Telltale Face

The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like a wild beast, screamed “Off with her head! Off—” 

"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

Here's your semi-regular "hey, there's a Honkaku Discord server" message!

Oh, so I read this book 14 months before writing this review...

The Uegemis were once a wealthy family of merchants living on their own private island near Yokohama, but they had lost much of their fortune by the Meiji period. The elderly Kazuichou realizes how his own son Kazui had no talent for business, which worsened after the death of Kazui's wife as his attention turned to drinking and smoking. Worried about the future of the Uegami clan, Kazuichirou decided to marry a younger new wife Reika, but before a second child could be conceived, the man died. His will however stipulates it won't be opened until two years after his death. And so the widow Reika, her 'son' Kazui and Kazui's daughter Karen lives "happily" together on the island while waiting these two years, remaining polite to each other until they know who will inherit the Uegami money. After a long period of illness, Karen lost a lot of her memories, and is now recovering. A powerful related family sends the housekeeper Shizuka, a Mary Poppins-esque super competent, but somewhat cold woman of Russian descent, to the house to care for Karen, but also to keep an eye on things to see what will happen to the Uegamis. Another guest at the house is Gorou, Karen's cousin. Karen still has trouble remembering things, but she feels something is amiss in the house and suspects her family is hiding something from her. Her suspicions are aimed at the courtyard of the house, a large open space to which the door is always kept locked, and where something is being kept. One evening, widow Reika is late for dinner even though they are to have dinner together. She's often late though, so at first nobody thinks too much about it, but when they try to call for her, they find her door locked and no reply coming from inside. Breaking the door open, they find her decapitated body. For some reason however, Kazui seems very reluctant to call the police. But when more victims fall who also lose their heads, Shizuka acts to protect her mistress, and she's willing to go far to accomplish that in Tsukihara Wataru's Kubinashiyakata no Satsujin ("The Murders in the House of the Headless", 2018).

Kubinashiyakata no Satsujin is the second book in the Maid Detective Shizuka series, but the third time I'm discussing this series because I don't read things in order. The stories are set in the Meiji period and feature Shizuka as the series detective: a mysterious woman of Russian descent who seems to be a cold, but efficient and effective housekeeper, but who can have a rather sharp tongue when pushed and she's in possession of an even sharper mind. She works for a different family in each story, so you can basically start with any book, as there's not really a chronology or direct connections between stories. What is interesting about these books is that they are quite short, but each of them focus on very specific themes, like the mitate satsujin (murders patterned after something, like nursery rhymes) in the first book, or locked rooms/impossible crimes in the third. Each of these books approached these themes from both a "straightforward" angle, as well as a more meta-angle, like in the first book Shizuka planning to destroy all the paintings all the murders there were mirroring, because then the murderer had nothing to mirror.

The headless corpse is of course a very common trope in mystery fiction, and if you have two or three of them, you of course start asking the usual questions like "Does the body really belong to the believed victim, as there's no face to verify?" But as this book is titled after the trope, and considering other books in this series have approached familiar mystery themes from a meta-angle, I wasn't too worried about this aspect, as I was sure Tsukihara would still manage to present an interesting twist to it. Mind you, I don't think the two books by Tsukihara I read previously were perfect in their execution, sometimes with some dodgy tricks, but at the very least, each of the books gave me food for thought as they tackled the familar tropes in interesting ways, so yeah, I can forgive them for stumbling a bitand in general, I still think they can be fun reads.

In a way, Kubinashiyakata no Satsujin is quite similar to the previous two books I read and as I'm writing this review some time after I read it, I do have to admit I had to check a few times because some scenes are just so similar and I wasn't sure in what book they occured. This book is perhaps the best at the horror aspect though. You follow Karen awakening with partial loss of memory and slowly sees her suspecting her family is keeping something secret from her, and while we the reader know Shizuka is the detective, it does feel like those Gothic horror novels where you can't trust anybody, especially as this is set in an old house on a private island. The one big question is of course the courtyard: the house itself consists of four wings, connected to each other with corridors so you have a large square courtyard in the middle, but only one door in the North Wing leads into the courtyard and it's usually kept locked. At the centre of the courtyard is a mysterious building with seemingly no exits, and of course, you can guess this place will play a big role in the mystery. It's a shame the book is pretty unclear when it comes to the actual floorplan of this building, and a diagram would've helped so much in solving this mystery, for some elements of the mystery can only be solved if you happened to remember the textual description of where the rooms are etc., even though a proper diagram would've helped so much. Now I think about it, the third novel was also a bit vague in explaining the floorplan of the building there, so that was an issue Tsukihara didn't improve upon. Nonetheless, the house itself is pretty creepy, and this book is perhaps the best at atmosphere of the ones I've read.

But the big theme of the book is of course decapitations, and fun things are done here! Shizuka of course immediately ponders about the question the moment they find the decapitated body of Reika, and even challenges the murderer to show them the victim's head, or else she's not going to believe the body is Reika's. Shizuka does more of these meta-attacks on the murderer, like threatening to injure everyone's faces so they don't have faces anymore, meaning there'd be no reason to decapitate any victims anymore if the reason is to obscure their identity. I love these pro-active suggestions Shizuka makes to counter these familiar mystery tropes and that's what makes these books worth a read. Shizuka is the type of detective you either like or don't, I think, as she can be cooooold, but I really love how she's always willing to do the drastic to mess up the murderer's intentions. And yep, the fun part is seeing how the murderer reacts to Shizuka's challenges of course, and ultimately, we are actually presented with an interesting explanation why the murderer in this book is decapitating their victims, and it's pretty surprising one! It was not at all what I had expected, so it wins points there, and while the idea itself is actually one of the more "logical" ones, it's the application to this particular story that works really well for me.

In fact, I think that of the three Shizuka novels I've read now, I enjoyed Kubinashiyakata no Satsujin the best overall. It is a smooth read due to the Gothic horror-esque approach with an amnestic narrator and while the tricks in this book are less "grand" compared to for example the next book, I find it's a more balanced story, improving a bit on the very hasty first book and not being as crammed as the third book. Given the books are not really connected strongly to each other, one could decide to start with this one first. One thing though, I still don't really understand the Meiji period setting and Yokohama specifically, as each of these books feature closed circle situations somewhere outside Yokohama, so you very seldom actually get a sense of time beyond "sure, they don't have phones yet". I hope later books do more with the time period.

Original Japanese title(s): 月原渉『首無館の殺人』

Paint Me a Murder

Can you paint with all the colors of the wind

"Colors of the Wind" (Vanessa Williams)

I really shouldn't be writing reviews four months after reading the book...

It is around the turn of the century, when Akitsuki Kazumi's father passes away. Going through his belongings, Kazuo finds an old painting of a manor on a cliff, but part of the upper layer has faded away, revealing a hidden painting, of a man being hanged. The family hopes the painting is worth something, but they are told it's not a particularly valuable painting. Despite that, they receive a rather curious offer: a man called Higami Kouichi is willing to pay much more for the painting than it's actually worth, but a Akitsuki family member has to deliver the painting personally, at an address in Yokohama, the international hub of Japan now it has opened its borders at the end of the 19th century. On his way to the address, he gets lost in labyrithine Yokohama, he's found by Shizuka, a maid of Russian descent who works at the Higami residence. He's surprised when he's brought to the outskirts of the town and crosses a suspension bridge to a cliff to find the manor in his painting! Inside, he's welcomed by Higami and five other guests, but one of the men looks exactly like the hanged man in Kazumi's painting. The six men and women clearly form some kind of group, and little by little, Kazumi manages to piece the story together: these people are the Those Who Remain and they are connected through a set of paintings, which all depict this manor on a cliff. Apparently, the paintings together hold a hint that point towards a treasure, and originally, these paintings were owned by the parents of the people present, save for Higami Kouchi, the sole "original" member of the group. With Kazumi's painting here now, the set is complete, but they have no idea how to find the treasure. A storm prevents Kazumi from leaving that night, but the following morning, they find one of them hanging from the balustrade of the stairs of the main hall. The suspension bridge has also been cut, preventing them from leaving the house. However, just as panic starts to take over, the capable maid Shizuka takes over, because she recognizes that this murder was patterned after the painting beneath the upper layer in Kazumi's painting and that the other paintings are likely to be hiding similar paintings too.  However, Shizuka has more than a few plans to stop the murderer from committing more murders in Tsukihara Wataru's Shiyounin Tantei Shizuka -  Yokohama Ijinkan Satsujin Jiken ("The Maid Detective Shizuka - The Yokohama Foreigner's House Murder Case" 2017).

Last year, I read Inugamikan no Satsujin ("The Murders in the Inugami House"), the third novel in this series set in the Meiji Period, focusing on the maid Shizuka, a very efficient, but sometimes rather ruthless woman of Russian descent who appears to be working somewhere else in each book. It was a short book that had some plotting faults, but overall, I enjoyed it as a short read and it had some really interesting ideas regarding mystery tropes (in that book's case: locked rooms and impossible crimes), that however weren't always explored to the fullest because of the relatively limited page count. Still, I definitely wanted to read more of the series, so I decided to go back to the first novel in the series. And in a way, it's a book that is very similar: not without flaws, but at the same time it manages to come up with really original concepts regarding well-known mystery tropes that I had never seen before and overall, it's an enjoyable read.

The theme of this book is the mitate satsujin, murders patterned after something: the nursery rhyme murder is of course a well-known example of this in English language terminology, but the nursery rhyme murder is a bit smaller scope than the mitate satsujin. In this book, the murders are patterned after the hidden paintings, which all depict hanged people, which of course means people are getting hanged. A lot. The upper layers of the paintings all hide a painting of an original member of Those Who Remain being hanged, and while most of them are already deceased (Higami Kouichi being the exception), their offspring look eerily much like their parents, resulting in very creepy murders that look exactly like the paintings. As a trope of course, the nursery rhyme murder and other mitate satsujin are not rare, especially not in Japanese mystery fiction (there's an interesting lecture on the topic in Yamanma no Gotoki Warau Mono by the way!). I personally love them, so I have read/seen a lot of them, but still, Shiyounin Tantei Shizuka really managed to surprise with how it handled the theme.

For seldom have I seen a detective character in mystery fiction be so pro-active in trying to prevent more murders, and also willing to take such drastic measures. The moment Shizuka realizes the first murder was patterned after the painting, she tries to convince everyone that the only way to prevent further murders from happening is to make the "mirroring" fail: what if for example if they'd just burn all the paintings, making it impossible for the murderer to mirror the murders to the paintings or to make the fact they mirrored the murders clear to the survivors? While obviously, Those Who Remain are after the treasure and refuse to take such a drastic measures, it's wonderful to see how Shizuka is able to come up with incredibly resolute ideas in order to make the whole concept of a mirrored murder fail, taking away the reason for the murderer to pattern their murders after the paintings and hopefully the fundamental reason for the murders in the first place. This is a really weird detective novel I wouldn't immediately recommend to those who have never read a mystery novel, but for those familiar with tropes, Shizuka is a really wonderful and memorable character, because she basically tries to fight back against the murderer by systematically attacking the tropes of the mystery genre. Explaining more about her tactics would spoil the book, but I guess you could compare it to "I won't let you kill me, I'll commit suicide!". A lot of the tactics wouldn't make any sense at all outside the mystery genre, but if you recognize the trope, Shizuka's plans are so entertaining to read because yes, she's willing to do anything to make the theme of the novel not work, and that's a wonderfully creepy concept.

That's perhaps why I'm a bit disappointed the book doesn't always make best use of the concept. The book is rather short, and most aspects feel somewhat underdeveloped. Some characters barely speak one single sentence before being killed off screen, and some of the conversations/deductions are written a bit too briefly, making it hard to understand what's meant/the implications of what is said the first time you read a sentence. As I mentioned above, the parts where Shizuka tries to prevent the murderer from committing more murders based on the nursery rhyme trope are the best, but it's here where the writing tries to handle things too swiftly, making it appear there are jumps in logic: this is also why I wouldn't recommend this book to newcomers to the genre, because while someone with knowledge of the trope can keep up eventually, I think sometimes the writing goes through the concept far too briefly, making it rather hard to swallow. The murders are rather "practical", with nothing fancy about them (not really an impossible aspect to them, or some great chain of reasoning needed to see who did it, as it's bascically "everyone could've done it"), and I think it becomes rather easy to guess who the murderer is once you get into the second part of the book, especially if you keep focused on the theme. As whodunnit, this book won't surprise you very much.

Oh, and one last minor disappointment was that the period setting wasn't really utilized here. The setting of Yokohama in the Meiji Period (where most foreigners lived after the international borders were opened after Japan had been mostly closed for 400 years) is super interesting, but you don't see anything of it! The book is about a closed circle situation inside a manor on a cliff and even the historical aspects don't really come alive in this book: while Shizuka doesn't talk about mystery fiction, it's clear to the mordern reader her strategies are based on modern understanding of tropes in mystery fiction, so she feels a bit out of place. So on the whole, you don't really get to see much of the historical setting.

So perfect, Shiyounin Tantei Shizuka -  Yokohama Ijinkan Satsujin Jiken definitely isn't, but at the same time, it's a book I enjoyed reading, because it had such a wonderfully meta-approach to the nursery rhyme murder trope. I think it's a really worthwhile read if you're familiar with that particular trope in the genre, because the book really manages to do tackle the concept from surprising angles through the "the end justifies the means" approach of Shizuka, giving a lot of food for thought about the genre.

Original Japanese title(s): 月原涉『使用人探偵シズカ 横濱異人館殺人事件』

The Inner Circle

"A donut hole in the donut's hole."

"Knives Out"

Okay, with Inugami in title and the familiar -kan no Satsujin (... House Murder(s)), the title of today's book sounds a bit too familiar for mystery fans, I think.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Serizawa Hiyoko and her personal maid Tsuyuri Shizuka travel through a wintery cold to the manor of Serizawa's uncle, who married into the Himuro family to attend to a curious ceremony to be held at the house. As of late, Himuro Takamine has been become involved with the Society of Man, a shady new religion who has convinced the man to hold the Ritual of the Dog at the manor. Hiyoko's excuse is that she'll be visiting her cousin Meiko, but in fact Hiyoko has been sent by her grandmother to keep an eye on things to see what her uncle is getting himself into. Upon arrival however, Hiyoko is surprised to see that Meiko herself too is determined to participate in the ritual which is supposed to call down the spirit of Takamine's late wife. The ceremony is held in a specially-built dome-like structure in the house, basically consisting of three circles within each other. Facing the structure from the front, the first door leads to a curved outer corridor which leads to the exact other side of the circle. There a second door leads inoto the second corridor (the second ring), which curves back to the front. The final third door leads into the inner circle of this structure, where the temperature is freezing. The ceremony will have Meiko praying here in the middle for hours on. However, in order to deter people from disturbing the ritual, a grotesque safety measure is built into the building: each of the three sliding doors leading deeper into the structure has a guillotine blade built into it, attached to a box on the inside of each door. Three persons are to lie down in those boxes and be locked inside, with Meiko in possession of the key. Unless Meiko herself uses the lock to free the people lying in those boxes first, anyone forcefully opening the sliding doors will decapitate the people lying in the boxes and who'd be so desperate to kill three humans to interrupt the Ritual of the Dog?

But the unthinkable does happen! While there are people standing guard outside the structure during the ritual, they suddenly hear Yuuri, Meiko's friend lying inside the first box (attached to the first door), cry out. Sensing something is wrong, Hiyoko and Shizuka approach the door only to witness how the door is slid open, decapitating Yuuri. Realizing someone inside the structure slid the door open, Hiyoko and Shizuka make their way deeper into the structure, finding everyone in the boxes is dead, decapitated by the guillotine doors. But when they arrive at the center, they are shocked to find Meiko standing in the middle, but she too has been stabbed to death and was frozen in her standing position. But there's not a single sign of the person who opened the guillotine doors from outside and there are no other exits out of this structure. But what surprises Hiyoko the most is that Shizuka confesses she was afraid this would happen: three years ago, when she worked as a housekeeper at the Yukishima family, the Society of Man had erected the same structure for the Ritual of the Dog and there too someone had managed to penetrate the triple-layered locked room. As Shizuka recounts the events that occured three years ago, she slowly pieces together what happened this time in Tsukihara Wataru's Inugamikan no Satsujin ("The Murders in the Inugami House" 2019).

This is the third novel in Tsukihara Wataru's series set in the late 1800/early 1900s Japan starring the maid Shizuka, a very capable housekeeper of Russian descent who at times has a tendency to fall out of her role and mock her superiors, but who nonetheless is extremely good at what she does, and that includes some occasional detecting. I hadn't read any of the earlier novels before (yep, I never read things in order), but starting with this novel didn't seem to problematic at all. I don't even know whether Shizuka is also working for Hiyoko in the other novels, or whether she's working somewhere else each time, but at the very least, you can start with Inugamikan no Satsujin without worrying too much.

I picked this one entry up because the premise sounded interesting, with a triple-layered locked room murder mystery, with a structure with guillotine doors and shady ceremonies. If you ask me what I think of the book now I have read it though, I have to admit I'm torn. It has some really neat ideas, mostly with the enigmatic structure and the guillotine doors, but at the same time, the story has characters act in rather unconvincing manners in order to make the plot work, and some of logistics behind the murder plot are rather iffy upon scrutinization, so the book doesn't quite manage to completely win me over. But to start with the fun parts first: I love the utterly nuts idea of a building with guillotine doors which force you to commit a murder if you want to open it. In the book they say they can't believe anyone could be so desperate or crazy to use those doors, but as the reader, you of course know it's soooo going to be used to kill everyone in those boxes. This is where you also realize that this book is more focused on presenting the core mystery problem with an interesting murder situation, rather than focusing on really providing a firm foundation to explain why this structure exists in the first place: if you really wanted nobody to disturb the ritual, you could just lock the doors without human sacrifices and the story hardly explains why the ritual demands the middle of the structure to be freezing cold, or why the structure is built inside another building, or why it has that particular circle-within-a-circle-within-a-circle layout. Tsukihara simply came up with an idea for a triple-layered locked room murder, and ran with it. Don't think too hard about it and just accept there's a building with guillotine doors.

The book starts in media res, with Hiyoko and Shizuka discovering the deaths inside the structure, and afterwards, the story follows a dual narrative structure, with chapters alternating between the ones set in the present (starting with the build-up to the discovery of the murders) and chapters set in the past, when Shizuka was working for the Yukishimas and the same Ritual of the Dog was held with similar results. These chapters are titled almost the same and often, events and conversations appear to be echoed between the past and the present, yet at the same time, as this is a mystery, the reader is of course aware that it isn't a coincidence that deaths occur whenever the Ritual of the Dog is held by the Society of Man, and the plot will have you wondering why this ceremony is being held again and what the true purpose is of this insane ritual. The events in the past are very similar to the ones in the present, with a figure opening the killer doors from within and ultimately finding the girl who had been praying inside stabbed. While the narrative of the past is intricately connected the narrative of the present, I have to say that in regards of the mystery plot, things get a bit rushed here, with events that seem barely possible in terms of the timeline and by the end, you're more puzzled about whether all that could really have been done and also about the motivations for some characters to act like that. 

The narrative in the present has a more solid mystery plot and forms a nice contrast with the one in the past, but here too you are left wondering about whether it was really worth it for the culprit to do all of that for those causes. I'm not the kind of mystery reader who usually fuzzes too much about character motivation, but it's really rare for me to me to think a book could have come up with a more convincing reason to explain character actions, because I'm usually very willing to just roll with the plot. The problem of the murderer opening the guilotine doors from the inside and then disappearing from the structure is good though, with some nice moments that don't just focus on the howdunnit, but also have Queenian moments that focus on the question why some objects/circumstances are the way they are and the logical implications from that.

Inugamikan no Satsujin is a pretty short novel, and due to its dual narrative structure, it has to go through events pretty swiftly, which has both benefits and drawbacks. It goes straight to business, throwing a very odd building with guillotine doors at you and people locked up boxes and frozen corpses and more, and it ultimately uses these elements to weave an entertaining locked room mystery, but at the same time, it also rushes through some details which make you wonder, hey, do things really work the way it was just said here? I enjoyed Inugamikan no Satsujin as a short read as it has some genuinely memorable moments and ideas and will also pick up some other adventures with Shizuka later, but at the same time, it's also a book that left me wondering about what it could also have been with perhaps fifty pages extra to work out some of the more rushed parts of the murder plot and the underlying motivations.

Original Japanese title(s): 月原渉『犬神館の殺人』