"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."
"Genesis" (King James version)
I wouldn't say I lived *at the foot* of Mt. Hiei, but the place I was staying while living in Kyoto was pretty near Mt. Hiei, relatively speaking...
Perusing the magazine The Charms of Kyoto, detective Kisarazu Yuuya comes across an article on Shirakashi Munenao, a famous painter and sculptor who lives with his extended family in a bizarre manor located at the foot of Mt. Hiei in Kyoto. The article featured photographs of the interior of the home, which consists of three storeys, that are off-set, creating a kind of "ladder" effect which nothing beneath the second and third floors. One of the photographs showed a symbol in the house interior which immediately captured Kisarazu's attention, as it was connected to a case he never managed to solve: three years ago, the bodies of a man and a pregnant woman were found after a landslide. They were obviously killed, but the police didn't manage to identify the bodies, and neither could Kisarazu even after being brought onto the case. He did find a platinum ring near the scene, with the exact same symbol which he know learns is somehow related to Shirakashi Munenao, which convinces him the two deaths are somehow connected to him.
Kisarazu's not the only one interested in the Shirakashi's though, as the reader is also introduced to Anjou Norisada, who has recently been moved internally to the editorial department of The Charms of Kyoto. His mother died some years ago, but on her death bed, she confessed to Norisada she wasn't his real mother. She wasn't able to bear her own children, so she had actually kidnapped a baby at a train station, snatching him from his real mother and jumping in a train as the doors closed. While his mother had always treated him with much love and he considers her his real mother, Anjou is naturally also curious to his blood parents, and the only clues he has are his name, "Norisada" (the name his real mother shouted as the train departed) and a ring with an unusual symbol and like Kisarazu, Anjou too noticed the symbol belonged to the Shirokashi family. He confesses to Kurata, the senior editor at the magazine who wrote the article, about why he's interested in Shirokashi Munenao, and Kurata promises to help him get close to the family. Kurata became friends with Akika, the daughter-in-law of Munenao as they share an interest in classical music, so Kurata invites both Anjou to come along to a concert Akika will also be attending, creating an opportunity for Anjou to ask about the symbol. Kurata also arranges for an interview with the great artist himself at his Kyoto manor and promises to bring Anjou along so he can find out whether he's actually born a Shirakashi, but Kurata becomes sick and now it's Uyuu who's put on the interview together with Anjou, Uyuu, who survived the tragedy on Kazune Island and then got caught involved in a series of arson, has more things to worry about than this interview though, as he's contemplating marriage with Touri, his girlfriend since Natsu to Fuyu no Sonata.
Uyuu and Anjou arrive on a snowy day at the Shirokashi house, which is happily inhabitated by four generations of both the Shirokashi and Nachi family, who have a strange relationship: all four generations consists of marriages between these two families: Akiko for example married her cousin Munenobu, who is the son of Munenao: Munenao is married with his cousin Nobuko, while Munenao's twin sister Sadaka is married to Nobuko's twin brother Noriaki, and the same for the generation above them. Akiko and Munenobu also recently had their first child, who is of course the great pride of the two families. During the interview with Munenao, Uyuu learns Munenao, as do the rest of his family, consider themselves a divine family, free of the shadow of the devil. They believe light gave birth to two gods, one male and one female, whose offspring bathe in the light, but once someone has been tainted by the devil, they will forever bear the mark of the shadow: the Shirokashi and Nachi families however consider themselves the light. Despite Uyuu's focus on their job of doing an interview, Anjou manages to find more clues that indicate he was indeed born as a member of the Nachi family, and that he might be Akika's brother, but why did his birth mother never report his kidnapping to the police, and why do the Nachi and Shirokashi families pretend there never was another child? Anjou manages to confront Akika privately and suggests he might be her brother, to which Akika reacts utterly shocked. She promises she'll explain tomorrow, but she can't say anything now. Anjou grudgingly agrees, but it turns out he'll be staying longer at the house than expected, as heavy snowfall prevents Anjou and Uyuu from returning home immediately, and they are offered dinner. After dinner, Akiko goes to practice the piano, while everyone else in the house also goes around doing their own business, but later that night, when her mother goes looking for Akika, she makes a most horrid discovery: Akika's head is laid out on the piano, her body missing! The police is called, and soon Akika's body is found in the incinerator outside the house, but when the police start investigating everybody's alibi for the hour after dinner between when Akika left everyone, and her head was discovered, they realize something odd is very going on: not a single person of the nine members of the Shirakashi and Nachi households, as well as visitors Uyuu and Anjou, would have had time alone in order to decapitate Akika and move her body to the incinerator: all eleven persons in the house have enough of an alibi to prevent them from being the murderer! But how then was Akika killed in
Maya Yutaka's
Mokusei no Ouji (2000)? Anjou wants to know, Kisarazu is also convinced Akika's murder is connected to the mysterious deaths of three years ago and Uyuu... he is not sure he wants to know, but he tries his hand at breaking the murderer's impossible alibi after he remembers the two great detectives Mercator Ayu
and Kisarazu Yuuya seem to have high hopes for him as a detective.
Mokusei no Ouji is the third book, and I believe the last book in Maya Yutaka's Uyuu cycle, a set of three books that star Uyuu, a young editor who works at a magazine and who has the worst of luck as he keeps getting involved in traumatic murder cases and while he *kinda* tries to solve them one way or another, it never goes the way he, and the reader, want to see. These books also feature appearences of Maya's two other main detective characters, namely the great detective Mercator Ayu, and the detective Kisarazu Yuuya (and his Watson Kouzuki), who both seem to think Uyuu has the potential to become a great detective himself, so they encourage him to try and solve the problems he faces himself, but somehow Uyuu never seems able to answer their expectations. The way Maya plays with tropes of the mystery genre is of course well-known by now, and both Mercator and Kisarazu play around with the notion of the "great detective" trope, and in the case of Uyuu, we have someone who we constantly follow as a protagonist, who does try to detect and who is actually encouraged to do so by two bonafide accomplished detectives, but... he always fails. That's Maya for you.
As the text on the obi suggest, the main mystery of Mokusei no Ouji revolves around every suspect in the house having enough of an alibi for the murder of Akiko. Discounting Uyuu and Anjou, who can vouch for each other, the other nine people in the house all had their own things to tend to in the hour between Akika leaving the room, and her head being discovered. Some would be be in the presence of others for most of the time, while others would be mostly alone, but none of them have no alibi at all: everyone is seen by someone else at various points in the hour in question, and that means nobody has enough time to 1) kill Akiko in the music room, 2) decapitate her and 3) move her body (without the head) from the music room to the incinerator outside without being seen. The layout of the house is by the way pretty insane, as it lacks a real "main hallway" to all which rooms are connected, and instead you constantly need to go through one room to reach another room: this alone makes it basically impossible for the murderer to have moved the body without being seen.
The murder that is made "impossible" because everyone has an alibi is of course a familiar trope of the genre, and especially in Japan there are many authors who actually make this type of story their forte, but of course it wouldn't be Maya if he'd just do this straight. And that is why after the (first) murder, you are treated to paragraph after paragraph in which EVERYONE's movements is explained in detail. And I mean down to the minute. There are (synchronized) clocks everywhere in the Shirokashi house, which means they all know exactly where they were/what they were doing at what time. Furthermore, because there are so many rooms and small corridors between those rooms in the house, Maya decided to number them, instead of writing their names. The result is you get paragraphs like "Munenobu was in 1, so he could have taken route 2, 3 or 4 to get to the scene 5, but his father-in-law was in room 3 from 6:23 until 8:25, so Munenobu could only have taken route 3 after 6:25, while route 2 and 4 would be occupied from 6:24 and 6:33 on, meaning there'd only be the 6:25-6:33 gap for him to kill Akiko and go back via route 4, but that's too short and he does have an alibi for 6:35-6:41 on, so..." And that for all the characters in the house, and all the viable routes. It doesn't help all the family members of the Shirokashi and Nachi family have very similar names: the names of all eleven members are comprised of combinations of just eight kanji, so all the names look visually the same.
Yep, Maya isn't really expecting the reader to be mentally engaged in solving this puzzle and it is intentionally designed as a very tedious conundrum with people moving about every few minutes, making it impossible to really grasp where everyone was at what time. He takes the intricately plotted alibi puzzle, like we have seen in works like Obelists Fly High and Suizokukan no Satsujin, and takes it to its extremes, creating an insanely monstrous puzzle that would only be comprehensible in an interactive visual format (moving the characters on the floorplan along a timeline similar to games like Unheard or Lucifer Within Us), but is likely to just drive readers of the novel insane. Or mentally disengaged. Funnily enough, Maya then also presents us with a group of people who are insanely engaged with this puzzle: in A, we learned how Uyuu started visiting a group of mystery fiction fans, with Kisarazu one of the members. Uyuu has become a full member by this book, and with Uyuu having been on the scene, and Kisarazu being interested in the murder himself, all the members try and solve this impossible alibi puzzle. The outcome of this competition is pretty hilarious actually, in the context of Maya deconstructing the alibi puzzle trope, and I think everyone feeling a bit underwhelmed by the solution is exactly what Maya was trying to go for with this formadible-looking puzzle.
That said, that doesn't mean Maya doesn't do interesting things mystery-wise in this book. There are actually very clever hints pointing to the solution of the alibi trick, and while you might shrug at the actual practical answer to how the murderer managed to kill Akika despite having a perfect alibi, Maya uses it as a stepping stone to ask more important questions, which ultimately revolve around the matter of motive: why was Akika killed, and is it in any way connected to Anjou trying to look for his birth mother? The answer is horrifying, and while I think one important aspect of the motive is probably pretty guessable due to the way Maya has structured this novel, the grand motivation behind everything is absolutely nuts, in the good sense of the term, and I dare say it's basically impossible to guess this was going to be the reason Akika was killed. This might be a good time to also note that this book does touch upon certain plot points of A, and you'd better have read Natsu to Fuyu no Sonata and Tsubasa Aru Yami too, because this book not only spoils/very suggestively talks about the endings of these books, they are also thematically connected, with a common theme linking them and basically all of them ending in a "world-ending" catastrophe. I love the insaneness of the background behind Akika's murder in Mokusei no Ouji, and I feel it's really only Maya who could pull this off, but I think it works even better with the context of the previous books, so I really recommend you reading them in order. The book also serves as a semi-epilogue to Tsubasa Aru Yami, so in that sense, also worth a read.
Mokusei no Ouji is also the one Uyuu novel I think that is the most... balanced? As a Maya novel, it of course plays with the genre tropes in a catastrophic manner, but it's infinitely more readable than Natsu to Fuyu no Sonata, with Anjou being a character you want to root for as he's looking for his birth mother (he's a bit mean to Uyuu though) and a narrative that is pretty easy to follow, and as a mystery, it's also more engaging than A, and if you kinda skim over the alibi part of the book, you still have an interesting, though totally batshit insane motive waiting for you. But it's also a lot more enjoyable to read after reading the previous two Uyuu novels, due to the story and thematic links. But definitely worth reading if you're invested in the Uyuu cycle!
Original Japanese title(s): 麻耶雄嵩『木製の王子』
