The Triple Hoax

“Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.” 

"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

Hm, it's been some years since I last did a short short post, when I want to do discuss several mystery-related media without having to write a full-length review.

First off, a small preview of The Beautiful Kyoto Flower Arrangement Practioners Murder Case, the newest story of Kindaichi 37-sai no Jikenbo ("The Case Files of Kindaichi, Age 37"). The first half of this story is collected in the recently released fourth volume, which makes it impossible to write a full review on the story, though I can already reveal I kinda like the main problem. Kindaichi is sent to Kyoto by his PR company to work out a new package tour for foreign tourists, where they'll have the chance to visit a famous family of ikebana practictioners, the traditional art of Japanese flower arrangement and attend a course. The Kyougoku family is the head of the Akaike-style of ikebana, and previous collaboration projects already made it clear the head of the family's infamously hard to work with, a fact Kindaichi and his assistant Hayama also find out the moment they arrive in the Kyougoku home in Kyoto. The current head of the family is actually not a gifted ikebana pracitioner himself, and only became the head of the family after the death of his brother. His twin nieces Kaoruko and Sakurako are the talents of the family, although Sakurako left the house to become a modern flower artist (though she's back now to help out). Kindaichi and Hayama stay for one night at the house, but in the middle of the night, Kindaichi discovers the dead body of Sakurako lying in the rock garden. The carefully raked pattern in the gravel (which takes up to 6 hours to do) only show Sakurako's own footprints as she walked to the middle of the rock garden to apparently commit suicide on top of the rocks, and she has a motive too as revenge porn pictures of her were posted on social media some weeks earlier. It's hard to say where this story will bring us at the moment: more murders follow, but there's surprisingly little investigation conducted into this neat variant of the footprints-in-the-snow at this stage of the story. I do hope that volume five will contain the conclusion to this story (though I can't imagine it won't).

And as for the main reason for wanting to write a short short today: lately I've been into reading classical shoujo (girls) manga from the sixties-seventies. In my review of Takashina Ryouko's Piano Sonata Satsujin Jiken, I wrote:

(...) the puzzle plot mystery manga's roots could be traced to the uprise of female manga artists in the 70s who would leave an everlasting impression on the industry. The 70s provided a space for experimentation within the manga format, and it was especially daring female artists who did incredible things there. A while back, I reviewed the animated feature They Were Eleven! for example, based on a comic by industry legend Hagio Moto which incorporated mystery, science-fiction and human drama. The horror genre in the manga format has also been long associated with comics for female readers, as that too flourished in the 70s under the auspices of female manga artists. From there it's not hard to see how horror artists would work their way to mystery manga, as the two genres have much in common.

So I've exploring this period of mystery manga even more lately. One of the more interesting titles was Yamada Mineko's Alice series. Yamada's one of the members of the so-called Year 24 Group, a group of female manga artists who were groundbreaking in their genre-breaking approach to female-oriented comics in the 70s (see also Hagio Moto mentioned in the quote). The group is named after the fact most of them were born in or around the year of Showa 24, or 1949. Yamada is best known for her science fiction series Saishuu Sensou ("Final Wars"), but she also wrote horror and mystery stories. I believe that most of her mystery-related output is concentrated in her Alice series, which was published from 1974 until 1978 in various magazines. The first story, Run Alice, introduces us to the young girl Alice, whose rich parents (who were never around anyway) have recently died. Her uncle and aunt want to inherit the immense family fortune, and hire assassins to kill their niece. What follows is a comedic adventure with Alice ending up at an all-boys school and become friends with a boy there called Dick Tracy. At this point, it's hardly a mystery stories, but the second story, The Stolen Jewel, is definitely an orthodox mystery story, where at a school party, someone's jewel is stolen. The plot is borrowed from G.K. Chesterton (which Yamada herself explains in a note at the end of the story), but it's a first step into a more classical mystery series.

What makes this series interesting for the reader is that Yamada used the characters of Alice, Dick and their friends in a very diverse manner. Yamada wrote for multiple magazines with different target readers, but Yamada would constantly adapt her characters for whatever story she wanted to write for the magazine. The pilot story is a comedic, slapstick inspired adventure that is very cartoon-like, while the fourth story, Where Did Our Summer Go?, is a pretty deep psychological thriller completely unlike the pilot story. Each of the nine Alice stories is completely unique in terms of atmosphere and as Yamada's artstyle also changed drastically in these four years, most of the time the stories don't even look like they belong together. You have a few classic murder case stories, but also theft cases and a few more psychologically-oriented thrillers. Heck, the very last story is actually a crossover with the science fiction Saishuu Sensou series, resulting in a really weird series 'finale' (it's best read as a spin-off). Overall, the mystery plots of the Alice series are seldom really impressive, but as perhaps one of the earliest proper mystery manga series with recurring characters and setting, it's definitely an interesting title in terms of history. All the Alice stories are collected in the volume Alice to Sannin no Futago ("Alice and the Three Twins"), though I think there's an older volume with the exact same title (other cover) that may not feature everything (and you can also find the various stories spread across different collections, to further the confusion).

One series that has definitely made into the history books on manga is Patalliro! by Maya Mineo. This shoujo comedy series that has ben running since the late 70s is about a short, arrogant and money-grabbing guy called Patalliro, who also happens to be the king of the really wealthy kingdom of Malynera. The core of this series is slapstick comedy, revolving around the wacky adventures of Patalliro, his friends Bancoran (a MI6 agent), Maraich (handsome assassin who married Bancoran) and Patalliro's personal army of "Onions" (handsome men whose uniform/hairdo makes them look like onions). The series is immensely popular with over a hundred volumes, an anime adaptation and was even recently made into a live-action movie-musical (based on the musical that ran before the movie).

Like The Simpsons, Patalliro! can take on many genres: sometimes it's just comedy, sometimes it's science fiction, other times they have occult adventures and of course, there are quite a number of mystery stories. There are in fact so many mystery stories, they have exclusively mystery-themed volumes of Patalliro!. They were on sale a few weeks ago, so I picked a few of the mystery volumes. Considering that Patalliro! isn't mainly a mystery series and that these detective stories are more like And Now For Something Completely Different episodes, I have to say I was quite amused by them. Sometimes the stories take some time to really move beyond the slapstick prologue and get on with the plot, but the story gets going, you'll come across the classic tropes like impossible thefts, locked room murders and whodunnits. None of the stories are truly brilliant, but they're also better than they have any right to be considering that Patalliro! isn't even a mystery series at heart. The plots are admittedly often simple and the experienced mystery reader can definitely quickly pick them apart, but they're well-constructed and they're perfectly fine as a mystery plots in a non-mystery series. For those interested, I know that at the very least, volume 29, 35 and 45 of the bunko releases are touted as mystery-themed volumes and there may be more of them.

Anyway, that's it for this Short Short. I'm still busy exploring the world of 70s mystery and horror manga, so I might return to this topic in a more extensive post in the future, and as for Kindaichi, the next volume is scheduled for October (as is the home video release of Detective Conan: Fist of the Blue Sapphire by the way!), so I'll probably review the full story then.

Original Japanese title(s): 天樹征丸（原）、さとうふみや（画）『金田一37歳の事件簿』第4巻; 山田ミネコ　『アリスと３人のふたご』; 魔夜峰央　『パタリロ！』第29巻