The Border-Line Case

"Space, the final frontier."

"Star Trek"

This has nothing to do with the book of this post, but: Mu is one of my favorite characters from Saint Seiya, and I love his attacks Starlight Extinction and Stardust Revolution.

Hase Homare is a tour attendent on a special monitoring trip for the first low-cost space carrier: a group of guests have been selected to come along to spaceship "Hope!!", which will bring them to the space station hotel Stardust, where they'll enjoy a few nights before heading back to Earth. The service will start officially soon, so this special trip is one last check to see if everything will go as planned. There are just a handful of guests coming along, most of them who have paid a lot of money to be able to see Earth from space (and one student who just happened to win a contest), so there are only two staff members on Hope!!: Homare and the captain Itou, a former astronaut, who after a period of seeing the bottle too often, has gotten his life on control again, eager to prove himself to his family and the rest of the world. The trip to Stardust goes perfectly, with all the guests arriving safely at the hotel, where they are greeted by the hotel staff who had arrived earlier. The hotel resembles a cone with a halo around it: the main cone building, with the dock, storerooms and all the equipment and machines, has mainly zero or low gravity, so people are advised to use the special belts they have to anchor themselves, though there's is gravity in the halo part of the building, which is where the guests rooms and lobbies are. While Homare goes off to write up a report on the trip for headquarters, Itou starts carrying out rations they brought on their ship to the storerooms, but when Itou doesn't return, Homare goes looking for the captain, only to find Itou dead in one of the storerooms. However, the scene is bizarre: it looks like Itou hanged himself with a belt... only you generally can't hang yourself if there's no gravity. Staff members all have special smartwatches that monitor their movements, and it appears nobody of the staff came even close to the storeroom around the death of Itou, so that seems to clear them, so does that mean one of the hotel guests is the murderer? Or was it suicide. The management back on Earth however order Homare to continue as planned, as too much is at stake on this first test trip. When a second death happens however, the hotel staff members use escape pods to return to Earth, citing their legal work conditions (only allowed x hours in space), leaving Homare and the guests alone in the hotel. Homare can operate "Hope!!" all by himself up to a degree, but the guests all seem reluctant to return to Earth now, as they have just arrived, so it's decided they stay in Stardust as initially planned, but then more deaths occur while trapped up in space in Momono Zappa's Hoshikuzu no Satsujin (2023), or as the book also says on the cover: Stardust Murder.

Momono Zappa is a game scenario writer who made their debut as a novelist in 2021 with Rouko Zanmu ("Dreams Are All That Remain To The Tiger Who Has Grown Old"), a cool mystery novel that utilized a wuxia fiction background. Hoshikuzu no Satsujin similarly has a mystery set in a rather unique location: a space station. At the same time, we're not talking about the super far future: the world portrayed in this book is certainly quite close, with low-cost space carriers probably appearing soon, and the setting is far closer to our current society than say the mobile suits in Gundam Wearwolf, also a mystery set in space. So for a great part, a lot of the setting of Hoshikuzu no Satsujin will be almost the same as ours, with people needing Wi-Fi to do livestreams for back on Earth. In fact, Momono does a great job at portraying the practical difficulties of operating such a space station, occasionally touching upon the technical and scientific details about how things are working at Stardust. At one point, the space station also loses its contact with Earth, leaving Homare unable to call back to headquarters and inform them about the subsequent deaths after Itou's death, and the idea of just... being stuck in space without a way to call for help is just horrible. Of course, they have escape pods they could use, but Homare does emphasize that the escape pods just shoots them towards Earth to the ocean, so it could take days before the pods are actually retrieved and they're saved, so it's a last resort. So there's a lot of mileage to be taken from the concept of a closed circle situation... in space.

Like in Rouko Zanmu, Momono does like focusing on their characters and what drives them: each of the guests, but also the staff members have their own specific reasons for wanting to come to space, and it's what also informs their actions while being confronted with their predicament. Like a lot of these And Then There Were None-esque stories, you'll be looking out for motives in each character's backstory for wanting to commit murders while being in a closed circle situation (and in space, no less!), and the interplay between the various backstories does allow for a bit of going back and forth between suspects, though I'll be honest and say that motive-looking is seldom my favorite part of a mystery story. Those who want a more introspective mystery however, might find something they'll like here, as of course, the dream of going into space is one that has mesmerized people since ancient times, and you can easily imagine how everyone holds very different thoughts about what space could mean to them.

As for the mystery, a lot of the immediate riddles Homare and the rest of the guests are confronted with, are about howdunnits: whether it was a suicide or murder, how could Itou have been hanged, if there's no gravity to do the hanging? Another guest is nearly suffocated in his room, even though they locked the door before going to sleep (i.e.a locked room), and more such curious incidents happen. The tricks behind these occurings are... perhaps not surprisingly if you think about it, but I have to admit I was surprised how technical some of these tricks were. In a way, Momono does hint at these tricks, but the jump from being presented clue A and me deducing that could result in trick X was way too far for me, so I personally didn't always feel as impressed with the trick as I could've been: perhaps a more science-minded reader will love what Momono does here, as the tricks utilized by the culprit does make good use of the space station setting. I wouldn't say this is hard science by the way, just some things aren't as intuitive to my feeble humanities mind as for the author.

There's a direct sequel to this book by the way, Rousoku was Moeteiru ka (Is the Candle Burning?), which focuses on one of the guests of the hotel after returning to Earth. I have no idea whether the semi-scifi setting of this book is continued in the second book, so in that sense, that is kinda what interests me.

Anyway, Hoshikuzu no Satsujin uses a unique setting, but without going overboard or alienating readers with the lite scifi setting. While mystery-wise, I felt some of the tricks were a bit too technical for me to feel intuitively clever, as a book about people being trapped in a space station under deadly circumstances, I found the book quite captivating, and I blazed through it in no time, because I wanted to know how it'd end. I will probably pick up the sequel in the future too, so expect a review of that book too. 

Original Japanese title(s): 桃野雑派『星くずの殺人』

Fishing for Clues

"Unagi is a state of total awareness. Only by achieving true unagi can you be prepared for any danger that may befall you."
"Friends"

The Roman Hat Mystery. The French Powder Mystery. The Japanese Christie Mystery. The Japanese Carr Mystery. The Japanese Larsson Mystery. The Swedish Carr Mystery. The Chinese Carr Mystery. The American Christie Mystery. The...

Bruno Fredner is a wealthy man, who owns farmlands (and the farms on it) as well as forests in Småland, Sweden. He controls the land on which the people live in this region, and not surprisingly, that notion starts to get to certain people, and Fredner himself isn't doing much to help the brewing tension between him and the local people by being a womanizer who uses his money and influence to get the women he wants. That things have become only grimmer becomes immediately clear to Lasse, who has recently returned to his home village. The economist grew up here, but left for Stockholm, leaving his brother and mother to tend to the farm they rent from Fredner. Learning about the latest gossips, he learns how Fredner has now seduced his brother's girlfriend Eivør and that they have announced their engagement, even though his brother, Eivør's ex-ex-boyfriend and her aunts (her guardians) absolutely despite Fredner, along with the rest of the townspeople. So were people really surprised when Bruno Fredner was found murdered one day... inside an eel box? Well, probably, because that's not a likely place to die. Bruno Fredner owned a piece of land along the Nissan river, and he had placed a trap along a small dam to capture eel, a box which lets water (and eels) in, but where the eels are prevent from swimming out. Bruno Fredner was found inside his own eel box, but more curiously enough, the box' lid was locked with a padlock, and the only key was found on Fredner's body! Furthermore, Fredner's body was completely dry, meaning he wasn't 'swallowed' into the box via the river itself. This curious case of the locked eel box asks for the mind of Inspector Bertil Durell in Jan Ekström's Ålkistan ("The Eel Chest", 1967), which was translated to Japanese as Unagi no Wana ("The Eel Trap") in 2024 by Mizuki Sayako.

The Japanese version describes Jan Ekström as the Swedish Dickson Carr, a nomer which probably has lost all its meaning as everyone is [Nationality] [Different Author Name] nowadays. As this is the only book by Ekström I have read, I can't really comment to the accuracy of that nickname, but if Ålkistan is anything to go by, I assume the nickname comes more from the fact he wrote a locked room mystery, than actually being close to John Dickson Carr in terms of writing style/atmosphere. While small villages with colorful characters are also seen Carr stories, this one is a bit mundane in terms of setting and we certainly don't get spooky ghost stories that have been told for centuries in those neighborhoods or anything like that.

Though some of the melodrama comes close, I suppose. The book follows several characters, jumping between them as we see things brew slowly: we see how everyone seems to hate Bruno Fredner, from the aunts of his future wife to spurned boyfriends of Eivør and people who find their futures endangered by the rent they have to pay to their landlord. The love... square? between Eivør, Bruno, Lasse's younger brother Magnus and farmer Jacke (who dated Eivør before Magnus) naturally creates one of the biggest motives for the murder on Bruno, so we follow the relevant characters a lot in this tale. The jumping between the various POVs adds variety, but at the same time does tend to make things feel a bit slow, as not all segments are really relevant to the mystery plot, and we just see the people react to the murder and the ensuing investigation. Which I know some readers will appreciate a lot, but I personally tend to feel like they slow down the main plot too much. Though I suppose that a lot of the depictions of rustic life in 1960s Sweden might come across as familiar and genuine to a Swedish reader? Perhaps? Okay, I'll admit I know nothing about Sweden...

I do like the bizarre and unique crime scene though. It's also a weird inversion of a locked room mystery, as the eel box wasn't locked "from the inside": the padlock was on the outside, locking the lid of the box which allows one to climb inside to retrieve captured eels. However, the key was found on Bruno's body and you can't reach his body from the top of the box. There is another "entrance" to the box via the dam, which is the inlet through which eels are supposed to swim into the box, but the dam opening was closed, and Bruno's body was also completely dry, meaning he didn't get in via the water. The trick itself is fairly original, but it is nearly impossible to guess how a certain object was used to create this locked room situation even after the introduction of the relevant clues. The basic idea behind the locked room situation itself is interesting, though oddly enough I have come across a similar trick a while ago so it was already half on my mind. What I perhaps like better is how the situation is then also used to figure out who the killer is: a lot of the clues that start pointing towards the killer arise from examining the unique crime scene and the question of why the killer had Bruno Fredner killed inside a locked eel box, and I like the quasi-Queen-esque deductions that spring from this.

I think the utterly bizarre crime scene is what really sells Ålkistan, and for that I think it's definitely worth a read, as the core mystery is competently built and it's a well-rounded detective story on the whole. It certainly made me curious to Ekström's other output, and then I remembered I had one in possession actually: The November 2024 issue of Hayakawa's Mystery Magazine featured a "John Dickson Carr and His Successors in the World" special, and following the relative success of the Japanese release of Ålkistan among mystery fans, this issue featured a short story by Ekström: the story was I believe originally titled Dnr 94.028.72- Mord, translated to Japanese as Jikenbangou 94.028.72 ("Case File 94.028.72") and it too stars Inspector Bertil Durell as he tackles a locked room murder mystery.

This time the mystery set in a laboratory, where they conduct experiments in sub-zero conditions. Durell is asked to investigate the very curious death of a scientist in one of the experiment rooms: he had been in the room to conduct an icey experiment, but didn't appear out of the room after one hour, the maximum a person is allowed to stay in the freezing experiment chamber. When his superior goes check on him, the scientist was found stabbed in the room. But how did the murderer escape? The window on the ceiling was locked from the inside, while the 'normal' door was open, but it leaves a record when the door is opened during an experiment, and the two observers in the control room noticed nothing wrong about the door. 

The story is pretty short, but I do really like the lab setting of the story, which is pretty unique. The story is... not the same as Ålkistan, but it does have some similar ideas behind it. I kinda skimmed through the story, so perhaps it was just me misreading things, but I wasn't completely sure whether it was clear how certain things worked in the experiment room which allowed for the murderer to create their locked room murder trick, but it was alright considering the limitations of this story, even if I probably shouldn't have read it after Ålkistan. This story is available in English by the way. And Ekström has more books available outside of his native Swedish (which I can't read), so perhaps I will try them out in the future.

Translated Japanese title: ヤーン・エクストレム『ウナギの罠』

The Sound of Murder

「『ミステリ』では人が死ぬ。人が死なない『ミステリ』もあるが、ほとんどは人が奇妙な死に方をしている。串刺しされたり、バラバラにされたり・・・それは忌むべき物語だ。だがどうして昔の人たちは、『ミステリ』を書き、『ミステリ』を読んだのだろう。どうしてそれを喜んで受け入れたのだろう。人が殺されると嬉しいから『ミステリ』を読むのではないのか？もっとたくさん、人が死ねば、君たちは喜ぶのではないのか？」

 『オルゴーリェンヌ』

 

 "People die in mystery stories. There are mystery stories where nobody dies, but in most of them, people die in curious ways, like being impaled or cut in pieces... these are stories we should abhor. So why did the people of yore write mystery stories and read them? How could they embrace them with such joy? Does it mean they read mysteries, because they become happy when someone is killed? Don't you find it more joyous when even more people are killed?"

"Orgellienne"

I'm never sure what to think of when they change the cover of a book when they release the paperback pocket version, but still keep the same general style/idea of the trade paperback version. Why change it in the first place then...?

A long time has passed since books were banned from the world: books were seen as the source of evil, planting ideas in the minds of people and thus needed to be eradicated from the world. Mystery novels in particular were seen as a shameful past: how could people find pleasure in stories about killing others? However, before all the books were burned, some great mystery fans did everything to make sure future generations could still enjoy mystery fiction: they decided to store all mystery fiction as pure data. These people hid specialized data sets, like a set on "locked room mysteries" with the relevant books and secondary literary in so-called "Gadgets": jewels that hold the data sets and which are imbedded in other items, like a scarf. Chris has inherited such a Gadget, holding the set on The Narrator in mystery fiction, and since then, he has become interested in the forgotten art of mystery fiction, and he hopes to become a mystery writer himself. For that, he needs to find more Gadgets, and that is why he is travelling the world. However, that is a dangerous trip, as Censors are desperately hunting after any remaining books in the world: whenever they locate a book, it's not only the book that gets burned down, but the whole place it was found, just to be sure there are no other books there. The Boy Censors are particularly feared throughout the world: they have been trained since their childhood to look specifically for Gadgets and are relentless in their hunts. However, during a previous adventure, Chris became somewhat friendly with the young censor Eno, who let Chris go despite knowing he was carrying a Gadget.

During his travels, Chris learns an old friend, Kirie, has been looking for him, and he receives a message telling him to go to the place they first met. Chris carefully makes his way towards the harbor town, but on his way there, he runs into the mute girl Yuyu, who is being chased by censors. The two are detected and chased throughout the city, but are surprisingly saved by Eno, who picks the two up in his car. Eno drives to the harbor town, where they find Kirie at a small clinic, as he's very ill and has not long to live anymore. Eno explains Yuyu is being suspected of being in the possession of a Gadget. Yuyu is a housemaid who lives in Carillon House, a house located on one of the "new islands" that have emerged ever since the sea levels have been rising (i.e. it is a part of a city that has become mostly submerged, making it into an island). The censors got anonymous information a Gadget was hidden at the house, and the boy censor Karte and his lieutenant Eve are now at the house looking for it, but last night, Yuyu disappeared, which of course made her the prime suspect of having taken the Gadget away. It turns out that very rarely, once every few months, a cramped path appears between the island and the mainland at low tide, and last night happened to be such a time, which is why Yuyu managed to escape without a boat. Yuyu manages to explain that her master sent her away from the island, but she was not given a Gadget with her. Eno is torn between wanting to let Chris go, and his devotion to his work, and eventually, they decide to go to the island together: they can prove Yuyu's innocence by finding the Gadget in the Carillon House, which should resolve everything. 

The Carillon House is owned by Crowley, a wealthy man who loves music boxes above everything. He has allowed several people to live with him, paying for their food and life expenses, who create music boxes for him and the whole house is full of them. When Chris, Eno and Yuyu arrive at the house, tey find Karte and Eve are rather off-hands with their search for the lost Gadget, claiming it will find their way to them. While Chris and Eno start searching for the Gadget however, they stumble upon a horrible sight: one of the disciples of Crowley is discovered impaled on a steel beam at the light house. But how would one lift an adult body several meters up in the sky and drive their torso through a beam projecting towards the sea? As the search for the Gadget intensifies, more people end up dead, like someone found in the ruins of a toppled building and someone found killed in a tower room which was locked from the inside... Is someone using the knowledge of mystery fiction from the Gadget to commit all these murders in Kitayama Takekuni's Orgellienne (2014), or as the inner work also says: The Girl Who Became a Music Box.

Orgellienne is the second entry in Kitayama's Boy Censor series, and.... no, I haven't read the first one. Yep, I seldom read things in order. I am not sure how much this book spoils about the first, but the book explains the basic premises of the Gadgets and the Censors are the start of the story, and that's the most important thing to know, so it's not difficult to get into this world even if like me, you decide to start with the second book.

Besides Kitayama's Danganronpa Kirigiri series and a few short stories, all the books I have read by Kitayama are either formally, or informally part of his Castle series, which has a distinct, almost fantasy-like atmosphere. While the degree in which differs per book, some of them really don't take place in our world, but a more fantastical world and that's also in Orgellienne: while concepts like book burning and censors isn't fantasy per se, the way people think about books, Gadgets and the way Gadgets work as data sets that can only be activated by special means do make it sound like books are magic in this world. There's also a fairy tale-esque backstory to this book: the prologue tells about a young boy who is taken in by a master music box maker, becoming his youngest disciple and him falling in love with the master's blind daughter, and the ending is tragic, but very fantasy-like.This backstory that of course somehow connects to the current murders at the Carillon House, somehow. Chris' interactions with the mute girl Yuyu also have a dream-like element, as Yuyu shows him the ruins on the island, which is when the post-apocalyptic atmosphere of the series is felt the most, perhaps. The idea of an urban island, a part of a town + forest which has become an island due to the rising water, is pretty cool, as you have complete buildings (that have become ruins) on the otherwise almost empty island. And... for some reason I know had to think of Arkham City from the same-titled Batman game.

As Chris tries to learn more about the house and its inhabitants, he finds them all being rather secretive and before he knows it, people get killed in seemingly impossible manners. Which is of course Kitayama's bread and butter: impossible situations that are quite grand  and almost ridiculous, in this case best exemplified by the stabbed man hanging over a sea cliff, and later someone being murdered in a tower room full of music boxes. To be honest, the actual solutions to these impossible crimes are not the kind of absolute insanity I've come to expect from Kitayama: while they do rely on physical tricks as always, the solutions miss just the right amount of crazy I usually like about Kitayama's work (they are still pretty much of the string & needle variety though) and in that sense, this book was a bit disappointing.I think I liked the impossible death in a building that toppled over the best: the building was lying completely on its side, and the victim seemingly either fell down themselves, or was pushed down through the broken windows of one of the higher floors (which because it was lying on its side, basically became a huge pit). The trick behind the fall is pretty simple, but well hidden with the clues and a good example of Kitayama's focus on physical tricks.

Mystery-wise, I found Orgellienne more interesting in the way it explored multiple/false solutions: Kitayama has the various characters fire various theories and solutions at each other, resulting in a rather exciting story, as everyone has very different reasons for wanting to wrap up the case quickly, but they all come up with reasonably convincing theories and it keeps the reader guessing whether they themselves are on the right track or not. Interestingly, Karte isn't really used as a straight rival detective in this book: while he's younger than Eno, he knows Eno's gone a bit soft as a censor, and Karte definitely works more ruthlessly, but at the same time, he's also content at allowing things to develop on their own and see where it gets him, and he doesn't feel as much as a rival, rather than someone who may have conflicting goals, but can end up on either side depending on his mood and how he wishes to accomplish his goals in the end.

Orgellienne is not exactly the book I'd immediately think of when I think of Kitayama's work: while it does feature Kitayama's trademark locked room murders and physical trickery behind them, the actual tricks themselves are relatively tame, in comparison to his other work. The fantasy-like world he depicts here is perhaps the best I've seen in his work though, with a young boy in look for detective fiction, because it's been banished from this world, and a mysterious house full of music boxes with a romantic, but tragic background story. The series is only two volumes long at the moment, so it's likely I'll read the first one too in the future.

Original Japanese title(s): 北山猛邦『オルゴーリェンヌ』

The Mystery of the Flying Express

“Trains are relentless things, aren't they, Monsieur Poirot? People are murdered and die, but they go on just the same. I am talking nonsense, but you know what I mean."

"The Mystery of the Blue Train"

My version of this book had the first cover, but I had to post that second cover too because it's just too... memorable.

It is a November morning in the lobby of Hotel Soukai in the hot spring town of Wakura on the Noto Peninsula, when a tour guide notices one of her travellers hasn't shown up yet for their upcoming bus trip. She has the front desk call to Mitsubayashi Masase in room 711, but there's no answer, so they go up to wake the woman, who's registered as a housewife living in Yokohama. The bellboy opens the door with the master key, only to find Masae lying dead on the floor. Police investigation soon seems to settle the matter as a suicide: Masae died of consuming cyanide, but the hotel room key was lying besides her in the room, and the master key is kept safe by the manager at all times. There's also a magazine lying on the table, with a passage underlined which seemed to indicate the motive for suicide: a bad marriage. The participants of this tour all arrived on their own at the hotel yesterday, and while most of them had dinner together as arranged by the tour, Masae had chosen to have dinner herself, and it seems like she committed suicide that evening, without ever sleeping in her bed. The police also soon learn she indeed had a very bad marriage with a husband who had been openly cheating on her for years with the same partner and they are very surprised to learn the man won't even travel from Yokohama to Wakura to identify his wife's corpse, stating he's busy with renovating his shop. Instead, Masae's uncle comes, who says he is hardly surprised by Masae's husband's behavior, and he even accuses him of murder, while Masae's half-brother confirms her sister's marriage was dead, though he seems to agree it was a suicide. While the police seems content to wrap things up, news reporter Tanida, head of a kisha club, smells a potential scoop, so he calls his friend Uragami Shinsuke, a freelance reporter and tells him about the death of the beautiful Masae, and how she was found dead in a locked room and how it perhaps could be murder. Uragami takes the job, and together with Miho, a student he helped a while back and has now become a part-timer at the magazine he writes for, the two start digging in the case, but the more they learn, the more impenetrable the locked room, and the alibi of their main suspect is. Is it really suicide, or are they being fooled by an ingenious alibi trick in Tsumura Shuusuke's Noto no Misshitsu - Kanazawa Hatsu 15ji 45pun no Shisha ("The Locked Room in Noto - The Dead Leaving Kanazawa at 15:45", 1992).

Tsumura Shuusuke was a writer who for twenty years long, worked on  The Black Report, a long-running series which fictionalizes real-life incidents. In 1982, he became a novelist with the recommendation of Ayukawa Tetsuya, and two years later, he wrote his first novel starring the freelance investigative journalist Uragami Shinsuke. I had never read any of his works, but he was fairly prolific, writing about four novels each year until he passed away in 2000 and his work has actually been adapted for television too. I myself first heard about this book via Ooyama Seiichirou's Twitter account, who was quite positive about the work. Based on the style of his book titles and Noto no Misshitsu, it's clear he writes in the travel mystery modus: mysteries set in touristic destinations, and often featuring alibi tricks using trains and other modes of transport. 

 

By the way, I do always have a fondness for diagrams in mystery novels that are clearly hand-drawn. Like sure, diagrams drawn on the computer look slick and are often very clear, but there's a charm hand-drawn floorplans have...

Plot-wise, Noto no Misshitsu is pretty much nothing more or less than you'd expect of a mystery novel featuring a train-based alibi trick, and in that sense, it's hardly a surprising book, but I do have to admit I really liked how the book provides a reason why the detective (Uragami) would start to have doubts about what is on the surface a perfect alibi. Early in the book, it is established that if this was a murder, there are three suspects. Masae's father recently passed away and most of his fortune will go to her. The first suspect is Masae's husband, who is cheating on her and owed his father-in-law money, so now his own wife who might be leaving him, the second is Masae's half-brother, who had swindled a company before and supposedly lives a better life now, but still with money borrowed from his father, and Masae's uncle, who also borrowed money. All three of them seem to have pretty solid alibis, so why would the police, without any real cause, suspect their alibis are fake? I remember how in the film edition of Ten to Sen, the way the police detective suddenly decides to suspect someone who just showed he had a perfect alibi was absolutely hilarious because how forced it was (+ the acting was very stilted), but in Noto no Misshitsu, there's a pretty good justification: Uragami is looking for a scoop, so yeah, he hopes Masae was killed in a locked room and the murderer came up with some brilliant alibi trick, because that's what will sell: he has no guarantees it's actually true, but it does give him a reason to try and dig deeper into everyone's stories than the police would. It's a bit silly of course, but it strangely works.

It doesn't take long for Uragami and Miho to start having doubts about the suspect who claimed he was on board the Twilight Express, travelling from Osaka all the way to Sapporo. I usually try to avoid spoiling too much about a book, but the book literally opens with a time schedule for the Twilight Express and a map of Japan showing which stations it stops at, so at this point, even the book itself doesn't pretend like the other two suspects are viable suspects: yes, we are going to focus on that one suspect who was in the Twilight Express. The man was seen during four different times throughout the trip starting late afternoon until the following morning, from when he got on the train, to during dinner and at arrival, so that seems to prove he was there all the time. Meanwhile, Masae was killed in the early evening in Wakura, and while the Twilight Express does go in the general direction of Wakura, it does not pass the town, making it impossible for that suspect on the Twilight Express to kill her. And then there's of course the locked room, which makes it not only impossible for that particular suspect, but for anyone in general.

The locked room mystery by the way, is not something to really write home about: while the precise set-up of how it was done is interesting in terms of Tsumura actually clewed it, the trick itself is rather trite, and one of those ideas you could imagine someone who'd never even heard of a locked room mystery to come up with. So while the "locked room" is part of the book's title, don't expect much of it. 

As a story focusing on someone with a perfect alibi by being inside a gigantic moving steel box however, Noto no Misshitsu is far more interesting. Mind you, the fundamental idea behind how the murderer managed to create this perfect alibi, while at the same time also committing a murder elsewhere, might not be very surprising: once you know this is an alibi story revolving around a train, it's likely you'll have some idea how it was done. But what Tsumura does do extremely well is... covering his tracks. Like, the basic trick is, on paper at least, very simple, but Tsumura then makes sure the trick actually works by adding little tricks on top of that to hide the main alibi trick, and while it wouldn't be special if it had been only one thing, Tsumura does this so extensively, it actually helps make the main alibi trick really feel like an impenetrable wall. Uragami starts attacking the alibi pretty early on in the book, but each time what appears to be a weak point in the plan, turns out to be covered with a line of defense by the murderer, and it slowly, but surely makes you believe perhaps he's really innocent. While I'm not a huge fan of the main, connecting element that allowed the murderer to create so many walls of defense (it demands a lot of moving parts for this plot work!), I do like how thorough Tsumura was with plotting this perfect alibi: you really can't be sure it's over until it's over, for each time the murderer conjures up a new bunny from his hat. In this regard, you can see how Tsumura had been writing these novels for about a decade by then, so it's a very competently constructed puzzle.

I wouldn't call Noto no Misshitsu - Kanazawa Hatsu 15ji 45pun no Shisha a particularly remarkable example of a mystery novel with an alibi trick, but it is competently plotted and a pretty solid read on its own. It's definitely written by someone who has a lot experience penning such novels relying on train time tables, and I do enjoy reading them once in a while, so I might read more by Tsumura in the future too.

Original Japanese title(s): 津村秀介『能登の密室　金沢発１５時５４分の死者』

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』

Much Ado About Murder

We that are young 
Shall never see so much, nor live so long. 

"King Lear"

These re-releases by Tokuma have really cool art...

Kaji Tatsuo's Lear-Ou Misshitsu ni Shisu ("King Lear Dies in a Locked Room", 1982) is set soon after the second World War in the ancient capital of Kyoto. Takeshi is a student at the prestigious Third High School, a school affiliated to Kyoto University and which would later be absorbed into it (note that under the old school system, this "high school" basically corresponds to the first years of modern-day university). The students of the Third are highly respected around the city, and due to their superior education, the students also tend to... have interesting characters, resulting in them all calling each other by nicknames. Takeshi, known as Bon to his friends, is roommates with Iba, better known as King Lear (because he's a realist -> riarisuto -> ria -> Lear) and they live together in what is technically just a storehouse: the owner is still storing valuable items there, but wants someone to keep an eye on things out of fear for burglars, so he's having these two students live inside the front part of the storehouse, using them as basically live-in guards. Bon has a part-time job as a Kyoto tourist guide, and after showing a visiting elderly couple around town, and being thanked very generously with a meal, he returns to his home, only to find a fellow student, Bart ("Beard" in German), standing in front of the storehouse: he and another friend had visited King Lear earlier, but he forgot his wallet, and has now returned to get it back, but for some reason, King Lear won't open the door for him, which is very odd, as he called to say he was coming. When they peek inside through the keyhole, they see to their great surprise King Lear is lying motionlessly on the floor. Bon finds his own key and opens the door, but it is too late for King Lear: he is dead. Police investigation indicates he had been injected with a poison in his arm, but there were no signs of resistance on his body, suggesting he was caugh off-guard by someone he trusted and furthermore... the door of the storeroom was locked from the inside and the key was found inside Lear's trouser pockets. This however soon results in Bon becoming the main suspect of the murder: excluding the owner of the storehouse, Takeshi had the only other key in possession, and he actually had a bad relation with King Lear as of late, as they were both in love with the same woman (Bart's Schwester (sister)), though it seems like Bon had been the victor. It doesn't help that Takeshi's alibi of showing a couple around Kyoto can't be verified by the police. Bon's friends don't really believe he's the killer though, so his friends, including people like Reich (rich), Magen (stomach) and Razor start investigating the case too, but are they truly ready for that, for deep down, they do know it is likely the murderer is a person in their circle of friends...

If people thought the characters in The Decagon House Murders were obnoxious by using nicknames like Ellery and Carr: I assure you, the reverse weaboos in this novel who call each other Bart and Magen and each other's sisters Schwester are worse...

Kaji Tatsuo (1928-1990) was a mystery author who debuted in the fifties and kept on writing until he passed away in 1990. Last year, I discussed Kiyosato Kougen Satsujin Bessou ("The Murder Villa in the Kiyosato Plateau"), a novel which managed to surprise me in a way I really hadn't expected, so I knew I would be reading more of his work, something made easier because publisher Tokuma has been re-releasing some of his novels the last few years, and they also happen to feature very nice cover and inner art!

My interest in this book at first lay in the fact it was set around students of the Third High School, so basically Kyoto University: I myself studied for a year at that university, and there are actually still remnants of the Third High School to be found around the main Yoshida Campus. However, for me that was just a 'Huh, that sounds interesting for me personally' thing, but once I started reading this book, I was pleasantly surprised by the way Kaji really focused on the lives of the students. This is for a large part also a story of growth, a story about students who are not quite adult yet and perhaps think too much of themselves as students of Third, but who have lived through a war and now try to build a future for themselves by proving themselves at this school, not only to the outside world, but especially to themselves and their direct peers. This results in some really colorful characters who are full of pride, but who do really show you glimpses into the lives of the respected elite students of Third in Kyoto and it's the interactions between these characters that really drive the plot, as ultimately, this is best read as a tale of mystery focusing on motive, rather than the locked room of the title.

Though I have to say: I do really like the locked room mystery of this novel. The book is split in two sections, one set immediately after the murder on King Lear. Bon (Takeshi) is more-or-less accused of the murder by the police, while his friends, led by Razor (who is one year above the rest) tries to prove Bon is innocent, leading into them coming up with all kinds of potential theories about how the room could've been locked from the inside, and who the murderer could be. At the same time, we get (a lot) of flashbacks to the time leading up to the murder, and we learn how both King Lear and Bon first learn about Bart's Schwester by coming across her photograph, and then the two of them both trying to woe her by visiting her home, under the pretense of  wanting to visit Bart during the holidays. Yes, this is pretty stalkery behavior. The roommates become romantic rivals, which according to the police is a motive for the murder, even though it was Bon who managed to win the sister over, and King Lear who was, for the moment, the loser in the love war (meaning King Lear had a motive to kill Bon, not the other way around). Eventually, a kind of conclusion is reached which points to someone else, but true answers are never obtained and the truth behind King Lear's death remained vague.

The second part of the book is set many decades afterwards, when Bon's son hears about the ordeal his father lived through in the past and he starts to get an idea of how King Lear could've been killed by someone inside a locked room. This part is interesting, because we see Bon in a very different role, and we hear what happened to everyone after the murder: some managed to accomplish their life goals, some ended up completely different and there's a distinct, sentimental tone here, as for some characters, you really wish things would have ended differently.

The locked room murder is thus more like the driving force that changed everyone's lives in this young adult novel, though as I said, on a technical level, the locked room mystery is pretty good. I love how it basically reversed a certain dynamic often seen in simpler locked room mysteries to create something original, and while the concept on its own is very simple, it works great here, especially in this specific setting (old building in Kyoto soon after the war). However, what is even more memorable is definitely the motive behind the murder. While I am not a big fan of some of the workings behind the murder (too many moving parts), the motive is one that really fits these characters attending Third. I wouldn't call the motive completely original in all aspects (it isn't, and it's likely you'll have come across variants of the same idea in other mystery novels), but it is incredibly well-integrated in this tale of mystery, growth, dreams of the future and wanting to escape the shadow of the war, and because of that, Lear-Ou Misshitsu ni Shisu feels like a very complete and balanced novel.

So I was once again very pleasantly surprised by Kaji Tatsuo. Lear-Ou Misshitsu ni Shisu is pretty short, but a very well-balanced mystery novel that will even appeal to non-mystery readers. The setting is original, and Kaji really makes fully use of it, and he has a rather colorful cast of characters to keep the reader entertained too. I am certainly going to read more of him in the future too.

Original Japanese title(s): 梶龍雄『リア王密室に死す』

The World's End

"We cannot conceive of a life other than this one - of a life after death. We can visualize only a continuation of what we know. We have no real belief in a God."
"Death Comes as the End"

It's just a feeling, but I have a suspicion a majority of posts on snow-themed mystery stories on this blog are actually published in the warmer half of the year...

As I announced in my review of The Werewolf Murder Case in volumes 14~16 of Kindaichi 37-sai no Jikenbo ("The Case Files of Kindaichi, Age 37"), the plan was to wait until a full story was released before I'd do another review of this series within the Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo franchise, where we follow a now middle-aged Kindaichi Hajime as he gets involved in murder cases despite not wanting to solve mysteries anymore. But then it was announced this series would wrap up last year. So I figured, as stories in this series usually carrying over across multiple volumes, I might as well just wait until the last volume is released to do a review of the remaining volumes. So volume 18 of Kindaichi 37-sai no Jikenbo was released earlier this year... and I completely forgot to get the volume. So that explains why this review is coming now so late after its release. Anyway, volume 16 first starts with the very last chapter of The Werewolf Murder Case, where we learn about the motive for the murders in that case (yes, it's revenge, it's always revenge), but then it's back to business as Hajime's assigned to a new project for his event-organizing company: Hijiri Island, a mountainous island in Hokkaido wants to drive its economic activity by profiling itself as the perfect resort for backcountry/off-piste skiing. Hajime and his subordinate Marin are to check out the place and will be staying in a lodge high up in the mountains, a place only reachable via helicopter. They will be joined not only by someone from the municipality, but also by the backcountry ski team of the skiing club of the Imperial Women's University, a prestigious club whose members often appear in the World Cups. The team always trains here, so they know the grounds well, so Hajime and Marin will be questioning the young women about the mountains in order to develop the place as a resort. Everyone is to stay in a newly built lodge, but the evening they arrive, they find someone has tampered with the heating, and it's slowly starting to become freezing cold inside. 

Fortunately, the old lodge is 500 meters away from the new lodge, and everything should still work there, so they decide to move to the old lodge: the men go first to make sure heating there does work and to carry the kerosene, while the women will follow later with the food supplies. The men have just arrived at the old lodge and starting to prepare for their stay here, when the women in the new lodge use a walkie talkie to contact the men: one of the skiers has gone missing, and there's blood in the hallway. Two of them return to the new lodge, while Hajime and the municipal official stay in the new lodge, but then they discover the body of the missing skier: her head has been cut off, and placed on her lap! When everyone has moved to the new lodge, they learn that their radio is not working and the skis have gone missing, making it impossible to contact with the outside world nor to go down the mountains themselves. By discussing the case, they discover that while nobody has an actual alibi for the murder, as they don't know what time exactly the victim was killed, everyone does have a soft alibi: nobody could've carried the body from the new lodge to the old lodge unseen: the round-trip would've taken quite some time, but nobody was gone for long times/went unseen between the time the victim was last seen alive and the time the body was found. Soon one of the women suggests it's the headless skier: two years ago, a team of skiers got stuck on the mountains when the weather suddenly changed for the worse. Stuck in the cold and with no way to call for help, the team's leader volunteered to ski down the mountain alone to get help. However, after she left, a rescue helicopter found the remaining team members, but the leader never made it off the mountain alive. Only her cut-off head was later discovered: someone had strung piano wire between trees, so when the leader was hurrying down the mountain to get help...  Some say a headless skier is now haunting the mountains, but is this ghost also responsible for the murder, or is this the work of a living and breathing human?

You know, The Headless Skier Murder Case, which spans volumes 16 and 17, has a funny setting. Closed circle settings in this series are often either on an island or somewhere in the mountains... so why not set the story on a mountain, on an island, writer Amagi must've thought. But if this fusion of ideas sounds like he was trying to cook something grand, I'll have to disappoint you, as The Headless Skier Murder Case is a surprisingly simple case, basically revolving around one single trick. The mystery revolves around the fact nobody is ever gone long enough to allow them to carry a dead body and their head to the other lodge and return, which thus gives them all an alibi. This mystery is repeated later, as another dead body is found, this time at the new lodge while everyone was staying in the old lodge. The problem is that it is really just this mystery that drives this story, and the solution is not only a concept we have definitely seen previously in this series, in those stories we ususally get more than just this one idea, so there they can at least benefit from being presented as more difficult puzzles as they are interwoven with other ideas. Here, the problem is presented so bluntly it's nearly impossible to not guess what's going on. The big surprise is actually when the murderer is revealed and they start explaining their motive (yes, it's revenge, it's always revenge), as we learn how this person had been directed by a certain character to commit these murders: while the identity of this person won't be revealed until the next story, I *kinda* suspected who it was, though I thought it would be cheap, and then it turned out it was really that person and now I have no idea how this is going to develop in future series. 

The final volume of this series, The Sealed Space in the Sky Murder Case, starts with Hajime confronting his old nemesis The Puppeteer from Hell, a "crime consultant"-esque character who helps people bent on revenge by supplying them with perfect crime plans. While the Puppeteer has been in prison all this while, Hajime knows the Puppeteer has disciples: they call themselves the Olympian Gods, with the Puppeteer as Zeus the omni-god and Hajime has already encountered and captured a few of them. But after a conversation with the Puppeteer and a hint from his cousin Fumi, Hajime realizes one of the Olympian Gods, Hephaestus, is actually a person near him: he deduces Hephaestus is someone at his work, and that Hephaestus, with the help of another inside person at the company, has been keeping tabs on Hajime, which is why all these murder cases have been happening to Hajime each time he's gone on a business trip. Hajime has a pretty good idea of who Hephaestus's accomplice in the company must be, but the moment he decided to keep tabs on her, she ends up dead: ostensibly via suicide by throwing herself off the rooftop of the company building. She had borrowed the key to the rooftop to water the plants there, and as the key was found in her pocket, the rooftop door was indeed closed/locked and the guard kept the spare key safe, it looks like a genuine suicide, but Hajime knows better: Hephaestus must have killed their accomplice to silence her, and used a "sealed space in the sky" murder trick to challenge Hajime himself. But how could Hephaestus left the rooftop after the murder, as the door to the rooftop was locked (with the victim down below in possession of the key) and no way to reach the surrounding buildings? Hajime knows this is his chance to nab Hephaestus, and narrows the pool of suspects to a handful, but the list includes not only his direct superior, but even his faithful subordinate Marin...

For a story that is mostly about very quickly wrapping things up and features a very simple trick for its main mystery, I have to admit I liked it better than I had initially expected. A lot of the initial chapters is about trying to bring back the whole story about the Olympians back to the foreground again, as it's not been a priority plot element throughout, usually only being mentioned at the end of a case if the murderer happened to be one of the Gods and forgotten again, but here we get a crash-course on the related previous events and a rather cool deduction by Hajime about who he thinks Hephaestus' accomplice is and why. This is the type of hinting and plotting you very often see in Conan, using its serialized format to plant clues within various stories, across a longer period of time, but Kindaichi basically never uses this, with far more compartmentalized storytelling (and very loosely connected stories), so it's cool to see it utilized here. The 'Sealed Space in the Sky" mystery is relatively simple, with rudimentary visual clues and like the previous story in essence a one-trick-pony, but I do like that the focus in fact does not even lie on the howdunnit, but the whodunnit, as we see Hajime then utilize the howdunnit to cross off the suspects of the list, using Queenian logic to identify Hephaestus. This series more often uses a straightforward way to identify the killer (X making certain utterances/doing certain things/in possession of certain things), so seeing a Queenian chain, even if very short, is pretty cool.  The identity of Hephaestus is perhaps not as interesting as the direct aftermath, as the gameboard is reset to lead into the next series. We do get a brief explanation why Hajime swore off solving mysteries long ago, but we don't get the details, but then it's basically off to the next series. And very literally too, as this volume also included the first chapter of the new series: Kindaichi Papa no Jikenbo ("The Case Files of Dad Kindaichi"), in which Hajime has been a father for a few years while running his own detective agency.  Hajime's new client instructs him to go a certain place on a certain date, and because Hajime is a very responsible father and definitely knows what's going to happen whenever he goes to a remote place, he decides to take his son with him and the two find themselves arriving at an old decrepit hotel that's absolutely safe and where no murders will happen...

Anyway, that wraps up Kindaichi 37-sai no Jikenbo. I have to admit, the initial shock factor of seeing a suddenly aged Hajime quickly waned after the realization that storywise, these cases weren't that different from the usual affairs save for a few rare exceptions like stories with a more urban setting. Some ideas never really come to full fruition I think, but as a limited series, it at least had more direction than the 20th Anniversary series or 30th Anniversary series. The last story at least does a lot to make it feel more like a series on its own, so that helps, though I can't feel super excited about the deal of the Olympian Gods basically halting midway, and I'm still not sure what to think about that one character turning out to be one of the Gods too... I guess I'll have to keep on reading the new series to see if Amagi decides to actually end some of these plotlines anytime soon (I mean, I know Conan is long, but at least it has arcs that actually start and end).

Original Japanese title(s): 天樹征丸（原）、さとうふみや（画）『金田一37歳の事件簿』第16~18巻

Death in a Ghost Town

"Fire in her eyes, ice in her voice."

"The Mysterious Affair at Styles"

Two Conan-related reviews in a week! Three actually!

Volume 107 of Aoyama Goushou's extremely long-running Detective Conan was released in April to coincide with the release of this year's theatrical release Detective Conan: One-eyed Flashback, as they always ramp up the marketing around this time of the year, timing several releases together. The manga in particular is timed very specifcially with the film release, always featuring a story that is somehow connected to the film, for example featuring the same guest characters or having thematic ties. This does mean that mid-April is usually a hard deadline for the manga, with no room for compromise. Because Aoyama Goushou has been working more slowly in the last decade or so, with the serialization of the manga often taking breaks after a story has been finished, it's been harder and harder to actually fill out a complete volume each time: they can't wait for enough material to be made first, because certain dates do require a release of the manga. And thus volume 107, like previous volumes, cheats a bit by only featuring ten chapters of the manga, instead of the usual eleven, with behind-the-scenes storyboards/rough sketches of the manga used to fill out the page count. As a plus though, this volume features three complete stories, so no stories that are continued from the previous volume or continue into the next.

The volume opens with The Five They Met, where Ran finally recalls how she and Shinichi had met a certain group of five young police cadets when they were young: Shinichi had accidentally broken a faucet in the park with his soccer ball, but they were helped by the cadets. It takes some time for Shinichi to be convinced they are really police cadets, but once that's over, they confide to the five about a strange ghostly adventure they had last night: they had gone to an old decripit house, when they saw fiery fish swimming in a pond, a ghastly snake-like apparation jump out of nowhere, and the owners of the house even took a picture of the children, with a creepy oni face floating behind them. However, once the cadets hear about these strange happenings, they seem to suspect something's not right about the house so they go have a look...

This is one of those stories we have seen very often over the last decade where the focus lies more on the underlying story of explaining how certain characters met, rather than on the mystery plot. So it comes to no surprise that the mystery here is very simple: the question of "how" Shinichi and Ran became witness to all those ghostly appearances depends basically on 'specialist' knowledge or trivia, and that's seldom a really interesting basis for a mystery unless the build-up is really good, and as for the "why", that is pretty easily guessed. Perhaps it's a bit more surprising to the Japanese reader, but considering where I'm from, it was literally the first thought I had because it's not rare at all to see similar news articles where I come from...

The Truth Behind the Fire of the Dead is the story that loosely ties to the 2025 Conan film One-eyed Flashback, as this story is set in Nagano and of course stars the trio of the Nagano Prefectural Police: Inspectors Yamato and Koumei, and detective Uehara. Kogorou, Ran Dr. Agasa and the Detective Boys were going to ski in Nagano, but because Kogorou caught a cold, he and Ran are staying home. Dr. Agasa and the Detective Boys do swing by the Nagano Prefectural Police however, as detective Uehara had prepared some souvenirs for Kogorou to thank him for all he's done in the past for them. The kids get a tour around headquarters, but then run into the Compass Detectives: a group of influencers who check out haunted places, who derive their name from the fact they all have a kanji for a cardinal direction in their family names. Like the Detective Boys, the four members of the Compass Detectives have known each other since their childhood. There were actually five members, but Takehiko, the brother of Nanjou Kaori, passed away three months ago: the five of them were staying in a ski lodge, but while two of them were out for groceries, an earthquake happened, which led to a fire in the lodge. Kitakura Yuuta managed to carry Itou Tamaki out of the lodge, but couldn't find Takehiko. After the fire was extinguished, his remains were found trapped beneath a fallen cabinet. The four Compass Detectives are now visiting the police, because forensics have managed to retrieve the data from Takehiko's smartphone. The Compass Detectives are now heading to the ski resort Hakuryuu, where Takehiko died and are attempting to catch the ghostly apparation "The Fire of the Dead", a local Nagano supernatural phenomenon which claims that if someone thinks hard enough of a deceased person, their spirit can manifest itself in this world as spontaneous fire. The Detective Boys were also going to Hakuryuu to ski, and because Mitsuhiko is a huge fan of the Compass Detectives, they are allowed to watch them film as Itou Tamaki, the star of the channel, tries to contact the ghost of Takehiko. But just as things seem to end in a dud and they wrap up filming, her sleeve suddenly catches fire out of nowhere! At first, they think it could be a fluke, but then strange things happen to the other members too, from smoke appearing out of nowhere to someone's sleeve catching fire while he's driving a car. Is this really the handiwork of a ghost, or is someone playing tricks?

This story unfortunately feels a bit similar to the previous one, with the tricks behind the sudden fires being things that rely mostly on trivia/specalist knowledge. The whodunnit is not very interesting either, as one character seems to be given the most 'suspicious attributes', so even if you don't exactly know how the fires were created, the fact character X has all the "unusual things" the other characters don't have already informs the reader too much. There's a nice subtle visual clue, but that' s not enough to make this an interesting story, nor are the short childhood stories detective Uehara tells to the Detective Boys about her, Yamato and Koumei. The one great scene is the moment Haibara finally gets "even" with Uehara after their first meeting back in volume 65.

The final story, Three Liars and a Fortune is funnily enough the most interesting story mystery-wise, even if it has no important story lore compared to the previous two stories. Ran has noticed her father has been behaving a bit strangely lately and discusses this with Conan. They overhear Kogorou on the phone discussing what to buy as a present for Ran, and it's clear he's speaking with a woman: after jokingly suggesting Kogorou might be having an affair, the two decide Kogorou must just be talking with Ran's mother, but then Eri herself shows up, making it clear Kogorou is talking to another woman. The three decide to tail Kogorou, as he has going to meet the mystery woman in a restaurant, but as they arrive at the station, three men, all holding identical paper bags, bump into each otherand all drop their bags behind Kogorou. The three men all look in the bags to try to find their own, but to their great surprise the bags all contain explosive stuff, and almost literally so: one bag contains a bloody knife and t-shirt, another bag contains a pistol and the third... a large quantity of money bills! The three men all claim the bag with money is their own, and deny they are the owner of either the bloody knife or the pistol. One of the men claims they are an attorney and that the money is actually ransom money, which is why the police can't be involved, so Kogorou takes the three men, and their bags, to a nearby restaurant to determine who is the owner of the money.

While this is a simple 'one out of three' type of story, the premise is hugely entertaining, with all three men obviously trying to claim the money as their own, while wanting to deny to have anything to do with the knife or the pistol. While it is soon determined the blood is fake, and that the pistol is just a model gun, the money still gives the other two men enough of a motive to try and claim it's their money. While determining which men are lying once again relies on trivia, the trivia used are far more commonly known in Japan than the ones seen in the previous stories, so it feels more fair, and even then I feel this stories has more clues than just those bits of trivia. While not one of the best 'one-of-these-three' stories in the series on the whole, I do think it has one of the best set-ups.

Unfortunately, the next volume is scheduled for next spring, so I guess no Conan manga reviews anymore this year... 

To ease the pain, I'll do the same as volume 107 and fill out this post with some fluff, adding another very important Conan-related review: that of this year's McDonalds' Conan tie-up. The Chicken Tatsuta burger is a fried chicken burger McDonalds Japan offers for limited periods, and last year, it was offered in the form of a collaboration with Detective Conan, being sold around the time the 2024 film The Million-dollar Pentagram was released. The collaboration returned this year, with two Chicken Tatsuta burgers being offered simultaneously, the classic one, as well as the Tartar Sauce Namban Chicken Tatsuta. I went for the latter. Like the actual dish Chicken Namban, this fried chicken in this burger is covered in a vinegar-based sauce, which softens the fried chicken a bit, and gives it a tangy bite, which is softened by the creamy (but also slightly tangy) tartar sauce on top. I don't eat fried chicken with tartar sauce that often, but the two go well together and as it's becoming hotter in Japan, the slightly tangy taste of this burger makes it easy to wolf down. The bread they use for the Chicken Tatsuta burgers is also great, soft and fluffy. They are also offering a McFizz lemonade with Setouchi lemon & yoghurt taste, which is also really refreshing. And the special Conan cup they serve it in has a cool gimmick if you drink all of it!

Anyway, volume 107 of Detective Conan once again continues the trend of the last few years, with Aoyama not being able to do a full-time serialization of the manga anymore, resulting in almost all stories having some kind of connection to the overall storyline/focused on revealing backstory lore, with the mystery plots taking a backseat and becoming more and more reliant on random trivia. Which aren't ingredients that result in a medicore story per se mind you: volume 100's The FBI Serial Murder Case in a way relied a lot on trivia too, but that was one of the best cases in the last decade. But that one too is already 4 years old... I can understand why Aoyama tries to make every other story more "important" to reward long-time fans, if he's tied to this publication schedule, but I have to admit I'm getting disappointed some of the films are getting more interesting mystery-wise than the manga...

Original Japanese title(s): 青山剛昌 『名探偵コナン』第107巻

The Third Bullet

"Sometimes, I just want to put this gun right against her head, and ever so gently, pull the trigger."

"Death on the Nile" (1978 film)

Huh, it's been over 13 years since I first heard about this book, and through that the Mikikaze series... and I end up reading this one as the last of the novels in the series...

Minami Mikikaze, professional photographer and amateur detective, is asked by his high school friend Kazuya for desperate help: Kazuya is the defendant in a double murder case, and the prosecution's case against him is very strong, as he was found together with the two victims inside an apartment room which was locked from the inside. The two victims were ex-convicts, who were working for a company that was actively recruiting ex-convicts to help them get their lives on the rails again. When they didn't show up for work, their boss went to the apartment room, but found it locked with the key, latch and door chain, so the building's caretaker had to break open the door. Inside, they found the two men shot through their head, one lying near the door, the other sitting on a sofa, with an unconscious Kazuya sitting next to him and the pistol lying on the floor. Based on what the three men were wearing, it seemed like they were planning to commit a robbery, but Kazuya denies everything: he knew the two men, because he once helped his brother-in-law who had written an article on the company's commendable efforts to help ex-convicts on their way back into society, but he swears he was not planning something criminal with them: he only had something to discuss with them, but after drinking something, he lost consciousness, so he claims to have no idea why the two men were shot to death, and why the door was locked thrice. The police investigation however fingers Kazuya as the culprit and some months later, the case is all ready to be handled in the court, at which point Kazuya asks Mikikaze to help solve this locked room mystery. Mikikaze manages to get hold of a lead, which leads him to the United States to visit a certain witness, but while talking with this witness, he's knocked out by something in his drink, and when he wakes up... he finds himself lying next to the dead witness he was talking to, in a locked room! Finding himself in the exact predicament as his friend, Mikikaze knows he's on the right track, but can he save both himself and Kazuya in Tsukatou Hajime's F no Madan ("The Magic Bullet of F" 2004)?

F no Madan is the second novel in the Minami Mikikaze series following Agni no Atsui Natsu, and with that, I have now read all the full-length novels in this series (I still have to read two short story collections). Misshitsu Kingdom (Kingdom of the Locked Room) is still by far the best one in the series by the way, but this novel too will probably interest locked room murder enthusiasts, as they will probably recognize the set-up of this novel: yes, this is Tsukatou's take on Carter Dickson's The Judas Window, focusing on the trial of a young man accused of murder because they were found in a locked room, with a murder victim in the same room. Of course, the similarities are in the base setting, as here we don't have a locked room in a large country house, but a very urban setting, with a triple-locked apartment in a city just across a giant department store. And there's the mirrored situation, where Mikikaze visits a witness at a farm in the American countryside and wakes up in a room with a dead body, but the twist here is that Mikikaze is aware the murderer is outside the room and busy "completing" the locked room situation. The book jumps back and forth in time, with the Mikikaze segments being in the present/real-time, and the segments that go over how Kazuya was discovered in the room and the subsequent investigations by his attorney set a few months before that. As you can understand, the Mikikaze segments are far more exciting, as Mikikaze knows the murderer is busy setting things up to make him into a scapegoat, but the fact he's been drugged and his own weak heart (and the fact the murderer is likely armed) prevent him from doing anything reckless to apprehend the killer, even if he knows the murderer is still in the house.

The book itself doesn't hide the fact it's basically a tribute to The Judas Window by the way, and I do recommend reading that one first before reading F no Madan. While the latter does not explicitly spoil the former, it is clearly written as a modern take, and while Tsukatou adds a lot of original, and frankly told very clever twists to it, I think you do get more out of it if you know the underlying context too. 

Purely seen as a locked room mystery, I think that F no Madan has both really clever parts, but also parts that do demand the reader to just with certain things. As a modern take on The Judas Window for example, I think the concept Tsukatou used is really clever, and the way it's a surprisingly safe method for the murderer to commit a double murder in a triple-locked room is quite memorable. However, to get everything into position, the murderer would need to manipulate a lot of moving parts and actors, and especially the latter part feels a bit unbelievable at times. This isn't a murderer who subtly manages to force someone to act in a way that benefits them, this is almost truly being a puppeteer, because it's quite unbelievable different actors would all exactly act in the way the murderer would need them to act without even one moment of hesitation. So in that sense, the locked room situation does feel a bit cheap, as too much works out for the benefit of the killer, simply because it needs to do so. On the other hand, I really love some of the preparations the murderer did do in order to make things go the way they needed to: I still don't think his preparations would've ensured everything would go the way they needed, but that one action they did explicitly take beforehand, in order to ensure at least two actions would be taken by one of the people they needed to manipulate, was done really clever, and worked perfectly to strengthen the trick of the triple locked room. That part alone does make this a memorable locked room, as it shows Tsukatou's eye for detail.

The present-day situation, where Mikikaze finds himself trying to fight the sleeping drugs he's been fed and figure out how to escape the room, without alerting the killer in the house, is an exciting read, and it does hold hints that are also applicable to the Kazuya locked room, but the story moves very slowly in those segments and ultimately, this part is far more simple than the Kazuya locked room, so it's not as surprising mystery-wise. It's more a grand way to allow Mikikaze to solve things and confront the killer.

While the book feels a bit artificial due to the machinations of the killer going so perfectly, F no Madan does happen to also be the one book in this series where Tsukatou clearly tries to work more on characterization and even tackles social school problems: a lot of the Kazuya-focused chapters focus on Kazuya and his stance in life: part of the mystery revolves around the question why he's so reluctant to talk about why he was visiting the two victims, if he was not involved in anything criminal and we learn a lot about his views on societal problems. I thought these parts were a bit too longwinded, but there's an interesting subplot hidden here that deals with his motive for keeping silent, and while it's not really presented as a "solvable" problem, the idea itself is good. Personally, I could've done with a tighter plot with less of the character musings, but your mileage may vary. I do have to admit I was surprised that early on in the book, we get a diagram of the crime scene, and then the narrative moves more to exploring Kazuya's character and his relations to everyone, and when the story returns to the locked room, we get the crime scene diagram again... and I do mean again, because it's the exact same diagram. As if Tsukatou himself suddenly realized he had drifted from the main mystery too much and feared the reader might've forgotten about it, so he showed you the same picture twice to jog your memory.

Also: for some reason the book does not really explain what the "F" in the title means..

Personally, I liked F no Madan the least of all the Mikikaze novels, though that's not very surprising: it's hard to beat the brilliant combination of the locked room mystery with Ellery Queen-esque deductions of Misshitsu Kingdom, of course I'm going to like the even more Ellery Queen-inspired Aru Girishia Hitsugi no Nazo ("A Greek Coffin Mystery), and in the end I prefer the brevity and focus on the mystery of Agni no Atsui Natsu simply better than the more prosey F no Madan, but readers who like more characterization, or the way the book builds clearly on The Judas Window might feel very differently. I do think it's a decent locked room mystery, and definitely worth a read if you have already read The Judas Window.

Original Japanese title(s): 柄刀一『Fの魔弾』