Great cover!
After a long day of catching up and preparing for the important event tomorrow, Aya excuses herself as she tries out her dress in a room, while her friends all retreat to their respective rooms, have a chat with Ichino or have a bath, all remaining in the old wing. When Aya doesn't appear anymore however, they go check up on her.... only to find her decapitated body! The local police, of course not experienced in such murders, quickly have support from the prefectural headquarters come down to investigate the murder on the daughter of the prominent family. Because no footprints are found in the garden leading away from the house and because Ichino herself had been in a position to keep an eye on the hallway connecting the old and new wings of the house, suspicion soon falls on Aya's friends, as they were the only people in the old wing with Aya. However, none of them have Aya's head in their possession, clearing them of the murder for the moment. Aya's head is later discovered at the offering box at the nearby Dragon Kneeling Temple, almost like how they used to display the heads of criminals who had been decapitated. Aya's death however was only the beginning, as more of her friends are decapitated too, with their heads each time ending up being displayed at the temple. Who is this killer and why are they after the heads of these childhood friends in Kojima Masaki's Ryuu no Tera no Sarashikubi ("The Heads on Display at the Temple of Dragons, 2011)?
Kojima Masaki is an author I haven't discussed before. His publishing history is quite interesting: he had a few short stories first published in Shimada Souji-related anthologies and then made his debut in 2005 with the book Ten ni Kaeru Fune ("The Boat Returning to Heaven"), which he co-authored with Shimada Souji. That book would also be the first work in a series featuring the amateur detective Ebihara Kouichi, who is also the detective in Ryuu no Tera no Sarashikubi. Kojima's second book followed in 2008, which also featured Ebihara, but this time the book was credited to Kojima alone, and since then, he has written nearly ten of them. The Ebihara Kouichi novels are very much inspired by Yokomizo Seishi and Mitsuda Shinzou's work, featuring isolated rural communities as settings with local legends/beliefs that act as a core for the gruesome murders that follow. Ryuu no Tera no Sarashikubi is no exception to that: in this novel, Ebihara Kouchi is hired by Kouzuki Ichino to investigate the murder on her granddaughter. It happens that one of the police detectives investigating the case is Hamanaka Kouhei, who is actually a relation to Aya, as his grandmother is a sister of Ichino. She forces Kouhei to leak information to Ebihara and while Kouhei initially refuses, he can't really go against his great aunt and he soon finds himself reluctantly feeding all the police findings to Ebihara, who however proves himself indeed to be the one to find light in the darkness.
The book actually starts with a prologue set in the past, where we learn a young Aya, as the heir of the leading family of the small community, was pretty much a bully who ordered the other girls around. We learn that because of her doing, one of her "friends" has a motive for wanting her and the other girls dead once they're adult, but the reader is not informed as to who this person is. As I mentioned, I had never read anything by Masaki before, but he's sometimes referred to as an author who tries to stuff too much in his novels: I can definitely see some of that in Ryuu no Tera no Sarashikubi: a lot happens in this rather thick book, with multiple murders and also mysteries revolving how the cut-off heads end up at the temple, and then more mysteries regarding the history of the Dragon Kneeling Temple and there's of course the puzzle of how the unknown "victim" of Aya's bullying in the prologue is precisely connected to the current murders. While Masaki does keep the plot fairly focused, not all elements are developed as strongly as others, with some parts of the mystery sometimes ending up significantly weaker than others. The riddles surrounding the first death (Aya's death) are developed in a great way for example, from how the head was spirited away from the house, to the clues indicating how it was done, the clues pointing at the culprit and the set-up of how it was all accomplished in the first place. There are a lot of moving pieces in this "set piece" of the novel, but Kojima plots the whole thing in a very competent manner and it's very satisfying to hear Ebihara reconstruct the murderer's movement in this segment. Compare that to a later mystery, where witnesses see the body of a murder victim appear out of nowhere at the temple, and there the whole set-up is just barely believable, as you'd think very few witnesses indeed would've been fooled by such a trick.
Generally though, I did like the book and I think readers who like Yokomizo's work will find a lot to enjoy in Ryuu no Tera no Sarashikubi. The book can be pretty dark at times by the way, and interestingly enough, it's Ebihara who functions as a comic relief character, as his interactions with Kouhei (and Ichino) are often quite funny, while the rest of the book focuses on these gruesome murders and the investigation into this circle of friends slowly breaking apart not only because of the deaths, but also because underlying dynamics and interpersonal history that had been festering for two decades are finally exposed because of these murders. The conclusion is full of twists and turns that more often than not reveal rather nasty revelations about what led to these murders in the first place. Kojima has some good surprises hidden in this segment too, with some seemingly obvious facts being proven to be completely wrong assumptions that have been hiding the truth up until then and it really makes you eager to read until the very end, because as the reader, you're just never really sure whether Kojima has more twists waiting or not. Again, I don't think everything is executed perfectly and sometimes the connections feel a bit forced, but I do like what Kojima's going for and most of it works as intended.
The Ebihara Kouichi series has been released by several publishers and not all have the books have seen re-releases. I believe most of them are now available as e-books, but Ryuu no Tera no Sarashikubi is one of those books that only has a physical release at the moment, and it has also only been released as a hardcover release. I happened to come across this book, which is why I started with this book even though this book was released around the halfway point of the series. But my interest has certainly been piqued now, so I will definitely read more by Kojima.
It's not something that affects the story by the way, but the chapter cover page of this book has a very weird mistake, where it features a completely different chapter title than the one actually printed in the table of contents and in the margins of the pages of said chapter. The title features a term not from this book, so it's not even a chapter title that was changed between drafts, it's genuinely a title that comes out of nowhere.
Anyway, as a first encounter with Kojima's work, I did enjoy Ryuu no Tera no Sarashikubi. It is obviously whose works serve as an inspiration for the Ebihara Kouichi series, but Kojima's book does stand on its own and while not every trick and set piece is as strong as another, the overall product is a pretty solid mystery story that excels especially in atmosphere. It was certainly enough to make me interested in the other books in the series, and most of them are more easily found than this book, so expect more reviews of this series in the future.
