The Case of the Captured Queen

"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

"Through the Looking-Glass" 

 

The cover of today's book has an interesting design and looks quite good in real-life, not so much as a small image file... 

Rokuhara Azusa is a woman in her late thirties who works at the Citizen's Affairs counter of Matsumoto City Hall, handling complains and other problems Matsumoto inhabitants may encounter in their daily life. One day, Takatsuku Kenichirou, a judicial scrivener in his forties, wants a consultation regarding his wife Mutsuko. In the last few months, his wife Mutsuko has claimed twice someone has tried to attack her, though she has remained unharmed and both times, she was just at home and nobody else saw anyone who could've attacked her. Mutsuko has always been rather high-strung, so she might have just imagined things, but Mutsuko absolutely refuses to even speak with a psychatrist, having rather strong misconceptions about mental health issues. Kenichirou hopes the Citizen's Affairs people can help him. Azusa and her co-worker agree to have a talk with Mutsuko and arrange to meet them in a few days at their home, which Kenichirou and Mutsuko share with Mutsuko's father, a farmer, and her father's second wife. Azusa arrives at the home just as Kenichirou also returns from work and they are walking to the house, when they hear Mutsuko crying for help from above. She cries "No, please... Natsumi!" as she slowly retreats with her back to the open window and before anyone can stop her, Mutsuko tumbles backwards out of the window, to her death. Azusa rushes inside the house and locates the room from which Mutsuko fell, only to find the door locked from the inside. The police is notified, and one of the detectives put on the job is in fact Azusa's husband Tomoki. When the police break the door down and enter the room however, they find it empty: no sign of the person who pushed Mutsuko or at least scared her so she fell to her doom. 

While Tomoki is struggling with this locked-room murder, Azusa continues her work at City Hall, where she deals with a slew of other incidents that may or may not have a criminal side to them: an elderly man who lost his wife a while back and was going to place the urn with his wife's ashes in the family tomb, found an unknown extra urn in the tomb, which is usually kept locked with a padlock. Meanwhile, another citizen suspects he had been stalked by an unknown figure from the station. The work pressure is also starting to affect Azusa and Tomoki's marriage, so both try to resolve their cases as quickly as possible so they can focus on each other in Asane Juuji's debut novel Aka no Joou no Satsujin ("The Red Queen Murders", 2024).

Asane won the 16th installment of the Bara no Machi Fukuyama Mystery Award with Aka no Joou no Satsujin, which earned him the publication contract of his first novel. Last year, I read his Sennen no Whodunnit, a science-fiction mystery set a thousand years in the future and as I am writing this review, he has a new book in serialization, which features a title referene to Schrödinger's cat, so you'd think he's very science-fiction-inclined, but his debut novel is the complete opposite. And it's actually very easily explainable too. For this book stars a civil servant who works at city hall of Matsumoto in Nagano Prefecture, and Asane in his real-life day job is in fact...  a civil servant who lives in Azumino, the city neighboring Matsumoto. So I wouldn't be surprised if Asane does in fact work at city hall and is now, or was at one time, assigned at working at the Citizen's Affair counter there. For this book is really rich in descriptions of the city of Matsumoto and its direct neighbors, from the vibe to geography, and the reader also gets an interesting look at the work they do at the Citizen's Affair counter, explaining how the people there are not experts in all topics per se, but they have a vast wealth of knowledge in various topics (because people come with all kinds of complaints and problems) and they generally have a good idea of how to proceed next or what experts to call in. So one moment, you might have someone who wants legal advice about property borders, the next visitor might be asking about financial problems, and it's quite educational to see how they first explore the options they have before they start referring the visitors to other means.

One also wonders how much of Asane's real-life experience is mirrored in the way Azusa and Tomoki's as civil servants (one at city hall, one at the police) negatively influences their marriage. The book focuses a lot on their relationship as the two deal with their own cases and get swamped with work. Azusa's getting more and more irritated by the fact Tomoki never tells her in advance whether they'll be having supper together or not, even though she also understands a homicide detective usually doesn't have the luxury of being able to free up their evening schedule every day of the week. Tomoki too knows he should try to communicate more, but practically speaking, his job simply doesn't give him much room to do much about that. While I'm not really a big fan of  the "detective has troubles at home" trope, it works here because Tomoki and Azusa each head different cases, so they are basically "each other's problem" and their relationship ties the initial murder case to the seemingly non-criminal cases Azusa's looking into in a very natural manner.

Anyway, the story starts with the seemingly impossible death of Mutsuko: Azusa, her co-worker and Kenichirou watched as Mutsuko cried out in fear of someone called Natsumi, and then fell out of the window of her room, which they found locked from the inside. So who scared Azusa to death, and how did they escape the room? As the book is fairly realistic, one doesn't need to fear for old-fashioned needle-and-thread tricks hiding behind this locked room. In fact, the police is so pragmatic in this book, they initially just decide to ignore the locked-room mystery, assuming the killer must have had made a spare key for themselves. Their investigation focuses on the elusive "Natsumi", whose name Mutsuko uttered before she died. The police figure that if they catch Natsumi, she'll be able to explain how she managed to lock the room. So the first half of the book feels a bit like a police procedural, as we follow Tomoki and his senior partner Fujita as they comb through Mutsuko's past to find someone called Natsumi whom she might fear. 

It is only in the last third we see a larger focus on how the locked-room mystery was done. While one of the suggested fake solutions is a bit funny if you imagine it, it's dismissed fairly quickly and easily (and I think a lot of readers wouldn't have fallen for it anyway as the main argument to dismiss it is fairly obvious), the final solution is an interesting variation of a trick I have only seen a few times, which in turn is basically just an inverted variant of something that is very common. Because of the realistic approach of the book, one can't deny it feels a bit unfair here, as this method will never always 100% lead to this outcome every single time, but I do like the basic idea behind the trick, especially as Asane did his best at organically at planting certain pieces of knowledge that are necessary to solve the locked-room mystery. It's specialist knowledge you need, but Asane at least went the effort at providing some pointers to that knowledge and did that in a way that shows he wants to play the game fairly.

Azusa meanwhile deals with some other problems, of which the "locked family tomb" sounds the most interesting at first: a man and his two sons are going to place the urn with the mom's remains in the family tomb, but when they unlock it, they find a fifth urn inside, even though there should only be four at the time. Because the space where the urns are kept is usually locked with a padlock, this is effectively a locked-room mystery. However, the solution to how this was done is quite disappointing: there's nothing clever about how it was done, and it's also not really hinted. However, Asane does do a good job at then connecting this "crime" to the locked-room murder mystery of Mutsuko. The same can be said of the mystery of a mysterious stalker who follows a few people from Matsumoto Station to their home. When Azusa is first consulted about the matter, she advises the visitor to go to the police, and there they learn more people have filed a report about some stalker following them down the streets. 

Not very surprisingly, as the story progresses, we learn these various incidents are in fact somehow connected, one strand of investigation turning out to actually be a clue necessary to solve another. This Judge Dee-esque approach works up to an extent, though it is of course rather "lucky" all these cases that were brought to the Citizen's Affairs desk happen to be connected one way or another. I do like the whole picture that is revealed when all is solved, with one main plot being set in motion causing unforeseen ramifications elsewhere in the city. While coincidence does play a role in the whole matter, I think the plan of the culprit of this mystery has some cool ideas that feel surprisingly "realistic" even though much of the book is devoted to the mystery of a vanishing assailant and a two locked-room mysteries.

Oh, and the Alice in Wonderland reference in the title (The Red Queen)? Yeah, you don't have to think about that, it really doesn't become relevant until the very end once everything is settled...

I wouldn't recommend Aka no Joou no Satsujin on its merits as a locked-room mystery to be honest, but overall, I did enjoy the book. The work definitely benefits a lot from Asane's own experience, as the real-life parts that depict the city of Matsumoto and the work done at City Hall truly give this book a unique vibe and while I thought I wouldn't like the whole marriage trouble plotline with Azusa and Tomoki, it worked surprisingly well to connect the various incidents together as we see the couple tries to balance life and work, with the lives of some of the people they meet during their work mirroring their own lives and possible future. The core mystery plot is a bit winding and relies on coincidence in a few instances, but I like the way Asane weaves several aspects of the varied work done at the Citizen's Affairs counter in one story. So surprisingly, despite the book opening in chapter one, section one with a locked-room murder, I actually liked this book especially for its grounded realism and the way it used for the mystery!

Original Japanese title(s):  麻根重次『赤の女王の殺人』

Sleeping Murder

"Uh, Jennifer, um, I don't know how to tell you this, but I... you're in a time machine."

"Back to the Future: Part II" 

I assure you: this book is more entertaining than the cover might suggest. 

In a not-too-distant future, mankind is preparing for a once-in-a-lifetime experiment. Nay, a once-in-a-millenium experiment. A private company is preparing to place seven people in a state of cryogenic sleep for a thousand years. The seven are to enter their sleep in special pods called tegmines. They are set to awaken one millenium later. To ensure their safety for all that time, the pods are placed in a special shelter in the mountains: the doors can only be opened from inside and because it's impossible to tell what will happen in a millenium, food and other supplies are also stored in the shelter, in case future researchers can't reach the shelter swiftly once the experiment ends and the seven awaken, allowing the seven to survive for some time on their own. 

And so, in the very-distant-future, Kuran, a former teacher who lost his wife, wakes up to find all kinds of tubes attached to his body, which he removes before he gets out his tegmine. As he watches the others do the same, he remembers how the members of the team had only met three days (+ 1000 years) ago before they entered their sleep. While six of the people were selected from a pool of people who signed up for this, one of them, Iriya is actually one of the researchers who worked on the project herself. One by one, they wake up: Kuran, Iriya, Shiina, Kuroe, Maruko, Kai and... then they notice the seventh person doesn't wake up from his sleep. As they examine his tegmine, it turns out it had ceased operation over a hundred-and-fifty years ago. They open the device, only to find a dead Shimon inside. Only, it doesn't look like he died because his tegmite stopped working, it's the knife in his back that probably killed him. The discovery immediately confuses everyone in the shelter: who could've killed Shimon, and why? Because the shelter can only be opened from the inside, it seems logical to assume the murderer must be one of the six others. The problem however is that a tegmite can't be operated from within the pod itself: even if Shimon and his killer happened to awaken a hundred-and-fifty years ago through chance, his murderer wouldn't have been able to get back in the tegmite again to freeze themselves again. For some reason, there's been no contact from the outside world yet, so the six prepare to wait for a few days, but when they go look for food supplies, they find the mummified body of a boy in the storeroom. His head has been bashed in, so they can't even tell whether it's someone they know, but this raises more questions: this boy wasn't in the shelter a millenium ago when it was sealed, so how did they get in, when did they get in, and how were they killed? The AI in the shelter's computer has been programmed to summarize all important news of the last millenium for once the experiment ends, so the six read up on all the major events, which includes a declining population and states forcing their population to move into concentrated areas, which may explain why there's been no contact yet. However, for some reason, there's a blank in the records: a period of about 125 years, between the last 15 years and 140 years, is completely missing, with no information whatsoever. They decide to explore the "future" world outside the shelter themselves, but what they find is not quite what they had hoped to see in Asane Juuji's Sennen no Whodunnit ("A Millenial Whodunnit", 2025).

A book that knows it has a cool premise so it doesn't even wait to hit you right with it: within the first 10 pages or so, you already know people had been kept in a cold sleep for a millenium and that once they wake up in their closed shelter, one of them has been murdered and that it's technically an impossible murder too: the reader knows right away they're dealing with an impossible murder, set in a closed circle situation and in the future too. It's a great set-up for an interesting mystery and while the story might not develop exactly the way most mystery fans will expect it to go, the book still ends up as  a fun sci-fi mystery. 

While the book starts right away with the mystery, the murder of Shimon actually isn't that important early on in the book for the very obvious reason that the six time travelers have more things to worry about. The experiment has apparently been succesful, but why has nobody come to welcome them into the future? Why is there no contact with the researchers who, together with future generations, were supposed to look after Karan, Kai, Iriya, Shiina, Kuroe, Maruko and Shimon? While knowing Shimon's been murdered, and there's an unknown dead boy in the shelter does disturb everyone, the priority now is to contact the outside world. Shimon's death being put lower on the priority list is also one that stems from the initial conclusions of the six that Shimon's death might not have anything to do with them personally: they didn't know each other until three days before the experiment started, Shimon was killed 150 years ago, and none of the other six could have been awake to kill Shimon and then go back into their pods, because they'd need someone outside to operate the pod (even supposing the existence of an accomplice, how could they have coordinated with an accomplice who lived over 800 years after they were frozen?). So the first half of the book or so seems more focused on discovering the world together with the six survivors.

After learning from the AI's summary of world events that most of the world's populations have been moved to concentrated areas due to declining populations, the survivors guess they have been forgotten and that the future humans must be located far away: their shelter was built deep in the mountains in a rural area a millenium ago, so if they want to go to the area where Tokyo used to be, they'd probably need to travel on foot for over ten days. Initially, they explore the area surrounding the shelter and occasionally find signs of where humans used to live. However, their discoveries lead to more questions. For example: why did they find so many skeletons lying in hospital beds in a nearby clinic, and why can't they find any 'contemporary' written records anywhere? As they slowly explore a larger area around the shelter, they find more pieces of a puzzle they didn't know they were working on, changing the focus of this tale from a "closed circle" mystery to an ontological mystery. Slowly but surely, a certain post-apocalyptic vibe creeps up on you, especially as the human history as the survivors know it has a 'blank period' for some reason, which started about 140 years ago.

As a mystery novel, the book does a good job at balancing the micro-level mystery of Shimon and the John Doe's murders within the shelter and the macro-level mystery of why there's no contact from the outside world. The whodunnit of the murders is given a whole new dimension if you factor in a millenium has passed. Early on, there's the matter of the survivors discussing Shimon's murder, and saying it happened 150 years ago already, but because they have also learned people in the future live much longer than in the time they knew, the murderer might actually still be around: something that would've been impossible with the common sense of their time. At the same time, the "futureness" of the story is kept fairly low-level, with the shelter apparently being far removed from future human civilization. These murders take a bit of a backseat in the middle part of the book, but they are of course addressed at the end, especially as we do learn there's a connection between their deaths and the bigger mystery of why the outside world is the way the survivors find it. The time-span of a millenium is used in a clever way to expand the problem of the whodunnit in a way most mystery novels can't and while Sennen no Millenium does weaves its sci-fi mystery tale using threads that may seem familiar from scifi and mystery fiction, author Asane also makes sure to clean up his threadwork and cut out excessive loose threads: it's a polished work, with story developments coming at just the right moments, clues and foreshadowing that are well-thought out and ultimately an overarching plot that is memorable, even if some of the twists feel a bit 'author-convenient'. While the direct motive for the murders is based on a reason that is probably a bit larger in scale than you'd expect at first, and coincidence is still alive one millenium later, but on the whole, it all holds together.

Though one does have to squeeze their eyes a bit to accept everything in this novel. Sennen no Millenium is not hard sci-fi by any means and at times, you do feel like Asane might not grasp the full length of a whole millenium completely. Just considering how much the world changed between AD1000 ~ AD2000, it does sometimes feel like the time period Asane describes is much shorter. Even supposing a certain language survived for a millenium, it's extremely unlikely two speakers a millenium apart would be able to immediately and quickly understand each other... Which also reminds me: early in the book the survivors read the AI's monthly synopsis of the world's major news for the last millenium to get an idea of what world they ended up in and... are you serious why are you reading a monthly synopsis do you know how much happens every month especially in a time like this how long would it take to read a millenium worth of that!!

Overall, I found Sennen no Whodunnit to be an enjoyable read. It's fun sci-fi mystery entertainment that might not be as 'hard' or completely fleshed-out in the way some readers might want it to see, but Asane uses his setting to create an amusing mystery that reads a lot like a mini-series. While as a mystery, some elements might seem familiar, I think Asane does a great job at implementing those ideas for this specific story and setting.

Original Japanese title(s):  麻根重次『千年のフーダニット』