The Dying Game

「この世界は不思議に満ちている。どんなにあり得ないことでも起こり得る」

『名探偵に甘美なる死を』

"This world is brimming with the unknown. No matter how impossible it seems, anything can happen."

""Delicious Death" for Detectives"

Anyone here reading the manga Delicious in Dungeon by the way? I absolutely love it...

It's the very distant year of 2024 and the world has finally started moving forward again after an unparalleled pandemic called COVID-19 basically stopped the lives of everyone on the world. The last few years, many people were forced to stay at home, but there was one industry that profited from everyone barely getting out of their houses: the video game industry. The VR game industry in particular grew immensely, as the technology allowed people to go outside and explore fabulous locations, without actually going outside physically. One of the major companies to benefit from the increased popularity is Megalodon Soft, best known for its hit open-world RPG Battle Without Honor and the unique detective game Mystery Maker. The latter is of course similar to Super Mario Maker, allowing players to solve murder mysteries in a VR environment, but more importantly allowing players to create their own cases to challenge other players. Especially popular is the real-time versus mode, where one player has to plan and commit a murder in real-time, with other players roaming around on the stage. Once, and if the murderer succeeds in killing off one of the other participants, an investigation phase follows where all the players (including the unknown murderer) are allowed to investigate the scene for clues and question each other. The unique gameplay made Mystery Maker an immense hit, and Megalodon Soft is already working on its sequel, which also includes upgraded hardware: besides the usual VR-goggles and gloves, players can now wear a special feedback suit which can also simulate temperatures and a sensation of pain among others. The suit also synchronizes with the hardware module RHAPSODY, a special seat regulating the VR-environment and it has the advantage of making you not look like a fool in the eyes of the other people i the room while playing a VR game.

As part of the marketing campaign of Mystery Maker 2, Kurata Chiaki, the producer of the Mystery Maker series, plans to invite eight amateur detectives to play a session of the upcoming game within RHAPSODY. The idea is that they'll record everything, both inside the VR world and in the real world, to make a kind of web-series/documentary and show how these amateur detectives tackle a case. Freelance journalist Kamo, who has written on miscarriages of justice, is one of the people invited as an amateur detective, but he is asked a special favor by Kurata: she wants Kamo to become the murderer in their session of Mystery Maker 2. She hopes he can come up with a brilliant murder to fool the other seven detectives and stay undetected himself. Kamo agrees, and is given some time in advance to work with the development team to plan his fictional murders and to implement the things he wants for his plan into the special stage the eight detectives will be playing. Three months later and the eight amateur detectives are brought to a small island. The Megaladon House on this island is of course owned by the company, and they'll be playing the game and recording everything in this private building due to security reasons, as the game is still in development. Among the other guests are a famous private detective, a former police detective who still appears regularly on television as a criminal expert and a high school student detective. And then there's Yuuki, a budding mystery writer who also happens to the cousin of Kamo's wife. But they have only just arrived on the island, when everyone is knocked out by their coffee. When they wake up, they find that the only people inside the Megalodon House are the eight detectives. They find instructions that tell them to wear their personal VR gear found in their room and log-in in their ID-locked RHAPSODY units to come to the VR world.

Inside the VR world, they find themselves in the Doll House, the setting of the murder game Kamo had planned. However, someone has taken over as the Game Master, and it's the same person who is keeping them captured inside the Megalodon House in the real world too. They are informed that the smart watches they are wearing have a poisonous injection installed into them and are advised to obey the game master's orders, especially as these injections are also installed in the smart watches "gifted" to the participants earlier on, and which they have all given to their loved ones, meaning people like Kamo's wife and daughter, and Yuuki's girlfriend, are in danger too. The game master's orders are simple though: the eight detectives are to play a game of Mystery Maker 2 as planned. The Murderer (Kamo) has to try to commit his murders undetected in the Doll House, while the Normal Players have to figure out who committed the murders and how. The game is divided in a Murder Phase, where in principle only the Murderer is allowed to move inside the Doll House to commit his crime (the others are to stay in their room, but are allowed to "fight" back against the Murderer), and an Investigation Phase, where the Normal Players can investigate the murder, while the Murderer of course has to remain undetected by pretending to be a Normal Player too. However, the Game Master makes this virtual game of life and death, one of real life and death. One of the eight amateur detectives is actually an accomplice of the Game Master called the Executioner. If the Murderer is found out by the others, or if a Normal Player makes a wrong deduction, the Executioner will kill them in the real world in the Megaladon House as punishment. Kamo is thus forced to commit murders in the VR world, while in the real world, everyone is on their guard for the Executioner, but it doesn't take long for locked room murders to occur both in the VR Doll House and the real Megalodon House. But who is the murderer? The Game Master has dubbed this game "Delicious Death" for Detectives, which is also the English title of Houjou Kie's Meitantei ni Kanbi naru Shi wo (2022).

 My first post of 2020 was about Houjou Kie's fantastic debut novel Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei ("The Hourglass of the Time-Space Traveller", 2019), and last year's first post was about her second, equally impressive novel Kotou no Raihousha ("Visitors on the Remote Island" 2020). I had hoped that 2022's first post could be about her third novel, but while the previous books were released late fall/early winter, Meitantei ni Kanbi naru Shi wo was released in the second week of January 2022, hence it not becoming 2022's first post. But you guess from my intention to make it the first post, that I had been looking forward to this book. Which is of course because I loved her first two novels. Houjou is a former member of the Kyoto University Mystery Club and also wrote whodunnit stories back then, and it shows in her writing style: these books are pure grand-scale puzzlers, plotted incredibly densely with almost any action, and utterence being a valid piece to the puzzle. While at one hand, you can feel Houjou is really trying to play as fair as possible with the crazy amount of clues laid down, these stories have also been deliciously hard to solve, challenging you to do long chains of reasoning in order to solve the impossible murders seen in her books and personally, it's the style of detective fiction I love best. The other interesting part about her writing is that she loves special settings: her debut novel Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei was a much a fair-play classic puzzler as you can get, but also included the brilliant plot device of time travel, while her second book Kotou no Raihousha cleverly had the characters fight against a true mystery, a being of unknown origins, of which they had to deduce its capabilities and intentions based on its actions and inactions. Houjou managed to write brilliant detectives using original, supernatural ideas, so I was really looking forward to the third novel in the so-called Ryuuzen Clan series, as these books all involve family members of the Ryuuzen clan. Meitantei ni Kanbi naru Shi wo features the both protagonists from the two previous books by the way: Kamo being the protagonist of the first book, and Ryuuzen Yuuki of the second.

Going from themes of time travel and unearthly beings to... a VR game might sound a bit... tame in that regard. Because while the VR-system in this book is slightly more advanced than the things we have now, it's not like the setting is really unusual or "special", because consumers have had access to VR games for years. And while the concept of the closed circle death game, where people are locked up in a location and forced to kill each other while others try to figure out who the murderer is, might not be as popular in detective novels, gamers are very, very familiar with them with popular games like Danganronpa, the Zero Escape series and many, many more about this exact theme (Oh, by the way, I started with The Sekimeiya a while back. It's both very fast, and very slow, so no idea when I'll be done with it...).  And the concept of having special phases for the murders is of course not only familiar for digital gamers (Danganronpa again), but also for real-life board game players who play games like Mafia/Werewolf. So on paper, Meitantei ni Kanbi naru Shi wo might feel not as exciting as Houjou's previous books. Especially not after my over-convoluted summary above!

Because in actuality, the plot of this book gets going surprisingly fast and it basically never stops until the very, very end, keeping you hooked all the way through. Because of the Game Master's rules, the story follows a basic "gameplay loop" of a Murder Phase, followed by an Investigation Phase in the VR World, which will lead to an accusation by one of the Normal Players aimed at who they think is the Murderer within "Delicious Death" for Detectives, while the accused is also given a chance to rebute these accusations. This is followed by a Murder Phase in the real world, where the players are forced to stay in their rooms while the Executioner tries to kill the person who failed in their role earlier in the VR game, which then loops back into a new cycle in "Delicious Death" for Detectives. The eight detectives are given two days to solve all the murders that occur in the closed circles in both in the VR world and the real world (with Kamo, as the Murderer in the game, having an advantage of knowing what happened in the game, but he'll be killed if any of the players figure his crimes out without figuring out those of the Executioner). Because all these phases follow each other and this insane death game keeps on going until the end of the book, Meitantei ni Kanbi naru Shi wo ends up being a very, very densely plotted mystery novel, with accusations, false solutions, clues and foreshadowing constantly flying around. There's the inverted angle for example, as we as the reader know Kamo is the Murderer in the game, but we don't see exactly how he manages to pull off his impossible murders there, so there's plenty of mystery there already, even without considering the other murders committed by the Executioner! Then you have the various characters arguing theories about the murders happening in the Doll House in the VR world, investigations in the locked room murders in the real world, people discussing the reason why they're being held by the Game Master in the first place, and so much more.. And with murders occuring both in the VR world and the real world, this book is truly a treat for those who love solving puzzles.

By the way, I love how the game Mystery Maker is portrayed in this novel. You can clearly tell Houjou is from a generation who grew up playing video games, as the way the game is shown feels so natural to gamers, all the way down to the little things. While the idea of RHAPSODY and VR suits feel a bit "near-futuristic", the actual "game grammar" will feel naturalistic to gamers with little details like having item descriptions for in-game items in your inventory, having save points and floating name markers. The Game Master also immediately rules out the cliched "they were using fake in-game names!' trick that is so outdated now, showing that Houjou is definitely a "contemporary" writer who plays games and is familiar with the cliches of how games in (mystery) fiction are sometimes portrayed. But it's not just the description of Mystery Maker that works; a lot of the ideas in this novel work only because half of the murders are committed inside a VR environment, and there are some brilliant tricks pulled off here! People who have played the Danganronpa games might remember a certain episode that made brilliant use of the game-within-a-game plot device and I'd say it's the same type of idea: some of the things the Murderer (Kamo) and the Executioner pull off are so original in mystery fiction, because they could only have been used within a video game context/world, and yet it makes perfect sense. That is why despite "a VR world" not being a theme as "supernatural" as time travel, Meitantei ni Kanbi naru Shi wo does do a great job at presenting murders that could only have been committed in these special circumstances.

People without experience with video games might find this book a bit too dense because of this though: with murders going on in the real world and the VR world, and having to learning the fundamentals of game grammar, one could say the book can feel a bit overwhelming even at times. I myself had to remind myself to really pay attention to what sections happened in the VR world and which in the real world, because even within one chapter people often have to go back and forth between the two worlds, so the book does require you to really pay much attention, more so than the previous two books, and if you already have trouble adapting to the idea of a VR game,  I can imagine Meitantei ni Kanbi naru Shi wo being a rather hard book to follow. I had to think to the Umezz Collection release of the classic manga The Drifting Classroom, which used different kind of paper depending on whether the narrative was in the present world or the place where the school had been zapped to, or to Shimada Souji's Okujou no Doukeshi, which used different fonts for the four different narratives, but such techniques wouldn't work here as good, as the section cuts are less "clean" with people going in and out the VR world within one chapter multiple times.

But still, personally, I think this book is a banger and certainly one of the best novels I'll read this year. The concept of having murders happening in a closed circle situation in both the game world of Mystery Maker and the real world isn't just a story set-up, it's an integral part of the puzzle plot. There are some great inspired ideas, like having the Normal Players who are killed in "Delicious Death" for Detectives reappear in the game (with a halo!) so they can join the investigation in their own deaths, meaning you have "ghosts" testifying about their own "murder." But you also have small occurances happening in one world that are later revealed to have been connected to incidents in the real world and more connections like these that tie the two worlds together, making this not a book consisting of two seperate halves, but a single story of ambitious scale.  The impossible murders happening here use tricks you are not likely to have seen anywhere else (the big reveal two-thirds in is truly memorable!), made only possible because of the special setting. The false solutions are also great, often very convincing and based on hints you thought were cleverly hidden, only to realize there were even more cleverly hidden hints that disprove those false solutions! For fans of the Ellery Queen-style of reasoning, with an emphasis on fair-play and long chains of deductions based on various clues spread throughout the book, Houjou has never disappointed and she doesn't disappoint in this book either.

In the end, I think I only need to mention two caveats for this book. Yes, this book can become insanely complex due to so much happening, and I also have to mention that it is definitely best read after the first two books in this series, because some of the moments work better having seen Kamo and Yuuki in their own adventures first. But besides that, I think Meitantei ni Kanbi naru Shi wo was another incredibly strong mystery novel by Houjou, one that I'd recommend everyone interested in pure puzzlers. This is the kind of mystery novel I personally love: an ambitious puzzle plot that's packed with clues from start to finish, detectives who throw theories at each other and debunk them, original murders that make good use of the unique setting of the book and long chains of reasoning where you see the detective crossing off each suspect one by one by utilizing every piece of information we've seen until that point until all the loose lines come together at one single point. Few novels manage to make solving a puzzle so fun with such a memorable concept. 

Original Japanese title(s): 方丈貴恵『名探偵に甘美なる死を』

What You Don't Know Can Kill You

「推理小説には「特殊設定ミステリ」というジャンルがあってね」

「はあ」

「その中では、物語世界だけで通用する超自然的な現象が登場し、それにまつわる特別ルールが提供されるのがお約束になっている。そして、その特別ルールが謎解きの前提条件になるんだ」

『孤島の来訪者』

 

"So there's this genre they call the Special Setting Mysteries..."

"Yeah?"

"You have these supernatural phenomena that only exist within the specific worlds of those stories, and they always come with special rules governing them. And those special rules become the basis for solving the mystery." 

"Visitors on the Remote Island"

My first post of 2020 was on Houjou Kie's Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei ("The Hourglass of the Time-Space Traveller", 2019), a book I absolutely loved. So I figure, why not start 2021 with a review of her second novel?

Kakuriyo Island is a small, remote tropical island that was once the home of about a dozen people, but it has been uninhabitated since 1974. Kakuriyo Island technically consists of two islands, which are commonly referred to as Kakuriyo Island collectively: people lived on the main Kakuriyo Island, which is connected to the tidal island locals called the Divine Land: whenever lightning would strike the Divine Land several times, the local, esotoric religious ceremony called the Lightning Festival would be held at the Divine Land, headed by the members of the Mikumi clan, the main family of the island. In 1974, however, the whole island community was slaughtered in what was later called the Incident of the Beast of Kakuriyo Island. When the police arrived on the island, they found a nightmarish scene: all twelve villagers on the island had been killed by a stab through the heart, save for island head Mikumo Eiko, whose body was floating in the sea. There had been one outsider on the island at the time, a professor Sasakura who had been examining the local flora and fauna, who was also found dead, but his body had been cruelly eaten skin and all by something. Because there are rumors of a hidden gold treasure on the island, it was first assumed that Sasakura might've gone crazy while looking for the treasure and that he got fatally injured himself too while killing everyone, but it wouldn't explain why the meat of his corpse had been devoured skin and all. It was first assumed the dogs must've done it, but the police never really found an answer that explained why the whole island was massacred or how the murderer managed to stab every victim right through the heart. Nobody has lived on Kakuriyo Island since, and to visit the island, one must now ask for permission from the local authorities.

45 years have passed when a small television crew arrives at Kakuriyo Island in 2019 to film J Television's special program World's Mysteries Detective Club. The host of the program will be the singer-songwriter Mikumo Echika, who also happens to be the last living heir of Kakuriyo's Mikumo clan: her father had not been living on the island when the tragedy occured and he never returned to his ancestral home during his lifetime. For Echika, this is the first time she'll see her family home, which of course is expected to be great screen material. The show will look into the tragedy that occured in 1974, but Professor Motegi, expert on tropical fauna, is also part of the team, as he hopes to discover a new species on Kakuriyo Island and so the coming days, two teams will be going around the island, one to film World's Mysteries Detective Club and one following Motegi's quest for scientific discoveries. The nine-man team quickly sets up camp and HQ inside the community centre (the only building on the island that's still intact) and the two teams each go off exploring the island. Assistant-director Ryuuzen Yuuki is assigned to Echika's team, but none of the others know that he's actually planning to murder some of the people present. His targets took someone dear to him, so Yuuki vowed to take revenge on them and everything has been prepared to execute justice during their stay on the island. Which is why he's rather annoyed when he finds one of his intended targets murdered, stabbed right through the chest. It doesn't appear any of the crew members could've commited this murder however and eventually, it leads them to the horrifying conclusion that there's something not from this world roaming this island that's trying to kill them. While the hypothesis sounds absolutely ridiculous at first, it's soon proved to be completely correct and they realize that it's this Outsider that was behind the 1974 tragedy where everybody got killed. The remaining people now have to figure out how to survive against an enemy of which they know nearly nothing and who might be much closer than they suspect in Houjou Kie's 2020 novel Kotou no Raihousha ("Visitors on the Remote Island").

People who have read Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei will recognize the family name Ryuuzen and thus realize the two books are connected, even if the (supernatural) themes are very different. Kotou no Raihousha introduces the series title The Ryuuzen Clan series for these books, and I certainly hope we'll see more entries in this series!

Like I mentioned earlier, Houjou's debut novel Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei was one of my favorite reads of last year: it had basically everything from closed circle situations, impossible murders, disappearances from locked houses, alibi tricks, a family curse, overly complicated family feuds and a creepy country house in the middle of nowhere to a Challenge to the Reader and on top of that there was also the science fiction element of time travel which was incorporated very well with the mystery plot. The story was a very fair, and very traditional detective story despite the time travel aspect, and one of the things that stuck with me the most was how densely clewed the novel was, and despite the enormous scale of the book, it felt genuinely like Houjou wanted you to make it to the finish line yourself. It shouldn't be a surprise therefore that I was really looking forward to Kotou no Raihousha the moment it was announced.

In a way, Kotou no Raihousha is quite like its predecessor, but at the same time very different. Once again, we have a story that seemingly follows a familiar mystery trope (murders on an isolated island), but with a supernatural theme. But whereas Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei starts out with introducing the element of time travel to the reader and also shows off what the governing rules of time travel are, Kotou no Raihousha turns this idea completely around: the characters in this novel are suddenly confronted with a being of which they know nearly nothing, only that it's unlike anything that we know from Earth. The mystery this time therefore focuses on figuring out what the characteristics and abilities are of this unknown Outsider, based on the actions it takes or doesn't (can't) take. In a way, this is similar to reading a 'normal' detective story and reading a passage that serves as a clue to tell you the murderer was left-handed or that they have an injury on their right leg, but in Kotou no Raihousha, the conclusions you have to make about the murderer are not 'normal' as its abilities and capabilities are unlike any living creature on Earth, but at the same time, they are defined in enough of a limited manner to make them not overpowered. Kotou no Raihousha is therefore a lot harder than the first novel, because this time, it's the reader's (and Yuuki's) task to identify the supernatural rules that govern this novel, while in Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei, the supernatural element focused more on application (as the rules were told to you).

It's what makes this a hard novel to explain in more detail, because the bulk of the novel revolves exactly around the manner in which the characters slowly, but surely create a bullet list of what the Outsider exactly can and can't do, and telling you more about some of the later situations in the novel might spoil too much already, as the story is definitely about slowly revealing what the creature is and how it commits the murders. There's an interesting locked room mystery situation at the end of the novel for example, with a man staying in a room in the community centre while keeping an eye on the rest of the building through cameras and there's even a dog standing guard in the hallway leading to his room, but still the man is murdered despite all of these security measures . Houjou makes clever use of the capabilities of the creature to create this locked room mystery and it's deviously keenly plotted as this scene also connects in a surprising way to other story developments, but so much of how the mystery works and why it's such a baffling problem hinges on discoveries made throughout the novel about the creature, so it's really difficult to explain what makes it so well planned. Whereas Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei starts off with "Hey, this is about time travel" (even in its title!), Kotou no Raihousha's mystery revolves around figuring out what the supernatural element is for yourself and it really shouldn't be spoiled here.

Like the first novel, Kotou no Raihousha is a very puzzle-focused mystery novel. Everything that occurs, will in a way connect to the mystery, either serving as a hint to the Outsider's characteristics or the murders the Outsider commits, and some might even feel it's too contrived, but this is definitely the kind of detective story I like: every event has a well-considered function as a puzzle piece and while sometimes it might feel a bit artificial, at least Houjou is playing the game fair and square. This novel has a Challenge to the Reader too and I think it's a lot more challenging than the one in the first novel, but you never feel cheated or that some elements were truly far too hard to figure out yourself.

I like how Kotou no Raihousha is a bit more... active and tense than the first novel. With a closed circle situation on an island with an unknown predator, there's a more tangible feeling of dread and terror and it's also funny how Yuuki is driven into a role of detective: he's still planning to get his revenge on the remaining targets while they're on the island, so he only wants to figure out what the Outsider is and how to defend against it so he can kill his intended targets himself, instead of having another of them taken from him by the Outsider. Following a would-be murderer playing detective so he can murder people himself is an interesting angle and creates a few intriguing scenes where Yuuki wants to create situations where only he'd get a chance to safely commit a murder on his target, but not the creature.

Before I started with Kotou no Raihousha, I honestly hadn't expected that writing this review would be so difficult. The book's a keenly plotted puzzle mystery that makes great use of a very unique supernatural premise to present a detective story you're unlikely to have seen before, but as the plot also revolves around having the readers and the characters themselves figure out what the mystery exactly is in the first place and then seeing it applied to the situations you see in the book, it's neigh impossible to really point out the more impressive moments without spoiling much of the fun. If you like Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei or puzzle plot mysteries with a supernatural premise in general, Kotou no Raihousha is a no-brainer and should appear on your to-read lists. The book's definitely a lot trickier if you're not familiar with supernatural fair-play mysteries as it demands more of its readers than these type of mysteries usually do, though Houjou still shows she's good at plotting whodunnit-style stories and it should still be an enjoyable read. I for one can't wait for the third book, whenever that may come. This is the first post of the year, but I'm sure this will end up on my favorite reads of the year list!

Original Japanese title(s): 方丈貴恵『孤島の来訪者』

No Time To Die

"Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart” 

"Momo"

And it's right back to business at the start of the new year!

Rena had been confronted with the reality of the "Ryuuzen Curse" all her life, as most of her family had died due to unnatural causes like traffic accidents. When what should've been a normal cold suddenly turned out to be a far more dangerous disease, she knew she wouldn't have much time left on this world. Her loving husband Kamo Touma, once a sleazy gossip writer who first fell in love with Rena while he was researching the Ryuuzen Curse, however could hardly accept something as a "family curse" as the reason why his wife's terminally ill at such a young age. While lamenting their fate in the hospital parking lot, Kamo is suddenly addressed by a mysterious voice who introduces themselves as Meister Hora. The voice assures Kamo that Rena's current condition is a direct cause of the Ryuuzen Curse and that the only way to save her is to travel 58 years back in time to the origin of the curse. In August 1960, practically all of the Ryuuzen Clan had gathered in the holiday villa in Shino. Head of the family in 1960 was Ryuuzen Taiga, great-great-great-grandfather of Rena. While there had also been family losses during and after World War II, four generations of Ryuuzen had gathered in the holiday villa that year to celebrate Taiga's birthday, with the youngest being Fumika, Rena's grandaunt, who was only thirteen at the time. Fumino, Rena's grandmother, had not been present in the villa at the time, which made her the only living Ryuuzen after the so-called Deadly Tragedy of Shino. A landslide had covered and destroyed the whole villa, leaving no survivors, but when the police investigated the building after the disaster, they learned some of the deaths had not been caused by a force of nature. The remains of Fumika's diary revealed that in the days leading up the landslide, several murders had occured inside the villa. The landslide had killed off the rest of the Ryuuzens, and the identity of the murderer remained unknown forever.

Meister Hora tells Kamo that in order to save Rena, he needs to stop the murderer in 1960. To Kamo's great surprise, he finds Meister Hora is capable of sending him through time and space, and he finds himself transported to the villa in August of 1960. Unfortunately, time-travel can be a wibbly-wobbly affair and Kamo finds that he arrives after the first two murders have already occured, but thanks to Fumika, who overhears Kamo and Meister Hora arguing and believes their time travel story, Kamo is quickly invited inside the house as 'a detective from the city' and asked to investigate the murders and capture the culprit. While Kamo's a pretty intelligent man and has the power of sixty years of hindsight, having once investigated this series of deaths himself in his journalist days, he finds that the case is far harder to solve than he had expected. Not only have the first two murders occured under impossible circumstances, as whole body parts were smuggled out of the villa even though the only exit had been watched all evening, he must also try to prevent further murders from happening, but things don't always go as he had learned from his history lessons. It's a race against the clock with the landslide about to happen in Houjou Kie's Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei ("The Hourglass of the Time-Space Traveller", 2019).

Houjou Kie is a former member of the Kyoto University Mystery Club (like Ayatsuji Yukito, Abiko Takemaru, Norizuki Rintarou and more), who made her debut as a professional writer in October 2019 by winning the 29th Ayukawa Tetsuya Award with this novel. She had been working hard on her debut, as she had already reached the final round of the 28th Ayukawa Tetsuya Award in 2018 with a different novel. In fact, she was also an active writer during her time as a student member of the Kyoto University Mystery Club (more about that later), but now she's made her professional debut, and man, I hope to see more of her work soon!

For Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei is brimming with everything I like about mystery novels. It's a very dense story, almost insanely so, but it holds together, somehow. Still, it's a mystery novel that involves closed circle situations, impossible murders, disappearances from locked houses, alibi tricks, a family curse and overly complicated family feuds, a creepy country house in the middle of nowhere, a Challenge to the Reader and on top of that there's also the science fiction element of time travel. Houjou is very ambitious to say the least, and it's almost a wonder the novel doesn't collapse on itself by its weight, for not only does it work, I'd say Houjou does a great job at keeping it all very understandable because she knows and understands how to plot a mystery story and more specifically, because she knows how clewing and foreshadowing has to be done for a fair-play mystery story.

To put it simply, Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei is very much like a novel-length version of the traditional Guess-the-Culprit/Whodunit stories of the Kyoto University Mystery Club. These are short mystery stories with a Challenge to the Reader written by members for members. Readers have about an hour to read the story and figure out who the culprit is in the story, but their accusation should always be based on the clues presented in the story. There are a few unwritten rules for these stories, like 'there is only one culprit', 'nobody besides the culprit lies intentionally' and 'all the hints necessary to solve the crime are in the story' (therefore, nothing/no person outside the world described in the story exists) and most of these stories are solved through a Queen-esque elimination method: identify the characteristics the culprit must have (i.e. must have known about the key in the closet, or must be left-handed) and see who fits (or does not fit) the profile. One thing that is very important for these stories that they must be fairly clewed. Anyone can write an unsolvable mystery story: writing a mystery story that is fair and solvable, but still challenging is difficult. Especially with the Guess-the-Culprit format, which are held in a classroom setting, it's not a good sign if after 30 minutes nobody even tries to guess who the culprit is based on the hints in the story.

Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei is like a novel-length version of these stories, and the result is that the novel is insanely densily clewed. Few stories will try to be as fair as this one, and even fewer will manage to be still as satisfying as this novel. Houjou has gone great lengths to properly hint every aspect of her plot and what's impressive is that she's always trying to do it as fairly as possible. The last set of murders for example, most writers would've left one single hint at what had happened, and in the conclusion mocked the reader for not guessing what the solution was based on that one thing. Houjou has a whole series of clues that together point towards the solution and she does that pretty cunningly too, as the hints are all found in different aspects of the story. But she does this for everything in the novel: every mystery in the novel, be it a murder or about the identity of the murderer, is accompanied by quite a few clues from various angles. It makes the conclusion a very satisfying read, as you'll see she has left clues everywhere in the novel that eventually all point towards the solution. It does make the writing  a bit unnatural occasionally, as they are times where you know she's just writing about something because it's so coming back in the conclusion as an important point and it's obvious you need to make a mental note now, but as a keenly plotted mystery novel that really hopes that its readers will try to solve it, I think Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei is one of the best novels I've read in the last few years. You can really tell the writer wants the reader to solve the mystery based on the hints, and not with a condescending "I gave you this and you still didn't get it?' attitude, but a genuine, playful manner that sees the mystery story as a logical game of entertainment. I think what will stick to me the most about this novel, is how wonderfully nice and kind-hearted the clewing is, without making the mystery too easy (as it really isn't).

After a short prologue, the science fiction element of time travelling seems to take a backseat, as most of the first half seems to unfold like a "regular" mystery story with all the impossible crimes and more, but the time travel aspect of the story returns more prominently in the second half, making this truly a mystery story that cleverly includes time travelling. I mused a bit about mystery stories that cleverly use supernatural/fantasy/sicence fiction elements to create more unique situations last year, and Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei is one to add to the list of succesful examples. The most important thing it does right is clearly declaring the rules and limits of time travel at an early stage, and you can use those rules to figure out if and how time travel could be used in this story. That said, what Houjou does well is not write a mystery story that only revolves around time travel. Many parts of the story are "normal", but the way it at least forces you to consider the possibility of time travel makes it a very different experience. Houjou's rules luckily limit the ways in which time travel could be used, and when it's used it's quite clever. In fact, I'm kinda disappointed one fake solution proposed for one of the murders wasn't the real one, as that would've been an absolutely original murder method. That said, you certainly mustn't think everything in the novel can be answered by crying "time travel!" and you have to carefully consider where it would work and where it wouldn't work, and in the latter case, still figure out how those impossible crimes were pulled off!

Personally, I loved this novel, but I can imagine some people might think it feels too much like a puzzle. As mentioned, it's a densely clewed novel with a lot of things going on, and that's even without including the time travel aspect of the story, which of course makes things even more complex. At the end of the story, everything comes together deliciously, but some readers could think this novel feels too much like a puzzle. As someone who reads mystery fiction exactly because I like cleverly plotted puzzle plots however, I can only say I wish more novels were like Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei!

After reading this story, I remembered I still had a short Guess-the Culprit story by Houjou from her amateur days, which I dug up. The Guess-the Culprit stories of the Kyoto University Mystery Club are for club members only, as they're usually scheduled as part of the weekly meeting, but once in a few years, the best of them will be selected to appear in the anthology Whodunit Best, which is sold by the Kyoto University Mystery Club at university fairs and other occassions. The most recent volume is 2014's Whodunit Best Vol. 5 (I'm in there too with a short essay!), which features Houjou's Obakeeeee! ("Ghooooosts!"), originally presented in 2006 as the 359th Guess-the-Culprit in the history of the club. It was pretty funny reading this story right after Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei, because you can definitely sense a common theme. The protagonist of this story is the college student Kouichirou, who can see and communicate with ghosts. He has a guardian ghost in Shinonome, a samurai-esque ghost who likes solving mysteries. Kouichirou is spending a few days up in the montains, to help out his uncle, who has bought a nice lodge there to serve as a B&B. One of the guests is murdered on the first night however, and it's up to Kouichirou and Shinonome to figure out whodunit.

And the common theme with Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei is of course the supernatural theme. It's a short story, but the clewing is quite diverse, some quite 'ordinary' for these kinds of Guess-the-Culprit stories (the culprit knowing or not knowing a certain fact), some more original. But then there's also the element of ghosts, and that's used pretty interestingly. In this story, ghosts adher to three basic rules like ghosts having no mass or having the ability to touch/carry things in the mortal world for thirty seconds, twice every twenty-four hours. And in order to solve the story, you really need to use those rules to figure out whether a ghost could or could not have committed the murder. It's a really interesting concept, and quite similar to how time travel is used in Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei, with it being an important concept to keep in mind, but not the answer to everything.

Anyway, Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei was a great debut novel. It's brimming with everything I like about the genre, and executed in very capable, and perhaps most importantly, very inviting manner, as you really feel like the writer wants you to solve the mystery yourself. I sure hope more of Houjou will be released soon: I mean, there's the novel with which she reached the final round of the 2018 Ayukawa Tetsuya Award....

Original Japanese title(s): 方丈貴恵『時空旅行者の砂時計』
水木貴理「お化けぇぇぇぇぇ！」