君と出逢った奇跡
2018's Honkaku Mystery Comics Seminar, the seminal study which explored the history of mystery manga, points to the trio of Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo, Detective Conan and Q.E.D. Shoumei Shuuryou in the early-to-mid nineties as the watershed moment that really popularized the genre. These series are serialized in magazines with boys as their primary audience (though the magazines are also widely read by girls and I think especially Conan has more female fans than male). People therefore might have a tendency to associate mystery manga with a male audience, but Honkaku Mystery Comics Seminar also clearly shows how mystery manga first flourished in magazines aimed at girls. The seventies and eighties were the formative period for originally written mystery manga with puzzle plots (not adaptations) and its champions were mostly women too. I have been exploring this formative period the last year with for example Takashina Ryouko's Murder series, the mystery tales sometimes featured in Maya Mineo's Patalliro! and Yamada Mineko's Alice series.
Earlier this year, I posted a short article on the first two volumes of Puzzle Game ☆ High School. At that time, I of course never could've guessed that Noma would pass away a few months later, but I had been reading the series on and off, and in the last few months, I've finally finished the complete original 34-volume series which ran between 1983-2001 (I read the bunko release, which is 18 volumes long) and I think it's about time I'd pick a few of the highlights from this lengthy series which I've grown to like a lot. But first a short introduction. As the title suggest, the series starts with a high school setting: Hazuru High School is a school with numerous school clubs and circle with an extremely high degree of autonomy and these clubs are exclusively governed by the student council: not even the school administration can interfere with these afterschool activities. Second-years Kazuki and Daichi are two childhood sweethearts who start their own new club: the new Mystery Club is also joined by Kazuki's best friend Mimei, a girl who can find out anything about everyone at school, and the shy first-year student Takuma, who also dabbles in stage magic. The Mystery Club's goal is to solve mysteries, of which there are plenty at school. From poisoned Valentine chocolates to blackmail attempts on clubs to vandals who paint the water in the pool red: Hazuru High School's unique club environment is also a breeding ground for countless of mysteries.
This focus on the chronology is what really sets this series apart from series like Conan and Kindaichi Shounen. Sure, Hajime might be 37 now instead of 17, but that's one single jump in time: Puzzle Game ☆ High School however is built around the notion that we see all these protagonists in various stages in their lives and the various sub-series all have a different theme and tone that fit the ages of the characters: the classic High School chapters for example seldom feature murders and focus solely on the students of Hazuru High School (you hardly see any teachers or adults around, as most of the 'crimes' are kept inside the school), while the Pre-Stage chapters make use of the idea that Kazuki is doing all these part-time jobs to introduce a diversity in settings. I only named the main sub-series above, but there are eleven titled sub-series, and they all feel distinctly different, even if they all feature the same protagonists. The three Puzzle Game - Maternity chapters for example all focus on mysteries revolving around pregnancies, while Puzzle Game ☆ Hong Kong Connection is like full-blown HK crime thriller. But as I said, these chapters are not published in chronological order, so for example the reader had already seen Hinako appear several times as a ten-year old detective before the Maternity chapters were published, and it's fairly common to see a few The Professionals chapters followed by a Jr. High chapter. The story The Goddess of Fortune makes interesting use of this plot-device by the way: the first chapter of this two-parter is about a money theft at Hazuru High School. While the school is sealed off immediately, the student council can't find the money even though it's a pretty large sum (meaning the bills are bulky). Kazuki and Daichi of course figure out the hiding spot for the money, which is actually quite clever. They identitfy the thief, but they can't figure out why that person out of everyone would ever want to steal the money The second part of The Goddess of Fortune is set six years later, when Kazuki and Daichi have established their own detective agency. The thief is finally released from prison, but now they finally learn why the thief committed the crime. This second part is not as surprising plot-wise, but it's a nice story that transcends time (and sub-series). The mini-series Tea for Two also spans across time: three tea-themed stories, one for every year in high school. The first one is the best: Daichi is living on his own now his parents have to move to the US for work, and he becomes a customer of a nearby cafe specialized in tea. Daichi and Kazuki learn that the wife of the owner died in a car accident nearby some years ago and Kazuki remembers she did saw that two bouquets and some drinks had been placed at the accident site out of respect. But when Kazuki visits the place again, she notices how one bouquet has been removed, but why, and why only one bouquet? The solution is perhaps a bit easy to guess, but it's a nice short mystery you of the type you aren't likely to come across in other mystery manga soon.
In general, the stories in Puzzle Game ☆ High School are fairly easy to solve for yourself, also because Noma is playing the game very fairly and offering fair-play puzzle plots. She definitely set the template for successors like Detective Conan, Kindaichi Shounen and Q.E.D. Shoumei Shuuryou, coupled with the series set-up with a regular cast of main characters and recurring characters and an internal chronology, with characters sometimes re-appearing after a few years. But while the stories may be a bit simple at times, there are still quite a few stories that stand out: as I'm writing this I can already see I'm not going to mention all the titles on my list, because there are just too many. In my earlier article, I already mentioned The Secret of the Red Pool in my first post, a fantastic school mystery about they mystery of why someone would throw red paint in the swimming pool, ruining the water. The motive for this 'crime' is both original and fitting the setting. Yasashii Hanzai ("A Gentle Crime") is set at the school festival, which has been threatened by a bomber. The gang of the Mystery Club eventually reveals a rather surprising truth lurking behind this truth. It's the type of story you might see in Q.E.D. or C.M.B. but not told like this.
Most of the series consists of The Professionals chapters and some of these stories take on a rather large scale: in the three-parter Tokibus Tour, Daichi and Kazuki are hired by Nonose, their former student council president who is now a lawyer. One of his firm's clients owns a touring bus company, but rumors have it that these touring buses are used to sell stolen art: potential buyers are given instructions to board certain buses on certain days and then the thieves will somehow contact them. The client has information that a recently stolen painting will be offered on one of the buses soon, and Daichi and Kazuki decide to go undercover by planting allies in and outside the bus to figure out who the thieves are and where the painting is. The story features a lot of familiar faces from the high school days who help out Kazuki and Daichi by pretending to be normal passengers and as a kind of ransom story like you'd see in Kindaichi Shounen (like the Shinsengumi story), it's fairly entertaining. The two-parter Panic in Hospital feels like Detective Conan movie: Daichi, Kazuki, Mimei and Takuma are visiting Nonose in a private clinic. At least, that's their excuse, because their real reason to come is to spy on one of the other patients. During their visit however, the clinic is taken over by an armed gang who take everyone on the floor hostage. Kazuki happened to be disguised as a nurse at the time, and with the help of the real nurses and doctors, manages to keep up the game and given some freedom to go around the floor to 'check on the patients.' As time passes by however, she starts to suspect that the gang's real goal isn't the ransom money.
There are some other minor gems in The Professionals: Listen to the Eternal Song is a fantastic everyday life mystery, where at a small party in a karaoke hall, Kazuki notices that the young man in the room opposite theirs is constantly repeating the same old song, but he does not sing and just sits there looking at the television. The young man is also visited by an elderly man, who seems to have a minor argument with him. The gang follows the man when he leaves the karaoke hall, only to find he's gone to another karaoke hall, where he plays the same song again! The explanation for this seemingly meaningless act is touching and very original. A Small Affair puts Mimei in the spotlight: her appearances in the series tend to be minor as Daichi and Kazuki are the main detectives, but she's not a founding member of the Mystery Club for nothing. In this story Daichi is investigating a doctor who's selling inventory to a dealer. He follows the dealer to his home and instructs Kazuki to tail the dealer by telling her where the dealer lives. When Kazuki arrives at the apartment the following morning however, she finds the man has moved everything away. She doesn't manage to pry information from the estate agent, but Mimei miraculously manages to find out where the dealer has gone too. It's pretty easy to guess what Mimei did differently than Kazuki, but the set-up is really good. In Worthy Juniors, Daichi, Kazuki, Mimei and Takuma are invited to the school festival by the current members of the Hazuru High School Mystery Club, who are dying to see the 'legendary' gang. Their project at the festival is a mini-murder play: a room has been changed into a murder scene and it's up to the participants to guess who the murderer is. But it turns out that the body in the room is really dead. The reason why there was a real dead body in that room is quite original and it's really fun to see how these new members of the Mystery Club seem to have some of the guts the original members have.
The chapters with Hinako can be fun too: the single chapter Puzzle Game ☆ Angel is about Hinako's first model gig as a baby for a wine company. The night after an event of this company visited by Daichi, Kazuki and baby Hinako, the son of the company's owner is found murdered at home: a burglar stole several bottles of the wine collection of the father and killed the son. Hinako however helps Daichi and Kazuki solve the case despite being still a baby. The plot is based on a certain Columbo episode (not the one about wine...), but the punchline is completely original and really funny. Hinako relly shows of her own deductive skills in Police Station Chief for One Day, where she and her boyfriend Juri (also a child actor/model) are made "boss of the police station for a day" in a campaign to bring youth crimes under the attention. Naturally, this usually just consists of participating in all kinds of events during the day, but Hinako manages to stop a crime-in-progress that nobody had even suspected simply by combining all the information she hears over the course of the day.
There are more chapters I really though worthwhile, but this post has been going for too long now. As I mentioned earlier, the original series ran from 1983-2001, but the series continued more-or-less non-stop with other publishers and other magazines. These various series too focus on different phases in Daichi and Kazuki's life: some return to the high school setting, some continue telling stories about their lives as professional detectives etc. Puzzle Game ☆ Mystere was the eight follow-up series which had only just started when Noma passed away (she had only finished the first chapter), so unfortunately this is where the series stops.
Anyway, Puzzle Game ☆ High School turned out to be a very entertaining mystery series with a clear focus on puzzle plots that are perhaps a bit simple at times, but the plot idea of jumping through time and seeing everyone grow really gives this series its own face. The sheer diversity in plots is also very memorable, while the fact the series ran in Hana to Yume (a magazine aimed at girls) also allows it to tackle very different themes than the mystery series than run in boys magazines (even if it can feel a bit too melodramatic at times). Puzzle Game ☆ High School is a series that really grows on you due to its enormous scale in story and the focus on the growth of the characters while also constantly offering different kinds of mysteries to the reader. I do intend to read the post-2001 series one day, but for now I'll take a break to let it sink in a bit.
Original Japanese title(s): 野間美由紀『パズルゲーム☆はいすくーる』(花とゆめ版）
