-worker: a lot of time has passed since the police detective was killed, but they still have no leads. Kanzaki Tatsuya is one of the detectives working on the case, when one night, he's approached by his superior Kyoudou who suddenly apologizes and.... promptly kills him with a pistol. Oddly enough, Tatsuya becomes a ghost, capable of going everywhere but not able to physically interact with other people or objects in the world. He learns from a fellow ghost that he's probably still hanging around as a ghost as he has unfinished business, though in time, he'll move on to the afterlife anyway. Tatsuya tries to warn his fiancee Sumako, who always works at the police station, that his boss is the killer, but she's not able to hear him. Unlike Hayakawa, an old friend who has recently been reposted here. For some reason, probably because he hails from a family with spirit mediums, Hayakawa is able to see and speak with the ghost of Tatsuya, who explains all that has happened to him. Hayakawa agrees to work together to catch Tatsuya's killer, but their investigation has only started when Kyoudou is found shot dead inside an interrogation room at the police station, but no pistol is found at the scene and a witness outside the room states nobody left the interrogation room after she heard the shot, so who shot Kyoudou? A ghost? 

You know, this is an interesting impossible murder situation! Here we have a world with actual ghosts, and a mysterious death that appears to be the doing of a ghost at first sight due to the weapon being spirited away and no murderer found at the crime scene, and yet it's still impossible because we know ghosts in this world can't interact with objects like pistols! Add to that the mystery of Tatsuya not knowing why Kyoudou was killed or even why Kyoudou killed him at the start of the story, and you have a fairly entertaining story. Despite the depressing idea of the protagonist being killed at the very start of the story, there's a distinct comedic tone to the whole musical (probably partially because that fits the style of Takarazuka, I surmise based on the few musicals I saw), with a lot of comedy arising from his co-workers constantly Hayakawa talking out loud by himself, because they can't see the ghost of Tatsuya. And then there are of course the songs and dances strung in between which all gives the story a flashy feeling, with characters singing their own character introductions or a witness dancing to her own testimony. It's a fun watch, though a bit long (though that's perhaps I watched the home video release and I'd experience it differently in the actual theatre).

As mentioned above, I haven't read the original novel, so I can't say how much of this musical is actually taken directly from the novel, how much of the plot might be musical-original or whether important elements from the novel were cut, but on the whole, I think Yuurei Deka ~ Sayonara suru, sono mae ni offers a surprisingly robust mystery story, that even without the musical angle, is worth a watch. In essence, Yuurei Deka's plot consists of multiple ideas and concepts that might be simple on their own, but they are interwoven in clever and thoughtful manners, making the mystery seem more complex than the individual parts are. It's a technique often seen in Detective Conan, where multiple relatively simple ideas that might just be "okay" are strung together to construct a story that is more than its seperate parts added together. So in the case of Yuurei Deka, there are definitely some ideas that seem a bit weak on their own: the direct cause for Kyoudou's death in the interrogation room is just silly and the ultimate reason why Tatsuya was murdered by his boss is also a bit weak, though the set-up (clewing) for both concepts is okay.The way the locked room was constructed was also rather underwhelming, but I think that the underlying fundamentals behind that part of the mystery do tie nicely back to the (admittedly silly) reason why Kyoudou died. There are some really clever smaller parts of the mystery though, with one in particular which I really worked well in musical form: while I can imagine how it was done in the original novel and can see how it'd be pretty tricky too there, the presentation in the musical makes it both easier and harder to spot, and that's quite memorable. Add to that that the story does at point make meaningful use of the whole concept of Tatsuya being a ghost (like him eavesdroppping on people) in terms of mystery, and overall, I think that Yuurei Deka is a good mystery story even if not every single part is as strong.

 

I don't think there are moments where I thought that the musical form (i.e. with song and dance) was essential for this story to work, but that didn't really bother me anyway, and as expected of a Takarazuka Revue story, there was also an emphasis on the romantic subplot (Tatsuya being dead and Sumako grieving for him), but still, this can be enjoyed as a straight mystery story.

I can't make any comparisons with the original novel, perhaps that one is better, or perhaps not, but at the very least, the Takarazuka Revue's Yuurei Deka ~ Sayonara suru, sono mae ni is an entertaining musical that tells an entertaining and well-constructed puzzle plot mystery and unless you're really bothered by the fact the characters suddenly start singing or that everyone's being played by women, I'd say this will probably satisfy the people looking for the rare beast that is a murder mystery musical.

Original Japanese title(s): 有栖川有栖（原作）『幽霊刑事(デカ)~サヨナラする、その前に~』

The Landing Ticket

朝だ始発だ電車が走る

5時半発の埼京線 

遙か遠くの会社を目指し

今日も電車が走る

It's morning /  The first train / The train is running

The 05:30 of the Saikyo-Line

On my way to the company faraway

The train is running today too

「電車で電車でGO!GO!」（Junkie As Machine/Zuntata)

I try to read at least one novel a year (partially) set in the city of Fukuoka. The first review of last year was Gekisou Fukuoka Kokusai Marathon - 42.195 Kilo no Nazo for example. I started with today's book because the summary mentioned Fukuoka as part of the alibi, but sadly enough, the reader doesn't actually get to visit the city themselves and the few mentions to the city are pretty sober. Ah well, I'll still count this as my 'one-in-a-year' as the story, at one point, does revolve slightly around specific Fukuoka geography.

Disclosure: I have translated Arisugawa Alice's The Moai Island Puzzle.

One morning, Yukari receives a call from the police with horrible news: her older sister Megumi (her only living relative) was found murdered in her holiday villa near Lake Yogo, just north of Lake Biwa. Megumi and her husband were to stay there a few days starting the day before, but business had prevented Shinichi from leaving his antique shop, and Megumi, who had arrived at the villa early, would spend the first night alone at the lake. She was murdered the following morning, and the police had discovered her body thanks to an anonymous phone call. Because her life insurance seems rather extravagant, the police and Yukari suspect that Shinichi killed his own wife with the help of his twin brother Kenichi, but the twins have perfect alibis: on the morning of Megumi's murder, Shinichi recalled he had an earlier made business appointment, and he took the Shinkansen train south to Fukuoka to meet with a collector there. Twin brother Kenichi too had been on a business trip that morning, travelling by train all the way up north to Sakata in Yamagata. Both arrived at their destinations in the afternoon, and several witnesses confirm having seen the two men at their respective routes at various points like the station. Yukari confides her suspicions about her brother-in-law with the mystery author Sorachi Masaya, a mutual friend of both Megumi and Shinichi, and Megumi's former boyfriend during college. Together they hire a private detective, who can't seem to find anything suspicious about Shinichi. The investigation runs into a wall until several months later, another body is found at the Lake Yogo villa. Another anonymous phone call leads the police to a body with the head and hands removed. The police is quite sure that the body belongs to either Shinichi or Kenichi, but both men have disappeared and it's impossible to tell which brother the body belongs to.

Magic Mirror (1990) is the third full-length novel by Arisugawa Alice, after Gekkou Game (1989) and The Moai Island Puzzle (1989). It was also his first novel that wasn't part of any series, and while I have read quite a lot by Arisugawa by now, it took me until now to read a non-series work by him. While his first two novels were clearly written in the spirit of Ellery Queen and the school that puts emphasis on logical reasoning, Arisugawa's third outing takes inspiration from F.W. Crofts, Ayukawa Tetsuya and (early) Matsumoto Seichou, being a mystery revolving around uncrackable alibis and an emphasis on time tables. In fact, like often seen in Ayukawa and Matsumoto's work, we actually have real train time schedules featured in this book. It's one of the elements that set Magic Mirror apart from the two earlier novels starring the student Alice, which are patterned after the more fanciful "good old closed circle on an isolated island/area closed off after a volcano eruption" tropes, while Magic Mirror is a a bit more realistic in tone (don't worry, it's still a puzzle-oriented mystery).

The first half of the novel revolves around the attempts of various parties trying to figure out whether Shinichi on his own, or with the help of his twin brother, killed Megumi and by extension, how they managed to have a perfect alibi for the time of the murder. Shinichi seems the most suspicious at first, but witnesses have seen him purchasing a ticket to Hakata Station, buying gifts at the station and he arrived in time at his business relation's place in the afternoon and a similar story holds for Kenichi. A large part of this mystery is solved early on in the novel by one of the characters, though the theory is still imperfect due to the existence of one piece of evidence. Due to that, the character has to abandon their theory for the moment, but this final hurdle is actually relatively easy to solve for the reader. While you can solve it "in a perfect" manner by actually examining the time schedules etc. included closely, I bet most people can instinctively make a good guess about how that piece of evidence was cooked (and check afterwards with the schedules). So this part is a bit easy, because a good part of the trick is already presented to the reader early on, while that last step is not as hard as the story pretends it to be. This murder feels the most 'realistic' in the sense that a lot of the mystery revolves around real time tables of means of transportations and real Fukuoka geography, so if you liked Matsumoto's Points and Lines, you'll feel right at home here.

The second murder, of the unknown decapitated body, is a lot more interesting though. What is interesting about Magic Mirror is that it starts off telling you there are twins involved. Usually, you'd think having twins in a story about a perfect alibi would be very, very cheap. In Magic Mirror, even knowing twins are involved doesn't mean you'll instantly figure out how Megumi was killed, and the plot device of the twins is turned upside down in the second half of the novel, when we are presented with a body which belongs to one of the twins, but you don't know which. This part is a bit more engaging: there's a part where Sorachi is convinced the man suspected by the police must be innocent, so he tries to find evidence to support that man's flimsy alibi of having been drinking at various places on the night of the murder. This part features a small, but nicely foreshadowed trick hidden within the man's testimony about his movements. But the murder on the unknown victim itself also proves to be an interesting murder: it makes fantastic use of the notion of twins, utilizing them in a very original manner to do something. I can't say too much because that would spoil the game, but I really like how the culprit used the fact that Shinichi en Kenichi were twins to completely befuddle the police investigation. I also like the one slip-up the murderer made that forced their hand as a concept, but as it was used here, it did feel like a bit too much coincidence: the murderer would have made a pretty brilliant plan for the murder, but goofed up at rather silly and trivial moments.

I have mentioned this novel before in this blog, as this novel is probably best known for its Alibi Lecture in the penultimate chapter and in my post on taxonomies/typologies/lectures, I made a short translation of the points raised in that Alibi Lecture. The Alibi Lecture is of course inspired by Doctor Fell's Locked Room Lecture, but the funny thing is that this is actually a lecture: Sorachi is invited by a college mystery club to hold a lecture on the Alibi Lecture he wrote in one of his novels, and in this chapter, Sorachi explains the types of tricks used in mystery novels to create a perfect alibi. Like in most novels featuring such trope lectures, it's an implied Challenge to the Reader to see if they can guess what kind of trick this particular novel is using, and perhaps even guess if this book is using a completely new type of solution. The Moai Island Puzzle featured a short Dying Message Lecture by the way. Obviously, both murders use some kind of alibi trick, and I don't consider it really spoilers to say that Arisugawa has of course come up with variations that are original on their own, and like it should be, the Lecture functions as both a solid clue to the reader (as it helps people not familiar with these types of stories), as a clever piece of misdirection (diverting the reader's attention by onlylisting what is seemingly possible, while pointing away from the actual solution).

Usually when I finish a novel, I have a fairly good idea of what I actually think of the story, and that also influences how I write the review. With Magic Mirror, I have to admit I was less enthusiastic about it when I first finished it, but as I am writing this review the following day, I notice I'm a lot more positive about the book now. While I think the final 'obstacle' in solving Megumi's murder is far easier than the book pretends it to be, I find that Magic Mirror does a really good job at utilizing the themes of the perfect alibi and twins in mystery fiction: it poses alluring mysteries to the reader that incorporate the fact we all know twins are involved and the second murder especially is interesting because of that. The result is a novel that keeps up a good pace from start to finish and which should entertain fans of the perfect alibi story.

Original Japanese title(s): 有栖川有栖『マジックミラー』

Bear Witness to Murder

Three little Soldier Boys walking in the zoo;

A big bear hugged one and then there were two.

Disclosure: I translated novels by both Arisugawa Alice (The Moai Island Puzzle) and Ayatsuji Yukito (The Decagon House Murders). And in case you're still looking for Christmas presents...

I don't plan to find me some Christmas mystery stories when the season approaches, but coincidences do happen, resulting in today's review. Anraku Isu Tantei ("The Armchair Detective") was a brilliant television drama series created by mystery writers Ayatsuji Yukito and Arisugawa Alice, produced irregularly between 1999-2017. Earlier, I have discussed the episodes ON AIR (2006) and ON STAGE (2017), with the latter later being confirmed by co-creator Ayatsuji as being the last episode of this series, at least in the usual format. If one considers the detective genre to be an intellectual game that challenges the reader (viewer) to solve the mystery themselves, than this show was the ultimate example of how to present a mystery drama as a game. Each story consists of two episodes: the first episode introduces the viewer to all the characters, the events leading up to the murder and the subsequent investigation. All the hints and clues necessary to solve the crime are shown in this first episode, while the solution is revealed in the second episode broadcast the following week. Sounds like common sense of course, but this point was of particular essence for this show, as viewers were encouraged to write in that week with the answers to the following two questions: 1) Who is the murderer? and more importantly: 2) What is the logical process by which you arrived at that conclusion? The winner, drawn from the people who submitted the correct answers, was presented with a sizeable money prize.  The show thus provided the ultimate challenge to the armchair detectives at home and one of the more impressive parts of the show was how it had to walk the line between being difficult enough that not everyone would arrive at the correct conclusion, along the correct route, but not being overly complex so nobody could guess who the murderer was in a logical manner.

Anraku Isu Tantei no Seiya ~ Kieta Teddy Bear no Nazo ~ ("The Holy Night of the Armchair Detective ~ The Mystery of the Vanished Teddy Bear~", 2000) was the third installment of this show, the first episode broadcast on December 21 and the solution episode following soon after on Christmas. We are introduced on Christmas Eve to Kumako, a young woman who recently found a new job, but her boyfriend sadly enough can't see her on Eve, so they plan a date for the twenty-sixth. The twenty-sixth is also the first day of Kumako working at NATO (Nihon Action Team Office), a small scale stunt action series production team, which recently got a small hit with the television tokusatsu series Athlete 4. It's also the last office day for the year, so everyone is present at the office. Kumako is introduced to all the staff and actors, but she soon learns her new workplace is also a den of intrige and hate, with love triangles, post-divorce fights and rumors of embezzlement flying around. In the evening, Kumako waits for her boyfriend in a restaurant, but she's stood up and she only comes home after a lot of drinking. At home, she finds an e-mail waiting for her by Norie, her new colleague who plays Athlete Purple in Athlete 4. To her surprise, Norie says she killed the boss of NATO at the office and that she'll commit suicide too. By the time Kumako had reported this to the police, it's already to late: NATO's owner Inoue was found with his head bashed in with his own golf club at the office, while Norie set fire to herself at her own home. The police however determine that Norie did not commit suicide, but that she was already dead by the time the fire was started. It thus appears someone else must've killed Inoue en Norie, and the main suspect is a suspicious figure spotted by the guards of the building that houses the NATO offices. The two men saw a figure dressed like Santa Claus carrying a large sack on his back leave the building that night, only moments after the Inoue murder must've happened. The Santa Claus costume was stolen from NATO's costume wardrobe, but there's another missing object: the rare, large teddy bear Inoue kept as a memento in his office. But why would the murderer steal a teddy bear or dress up like Santa Claus? Eventually, even Kumako is accused of the murder by the police, which is when she decides to use the magical flute she was gifted a few days ago, of which she was told it would save her from danger. The flute is of course the item that summons the titular Armchair Detective, a mysterious entity who is ratiocination personified and who can prove without any doubt who is in fact the true murderer.

The show was conceived as a puzzle plot mystery drama where the reader could participate, so to start off with some statistics: the television station received 36,731 (!) entries for this particular installment, the highest amount of participants in the history of the series. 21.5 percent of the respondents guessed the identity of the murderer correctly, but only forty respondants, or mere 0.1 percent, actually got the process right of correctly identifying the murderer/eliminating the other suspect. The numbers will thus tell you it was pretty hard to get all of the story right. I have seen most of the episodes of this series now, and I thought this was one of the easier episodes actually (it was), but getting full marks would've been difficult.

Because as always Ayatsuji and Arisugawa came up with a deliciously tricky story. The second episode starts off with every major character in the story being transported to the dimension of the Armchair Detective, who then goes through the long chains of deduction that lead to the identity of the murderer. The tone here is rather comedic, with each character trying to argue why they aren't the murderer. There are a few meta-rules here that help the viewer out: there is always only one culprit (no accomplices), everything shown on screen (including the time stamps) is correct and nobody besides the murderer lies intentionally. Still, you need to pay attention very well to keep up with the Armchair Detective while he eliminates the suspects one by one and crosses off false solutions. I mean, how many detective shows do you know that spend between thirty minutes and an hour purely to the explanation of a crime? In order to solve the crime yourself, you need to reference the time stamps of each scene and sometimes check the backgrounds very carefully for hidden clues. In some episodes, the zoom-and-enhance trope can be rather persnickety (and kinda unfair in pre-HD TV broadcasts), but it's done fairly err, fair here. As mentioned, this show has to be both difficult, and also fair enough for the viewer at home (anyone can come up with an unsolvable mystery), and I think this episode is definitely one of the better efforts. It helps this show isn't about locked room murders etc., as they are harder to present in a truly fair manner. You can show a thread and needle on the screen, but it's not really fair to expect from the viewer to imagine what could've done with that. This show is about eliminating suspects, so you have to determine what the murderer must have done or known, and then see which of the suspects does or does not fit that profile. You'll definitely have to rewatch scenes a few times to get it though, and unless you have photographic memory, it's impossible to solve this in one go. There are a few scenes in the first episode that do stand out as being obviously 'oh, this scene is used to prove that this character couldn't have done this or that' but this doesn't hurt the experience, because you still need the context of the murder to understand how this becomes revelant in the elimination process.

In this case, the mystery revolves around two questions: Why the Santa Claus dress-up, and why steal a gigantic teddy bear after committing a murder? At first, the problem seems so trivial and also meaningless, but when the whole solution is presented, you'll see how neatly everything fits, and how all the odd movements of the culprit actually made perfect sense considering the situation. The problem of the teddy bear in particular is great, with a convincing reason as for why it had been spirited away from the office, one that seems so obvious in hindsight. The misdirection is quite clever, and while I kinda knew which characters I could already eliminate based on some of the scenes, I still couldn't make out exactly how the teddy bear was involved, so I was pleasantly surprised when it was all explained to me.

Anraku Isu Tantei no Seiya ~ Kieta Teddy Bear no Nazo ~ is in general a strong installment in this series, and while I'll be the first to admit that this series can be very fussy about its visual clues, I'd say this was actually one of the entries that didn't expect everyone in 2000 to have HD recorders to be able to solve the mystery. Some of the scenes do telegraph themselves too obviously as being clues, but overall, the mystery of the disappearing teddy bear is an amusing one, resulting in a very well-constructed mystery drama show that also does its job well as a Christmas-themed mystery.

Original Japanese title(s): 『安楽椅子探偵の聖夜 〜消えたテディ・ベアの謎〜』

E=Murder

aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ

(Fermat's last theorem)

I'm horrible at the exact sciences.. I imagine that if Q.E.D. Shoumei Shuuryou did its unique style of mystery telling not with mathematics or similar fields of science, but with literature or a field like that, I'd be a lot more enthusiastic.

After reading a couple of volumes of Katou Motohiro's Q.E.D. Shoumei Shuuryou series and the sequel series Q.E.D. Shoumei Shuuryou iff the last year, I realized that I don't have any interest in reading all the adventures of the brilliant, MIT-graduated prodigy Touma Sou and his classmate Kana. There are definitely some interesting stories in this series, especially when the stories involve mathematics and other special fields of interest of author Katou himself, but few stories are truly memorable as mystery stories, so I have decided I am just going to pick my stories now, instead of going through all fifty volumes of the original series, and another dozen or so for the still running sequel iff, as that's just too pricey. Fortunately for me, special anthology volumes were released earlier this year, with the three mystery authors Tanaka Yoshiki, Tsuji Masaki and Arisugawa Alice each editing their own volume. These volumes seemed interesting enough, and when I asked for story recommendations a while back, I noticed a number of the recommendations I got happened to have been selected for Q.E.D. Shoumei Shuuryou The Best - Arisugawa Alice Selection (2019), which made it the most logical next step in my reading of this series.

The volume starts with Jacob's Ladder though, which I already reviewed earlier, so I'll be skipping that story. The second story is Infinite Moon (originally in volume 20) and starts with the arrival of an email from Touma's Chinese friend Hu. Which is a bit strange, Hu was presumed dead, due to a heart disease he had been suffering of his whole life. The email to Touma also prompts a visit by the Shanghai Police, who tell Touma that Hu is known to them as a member of Xi Xing She, a crime syndicate in Shanghai led by four men: the two Liang brothers and the two friends Huang and Wu. While the gang was basically divided in two factions (the Liang brothers, and the two friends), the four bosses carefully kept everything in balance, until three weeks ago, when Huang was fished dead out of the river. While the police had trouble getting information out of the lower-ranked members of the Xi Xing She, it appeared Huang's murder was retaliation by the younger Liang, as Huang had killed the elder Liang brother earlier. The police hope that Touma's friend Hu can tell them more about the power struggle going on, but time is ticking as the remaining Xi Xing She bosses kill each other off, while Touma has to figure out Hu's mysterious message: Come to ϕ. I have read several stories with a series of murders, where the murderer becomes the next victim and then the second murderer becomes the next victim etc., so Infinite Moon was not really surprising to me. I like how Katou links the story with mathematical theories in infinity and 0, but the core mystery plot is not really surprising: a lot of pages are used to simply explain the basic setting, but after that, you don't really need much explanation/clue-hunting to figure out what's going on.

The Kurogane Manor Murder Case (volume 36) reunites Touma with Karasuma Renji, a cocky assistant-professor in Physics who has a soft spot for Touma. Karasuma is a "person of interest" to the police in the investigation into the suspicious death (apparent suicide) of Professor Kurogane of K University in Kyoto. It was Kurogane who had sent Karasuma away from K University all the way to A University and even then, Kurogane kept the brilliant Karasuma shackled: he arranged so Karasuma's research at A University would become a joint project with K University under the supervision of Kurogane's own pupil Shida, which would mean Karasuma's name would end up below both Shida and Kurogane's names on his own research paper when published. Kurogane however was found hanging in his study in his manor one day ago, precisely when Karasuma returned to Kyoto. Kurogane had no reason to commit suicide, but murder also seems impossible as there were no footprints in the snow around Kurogane's study, nor did the help see anyone come or leave the study that day. The police can't really pin anything on Karasuma, but at the wake in Kurogane's manor, a more obvious murder happens: an arrow is shot right in Shida's neck during the night, but due to the long, covered galleries of the traditional Japanese house, none of the suspects could have shot Shida with a bow and arrow from their respective positions, due to the distance and most importantly the low ceilings of the hallways.

The death of Kurogane in his study itself is rather simple, though I do like how it makes clever use of the way a traditional Japanese manor is built (Katou studied Architecture in college). One important hint to the whereabouts of the culprit at this crime site is rather brilliant though, being a reference to Zeno's arrow paradox, though it does expect the reader to guess a certain's character behavior for it to work. Shida's murder is... original, but kinda hard to swallow. The way the building is used to create an impossible situation is great: it makes references to a special archery competition that challenged people to hit a target from one end of a covered gallery to another, the low ceiling making it difficult to shoot an arrow far enough (as an arrow needs to get high to be able to fly further). Karasuma for example had a clean shot on the victim from his position for example, but he'd need to be the strongest person around to have made that shot straight across the gallery. The trick behind the murder however requires you to kinda roll with it: it's original and it definitely works better due to the visual format of the story, but it kinda expects you to a) to know that's possible in the first place and b) that it would actually succeed in one try (even if with some practice), for the arrow was just as likely to hit a non-vital part or simply miss the target. In fact, an acquaintance with experience with archery basically rolled her eyes in disbelief when she saw the solution.

Locked Room No. 4 (volume 40) brings Touma, Kana and Himeko as members of the Sakisaka High School Mystery Club to the classic mystery setting: a mansion on a remote island. Sparrow Tours is a small tour operator/planner specialized in unique experiences, and now they're planning to do a mystery tour on this island, where the participants have to solve a mystery (locked room murders) during their stay. The story for this tour is written by the mystery author Yoimiya Sodehara, and the three kids have come along to act as a test panel. Another 'outsider' is Komaki, the head of Accounting of the parent company World Tours, who says Sparrow Tours' expenses are way too much and that he needs to take care of it right away. Once the group arrives on the island, Komaki goes off on his own, while Toum, Kana and Himeko are presented with the three locked room murder situations of the tour (the victims being played by the various employees of Sparrow Tours who have come along). The three kids quickly solve the three locked rooms (to the frustration to the author Yoimiya), but when they go to the dining room to rest, they find it locked. When they unlock it, they discover the body of Komaki sitting at the dining table, with lit candles illuminating the knife in his chest. With the door locked and the window looking down a cliff, it seems the gang is being presented a fourth, unplanned locked room in their tour. The first three locked rooms are pretty much child's play, and the gang manages to solve them almost instantly. The fourth, main locked room is of course more interesting: it's not super complex, but makes clever use of all that has presented before (like always Q.E.D. stories usually take a long time to set the story up). It's pretty obvious who the murderer is once you see through the main piece of misdirection, but I think this was a nicely plotted tale within the usual 100 pages.

In Question! (volume 44), Touma, Kana and Loki arrive at a mountain lodge house after Touma receives a mysterious letter that says "Question!", featuring Fermat's theorem inside. Included were also directions to the mountain lodge, and curious as to the meaning of this letter, the trio decide to go there. There they find two other groups, who happen to know each other from the local family court: both an elderly couple and a younger couple with a daughter who are living seperately now and busy working out a divorce. At first, the two groups figured this was some kind of last effort by the family court to have the two couples talk things over, but Touma's presence obviously proves that idea wrong. All of them have received the same mysterious letter, though with different riddles. The story unfolds as a kind of treasure hunt, with the solution of each riddle pointing towards another riddle and all coming back to Touma's Fermat's theorem. Don't expect to do much mystery solving yourself as the reader, as that's pretty much impossible and a lot of the story is also devoted to Touma's lecture on Fermat's theorem. It's pretty easy to guess what the story is really about though. Detective Conan also often features stories like these, but I find them more enjoyable there, as they work better as standalone mystery stories with a riddle that can be solved by the reader themselves, whereas even with knowledge on Fermat etc., Question! is mostly just guessing.

Q.E.D. Shoumei Shuuryou The Best - Arisugawa Alice Selection is on its own a fairly entertaining volume. Not a big fan of the opening and ending story of this selection, but the middle part is good Q.E.D. stuff and include some of my favorite stories I have read until now of this series. Arisugawa also obviously selected stories that showcase Katou's interest in mathematics and other academic fields: those topics are often mentioned in the Q.E.D. series, but they play an especially important thematic role in most of the stories included in this volume. I might also pick up one of the other The Best volumes in the future, as I think this approach (picking my stories to read) is probably the best way to enjoy this series for me.

Original Japanese title(s): 加藤元浩（原） 有栖川有栖（編）『Q.E.D. -証明終了- The Best 有栖川有栖Selection』

Borrowed Place

“I will now lecture on the general mechanics and development of the situation which is known in detective fiction as the ‘hermetically sealed chamber.’ Harrumph. All those opposing can skip this chapter."

"The Hollow Man"

Ever since Dr. Fell made the utterly shocking confession that he's in fact a fictional character in a mystery novel, we have seen more people, fictional or otherwise, thread in the good doctor's footsteps and take a look at the mystery genre in general, rather than a specific problem in a specific novel. Dr. Fell's locked room lecture provided a now infamous classification of how locked room murders could be achieved in tales of mystery and imagination, for example by making it seem like the crime happened earlier or later than thought, etc. The notion of attempting a taxonomy of a certain trope in the genre (that is, the locked room murder or impossible crime) is actually quite interesting, as it freely admits that there is no such thing as pure originality, and it is a clear confession that most of the time, every single idea in mystery fiction is just a variation of something else, some admittedly more inspired than others.

On the other hand, the possibility of a taxonomy also emphasizes the game-like element of the genre, I think. I have mused over "winning the game of a mystery novel" before, but I think that efforts like the Locked Room Lecture really show this element very well for this particular form of game.  A well-designed videogame for example, will present obstacles and problems for the player to conquer and more importantly, build on that as the game continues. To take the famous level 1-1 from Super Mario Bros.: the very first section of the level, the game first teaches you can 'jump', it will show you can 'jump on an enemy' to defeat it, and that you can 'jump higher if you hold the button longer'. What follows afterwards are increasingly difficult variations on these notions: you might be asked to jumped consecutively, or beat multiple enemies, or do tricky jump combinations of various heights. The further you progress in a game, the harder it gets. But the thing here is: the game is designed knowing that you have cleared the previous obstacles. A good stage design knows you are in the possession of certain skills and the knowledge of how the game world works ('jumping on an enemy kills it') and how objects and enemies move in a game. In short: it teaches you to recognize patterns, and in a way, that is what mystery fiction also does. As the Locked Room Lecture shows: most examples of this particular sub-genre can easily be identified as a varation of a certain pattern. If you, as the reader, want to "win" this intellectual game, you need to be able to recognize the pattern being used despite all the misdirection and apply your knowledge to this particular version of the pattern.

The plot device of having a character in a novel suddenly hold a lecture about a certain trope in the genre can feel a bit pretentious, but I think it works if you take mystery fiction to be a game of wits. Going back to Super Mario Bros.: say you make it to stage 8-3. I can, assuming you didn't use the special warp pipes or had someone else help you, perhaps assume you have played the previous levels and overcome the obstacles and problems presented there. I can therefore estimate how good you are at the game (at least good enough to do X). That is a different story with a novel: Carr is not likely to know how much you know about the mystery genre, or locked room murder sub genre, if you pick up The Hollow Man. It could be the very first novel you ever read, or just the last in a decennia-long diet of only impossible crimes. The in-novel lecture can thus function as a gauge: by presenting the patterns, the author openly shows the difficulty level they are working at, allowing the reader/player to estimate their own position. Is this author operating at a difficulty level much higher than what I used to, or is it just right? So I am quite fond of these kinds of lectures.

There have been many writers after Carr who have played with the Locked Room Lecture (Amagi made a typology and example stories for each category), or more specific examples of the impossible crime like Nikaidou Reito's Footprints-in-the-Snow lecture. I happened to have translationed one on locked room murders myself even, with Shinji, one of the characters in Abiko's The 8 Mansion Murders, agonizing the suspects and the police as he babbled on about his own locked room lecture, heavily inspired by Carr's. Shinji also refers to a famous essay by Edogawa Rampo by the way, where Rampo doesn't just attempt to categorize the tricks behind locked room murders: Rampo decided to categorize every single trick from mystery fiction. I don't have a full translation of the essay, though I do have a short translation of the various categories Rampo identified. As mentioned in that post, Rampo also has an interesting taxonomy of unique motives featured in mystery novels.

But I have to say, I am infinitely more partial to in-novel lectures on genre tropes, rather than standalone essays. And I also think it's not a secret that I'm actually not so singularly focused on locked room murders and other impossibilities as some of the other mystery bloggers around. Therefore, I'm usually very fond of lectures on mystery tropes other than locked room murders, even if you don't see them a lot. Granted, not every type of mystery works really well in a taxonomy. The 'list-up-all-the-characteristics-of-the-culprit'-type of whodunnit as championed by authors like Queen, Arisugawa and Aosaki for example doesn't really lend it well for it, though I have made a feeble attempt in the past by sketching an idea for a typology for clues used in these type of stories.

But to mention a few other interesting typologies: Arisugawa's The Moai Island Puzzle (disclosure: I translated the English version) features a very short Dying Message Lecture by Maria, which I quite like because the dying message itself is a trope that is often used as just a minor touch to a mystery story, seldom taking the spotlight. Mitsuda's Kubinashi no Gotoki Tataru Mono has a very unique and specialized one, as it is about the topic of decapitated bodies. I mean, once you start thinking about, you'll quickly realize that a taxonomy of this trope is quite possible (the question being why a body is decapitated) as there are a few variations, but it's still a surprisingly original lecture topic.

I didn't really have a point to make in this post, but "hey, I like lectures" but to finish with some more thought-provoking, I thought I'd add in a translation of Arisugawa's categorization of alibi tricks. The alibi is of course a very important notion in mystery novels, and is often also a crucial element of "true" impossible crimes, as well as semi-impossible crimes ("He couldn't have done it because he was seen elsewhere at the time of the murder") and variants. Arisugawa's lecture is featured in his 1990 novel Magic Mirror, and unlike his usual Queenian efforts, this novel is actually more inspired by the work of Crofts, explaining the lecture. And I haven't read it yet, though I will eventually, of course.

Anyway, if you have something to say about lectures on any trope of the mystery genre, or perhaps the alibi lecture specifically, leave a comment.

ARISUGAWA ALICE'S ALIBI LECTURE

(from: Magic Mirror (1990))

1. THE WITNESS HAS ILL INTENTIONS.
- The witness is intentionally lying.

2. THE WITNESS IS MISTAKEN.
a. Mistaken time.
- The watch of the witness has been tampered with; mistaken day of the week or date; etc.

b. Mistaken location.
- The witness is mistaken about the location they were with the culprit (the exact apartment, train, mountain, river, etc.)

c. Mistaken identity.
- The culprit had someone impersonate them.

3. THE CRIME SCENE IS MISTAKEN.
- For example the crime is committed in the mountains of town A, but the body is moved to the mountains of town B to make it seem like the murder was committed there.

4. PHYSICAL EVIDENCE IS TAMPERED WITH.
- For example the faked photograph.

5. THE TIME OF THE CRIME IS MISTAKEN.
a. Made to look like it happened earlier than actually happened.
- For example the victim is made to appear like they were killed at 2 o'clock, even though it happened at 3 o'clock, and an alibi is obtained for 2 o'clock.

b. Made to look like it happened later than actually happened.
- For example the victim is made to look they still lived at 4 o'clock even though they died at 3 o'clock, and an alibi is obtained for 4 o'clock.

A. Medical trickery.
- The time of the crime is faked through tricks like heating or cooling the corpse, tampering with the contents of the stomach, etc.

B. Non-medical trickery.
Using non-medical tricks to accomplish 5a and 5b.

* Both 5A and 5B feature an a and b variant.

6. AN OVERLOOKED ROUTE.
- For example it takes one hour between points A and B, but an overlooked route between those points is only thirty minutes. This category is especially often seen in mystery stories about train timetables, but one can also think of shortening an one-hour hike from the mountains to mere minutes by jumping off a cliff with a parachute.

7. REMOTE MURDER
a. Mechanical trickery.
- A pistol that is fired through a clock mechanism etc.

b. Psychological trickery.
- Having a person under hypnosis or suffering from conditions like sleepwalking commit dangerous acts on their own.

8. GUIDED SUICIDE.
- Giving the victim such a tremendous psychological shock they commit suicide.

9. NO ALIBI.
- That what the culprit claims is an alibi isn't a real alibi at all, but only said to make other people think they have one.

Original Japanese source:  有栖川有栖　『マジックミラー』

Sea Breeze

We are all rowing the boat of fate

The waves keep on comin' and we can't escape

"Life Is Like A Boat" (Rie Fu)

I haven't seen much of Nara, now I think about it. Only spent half a day there in total. I guess I could've seen more of it when I was living in Kyoto as it's basically around the corner, but then again, a lot of Nara has to offer is basically also in Kyoto. Except for the deers of course.

Disclosure: I translated Arisugawa Alice's The Moai Island Puzzle.

A meeting with a video production company about an original direct-to-video adaptation of one of his books brings Osaka-based mystery writer Arisugawa Alice from the west to Tokyo. His publisher in Tokyo also informs him his latest book is just fresh off the presses and ready to be shipped off, so Alice decides to swing by there too to see how the thing turned out. His colleague-cum-friendly-rival Akaboshi Gaku happens to be at the publisher too, and the two have a bit of chat (Alice naturally gifts the man his latest book). Akaboshi tells Alice he's working on a new mystery novel himself, and that he himself is actually about to leave for the west of Japan, for "Nara-by-the-Sea" to do some research on the theme of his new work: mermaids. Nara-by-the-Sea is a fancy phrase to describe Obama, a coastal town with many Buddhist temples which acted as the harbor for the ancient capitals of Nara and Kyoto, the greatest difference with those two cities of course being that Obama lies by the sea. The following day however, Alice learns that Akaboshi's body was found at the coast near Obama and it doesn't seem likely he'd commit suicide Alice and his friend Himura Hideo, who teaches criminology at Eito University, decide to find out what happened to Akaboshi in Arisugawa Alice's Umi no Aru Nara ni Shisu ("Death in Nara-by-the-Sea", 1995).

I think I mention this every time one of these series comes up, but the actual author Arisugawa Alice has two main series, both of which feature a character also named Arisugawa Alice. The Alice in the Student Alice series is a young student who acts as the Watson to the older student Egami, while in the Writer Alice series, we follow an Alice in his thirties who's a professional mystery author, who acts as the assistant to Himura Hideo, a criminologist. The interesting thing is that both these Alices write each other: the student Alice is a budding mystery author who writes about a professional mystery author named Alice and his friend Himura, while the writer Alice writes about a young student named Alice and his senior Egami. It's just a small thing that doesn't have any real bearing on either series, and it's not always mentioned either, but Umi no Aru Nara ni Shisu has a funny reference where someone mentions that the Alice there had written a novel called Something-something Puzzle, which is of course The Moai Island Puzzle which I translated.

Umi no Aru Nara ni Shisu is the third novel in the Writer Alice series, after 46 Banme no Misshitsu and Dali no Mayu, and also the first serialized novel Arisugawa wrote. It is obviously intended as a take on the travel mystery sub-genre: mystery stories that revolve around tourist destinations, the local culture/history and of course, the act of (recreational) traveling itself. It is a genre that is especially associated with television productions (obviously, as you can actually see the places), but also seen as a rather 'light' genre within mystery fiction, as often the mystery plots are of secundary importance, below the 'tourist' mode of the story. Travel is also an important theme in Umi no Aru Nara ni Shisu: Alice and Himura travel together to Obama in the hopes of finding what brought Akaboshi there and a trace of his murderer and along the way, the reader is told a lot about local Obama history and legends. In fact, one aspect I didn't really like of this novel is that it very often dumps a lot of information on the reader that feels too much as exposition. For example, there's a part where Alice and Himura talk about an Obama-related legend concerning the immortal nun Yaobikuni (it is said that you become immortal if you eat mermaid's meat), but you basically get to read an encyclopedia entry. This happens several times, where information that would've been more appealing to read in the form of an interactive discussion is presented as dry information (there's a part about The Exorcist too), and it results in a reading experience that is simply not as pleasant as one'd hope at times.

Travel also plays an important in the mystery plot. It doesn't take long for the story to focus on the alibis of the various suspects, and the attentive reader should notice right away the story is heading for an alibi-cracking plot, given the extreme focus on times and locations in the story (the importance of the alibis and the question of who could've murdered Akoboshi at that time and place is also emphasised a few times by Alice and Himura, so it shouldn't come as a surprise). The solution to it all is rather disappointing. There are basically two clues that point in the direction of the murderer (motive isn't a clue by the way) of which one is rather simple and basically nothing more than semi-trivia, and that would've fared much better in a short story, rather than a novel. The other clue is sorta okay, but very hard to imagine things would really work out that. It's especially hard to imagine in this time and age: perhaps it was more convincing in the early nineties of Japan in the certain field of industry this relates too. The circumstances that allowed this murder to happen in the first place are also a bit hard to swallow, and the actions of a certain character are just accepted as is without giving a convincing reason about why they would ever want to do that.

There is a second murder about halfway through the novel and tt features a method that has very little convincing power. There's an episode of Columbo that does the same actually, but it's similarly kinda hard to swallow there. The method also features something that wlll feel out-of-date. Of course, novels are always a product of their time, and I don't mind at all when I see things in novels that are obvious from a time I didn't know, but for some reason, I feel very differently about things and technology I myself do know and have used in the past, and that are outdated now. To me, part of the murder method feels like something from yesterday, but I can imagine that people from a generation younger than me will have no idea what they're talking about, yet it's also not far enough ago to feel "oh yeah, that's how things were done back in those days". Or maybe I'm just getting old....

Umi no Aru Nara ni Shisu thus isn't one of the high points in Arisugawa's oeuvre. It has an idea that might've worked better in a short story rather than a novel, but little of the rest of the novel really managed to impress. It is slow due to the many expositions and focus on alibis and while one can derive some entertainment from Alice and Himura's usual banter and perhaps the travel mystery angle on the town of Obama, there's never really a moment that really makes the reader sit up straight to see what's coming next. The Writer Alice series is much more popular than the Student Alice series and sadly enough, this has also its influences on the output, as while all the novels in the Student Alice series are really, really good, the Writer Alice is less balanced with more distinct higher and lower points, and Umi no Aru Nara ni Shisu is one of those novels that simply isn't as good as some of the other novels in the same series.

Original Japanese title(s): 有栖川有栖 『海のある奈良に死す』