The Witch's Curse

ひとつの目で明日をみて

ひとつの目で昨日を見つめてる

「The Real Folk Blues」（山根麻衣）

 

With one eye I look at tomorrow 

With one eye I keep staring at yesterday 

 "The Real Folk Blues" (Yamane Mai)

To be really honest, I wish we'd move away again from these covers, with a close up of a face, even if the illustrations themselves are pretty...

Three years after Heathcliff Bloodbury left the family home to wander the world, he finds himself hurrying back, as his mother Charlotte, ravished by disease, is about to die. Not once in those three years had he come back to the Bloodbury Manor, better known as the House of Eternity as the first Bloodbury had the manor built next to a waterfall symbolizing the eternal tears he shed for his deceased wife. When Heath arrives home, he learns Charlotte has already passed away and this younger sister Cordelia, who was born both blind and unable to walk, has been making the arrangements for their mother's funeral instead. Heath apologizes to his beloved sister, declaring he will take his place as the new head of the Bloodburys and give their mother a worthy send-off. Several guests have already been invited to come that same day for the wake, including uncle Edward and cousin Jefferson, as well as Chesterton, a local clergyman and one of Charlotte's close friend. One face however Heath had not expected to see: Gyro is an obnoxious self-proclaimed great detective, who had been hanging around the family ever since Heath's father Theodore died three years ago. Theodore was found dead in his locked study, with a noose around his neck: the remains of a rope hanging from a beam made it clear he had hung himself and the rope had snapped. Gyro however claims it was not a suicide, despite the head butler having seen and heard the master alive in the study when he locked the doors for Theodore to let him rest: meaning nobody gotten in the study to kill Theodore, and get out again. Despite that, Gyro has been dogging the family for many years now, and he especially has suspicions about Heath, who left his home immediately after his father passed away.

Another surprising guest is Lilyjudith Air, a young woman who claims to have been friends with Charlotte and said once she saw the announcement of Charlotte's death, she headed straight for this house from abroad. As there's a storm coming, every guest, including Gyro, is offered to stay at the house for the night, so they can all attend the ceremony tomorrow, as well as the reading of the will, which is kept safe by the head butler. The following morning however, Cordelia doesn't appear at the breakfast table, and when she doesn't answer the door, and it turns out it has been bolted on the inside too, they break the door open to find... the poor girl sitting in her wheelchair... without her head, as it's rolling on the floor in front of her. Heath nearly goes mad from seeing her sister murdered in such a cruel way, but is also perplexed by the fact this was a locked room murder: the door was locked and bolted, and while the window was open, it has bars and you can barely get anything through the window, especially not without disturbing the rose bushes beneath the window. As they are not able to inform the police because of the storm, everyone has to stay put in the house. Heath goes out looking for clues and happens to find Lilijudith deadly injured. He looks into her eyes as she passes away and... finds himself having returned to the start of the previous day. Lilijudith reveals to Heath she is a witch with a curse: the curse of rewinding her own death, and the curse of taking people with her. Every time Lilidies, the clock rewinds to put her back 24 hours back in time, complete with all her memories. The last person with whom she locked eyes before dying also retains all their memories of what happened. Lili explains she has actually been killed multiple times ever since she appeared at the House of Eternity, each time after Cordelia is found murdered. She makes a deal with Heath: he's to help her survive to learn the contents of Charlotte's will (her main objective for coming here), while they'll make use of her powers to learn who killed Cordelia and why, and use that knowledge to prevent her death. For this reason, Heath and Lili must stick together each new time loop, as Heath must be there to lock eyes with Liijudith whenever she dies, and if the occasion demands it, Lili or Heath must even be willing to start a new loop themselves  (i.e. Lili commits suicide or Heath kills her) to ensure they'll reset the loop in time and Heath will retain possession of his memories. How many time loops will it take and how often will Lili have to die in order to save the lives of both Cordelia and Lili in Minami Asov's 2024 novel Eigoukan Chourenzoku Satsujn Jiken - Majo wa X to Shinu Koto ni Shita ("The Super Serial Murder Case at the House of Eternity - The Witch Chose To Die With X") .

Locked rooms, reliving the same days over and over again and witches? No, this is not Umineko...

But those key terms were definitely the reason why I decided to pick up this book. Time loops are an often seen concept in mystery-related games, but you don't see them used as often in books actually. Of course, it's because interactive games often do lend themselves better for stories with time loops, as you can more easily allow the player to play through several loops (or even have them go back and replay), or for example use jump systems to jump to specific parts of the story where a story will diverge from the original loop, allowing for complex time flowcharts. That has been the case since Kamaitachi no Yoru, where you don't jump in time formally within the game, but where the player is constantly going back to earlier parts of the story in order to find a way out of the closed circle murder mystery. In that sense, a novel, with a linear way of storytelling, and using solely the medium of words (prose), might be actually less well suited for time loops, as reading the same parts over and over again isn't fun, and on the other side, it is difficult to make different time loops easily understandable to the reader: a game can use nice interactive figures or flowcharts to show you how each time loop is different or the same or in which time you are, but a prose story, even if it uses diagrams, will have more difficulties with that.

In that sense, I often did have the feeling Eigoukan Chourenzoku Satsujn Jiken would have worked better as a game, than a novel. The book shows you the "worst" loop possible, of Cordelia being killed in the locked room and Lili dying, and then things are explained to Heath (and the reader) regarding Lili's powers, the limitations to her powers and the task that awaits them. But then Lili also explains she had experienced seven loops before, all with different outcomes and people acting differently, so that suddenly adds a lot more "relevant data" to the puzzle right from the start, that might be difficult to process. A game would have been able to present this in a much more organized manner.

But we are thus dealing with the impossible murder on Cordelia, a possible murder on Lili and there's also of course the mysterious death of Theodore three years back. Which, by the way, has a really neat diagram, shown from no less than three angles. It's rare to see a locked room crime scene depicted in so much detail in a novel! It's weird by the way how easily this locked room murder, as Gyro declares it to be, is resolved rather... swiftly halfway through the book, when there's been barely any investigation into it: basicallly all you need to know to solve it, is relayed to you in the initial discussion about the apparent suicide, and it's in essence a rather basic trick, but the clues pointing to the culprit were done much better, and work thematically very well. The Cordelia murder is... actually in essence also very simple, though made much more complex due to the actions and motivations of the characters in the house. Who admittedly don't always get to do much in each loop (many characters don't do or say anything in a certain loop, so you sometimes tend to forget they were in the house...). The idea behind the trick behind Cordelia's death again is not as inspired as the way Minami sets up the clues, but then again, Minami does do a great job at tying Cordelia's death to the time loop plot device of Lili, with the two cooperating time travellers making the best of the time loops to find clues (by creating different situations each time loop) and create an outcome where Cordelia doesn't need to die.

 In fact, I do think the book is much better at using the time loops to bring an interesting mystery than using its locked room mysteries. Soon after Heath starts working together with Lili, he does start to have doubts about her: why does Lili know so much about his mother? Why is Lili's ultimate goal becoming witness to the reading of Charlotte's last will? What has Lili done in the earlier time loops she had before she started taking Heath back in time each time? It's here where Minami does the most interesting things with the plot device of rewinding death and taking people along, but also where the book at times stumbles as a mystery. Minami does really clever things with the time loops, and I think the actual reason why she picked Heath as her partner in her time loops is perhaps the most surprising and devilish mystery-related element of this whole book, and certainly a notion that makes this book worth reading. But as a mystery with supernatural themes, it's also not always 100% fair. The main rules of Lili's curses are conveyed to the reader fair and square, but then near the end you suddenly are treated to a few instances you were never told were in fact possible until that very moment! That immediately makes the book feel not as fair and clever as it could have been, despite the fact the supernatural elements that tie to the end could and should have been hinted at more thoroughly (though I suppose revealing some things early, might have put the attentive reader on the trail early too). For I do think Minami has all together a great collection of truly fantastic ideas in this book, but in order to play some of these games, a few cards are left unturned for too long. That said, I think the ultimate plan Lili is trying pull off in order to prevent both her own and Cordelia's death and get out of her predicament is conveived really well by Minami and it is what makes this book memorable.

Eigoukan Chourenzoku Satsujn Jiken - Majo wa X to Shinu Koto ni Shita was the first time I read anything by Minami Asov, but it sure made me curious to more! As a time travelling mystery, the book does not pull off everything it tries to do perfectly, and perhaps it needed a few more pages to flesh out some of the loops more, but it does try to do really clever things with its time loop plot device. And yes, I did think the locked rooms could've been a bit more surprising (even if they are used in clever ways to synergize with other element of the plot), and I didn't think the supernatural elements were treated as fairly throughout the book, but on the whole, Eigoukan Chourenzoku Satsujn Jiken offers a very interesting mystery novel about witches and time travelling and certainly worth a read.

Original Japanese title(s): 南海遊『永劫館超連続殺人事件 魔女はXと死ぬことにした』

Three Doors to Death

"That is so, monsieur. I ask of you if you have any knowledge of a man named Li Chang Yen?"

"The Big Four" 

I have to admit... I really love Christie's The Big Four, not despite, but because it's so deliciously silly.

What translated fiction does the translator read? Though I read mostly Japanese mystery fiction, I do occasionally read non-Japanese mystery fiction, and like everyone else, my choices are also limited by the languages I can read. So it is always a relief when mystery stories are translated to a language I can read. The Japanese publisher Hayakawa is one that focuses mostly on translated mystery fiction. One important source for translated short stories is Hayakawa's Mystery Magazine: this magazine originally started as the Japanese version of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, but after their licensing deal stopped, they switched over to the current name. Each issue features both serialized stories as well as complete short stories, and the last few years, Hayakawa's Mystery Magazine has been focusing a lot on Chinese-language mystery fiction, even featuring a fixed corner with a new translated story basically each issue. Today, I will be discussing works of two young modern-day authors who have been influenced by Japanese mystery fiction, one known as the Chinese Ellery Queen, and the other as the Chinese King of Locked Rooms, with all stories translated to Japanese by Ai Kousaku.

Shi Chen is a well-known Chinese mystery novelist who is strongly influenced by Japanese shin honkaku mystery fiction and his works have earned him the nickname of the Japanese Ellery Queen. He also runs his own mystery-fiction based book shop in Shanghai. Despite these credentials, his list of translated works in Japan is still criminally short, and none of his novels have made it across the sea, so for now, I'll have to do with short stories. Rinshitaiken wo Shita Onna ("The Woman Who Had A Near-Death Experience") was originally published in 2015 and features Shi Chen's detecting duo who had only debuted that very same year: the mathematician Chen Jue and his Watson, the historian Han Jin. In this story, Han Jin draws his friend's attention to a remarkable article by Professor Guo, who has devoted his life to researching near-death experiences. A few days ago, he manages to interview a woman who had been announced dead, but could be resurrected 40 minutes later. The woman does have vague memories of what happened after she was supposed to have died: some of the motifs are quite familiar and are mentioned in many such experiences, like the sensation of passing through a tunnel or across a river, but the woman had even more memories. The moment Chen Jue reads this account however, he suspects a hidden murder might have been committed, and he starts contacting the right people in a hurry to locate the hospital where the woman is staying. What in the woman's near-death account set off the alarms in Chen Jue's head, and what is the murder he fears may have happened?

A very interesting set-up for the story! The story is fairly short, and can be divided roughly in two segments: the first third or so, we deal with what feels a bit like some of the second period novels by Shimada Souji featuring Mitarai Kiyoshi, where the reader is first confronted with a fantastical experience or dream, which is then analyzed and shown d to be some kind of metaphore for an acual event. In this case, the generally "stereotypical" account of how the woman started passing to the other side contained clues that allowed Chen Jue to guess something's not completely all right. While the clue are there, one could argue that Chen Jue's reaction to those clues was a bit strong, as this only works if you can assume that every single detail is absolutely correct, while I wouldn't even trust my own memories of certain details even if I have been completely awake and focusing at the time, let alone if I was near death! The second half has Chen Jue examine the murder, for of course, he was indeed right and the near-death account did lead them to the discovery of a corpse. This then leads to a Ellery Queen-style second half, where we also discover only a select group of people could have committed the murder on the victim, and you're asked to deduce who it is by eliminating the other suspects based on the known facts. This process is done fairly well, though I do really think one certain condition that allows the reader to cross off some suspects, feels a bit unconvincing. While I do like the deduction process introduced here, it's just that... surely there would have been a better alternative to introduce a similar line of reasoning without that object? Because it just seems so unconvincing to me there would be no better/easier/more convenient substitute for that object, and it makes this part of the deduction process feel very artificial, even though I do like the general idea of what Shi Chen was going for. But yes, this is definitely the type of story I would expect from someone with the nickname of the Chinese Ellery Queen, and it does make me very interested to see how he'd a full-length novel!

Sun Qinwen is an author I have discussed in the past already, as I reviewed his first novel Lindongzhiguan ("Coffins in the Cold Winter") last year. He in turn is known as the Chinese king of locked room mysteries and a successor to John Dickson Carr. While his first novel was published under his own full name, he had already published many short stories before that novel under the name Jiding. Hayakawa's Mystery Magazine has featured three of the Jiding stories these last few years, two of them I'll be discussing now. Both stories star Wang Jiayi, a police detective, as the narrator. He's a fairly intelligent detective himself, but he also finds the university student Xia Shi to be more than a match for him: he met the young woman at a party for fans of mystery fiction and has since become smitten with her, though at the moment, they are just friends. In Namida wo Noseta Dangan ("A Tearful Bullet"), Wang Jiayi is visited by a woman whose father recently passed away, as she found a strange entry in her father's diary which seems to indicate somewhere a crime has happened. The diary entry is dated just before his death, and her father, who worked for a renovation company, writes about he and a new part-timer had been sent to a manor to renovate a basement room which had been locked for many years, with the key missing. They managed to break the door open... only to find the skeleton of a man lying in the room, with the basement key next to them. The hole in the skull, and the bullet they find in the wall seems to suggest this man had been shot. But the door was locked from the inside: so it couldn't have been a murder (for then where did the murderer go), nor a suicide (for then where is the pistol?). The owner of the house however wanted to hush things up, and offered the father and the part-timer a lot of money to keep quiet and to seal the basement again. As a murder might have taken place, Wang Jiayi starts investigating and finds out where the father had been working before his death. The owner of the mansion however of course denies a body was found in his basement, stating they just sealed the basement because the damp environment caused by the nearby lake made it not suitable for use anymore. Wang Jiayi suspects he lies, but then this man dies too: he had been fishing and was seen by a witness to enter a hut alone and he was about to prepare his fish when he suddenly keeled over in his kitchen and was dead. Because nobody was seen to have entered the hut besides the victim, it seems this was just an accident, but is that truly the case?

This story deals with two locked room situations, one in the past (the basement) and one in the present (the house owner). I do have to admit I find it disappointing the two locked rooms aren't really connected thematically: while there is something that connects the two situations, it's not like one side works as a strong clue/misdirection for the other per se, so they feel very disjointed. The present-day murder is more of a joke solution I think, it's basically unhinted and then the solution is sprung upon the reader, and it's not a really exciting solution in any way. The past death has a rather surprising solution I liked a lot: the basic idea is a bit simple, but original, and what I like best is how Sun clewed the solution here. There is another layer of mystery that only becomes apparent later in the story, but I wasn't really a fan of that; it works better in the original Chinese I can tell, but in the Japanese translation, it's difficult to convey the exact same idea without feeling a bit unnatural simply due to cultural differences.

Konchuu Koushukei Shikkounin ("The Insect Hangman") has Wang Jiayi investigating the mysterious death of an insect researcher, while also dealing with the fact Xia Shi seems to have attracted another suitor in the form of an old classmate. Wang Jiayi and Xia Shi are hanging out at a McDonalds when Wang is approached by his old classmate whom he hasn't seen in years. The man is working at an insect research facility, and he invites the two to visit. They accept, but they find the director is missing. They start looking for him and arrive at a small storehouse, which is being used as a temporary place to keep their stag beetles as they are moving. They try to open the door, but find the door has been taped tight from inside. When they finally brreak the seal open, they find the director dead inside, with the window and the door all sealed with duct tape, and the glass cases where the stag beetles were kept all thrown on the floor, broken into pieces. The director himself is found sitting with his back against the wall opposite the door, having apparently strangled himself by tying a rope around his neck, fixing the rope against the wall, and then having his body weight do the rest. But why would the director, who loved insects more than anything else, have broken all the cases with the stag beetles?

The story starts with a reference to Carr's He Wouldn't Kill Patience, the famous taped locked room mystery and the tale also has a very short "lecture" on the taped locked room, so you can easily tell what the theme is of the story. As you might guess, this locked room mystery revolves mostly around a mechanical trick that allowed the murderer to kill the director in a room of which all exits are taped tight. The solution is a variation on a solution I had already encountered before, using a similar mechanic, but the 'props' used to create the taped situation are different, and in that way, the story feels original enough. One could argue it is questionable how practical this trick would truly be if executed, but the idea makes enough of an impact to be memorable I think. What I really liked however was that Sun didn't decide to only focus on the howdunnit: the threads he added to support the whodunnit and whydunnit of the mystery do really help make this story feel much grander, despite it being a relatively short story.

I had already read a novel by Sun Qinwen, and while I don't think the short stories I discussed today were better than the novel, they were definitely interesting enough to keep me interested in his output, so I will be sure to read more of them if more of his work becomes available in a language I can read. Shi Chen was the new experience for me, and his story was certainly enough to make me interested in trying out more of his work, as you can recognize the influence of both Ellery Queen, and modern Japanese shin honkaku authors in this short story and I am very curious to see how his longer stories turn out. So I do hope more of both authors will be translated soon!

Original Chinese title(s): 時晨 "濒死的女人 時晨", 文孫沁 "载着眼泪的子弹" , "昆虫絞刑官"

Peril at End House

 迷わずに 瞳信じて 

風のららら…

 「風のラララ」（倉木麻衣）

 

Believing in what I see without any doubts

The wind's lalala...

"The Wind's Lalala" (Kuraki Mai)

Huh, for some reason, I thought I had started on these books much more recently...

Kagami Masayuki made his debut as a mystery author in 1999 with several short stories he wrote for anthologies (collected in 2022 in The Uncollected Works of Masayuki Kagami), but it was in 2002 he published his first full-length novel Sougetsujou no Sangeki ("The Tragedy at the Twin Moon Castle"). He would keep on writing two more novels and a short story collection, all starring the Parisian magistrate Charles Bertrand and his nephew and chronicler Patrick Smith in stories strongly inspired by John Dickson Carr's Henri Bencolin series. Kagami however would pass away suddenly in 2013 in his early fifties. I read Sougetsujou no Sangeki about two years ago and found it a highly entertaining locked room mystery in the tradition of Carr and since then, I have been working my through the (short) bibliography of Kagami, though it took a bit time as the books that were published during his life are only available physically at the moment, and a few of them usually only trade owners for a price I found way too high (as in, some were usually put on offer somewhere between 50 and 100 euro, or even more). So it has been a game of patience for me, keeping an eye on offers and trying to snatch them up if they were finally offered for reasonable prices.

And that is why it took me a while to finally get my hands on Kaze Hatsuru Yakata no Satsujin ("The Murders at Wind's End House" 2006), the third and last novel written by Kagami. But now I have finally read it! The book is set after the mammoth Kangokutou ("Prison Island"), the approx. 1200 page adventure where Patrick Smith became acquainted with Mary Kaley, a historian. Their relation has been great, which is why she wants Pat to come along as emotional support when she receives word her grandmother, Ingrid Kaley, has passed away. Ingrid Kaley was the widow of Christopher Kaley, the head of Union Mining Ltd., one of the financial powerhouses in the United Kingdom. She ran the company after Christopher passed away, and succesfully too. She herself however never had children, while at one time Christopher had a mistress Ivonne, who gave birth to triplets. Infuriated by her husband's infidelity, but also recognizing how Ivonne could never support three girls all by her own, she insisted Ivonne and the girls come live at their manor in Northern Ireland. Wind's End House is located on a cliff near Giant's Causeway and got its name because all kinds of air currents somehow make their way to that cliff, making it constantly windy. Ingrid turned out to be very caring of the sisters Claudia, Regan and Margaret, while Ivonne, grateful to Ingrid, ran the household for her. However, tragedy struck when the triplets were around five. One day, the gardener saw Ivonne enter the large hedge maze in the garden. Some time later, Claudia too entered the maze, in search of her mother. When much later Ingrid realizes both Ivonne and Claudia are gone, she goes looking for them in the maze together with the gardener: on the ground, which was still wet due to earlier rain, they could make out two sets of footprints making their way to the center of the maze, where there's a small gazebo. But when Ingrid and the gardener arrive there, they find a horrible scene: Ivonne is lying dead on the ground, her throat having been slit open. Young Claudia too lies on the floor, though she turns out to have only lost her consciousness. The police never could figure out who Ivonne was killed, as there were no other footprints on the ground, and there is no other way to make it through the maze.

Many years later, and the triplets have grown into beautiful women with their own families, but they have completely gotten estranged from Ingrid, who officially adopted them after Ivonne's death, but for some reason she started treating the girls differently from before their mother's death, and that relation never improved. There is also a lot of rivalry between the three sisters, who all have one son and one daughter, though Claudia's daughter Mary is adopted, as she was the daughter of a friend who passed away. While Mary could get along with her brother William and the introverted Patricia, her other cousins Cordelia, Stephen and David were outright bullying her, which was the reason Mary left the house to study when she became an adult and never returned. The will of Ingrid however stipulates all living Kaley family members must be present, so Mary finds herself forced to return home, but she brings Patrick along, introducing him as her fiance. While William and Patricia seem nice enough to Mary and Patrick, the latter can't help notice the other three cousins are exactly as Mary had described them. The will is read immediately upon Mary's return. But while Claudia, Regan and Margaret expected Union Mining Ltd. to be split evenly among the three sisters, the will read by the solicitor is more than baffling: Union Mining Ltd. is to be split between the two families who will get married first: whoever of William, Mary, Stephen, Cordelia, David and Patricia get married together first, will inherit the company, leaving the last family with nothing. Furthermore, in case of death or no marriages within the first three months of the reading of the will, the company will pass on toa certain Peter Graven or his living offspring. While the cousins have never heard of Peter, their mothers were petrified when they heard the name dropped, though they refuse to explain who he is. The mothers quickly call their own family meetings, all with the same message: get married to one of your cousins, as soon as possible. Claudia forbids Mary to marry Patrick, stating they can't be left out of the inheritance. Meanwhile, Mary and Patrick also become worried whether Stephen and David won't force themselves on one of their cousins for a fait accompli. When Stephen insults Mary for the ump teenth time, Patrick challenges him to a boxing match, which he wins convincingly, sending Stephen wimpering that night. However, the following day, an ever bigger surprise awaits everyone: Stephen is found.... hanging from a rope... attached to the top of an old grain silo, about twenty meters high! And something has left a gigantic imprint on the ground near the silo. Almost as if... the giant Finn McCool of Giant's Causeway picked up Stephen and hung him from the silo. Or is there a devious murderer at work here who wants the inheritence for themselves? Patrick and Mary don't have much confidence in the local police solving the case, so they can only hope Pat's uncle Charles Bertrand, the famous Parisian magistrate, can come quickly...

If there's one theme in Kagami's work, it's John Dickson Carr: he has written many straight pastiches of Carr's work (most of them found in The Uncollected Works of Masayuki Kagami), but his Charles Bertrand series too is obviously modelled after the Henri Bencolin series, with the detectives in both series sharing the background story of being French spymasters turned magistrates and having an American narrator. The first book, Sougetsujou no Sangeki, was specifically inspired by Castle Skull, and there are probably many Carr references to notice if you are more of a Carr reader than I am. That is why to my surprise, Kaze Hatsuru Yakata no Satsujin, despite its very British setting of Giant's Causeway, is modelled strongly after Yokomizo Seishi's Inugamike no Ichizoku. We have the family patriarch passing away, leaving three rivalling sisters and their families. We have the reading of the will, where the patriarch says the family business will be left to whoever first gets to marry (in this case, a marriage between cousins). There's the "extra" clause in the will, that stipulates the fortune will got an unfamiliar name or their offspring in case any of the primary candidates will die. And of course, like in Inugamike no Ichizoku, this will and all its crazy conditions sets off a series of horrible deaths, which formally start when Stephen is killed, but might already be announced early, as Mary got a threat letter telling her not to return to Wind's End, and when Patricia picked up Mary and Pat from the station, their car was sabotaged too!

But while the structure of the book follows Inugamike no Ichizoku, the crimes that occur at Wind's End, a large manor with a giant hedge maze in its garden, as well as an old mostly unused silo, are definitely still Kagami's bread and butter of Carr-ish impossible crimes. We have a murder at the center of a hedge maze in the past, where the murderer apparently entered and left the maze without being seen and without leaving any footprints in the soft ground. This is repeated in the present, when Patrick goes meet someone in the maze, but right in front of his eyes, this person shrieks and is found killed with a knife, even though Patrick saw nobody near the victim, and the only footprints leading to the center of the maze belong to the victim, and himself. We also have the death of Stephen, who apparently was hung from the very top of the silo, fifteen, twenty meters up high by the giant Finn McCool and later in the book, there's a death in a bathroom, but no murderer could've approached the third floor bathroom, because a witness had been cleaning out the storeroom and an old sofa had been blocking the corridor. That said, most of the impossible crimes in this book aren't that amazing on their own: the present-day maze murder is comprised out of cliched tricks, the bathroom murder is basically solved the instant a certain piece of evidence is found and the past maze murder is both somewhat unbelievable, and not properly clewed. That leaves the silo murder, which is indeed a rather alluring one: how could anyone hang Stephen from the top of the silo, given... Stephen is an adult male, and the silo is nearly twenty meters high. The giant imprint on the ground next to the silo, resembling a giant feet, seems to suggest the giant neighbor Finn McCool from Giant's Causeway came to pay a visit, but... that is of course not the case. I think most of the readers will have some idea of how it was done, considering it's just such a unique setting which limits the possibilities a lot, though I think Kagami did a good thing at setting up the clewing for this solution, and it is not just the best of all the impossible situations in this book, but simply a very entertaining idea on its own too.

I do think the book is actually both at its best and worst when it comes to playing around with the character relations and their motivations. Like Inugamike no Ichizoku, a lot of the mystery is created because we have a lot of characters with their own agendas, and their actions complicate the matter a lot. I think more than in previous books, Kagami managed to use his large cast of characters to make the mystery more complex. In some cases, this works out really well for this book, but in other cases, you really wonder why some characters did the things they did. One character does something that, okay, I can somewhat understand what you did that before the first death, but why not explain yourself once you see people are dying? The three sisters do things that serve as important events that inform the actions of other characters, but... why would you do that? Right that other event happened? For some reason, the husbands of the three sisters also barely say or do anything in the book, even though they are supposed to be there too as their children are getting murdered and their wives are going crazy from grief... So at times, Kagami succeeds in making the mystery more complex and alluring by playing these characters off each other, but at other times you really don't see why some characters do what they did, even though it has important implications to the plot. I wonder if Kagami had lived to write more books, he would have managed to develop the way in which to use characters to contribute to the mystery, and create more synergy between the characters and his impossible situations.

There were a few other smaller points that did bug me though. Like... did we just gloss over a pretty major crime at the end? And why can't Kagami properly write out English(-sounding) names? I was so convinced that thing with the initials was a hint, but that was just Kagami making a language mistake... Oh, re-reading my own review of the first book, I have to repeat again that despite Kagami writing in the shin honkaku tradition, he really tries to stay very loyal to his mission of writing stories extremely close to what Carr wrote in the 1930, taking the challenge of doing a Golden Age mystery novel on those terms alone, so no narrative trickery, no fantasy or sci-fi background, no focus on comedy, no Late Queen Problems or meta-discussions on the state of honkaku mystery fiction.So despite the book being very much like Inugamike no Ichizoku, you don't hear any snarky remarks about that.

But when Kaze Hatsuru Yakata no Satsujin works, I think it works really well, and overall, I did enjoy the book a lot. After the very grand Kangokutou, I appreciated the somewhat smaller scale of this story (similar to the first book, though a bit longer), and as a Carr and Yokomizo-inspired impossible murder story, it is constructed in a very confident manner, as you'd expect from an author who specialized in writing in the tradition of Carr. I do think that ultimately, I liked the first book the best, with probably the most memorable locked room murder in all of Kagami's writings and while it's the shortest book too, I think it makes the best use of its page length. All three books are worth reading though, especially for Carr fans.

Original Japanese title(s): 加賀美雅之『風果つる館の殺人』

Dead Man's Cavern

"Ragnarok, the end of the Viking world with a terrible winter that covered the Earth in ice, when vile crimes were rampant and all humanity lost."

"Max Payne"

I wonder if at those detective fiction courses at university they actually have locked room murder lectures...

During a holiday, Narumi, the self-proclaimed great detective of the Sealed Door club, invites his fellow member Kakeru (who was recently made his debut as a mystery writer), to go on an adventure together. While Narumi hesitates to tell Kakeru exactly why, they are travelling to a small village deep in the mountains of Gifu called Kagerou Village. When they arrive, they notice a strange church-like building in the middle of the village. They chat a little with the local people there, when they hear a cry coming from the nearby cliff: one of the Jizou statues has toppled on top of her, trapping her legs. Narumi and Kakeru quickly help her, but she then tells them her friend Yasoshima Daisaku fell off the cliff down in the swamp below. There's a dangerous path along the cliff that climbs down to the swamp, so Narumi and Kakeru carefully make their way down to look for Daisaku, who fortunately is safe: he is a firefighter and has experience with this. A tremendous storm starts as they climb up the path however, and it's becoming too dangerous to walk up this way. Daisuku instructs Narumi and Kakeru to find shelter in a cave halfway up the cliff path, while he goes further up to secure a way for them. Narumi and Kakeru are just inside the cave when the ground shakes, causing a cave-in that blocks off the entrance. To their surprise, they find there were more people inside the cave, and as they talk with these people, they learn this cave runs beeneath Kagerou Village and that in recent years, it has actually been converted to a cave hotel: the "church" Narumi and Kakeru had seen above is a wedding venue, and an elevator there goes down to the main part of the cave, which is surrounded by several rooms. The hotel is a somewhat eccentric attempt to attract tourists to the region. They also learn that Daisaku is a local who is to be married soon to Tsugumi, who is one of the people in the cave, as she was being shown around.

The group makes their way back to the main "lobby cave" to take the elevator back up, but when the elevator doors open, they find the nearly deceased Nanako, a local high school student: she's been shot in the cage. When she's asked who did this to her, Nanako points her finger at... Kakeru before she dies. While Narumi can quickly prove it couldn't have been Kakeru who shot her considering they just arrived there, the local people are still a bit suspicious about these two outsiders. They learn the elevator doesn't work anymore and for some reason, there's also no answer when they try the intercom connecting to the wedding venue above, even though there should be people there, and Daisaku should also know they're there. While afraid the murderer might have attacked the people above too, the people below in the cave can only wait, so they stay in the hotel rooms for the night, with Narumi warning everyone to keep their doors locked in case the murderer is still down in the cave, but his warning is not enough to prevent another murder the next morning. When one guest doesn't respond to calls from outside, Narumi and Kakeru try to open the steel door, but are only able to bend it slightly to create a gap, but the gap is enough for them to see the inhabitant is lying dead on the floor. But she has also written something in blood on the floor that seems to point to Kakeru again! Who is the murderer in the cave, and can Kakeru prove this time he really isn't the murderer in Kirisha Takumi's Ragnarok Dou - Akazu no Tobira Kenkyuukai Kagerou Numa he ("The Cave of Ragnarok: The Sealed Door Goes to Kagerou Swamp", 2000)?

Ragnarok Dou is the third entry in Takumi Kirisha's Sealed Door series, about the colorful members of a college club specializing in opening sealed doors. Last year, I read the first book in this series, Doppelgänger-kyuu - Akazu no Tobira Kenkyuukai Ryuuhyoukan he ("The Doppelgänger Palace - The Sealed Door Club Goes to the Ryuuhou House", 1999), which was also Kirisha's debut work. You might wonder why I skipped the second book and went straight for the third book in the series. Well, like with Summer Apocalypse a few weeks ago, I didn't actually choose this book because it was a book in this series. I was looking for books with dying messages as the theme, so when I learned this book had a dying message lecture, it found a place in the to-be-read pile, despite it meaning I would be reading a series out of order. Again. As always.

So yeah, the theme of the book is dying messages and it might be surprising to learn Narumi, the self-proclaimed great detective, comes up with a dying message lecture fairly early on in the book. While he namedrops Doctor Fell, Nikaido Ranko, Mercator Ayu and Sorachi Masaya as eminent predecessors when it comes to presenting a lecture on a specific trope in mystery fiction (locked rooms, no footprints in the snow, motives for creating locked rooms and alibis, respectively), I do have to say I find Narumi's alibi lecture really original. While I have seen dying message lectures before (disclosure: I translated Arisugawa Alice's The Moai Island Puzzle), the one in this book is quite original in that because it is about a message: being there's a sender and receiver, this lecture actually consists of two seperate sections (chapters). In the first Narumi presents a categorization of the type of dying messages a victim may leave behind to denounce the murderer (writing, oral, etc.), so the medium of the message, while in the second part, the lecture goes in detail about why said message might be misinterpreted/not understood (so the signife of the message). But what I liked especially about this lecture, is that it is in fact not just a fourth wall-breaking moment, or just two chapters where Kirisha shows he has done his homework and to provide the reader with context to understand how his twist on the dying message in this book will work. While I can't give details because it spoils one of the cleverest elements of this book, Narumi actually has a fantastic reason to actually be holding a lecture about dying messages, and it's precisely because he does this, they're in the end able to solve the case. Narumi might be a self-proclaimed detective, but.... he's actually truly a very clever detective, who in every other series would have been the protagonist. Narumi's just not lucky here, as the club president Godou is just a little bit smarter than Narumi (though less active). At any rate, I have seldom seen a lecture in a mystery story used in such a clever way in-universe, and that alone makes this worth a read, I think.

As the proper cave entrance is blocked and the elevator broken, the people in the cave hotel find themselves in a closed circle situation, but an odd one, as at first, there's no reason to believe the murderer is still in the cave, and it in fact seems more likely the murderer is on the surface, having shot Nanako and then sending the elevator down. The pistol used to kill Nanako is believed to be the one that should have been enshrined in the shrine in the cave: it used to belong to a World War II pilot who crashed in the swamp. But if the murderer did go up, how come a second murder occured in one of the hotel rooms? The door was locked from the inside, and because it's a steel door with a very sturdy, submarine-esque turn-dial lock, Narumi and Kakeru can't even force the door open with a steel bar, only able to open a minor gap through which they could confirm the victim died. As the story progresses, more people are of course killed in the cave. Meanwhile, everyone is also worried about the people above, for Daisaku and other people should know people are trapped in the cave hotel (especially Daisaku, as his soon-to-be-wife Tsugumi is one of the people there!) and Daisaku's a firefighter who told Narumi and Kakeru he'd inform the rescue unit, but why is nobody coming to their rescue? This leads to a lot of speculation on Narumi's part, and it's here where the book kinda repeats some of the... I wouldn't call them faults per se, but it's definitely something that stood out when I read the first book.

For like the first book, this book does feature a large cast of characters like many closed circle murder mysteries... but the narrative is mainly focused on the recurring characters, in this case Narumi and Kakeru, and later other club members after everyone is rescued and they go over the case again to try and solve it. Most of the book revolves mainly around discussions between just the recurring cast as they go over theories and discuss what they could do next, and the side characters that only appear in this book barely get anything to say before they die. The worst example of this is Nanako, who appears as a dead person right away, and we hear some characters lament her death, but we don't actually hear about how they know Nanako, who she is, and why she was in the elevator or anything. She's just there, dead. Only much later you hear a throwaway line about how one character knew Nanako exactly. This happens with other parts of the story too, where you don't really understand what their role is and how character X knows character Y, because the story is focused on Narumi and Kakeru chatting among themselves, instead of with others. It does allow the story to focus on a lot of the detective plot, as Kakeru and Narumi obviously talk about the ongoing case, but some of the puzzle pieces remain vague because you don't hear the other characters speak up too often. And while I do think the members of the Sealed Door club are fun and their banter does mean we get intelligent, genre-savvy discussions regarding the mystery, like the first book, you do feel some of the other characters should have given more speaking lines to flesh out the mystery more.

As for the mystery itself.... it's really dense! You have multiple dying messages (in the broad sense of the meaning, so writing, gestures, in-actions etc.), a locked room murder, long deduction chains about how the murderer must have been moving both on the surface and in the cave, and while I do think sometimes feel a bit chaotic, ultimately, I think it worked out pretty well. The solution to the locked room isn't that interesting to be honest, and the closed circle situation is resolved in a rather easy manner, but the deductions regarding the dying messages and the reasoning chains that point to the murderer are more memorable, and they work really well in conjuction with the aforementioned dying message lecture. Parts of the backstory of the shrine in the cave, which ties directly to the motive, are interesting ideas, though it's debatable about how "fair" it was presented and at times, this backstory goes pretty weird ways: I wouldn't have found the revelations here in any way weird had this been for example a Nikaidou Reito novel, but this being my second book in the series, I hadn't quite expected Kirisha to tell us this kind of backstory. This is an element I think could have been worked out in more detail to feel both more shocking, but also less... coming out of nowhere. 

The book also provides some more insight into the history of the Sealed Door club and why club president Godou started the club, which likely will tie to the final, fourth book in the series, I assume. These books are easy and fun enough to read, so I will eventually get there, not sure whether I will read the second book first, or the last one though.

Ragnarok Dou - Akazu no Tobira Kenkyuukai Kagerou Numa he is a fun mystery novel that does some original things via its dying message lecture, and for that alone, I think this is worth a read. Like the first book, it's a story that focuses a lot on the recurring characters and often has a comedic tone to it, so like many character-focused mysteries, it's pretty easy to get into, and while because of that focus, I do feel the mystery isn't presented as strongly as it could be, overall, I do always end up enjoying these books. Solid entry, and I'll be sure to read the other two books in the series too.

Original Japanese title(s): 霧舎巧『ラグナロク洞 《あかずの扉》研究会影郎沼へ』

Telltale Touch

"Only in the leap from the lion's head will he prove his worth."
"Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade"

What is it with reviews on sex-focused media that also happen to be mystery fiction this month...  

Last week, I discussed the newest issue of Nemoto Shou's own mystery comic Sharaku Homura: Detective of the Uncanny. Nemoto is not only a creator of mystery fiction in manga form, but also studies it. He has been briefly discussing various mystery manga on his website, especially those that ended up not getting included in Fukui Kenta's (otherwise extremely comprehensive) Honkaku Mystery Manga Zemi ("Honkaku Mystery Comics Seminar", 2018). Not all of these works are easily available now, of course, but as a fan of the mystery comic format myself, I of course try to read the ones I can find.

Today's topic was one highlighted by Nemoto which is still easily obtainable in digital form, and interestingly enough, it has actually seen an official English release in the past, though it is not available anymore: Marina Mystery File was created by Byakkomaru and was originally serialized between 1997-1999 in the magazine Young Teioh, though the magazine later folded and was transformed into Comic Maruman. The four volume series stars Marina, a 22-year old teacher at a high school, who is secretly dating one of her own students: Ishiyama Tooru. Their love is pure, she insists, so while the two do fool around a bit, they have not actually fully consummated their relationship yet, despite Tooru's attempts to convince Marina. The two are also both members of the Japan Mystery Club, a group of people interested in researching mysterious, supernatural events occuring in Japan, ranging from ghost stories and monster and UFO sightings. During their trips with the club however, Marina and Tooru have the knack of getting wrapped up in creepy and bloody murder cases that involve the supernatural phenomena they are investigating. Fortunately for them however, Tooru soon discovers Marina is a rather clever detective herself, but under one condition: she needs to be sexually aroused and pleased to get her little grey cells working at full speed.

Cue the sex scenes! I should probably mention right now that while Marina Mystery File is a mystery manga in the same tradition as Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo and Nemoto Shou's Sharaku Homura: Kaiki Tantei, featuring long series of murders that involve monsters or other seemingly supernatural beings/phenomena, it is also an adult manga, meaning it involves plenty of scenes where characters are having sex (rape at times) or fondling each other or themselves and more of that. The art style is rather mild and you can easily imagine Byakkomaru also doing "straight" comedy manga with this style, so the sex doesn't feel too realistic, but it is certainly something to keep in mind if you want to read this. I am not going to mention it in the write-ups on each story below, but just remember that basically every chapter (most stories are about five or six chapters long) will feature one or more scenes with sexual content, the last one generally being Marina being fondled/touching herself so she can get sexually stimulated enough to get that flash of inspiration that allows her to solve the case.

As mentioned before, the series feels very similar in build up to both Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo and Nemoto Shou's Sharaku Homura: Kaiki Tantei, though in general, the pure murder plots are not as intricately structured as those series. That said, considering Byakomaru is probably more an adult comic artist than a mystery writer, I do have to admit these comics are often reasonably amusing as mystery fiction, though a lot of the tricks seen here will feel familiar. Still, the stories actually follow good build-up and while not all the clues/hints Byakkomaru uses are as convincing as others, on the whole I'd say he actually gets the fundamentals of a proper mystery comic really good and the base stories are usually interesting too, so if Byakkomaru had studied the genre a little bit more while he was working on the series, this could actually have developed into a mystery manga more of us would remember, I think. The manga was released digitally over a decade ago in English by JManga, but that site is already defunct.

 

The opening story, The Kappa Murder Case, for example, has a great setup: the Japan Mystery Club is visiting a small village near a lake to investigate rumors of a hopping Kappa roaming around: the story goes that centuries ago, a kappa kidnapped a girl and raped her for three days and nights and now that kappa has returned. Which is bad news, as there's a girls' academy near the lake. The day after the club members arrive at the lake, they actually run into the kappa near the lake, and it is holding something gruesome: the head of a teacher of the nearby academy. And that was only the first death, as more people are murdered that seem to have a connection to the school. But why? While the first 'major' deduction of Marina that "proves" the kappa is in fact, not really a kappa is rather boring, there is acutally a pretty good visual clue that involves the identity of the kappa, one that makes very intuitive use of the comic format. Some of the surrounding drama is perhaps not clewed as well and feels rather forced, but this is actually not a bad story to begin with.

The Spirited Away Murder Case has Marina and Tooru visiting the Seikouin Girls' School, a Christian elementary school, which is Marina's old school. As they wander around, Marina learns one of Marina's sempai has become a teacher at the school too. But while they are chatting, children start vanishing from the school, prompting the teachers to call in the parents of the missing children. However, while they are searching the school grounds, one of the teachers is found naked and murdered in a room. Marina goes off to bring the husband to his wife, but when they return the room, they find it empty and clean of any blood traces. This puzzles Marina greatly, as she hadn't been gone for that long, but when they later return to the room again, they find two naked women dead in the room. Why are these women being killed, and where have the children gone off to? This one is immediately less interesting as a mystery. The mystery of the disappearing corpse is pretty easy to solve due to the way it is presented, and the trick itself is one you'll often see in these kinds of stories. The mystery of the disappearing children borders on the insane and doesn't belong in a puzzle plot mystery.

Just like the first volume, volume two and three each contain two full stories. The Ghost Mansion Murder Case has the Japan Mystery Club visiting a haunted mansion on a small island. They have only just arrived when they are welcomed by a poltergeist throwing cutlery around and soon afterwards, one of the members is found stabbed with a cross high up the wall. The boat that brought them to the island won't be back soon however, and soon more people are killed one by one, one of them even while they were inside a cabin that had been locked from the inside. This And Then There Were None-esque story gets the vibe perfectly down, though a lot of the happenings feel a bit familiar: the locked cabin murder for example uses a trick which is telegraphed a bit too obvious and there are famous mystery novels that feature the exact same trick (the iteration here can't even be called a variant). The hint pointing at the killer is... okay in theory, as I do have to admit Byakkomaru uses the comic format in a clever way to subtly show how two seemingly similar actions are not the same, which eventually point to the murderer, which would be fine if the murderer wasn't already looking extremely suspicious in this story even without the clue!

The Zashikiwarashi Murder Case is one of the more interesting stories in terms of execution. Marina and Tooru are visiting Kumono, a remote countryside village where Tooru used to live. They are visiting Sayuri, Tooru's childhood friend who suffers from a weak heart and isn't able to leave the village. Her parents are dead and her brother has run away from home, leaving her all alone. Her father however arranged that his fortune would go to the family member who will take care of Sayuri after his death: however, it is up to Sayuri to decide whether she'll go to her aunt or either of her two uncles, who are all very, very eager to get on her good side. These would-be guardians of Sayuri however are being killed one by one, but why and by whom? The who is a question that is easily answered to be honest, especially as the cast is so small in this story, but the story makes brilliant use of the comic format here to create a good suspenseful story. The foreshadowing here really show off that Byakkomaru does know the potential of the visual, comic format in mystery fiction, and he explains pretty well in this volume's afterword what he was going for in this story, and I think he pulled it off very competently! This is one story I would recommend especially if you're going to read this.

The Ghost Photograph Murder Case starts with the death of one of the Japan Mystery Club members. Apparently their death was already foreshadowed by a "ghost photograph": a while back, the club members visited an abandoned hospital which was supposed to be haunted, and one of the photographs taken of the member who died, featured a strange dark shadow covering half of their body. Marina herself hadn't gone on that trip then, but now the club is going once more to investigate this creepy photograph. While they are driving to the hospital, a landslide ends up covering the road behind them, trapping them in the hospital. They eventually go to sleep, all staying in the same large hall, but when they wake up, they find one of them has been strangled to death. But was it by a human, or a ghost...? A human of course. While the overall flow of the story, as in the scene-to-scene transitions, feel a bit unoriented, I do have to say I really like some of the psychological hints introduced in this story. The hint pointing at how the murderer managed to strangle one of the members without anyone noticing, even though everybody was sleeping in the same (spacious) hall and just a few meters away from each other, is actually really good in the context of this manga, and another psychological clue that points to the identity of the murderer, is actually a very clever idea with far deeper (cultural) roots than you'd guess at first sight.

The Snow Woman Murder Case has Marina being invited by her friend Naoko to a ski trip with some more acquaintances: they are staying at the holiday villa of Isaki Fusako at the ski resort. Three years ago, Fusako's son Seijirou got injured while skiing, but he was saved by the people at the piste: the people they have invited to stay at the villa now (+ Marina). They learn that there's a local ghost story of a Snow Woman, who can instantly freeze men and... she then breaks off their penises and runs off with it. That evening, Marina thinks she sees the Snow Woman outside, and the following morning they find... the corpse of Fusako outside, buried in the snow. Who is obviously not a man, so why was she killed? Heavy snowfall prevents them from getting help, and Fusako ends up being only the first of more murder victims in the villa, which seem to be committed by the Snow Woman, as the second murder is actually witnessed by several people, who then see the white Snow Woman jump out of the window as she flees into the snow outside while holding a dildo. This is an extremely daring mystery story, which uses a trick that is both brilliant... and not convincing. While there is good shock value when the trick is revealed, it also instantly raises so many practical questions about how it all works, it immediately makes you wonder if it could work. That said, it does make interesting use of the visual medium once again and I think it's still worth it, even if only for the hilarious image of a Snow Woman running around with a dildo.

The fourth and final volume features three stories which are bit shorter than the usual ones. The Kokkuri-san Murder Case centers around a group of girls in Marina's  class, who recently did a session of Kokkuri-san (table turning), which seems to have backfired on them, as the participants are dying one by one. The story seems more focused to tell a thrilling story than be a puzzle plot mystery, and while there's an interesting hint in theory that allows Marina to figure out something fishy's going on and who is the one that stinks, I feel Byakkomaru could probably have used the visual format a bit more to make the clue feel fairer: I think the idea is alright enough (even if limited, but that's also because of the shorter length of the story), but showing it more often would have made it feel more satisfying when the clue is pointed out to the reader.

Marina became acquainted with the police detective Eguchi Gorou in the previous story, and he has invited Marina to come along to the shooting of a film he will appear in to on orders of his superiors (to promote the police).  The Haunted School Murder Case takes place in an abandoned school, which stands on a cliff and is only accessible via a bridge and it is here where the film will be shot. And by now you of course already know the bridge will collapse and that people will be killed one by one. There is a locked room murder, but the trick is hopelessly outdated and boring. In comparison, the hint that points to the murderer is actually really clever, using Queenian logic to cross off suspects of the list. It is just a one stage deduction, but certainly one of the best mystery moments in this series.

The final story, The Black Magic Murder Case, is set at Marina's school, and starts with the discovery of a student being stabbed into the blackboard at school, surrounded by satanic symbols. It turns out some of the senior staff at the school are actually in some kind of crazy cult, but then these people are being killed one by one too. The main murder situation is very simple in set-up, and there's not really much of a mystery here in presentation: they find the victim dead in a room, but it was not like it was a locked room or anything. The misdirection falls a bit flat here, and the trick itself relies on what might be the one of the oldest/most cliched locked room tricks that exist: while Byakkomaru does introduce a twist, this twist feels impractical and not likely a trick that would succeed,

Marina Mystery File was oddly enough a series that left me slightly disappointed not because it didn't succeed as a mystery manga: I was disappointed because while my expectations were low, there are genuinely moments that surprised me mystery-wise, and you can tell Byakkomaru is familiar with the genre, so it somewhere I feel like it perhaps could have been much better as a mystery series. It didn't crash and burn, and comes close to being good. Very few of the sexy moments in this series are actually "needed" for the mystery plot, but when they do become relevant in terms of the mystery solving, it works pretty well, and you almost feel like if Byakkomaru had been given some more research time to work out the mystery plots more, this could have been a much better known mystery-cum-porn manga. Now it's just an interesting note in the annals of mystery manga.

Original Japanese title(s): 白虎丸『まりなミステリーファイル』

The Problem of Cell 13

“WORDS IN THE HEART CANNOT BE TAKEN.” 

"Feet of Clay"

To be honest, when I first heard about the story, I was hoping the book would be about a real Golem...

Mitsuki Usami is an academic researcher in natural history connected to a multi-disciplinary research facility in the United States. He has the tendency to get involved in odd crimes both real and fictional: while occasionally, he ends up solving cases via his work as a researcher, with his co-workers and even the police aware of his skill in problem solving, Usami also has the habit (?) of just finding himself in completely different world or realize his mind is now inhabiting the body of someone else. That doesn't seem to surprise him that much however, and wherever and whenever he faces an intellectual problem, he can't rest until he has managed to find a solution. In Tsukatou Hajime's 2005 short story collection Golem no Ori ("The Cage of the Golem"), Usami finds himself solving a murder in a world where the creations of M.C. Escher are real, a prisoner escaping a sealed prison in which he had been imprisoned for decades and the riddle of a man escaping a mysterious sun cult among others.

While the last three years or so, I have started reading Tsukatou's work fairly regularly, this is the first time I read anything in this specific series, though I had been wanting to read this for a long time. In a mook on locked room mysteries edited by Arisugawa Alice, a group of mystery authors was asked to vote for their favorite locked room mysteries, and the title story Golem no Ori was ranked in the top 20. When I learned about the short story however, the book was already out of print, but fortunately, Tsukatou's older works have been given a digital re-release the last two years, so I finally was able to have a look at the title story. 

The book however opens with Escher no Sekai ("The World of Escher"). During a break, Usami has a look at the art exhibition held at the research facility,  an event to invite people from the neighborhood to have a look inside the facility. The art exhibition shows the art of Harold Mueller, who was known as a successor to M.C. Escher, making all kinds of trick art pieces. His most famous work is a painting with a very unique backstory: the work was created after his wife and daughter were murdered, and according to Mueller, this painting shows who the murderer is. However, the painting contains multiple persons, depending on you look at the painting, including Harold's old housekeeper, himself and his art dealer. While contemplating about this painting, Usami dozes off and finds himself awakening in a world where the works of M.C. Escher are actually possible, like the waterfall where the water drops down and somehow ends up at the top of the waterfall again in an eternal loop. For the people in that world, the "impossibility" of these buildings seems natural, but they talk about a person who like Usami came from a different world with other rules, and that he eventually managed to return. Usami looks for the villager who might have talked with that man and know how he returned, but before Usami can find the villager, the villager is found dead. But who could've murdered him?

This is a weird story, with two very different parts that are only partially connected via M.C. Escher storywise. The murder in the world of M.C. Escher is obviously a fantasy-like story, but this story is more of an interesting idea, than one that is really worked out well. While I imagine it has to do with rights, the book is devoid of illustrations, so if you're not familiar with the M.C. Escher illustrations mentioned in this story, you have to imagine them based on the descriptions in the story, which probably doesn't really convey the essence of these works. Obviously, the fact that in this world, the M.C. Escher buildings can actually exist and function ends up connected to the murder, and while I think the essential idea is funny, it's also not really anything more than a funny notion, and the lack of visuals really hurt the story. The part regarding Mueller's painting is a bit more interesting, and is at least thematically cleverly connected to the M.C. Escher story (though story-wise, not at all), but the complete true meaning of the painting is impossible to guess simply based on the hints.

In the second story Schrödinger DOOR, Usami and his co-worker Hartman are called by the "colonel" (who runs the research facility) for an emergency at the research facility: the Moren twins, two researchers, are involved in a crazy situation which has already taken the life of one of the brothers. In a laboratory, one of the twins is found murdered, while the other has been put inside a special capsule nside a locked lab, but he doesn't react to anything. In a document signed by Karlie Moren, he confesses to being the PRA bomber, a serial bomber who had been active for several years. He states he has committed suicide, and that his brother Gerald is inside the lab. Last year, both brothers were suspects in a murder case commonly referred to as The Chinese Scissor Mystery, and Karlie now states that one of the brothers was indeed guilty and that he has now punished that murderer: if Karlie was the murderer, he's lying dead on the floor, and Gerald is knocked out, but alive in the locked lab, but if Gerald was the murderer, he's dead too. The authorities are challenged to put in a password, a keyphrase to show they understand what actually happened last year, to open the lab: if they're right, the door opens and they can check whether Gerald is alive, while otherwise, everything will be blown up with explosives. 

This is a a very chaotic story, with the story about the PRA bomber and the Moren brothers being in a Schrödinger's cat-inspired situation where you don't know whether Gerald is alive or not, and then "The Chinese Scissor Mystery" part set in the past, where both brothers were a suspect. To be honest, I didn't really like this story: "The Chinese Scissor Mystery" is an okay mystery story, but not remarkable mystery story on its own that relies a lot on Queenian deductions regarding certain used objects, like a set of scissors, and sets of footprints that seemingly make it impossible for either Karlie or Gerald to have murderered their neighbor, while they were having a masquerade at home, but like Tsukatou sometimes tend to do, the story is told in a way where you get fragments of information in in media res scenes, meaning you miss a lot of context which makes everything seem confusing at first, only to explain things a few pages later, only to do the exact same thing again the next scene, constantly jerking around with the pace. The Schrödinger's cat-inspired part also is interesting on its own, but misses real synergy with the Chinese scissor mystery part, and isn't really a "deduce it yourself" type of mystery, so this story just didn't work for me.

Mienai Otoko - Usami-shiki ("The Invisible Man, Usami-style") is a very short story where Usami is challenged to solve a mystery written by a co-worker. In the story, Helen, a career woman, is haunted by a voice of someone accusing of a murder she most definitely did commit to climb up the ladder. But while she keeps hearing the voice, she can never find out who is saying it, leading her to believe it is really a ghost. This is a very simple story, and the whole thing is very similar to a short story by a prolific American locked room mystery specialist whom I am sure Tsukatou has read, so it's hard to feel really enthusiastic about this one.

After three medicore stories, I was glad to learn Golem no Ori ("The Cage of the Golem") was indeed a lot more interesting, though again, I am not that big a fan of the double story structure of these stories. The plotline of a handyman falling off the roof of the research facility and calling for help, and his rescuers not being able to find him despite going to the exact spot the handyman says he is at, is not very interesting. However, at the same time, Usami has another of his weird experiences where his mind ends up in the body of a prison warden in 17h century England. "He" has been newly appointed to this prison, where there is one special inmate: a man only known as the Golem, a man so feared his name and records have been completely obscured and who has been kept for decades in a specially built cell from which there is no escape, as the door has been completely sealed, shuttered and barricaded. The door of this special cell has never been opened in the decades since the Golem has been kept: there's only a special small opening just large enough for a tray of food and water to slide through, and this opening is always kept shut from the outside until the food is brought. While he has been in the prison for decades, the arrival of the new warden seems to have changed something, as the Golem starts hinting at an imminent escape, which scares another inmate in the prison, who had a personal fued with the Golem. The warden can't believe the Golem can escape: the Golem is put in a room with thick stone walls, the door can't even be opened as it's completely barricaded and has been like that ever since the room was finished and you can barely get an arm outside the window. But on the night the Golem announced, the Golem does indeed appear to manage to escape his prison, and even kill the other inmate on his way out. How did the Golem manage to do this? This part of the story is probably the best of the whole book, and I do quite like this mystery, even if I have already seen a variation of the same solution before. It goes over the many seemingly possible situations there are for escaping a locked cell like in The Problem of Cell 13, but these possibilites are of course discarded. The solution however is clever as it plays with your expectations of why the Golem escaped his cell now, leading to a surprising way to escape the cell that seems so utterly impenetrable.

The final story bears the title Taiyouden no Isis (Golem no Ori Gendaiban) ("Isis of the Sun Temple - A Modern Cage of the Golem), the rescued handyman from the previous story tells Usami about a mysterious case at the headquarters of a sun-worshipping cult, where he worked once. A former follower of the cult had been detained inside a room at headquarters so he could "repent". This cell was made especially to punish the followers, so the windows were all frosted, allowing no direct sun inside the room. While the man was being held captive, the head of the cult, Ra, was worshipping the sun with his trusted assistants in the deepest parts of the headquarters. But the man somehow managed to not only escape his cell, which was being observed by a guard in the room outside, the man even managed to escape headquarters unseen! Even if the man managed to get out of his cell somehow, he'd only be able to go two ways from that point: one leading to the main entrance where plenty of other followers are, or one leading into the sun worshipping room where Ra and his assistants were, but none of them have any reason to have let the man go, so how did he escape both his cell and the sun cult's headquarters? The first part of this problem indeed offers an interesting twist on the idea of used in the original Golem no Ori, but in terms of feasibility, it seems very unlikely it would ever work: the story even says it was a gamble whether this would work, but simply addressing this problem doesn't mean it suddenly becomes more feasible, and while I like the idea on its own, it just seems like it needed something more to make the trick more... useable. The way the man escaped the building itself though is brilliant, and I really like the thematic implications of this trick. 

Overall though, I wasn't that big a fan of Golem no Ori as a short story collection. Most of the stories follow this two-plot structure, with one "outer shell" story and a narrative-within-a-narrative with Usami somehow being placed into this narrative-within-a-narrative (often with a fantasy twist), but I often felt the synergy between the two plotlines was not as strong as they could've been, and because of that, the stories just felt a bit chaotic, as if they were two stories mashed together for... reasons I simply don't get. The book also starts a bit weak, with the last two stories being the clear outliers and having the most memorable mystery plots, but even then, I don't think the "outer shell" stories really add that much to the plot, so it's difficult for me to feel truly positive about the book. I'd recommend reading the last two stories if you happen to have the opportunity, but don't expect anything as good in the earlier stories.

Original Japanese title(s):柄刀一『ゴーレムの檻』:「エッシャー世界」/「シュレディンガーDOOR」/「見えない人、宇佐見風」/「ゴーレムの檻」/「太陽殿のイシス（ゴーレムの檻 現代版）」

Bathtub Murder

Undinus sich winden

『黒死館殺人事件』

 

 Undinus sich winden

"The Black Death Mansion Murder Case"

The Tattoo Murder Case is probably one of the earliest Japanese mystery novels I ever read, so kinda funny how I only got around to reading its sequel now...

Matsushita Kenzou receives from his old schoolmate Urabe Kouichi, who hopes Matsushita and their mutual friend Kamizu Kyousuke, the famous detective, will come and save his family. When they were attending school together, Kouichi had shown signs of having vague precognitive powers, which is something which appears to run in his family: his great-uncle is in fact Urabe Shunzai: Shunzai had exhibited great precognitive powers at a younger age and presented himself as someone who was chosen by heaven. He became the head of his own "new religion", the Crimson Spirit, which started out as a minor cult in their home village in the rural plains of Musashino, but which rapidly attracted more followers, some of them even with great political influence. At one time, the Crimson Spirit had its headquarters in a splendid mansion in the capital and Shunzai would even be consulted during the war, but his predictions then missed the mark, and after the war, the cult shrunk as quickly as it had once grown: at the moment, it's basically just Shunzai and his next of kin, being his three granddaughters Sumiko, Retsuko and Tokiko, as well as Kouji. Because Matsushita knows Kouichi has been right about his feelings in the past, he travels to the village, though he isn't able to get hold of the travelling Kamizu. As he arrives in the village, Matsushita runs into a strange man who, when hears Matsushita is going to visit the Urabes, is told a prophecy: that night one of the girls will die floating in water. Matsushita has barely arrived at the house and told Kouji about this prophecy, when suddenly Tokiko ends up poisoned, though she fortunately survives the attempt on her life. It turns out the strange man is called Rokurou, who is a faraway relative of the Urabes and once a high-ranking member of the Crimson Spirit. He has however denounced Shunzai as being "real" and has started his own cult now. Matsushita is of course offered to a bed for the night, but that evening, as everyone takes turn to take a bath, a noise attracts everyone to the bathroom, where Sumiko is taking a bath. They find the door locked, so break it open, only to find Sumiko dead in the tub: she has been stabbed in the chest with a dagger. However, the window was locked from the inside, and there had been someone standing outside the bathroom to guard her. When later, a sheet of paper is found where Rokurou has written more of his prophecies, which indicate Shunzai and his three granddaughters will die in different manners. Are their deaths inevitable and fixed by heaven, or is it the act of a murderous human being? That is to be determined by Kamizu Kyousuke in Takagi Akimitsu's Jubaku no Ie ("The Spellbound House", 1949-1950).

Jubaku no Ie is the second novel featuring Takagi Akimitsu's fictional detective Kamizu Kyousuke, who debuted in Shisei Satsujin Jiken ("The Tattoo Murder Case"), which had ended serialization the previous year. While Takagi seemed quite enthusastic when he started serializing this story, it appears reception at the time wasn't that good: letters came from readers who bashed it, and eventually Takagi even gave up some of his payment for the story to set up a contest, with a money reward for the person who could guess who the murderer was. The book features two Challenges to the Readers by the way, one being a relatively conventional one, but then a chapter later, he adds in another where he basically says "You can't be serious, you still don't get it!??", which might be the time when they did the contest, I suppose? And oddly enough, Takagi really likes to spoil Van Dine (as in: actually stating the name of the murderer of The Greene Family Murders): he does so in the Challenge to the Reader, but he also spoiled Van Dine in Noumen Satsujin Jiken. Oh, and in the story itself, he basically spoils The Murder of Roger Ackryoyd while talking about something else. Forewarned is forearmed.

As the scond novel in the series, Jubaku no Ie is one of the better known entries in the series, and has actually also (relatively) recently been adapted for the stage. So I had been looking forward to reading this book. Atmosphere-wise, Jubaku no Ie is pretty good: the backstory of the Crimson Spirit cult and how Shunzai abused his authority to get women and money from first villagers, and then the whole country until his empire crumbled is interesting, and provides a great set-up where the whole Urabe clan is more-or-less hated by everyone who once was involved, like everyone in the village who donated money to Shunzai until they realized he must be a fraud. Meanwhile, the three granddaughters were brought up by their grandfather and at least Sumiko and Retsuko are still devoted believers of their grandfather, being one of the few practicing followers left. The prophecy left by Rokurou, who started his own rival cult and is clearly 'winning' in terms of gaining power, predicts the whole bloodline of Shunzai will fall, with each of the four remaining persons dying via one of the four elements of air, water, fire and earth. With Sumiko dying as the first one in a locked (bath)room, you'd think this might be a very cool mystery novel, as at the very least, the atmosphere is great and I see opinions online that, very understandably, compare it to the dark atmosphere found in Yokomizo Seishi's Kindaichi Kousuke novels.

As a mystery novel, and one with two Challenges to the Reader no less, Jubaku no Ie is probably not as impressive as Takagi probably had hoped it to be. When you add a Challenge to the Reader, you of course expect not a conventional matter "whodunnit", as in, the book shouldn't just expect the reader to instinctively guess who the murderer is, but there should be a proper trail of clues pointing specifically at one person, while also proving other people didn't do it. After the first murder on Sumiko, Kamizu arrives late at the scene (together with the police), but he is not able to prevent more murders from happening. Most of the subsequent murders seem able to have been committed by any person though, and while there is another locked room murder later in the story, it is resolved fairly quickly mid-way (and has a rather straighforward solution), the main problem is the first bathroom murder, which is also the one thing Takagi focuses on in his Challenge to the Reader, setting specific parameters about this murder to ensure to the reader he's playing a fair game here. The problem here is basically two-fold: one is that Takagi in an attempt to be clever, actually basically tells a falsehood in this Challenge to the Reader, rendering the whole Challenge moot and even more problematic... he skims over crucial parts of how he says the locked room murder in the bathroom occured. Like, going solely by what is said in the text, you still don't know how it happened, as Takagi basically skips over the part that actually explains how the murder had been committed without leaving any clues as to how the murderer entered. While there are interesting parts about this locked room murder, because it is set in a Japanese-style bathroom with its own characteristics, I feel the mystery of Jubaku no Ie falls apart, as the whole Challenge is based on the bathroom murder, but then it skims over parts of the solution (the parts that would actually be an obstacle in terms of execution). In fact, parts of this solution go straight against reasons the book itself raised earlier, but which for some reason are not addressed again when the actual solution faces the exact same obstacles.

Funny how this second Kamizu Kyousuke novel also revolves around a bathroom murder by the way...

But no, overall Jubaku no Ie didn't manage to leave a good impression on me on the whole. While it certainly earns high marks in terms of atmosphere, with the cult background and a creepy poem foretelling four murders, the main locked room murder skims over its own solution, despite it being the focal point of the book's Challenge to the Reader. I think what ultimately Takagi was going for with this locked room murder could be interesting, but the execution here is sloppy, and just doesn't work.

Original Japanese title(s): 高木彬光『呪縛の家』