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"

The Chocolate-Covered Contest

"Life is like a box of chocolates."
"Forest Gump"

Oh, wow, are we going from the yellow/brown covers for this series to blue? I love the art!

It's been over a year since I last discussed Ooyama Seiichirou's wonderful The Clockmaker Detective series here, which is perhaps better known nowadays as known as Alibi Kuzushi Uketamawarimasu ("Alibi Cracking, At Your Service"), which is not only the title of the books, but also of the live-action drama series. In January 2024, Ooyama started the third "season" of this series with the online publication of Tokeiya Tantei to Shinnen no Alibi ("The Clockmaker Detective and A New Year's Alibi"), the first story to be included in what should become the third short story collection. It took over a year for Ooyama to publish the second story, but it has now finally arrived,and you can read it for free on the J-Novel site of the publisher (the first story of this season is also still available). The basic premise of each story is of course the same: the unnamed narrator is a police detective who frequents Mitani Clockmakers, which is run by Mitani Tokino, a young woman who inherited the shop from her grandfather. As per her grandfather's instructions, she also offers an alibi cracking service, because alibis are are "time-related" and therefore part of a clockmaker's work. While he understands that passing on confidential information pertaining to police investigations to Tokino is probably not quite legal, and that it could cost him his job, it is also true that Tokino has managed to solve each of the problems he has brought to her, and that her exploits have helped the police immensely, even if his co-workers think it's him who has solved all these cases. Another reason for our narrator to visit Tokino frequently is the woman herself, as he's quite smitten with her and is trying to woo her.

The stories in this third collection seem to be themed after special events this time, for after the murder on New Year's Eve in the first story, this time we have a Valentine's Day-themed story with Tokeiya Tantei to Doku-iri Chocolates no Alibi ("The Clockmaker Detective and the Alibi of the Poisoned Chocolates"). The narrator this time arrives at the shop with some souvenirs from Kyoto for Tokino: his current investigation had brought him to the ancient capital, but with no clear results, he now has turn to Tokino for help. Hirata Yuuichi, a day trader, was been sent a box of poisoned chocolates and he died immediately after consuming one of them: the parcel had just been delivered, and soon after the housekeeper had given the box to Hirata, she heard how her master toppled loudly on the floor, convulsing in pain and by the time the ambulance arrived, it was already too late. The shipping documents on the parcel had been sent by Oohara Arisa, living at an address in Kyoto. The box also came with a letter, stating the chocolates, Miracle du Février, were a Valentine's Day gift. Because it seems a bit unlikely the poisoner would send the chocolates under her own name, the police don't believe the sender information, but when they call the number noted in the sender information section, they are indeed connected to Arisa, who does know Hirata, as she's in his day trading course, but she denies having sent chocolates to him.

The police do investigate her just to be sure, but it seems Arisa can't be the poisoner, as she has an alibi for when the chocolates were posted. The chocolates had been sent via the Kujira courier service, and by tracing the shipping slips, they trace the parcel back to a convenience store in Kyoto: it had been sent from that convenience store on the seventh of Feburary, with instructions for the parcel to be delivered on Valentine's Day. The chocolates meanwhile came from a specialty shop that makes special Valentine's Day chocolates each year, and they start selling at 10 am on the seventh of February. Because all nine chocolates in the box had been injected with poison, the police thinks the box of chocolates could have been posted at the convenience store at about twenty-five past ten at the soonest, considering the time needed to prepare the chocolates and moving from the chocolate shop to the convenience store. Arisa however boarded the Shinkansen train to Fukuoka at 10:32, meeting with a friend inside said train and they were travelling together the following three days. This makes it impossible for her to have sent those chocolates. However, as the investigations continues, the police learns Arisa has been deliberately hiding information from them that gives her a very clear motive for wanting to kill Hirata. But how could she have posted the box of chocolates at a convenience store at Kyoto's Matsugasaki Sakuragi-cho and appear minutes later in the Shinkansen train at Kyoto Station?

I thought Matsugasaki Sakuragi-cho sounded strangely familiar, but that's a part of town I passed by relatively often when I was living in Kyoto! At least, it's basically on one side of the river, while I went almost daily shopping on the other side of the river. And am I overthinking things, or is the name of Inspector Ayuta of the Kyoto police a reference to Ayukawa Tetsuya? You know, Ayukawa ('kawa' being 'river') and Ayuta ('ta' being 'field')...

Anyway, this is an interesting problem! While all of the stories in this series revolve around the seemingly obvious culprit having an alibi for the time of the crime, this is a rather interesting alibi, for the alibi revolves around the time the murder "weapon" was sent to the receiver/victim. Once a parcel is signed and been placed in care of the courier (and in this case, in the care of the convenience store until the courier comes and picks it up), you generally don't have any chance to tamper with it anymore. In this case, the parcel was also sent a full week before it would be delivered, and with a box of special chocolates that were first sold on that very day, so it doesn't appear like the suspect could've tampered with the parcel after she had left it at the convenience store, if she's the murderer. Oh, and it should be clear by now, but this is of course also Ooyama's take on Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case, taking its basic premise, but not (really) doing the multiple solution thing. I really like this problem, while I do think that when a certain fact is mentioned, the reader will likely be pushed very close to the solution, though a lot of the details are not that easy to solve.

In fact, I really, really love one of the clues in this story, one I really think is brilliantly hidden. I had in fact noticed that Ooyama had mentioned something, but at the time I thought that was just a cute detail he had added to flesh out the world, only for that detail to be used in the solution in a very clever way... With a story so much about moving objects, it seems almost silly I completely overlooked that one moving object. Absolutely a killer clue. The way Ooyama uses a rather cliche trope for an alibi trick to create a rather surprising "hidden alibi trick" is also very clever, and it really shows Ooyama has been specializing in these stories for some years now, as he's able to cook with familiar, sometimes even overcooked ingredients and still come up with something fresh.

But now I am wondering what the next story will be. Is it going to be a March story? One story for each month, something like Tokino's Labours of Hercules? But a project like that would probably span two volumes instead of one, similar to Norizuki Rintarou's Horoscope stories, considering the length of the previous books... Anyway, I sure hope the next story won't take over a year to come and that Ooyama'll pick up the pace from now on!

Original Japanese title(s): 大山誠一郎「時計屋探偵と毒入りチョコレートのアリバイ」 

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）」

Triple Death

"Our three weapons are fear, and surprise, and ruthless efficiency... and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope... Our four... no... Amongst our weapons... Amongst our weaponry... are such elements as fear, surprise... "

"Monty Python's Flying Circus"

The Honkaku Suiri ("Orthodox Deductive Fiction") and Shin Honkaku Suiri ("New Orthodox Deductive Fiction") anthologies were published between 1993 and 2009 by Kobunsha and were conceptualized as a place where amateur writers could send in their short stories to: publisher Tokyo Sogensha currently has the Sogen Mystery Short Story Award (formerly known as the Mysteries! Newcomer Award) as a counterpart to the Ayukawa Tetsuya Award, which focuses on novel, but that didn't exist yet back in 1993. The original series was edited by Ayukawa Tetsuya, and the Shin series by Nikaidou Reito and supervised by Ayukawa Tetsuya (until he passed away in 2002) and in the fifteen or so years the anthology existed, a lot of people were selected who'd later on become well-known mystery writers, like Mitsuda Shinzou, Ooyama Seiichirou, Ookura Takahiro, Kirisha Takumi, Kuroda Kenji, Tsukatou Hajime and more. Interestingly, I don't think most of them consider having their stories published in these anthologies as "their debut moment", even though it'd be their first "formal" publication. In a very far-away past, I read the last Shin Honkaku Suiri anthology, which was actually one of the earliest books I read in Japanese.

Shin Honkaku Suiri 3 ("New Orthodox Deductive Fiction 3") was published in 2003 and features the subtitle The Heirs to Villa Lilac, a reference to one of Ayukawa's novels. This third entry in the Shin series would also be the final volume supervised by Ayukawa, as he passed away a few months before this book was published (I assume his work had already been finished by then). While I usually review all, or at least most, stories in an anthology, I'll only discuss three of the eight stories (+ essays) included in this book this time: not because the others are bad, but because I was borrowing this book and only had time to read three of them before returning it! So I might return to this other stories in this book in the future, but that's no promise, though going by the quality of the stories I did read, I probably really should read them.

This book features the first time Onuki Kazaki was ever selected for the anthology, but interestingly enough, they got selected three times: three of the eight stories in this book are penned by them. The book also opens with one of them: Tomurai Tetsudou ("The Mourning Railway"), a title reminiscent of Oosaka Keikichi's Tomurai Kikansha ("The Mourning Locomotive"). The story opens with Kasuga Karin sitting all alone on a bench at the station of Inone, a small village. Earlier that day, she attended the funeral of an uncle and was now on her way back home, when she fell asleep in the train. When she woke up, she thought she was at the station Noboribou, where she needed to transfer, so she jumped out. Unfortunately, she got out one station too early. Because it was the late afternoon, she figured more trains would follow... only they didn't, and the busses to Noboribou had also stopped. By the time she figured that out, it was already night and rain had started to fall, making it dangerous for her to walk the way to Noboribou and because the village of Inone is so small and surrounded by the forest, no cars pass by to pick her up. A young man approaches her suddenly and quickly guesses why she's sitting with such a hopeless expression on her face at the station. He offers to pay for her stay at the inn where he'll also be staying. She's a bit suspicious of him, but ultimately accepts his offer. She learns he's interested in a terrorist who's been bombing train lines lately that are financially unviable. Rumors have it they might strike on the train line connecting Inone and Noboribou. That evening, Karin notices the young man went out in the night, and returned... with a bomb. What is he exactly and what is his true motive for helping Karin?

Like I mentioned, the title invokes the famous Oosaka story, and in a way, it has a similar set-up in the way there's no clear mystery in this story. The young man acts suspiciously, but Karin can't figure out whether he's the bomber or not, but the story doesn't focus on Karin trying to investigate that: the story continues the next day, when everyone has to take public transport to Noboribou, and it's then the story reveals its true nature. It's a very clever plot, that might remind people of Father Brown stories, A Aiichirou stories or The Nine Mile Walk, where you don't really know what's going on mystery-wise, until it's suddenly revealed something sinister was going on, based on clues that seem very vague at first. The revelation in Tomurai Tetsudou is brilliant, and really dark, and I can definitely see why it was selected for publication. Cleverly plotted, and theme-wise very, very memorable.

Sonoda Shuuichirou is an author who is featured in several of the (Shin) Honkaku Suiri volumes, but he never made a major debut as a professional writer, nor have his stories been collected in a single collection. I suspect he was a Kyoto University Mystery Club member, but am not 100% sure. I loved the story I read by him in the last Shin Honkaku Suiri anthology, so I was very curious to see what the story in this volume would be about. Dokusha Yo Azamukarurunakare ("Reader, Don't Be Fooled") starts with a segment where the narrator Sonoda discusses Chesterton's The Invisible Man with his friend Kurashina, a huge mystery buff who thinks very little of the trick of that story. When challenging Kurashina to come up with something better himself, Kurashina admits he already has a similar, but better idea in his mind, and soon after, Kurashina presents Sonoda with a whodunnit script with a Challenge to the Reader, explaining his story tackles the same themes of The Invisible Man, and challenging Sonoda to find the culprit.

The story-within-a-story is set at the building of the Engineering faculty of a university. It's the last day of the academic year, so the building is nearly empty, as classes have already ended about a month earlier and there are only a few professors here and students working on projects with those professors. That is why one of the two guards of the building finds it weird when a humanities student enters the building. Shibata Hirotaka has a student ID, so he can walk in freely of course, but he can't shake the feeling something's off, which seems confirmed when his co-worker mentions he didn't see Shibata when making his rounds, even though they have no record of him leaving the building. The guard makes another round, making sure to check who is in what room. He's at the third of the fourth storey, when he hears the alarm that goes off when a window is opened. He realizes it comes from above, but the next moment, he hears a loud crash, and he already knows what's happened: when he arrives at the open window on the fourth floor, he looks down and sees Shibata lying on the ground below. The police come questioning everyone in the building, and three of the students turn out to know Shibata from their theater group, but it appears they have a perfect alibi, so then who is the killer?

Well, I sure give it to Sonoda: this was an interesting take on The Invisible Man, a killer who is visible in the story, but also not. It only works if you make a very rigid assumption regarding how people talk, but I think it works here and it is absolutely fair. If you assume this story is 100% fair to the reader, then the method with which the killer is hidden works absolutely, but if you have even the slightest doubt about that, this story might feel unconvincing. As a whodunnit with a Challenge to the Reader though, it works, and that means I will have to read those other Sonoda stories that were included in these anthologies too, because that's two good stories out of two read now...

The final story I'll discuss this time is by Ooyama Seiichirou, and this is kinda technically his debut work, I guess, as this was the first story by him that got published in a 'proper' publication. His "author introduction" literally just says this is the first time he got selected. Saint Dionysus no Puzzle ("The Puzzle of Saint Dionysus") introduces us to the narrator (a detective writer), who is the Watson to Sakaki Kousuke, a private detective. Sakaki is asked by Kobayakawa Masatsugu to bring his sister back home: she is a member of a cult run by Kurusu Tokuzou, who thinks he's the reincarnation of Saint Dionysus (Saint Denis of Paris). The sister is actually one of his grand disciples and Kobayakawa tells Sakaki Kurusu and his grand disciples are currenlty staying on an island, marking the perfect opportunity to get to her, as she's usually in one of the well-guarded facilities of the cult. He suggest they use an inflatable raft to make their way there and rescue his sister. Sakaki and the narrator do as suggested and make their way to the island, but are immediately found by guards. The sister hysterically cries she has enough of her brother, and that she's here by her own free will. Sakaki and the narrator are thrown in a cell for the night, but the following morning, the grand disciples bring shocking news: Kurusu has been murdered! The head of the cult was found in the Meditation Chamber, with his head cut off and placed in his arms, just like Saint Denis of Paris. The grand disciples ask Sakaki to figure out who the murderer is: it has to be one of the grand disciples, as the lower-rank members all sleep together, there were guards making sure nobody would enter the island, and Sakaki and the narrator were locked up. Meanwhile, the remains of Kurusu are placed in the Heavenly Chamber, a private room for meditation for the head of the cult, set up at the highest point of each of the cult's bases. Sakaki and the narrator interrogate the grand disciples, of which none seem to have a good alibi for the night. The following morning, shocking news arrives again: the body of Kurusu was found in the Meditation Chamber again, holding his own head in his hands. Did he walk out of the Heavenly Chamber after being decapitated, just like Saint Denis of Paris? If not, why was his body moved?

A story with a very cool set-up with the cult and the ties to the story of Saint Denis of Paris, and while it might sound obvious now, but as this was Ooyama's first published story, I guess readers back then couldn't have known Queenian problems would be one of Ooyama's trademarks. And yep, we have that here too. While a tale about a corpse that leaves a room and walks in the night could easily have focused more on the horror or seemingly impossible aspects of the problem, Ooyama here focuses on the conundrum as a logical issue: why was the body and the head moved? The solution is of course brought by a logical process that focuses on the actions the murderer took and the motives behind it, and while the basic idea is pretty simple, it is a deliciously Queenian approach to the set-up, and I like the story a lot. I have a feeling Ooyama "now" would have planted more physical clues to facilitate the trail to the solution, but it's still very solvable while also making clever use of the story behind Saint Denis.

Anyway, these were only three of the eight stories in Shin Honkaku Suiri 3, but I enjoyed all three of them a lot, so I'll try and get around to discussing the remaining five stories in the future. I probably should try read more of the (Shin) Honkaku Suiri anthologies anyway: I have only read about 1.5 volume, but the quality of the plots is generally really high, and if all 20+ volumes of this series retain that level...

Original Japanese title(s): 鮎川哲也（監修）二階堂黎人（編）新・本格推理 03 りら荘の相続人』: 小貫風樹「とむらい鉄道」/ 園田修一郎「作者よ欺かるるなかれ」/大山誠一郎「聖ディオニシウスのパズル」

Remember to Ring Twice

"I'm going slap happy"

"South Park"

I always think of white and blue when I think of the covers for the Koigakubo Academy books, even those are not even the primary colors for every cover...

Disclosure: I translated Higashigawa Tokuya's Lending the Key to the Locked Room. If you haven't read it yet... read it! 

Higashigawa Tokuya first introduced his readers to the fictional school of Koigakubo Academy, located in Kokubunji, Tokyo, in 2002 with Manabanai Tantei-tachi no Gakuen. In that book, we followed the members of the Koigakubo Academy Detective Club as they tackled a murder case that happened at school. After the first book about the Detective Club, we have seen other books featuring the Detective Club too, but interestingly enough, Higashigawa also started to feature the high school in other books that weren't about the Detective Club exclusively. First we had the Kirigamine Ryou series, which featured the vice-president of the Detective Club who for some reason very seldomly met the characters of the main series, but still often came across mysteries herself. Four years ago, Higashigawa wrote Kimi ni Yomasetai Mystery ga Arunda, a wonderful short story collection about the Second Literature Club of Koigakubo Academy. And 2024, the twentieth anniversary since the first book with the Koigakubo Academy, brought us another new series about the school where so many odd happenings happen, both criminal and not. The binding element between all these series is the school itself, with some characters like the teachers or a delinquent student appearing in several series, while usually the main characters of each series remains in their own 'part' of the world.

Asahina-san to Himitsu no Aibou ("Miss Asahina and the Secret Buddy", 2024) is a short story collection which presents us with another detective character in the school: Asahina Reika is the daughter of the school's chairman, which basically gives her a lot of informal authority. That is why some students sometimes go directly to her to ask for help when nobody else can help them: Asahina is actually quite involved with the school's reputation and how it's run, and basically acts as a 'shadow chairman' under the auspices of her father. That is why Ishibashi Mamoru comes to her when he's accused of theft by his fellow Mystery Club members: one morning, Ishibashi was the first to retrieve the padlock key from the teacher to open the club room. When he noticed one locker door was open and approached it, the harm had been done: the user of that locker saw Mamoru standing in front of it, and it turned out a manuscript for a detective story he was writing, had disappeared from the locker. He had put it in the locker the day before, and other members were present when they all left the club room together, put the padlock on the door and returned the key to the teacher. This means nobody could've gained entry into the club room and stolen the manuscript from the locker, until Ishibashi asked for the club room key this morning. Mamoru swears he's innocent, and wants Asahina's help, who's secretly more than thrilled, because she's a huge mystery buff and realizes she might be dealing with a genuine locked room mystery. Her guesses however are shot down very swiftly, and it seems Mamoru won't be able to escape the shadow of suspicion, until Asahina accidentally slaps Mamoru in the face, and he.... turns into his deceased brother Wataru!  For some reason, Wataru's personality takes over each time Mamoru's slapped in the face. Wataru's a lot sharper than Mamoru and Asahina, and he quickly solves the case of the theft, even though Mamoru seems not to be aware of Wataru taking over his body and has no recollection of solving the case (he thinks Asahina did it). Asahina and Mamoru/Wataru's paths cross more often, and their encounters only make Asahina more interested in Mamoru and Wataru's odd relationship.

The first tale, Meitantei, Misshitsu ni Arawaru  ("The Great Detective Appears in the Locked Room"), introduces us to the main characters of Asahina, Mamory and Wataru, and also shows a bit of Koigakubo Academy's Mystery Club, which we have seen previously in the second Kirigamine Ryou short story collection. The problem involves a theft from a club room: the club members all saw how the manuscript was left in a locker in the room and they left the room together, saw how the padlock was put on the door and one of them returned the key to the teacher in charge. The key is specially made and can't be copied, and the teachers keep club room keys in a room with camera surveillance, so it appears only Mamoru, who took the key the following day, could've stolen the manuscript in the morning. Asahina presents a few fairly simple theories which are discarded fairly easily, which is perhaps also why the actual solution to the conundrum is also fairly simply: this solution is basically of the same level Asahina could and should have presented herself, and should've been shot down too. So to have the mysterious Wataru appear only to point out a simple solution.... 

Satsujin ga Misui Datta Hanashi ("A Story About an Attempt at Murder") starts with Asahina hearing the shocking news a student of Koigakubo Academy had been assaulted the previous night. The girl had been to a concert of Tamaranzaka 24 and had been on her way home, crossing a grove near the station, when she was attacked and stabbed in her stomach. She was found by a classmate who quickly called the emergency line. Because the girl's a classmate of Mamoru, Asahina decides to use him as her Watson to learn more about the case. They visit the mother of the victim, and learn the daughter didn't quite get along with the mother's boyfriend, but he has an alibi for when the girl was assaulted. While the actual truth behind why the girl was attacked is not very surprising or original on its own, I love the deduction chain Higashigawa laid out for the reader. The clue that leads to the revelation of how it was done is really good, and expertly hidden, and easily one of my favorite clues of the whole book. 

Asahina Reika is the honorary student council president, which means she supervises the board meetings once in a while (when she feels like it), and the other members just have to dance to her tune. the day after another meeting, Asahina visits the board office to use her locker there, when she notices a window was left open. She then realizes someone has moved some of her books in her locker, so she summons Mamoru (and Wataru) to help her find the insolent person who dares go through her stuff in Seitokaiyakuinshitsu no Koubou ("Offence and Defence in the Student Board Office"). After a good slap, we see Wataru's observations of a few clues that ultimately lead Asahina and Wataru to a rather surprising discovery, which shows there was something far more sinister going on in the student board office than just a theft. Not a huge fan of the story to be honest: the first half the mystery-solving is more focused on reverse-engineering Wataru's deductions about the intruder's actions, rather than doing that ourselves and in the second half, we investigate a mysterious message that... probably would have been more interesting in a visual medium, but not in a prose form.

Tenshi wa Poolside ni Ukabu ("Angels Floating at the Poolside") is set during a summer evening: students are still around at school because of two events: geography teacher Ikegami is supervising a group to watch the stars (she herself is actually a huge believer of UFOs), while another group of students are playing night baseball on the school grounds. A guard meanwhile is making his rounds, when he senses something's wrong with the school's pool. While the fence is properly locked and barbed wire ensures nobody can climb inside (or as some swimming club members say, it's to prevent members from fleeing training), the guard still can't shake the feeling someone is inside, so he unlocks the pool gate and has a look around. His attention is drawn to one of the diving boards, so he climbs the ladder. He's nearly at the top when he suddenly feels something hard hit his head, and he falls of the ladder, hits his head on the ground and is knocked out. But just before he passes out, he's sure he saw a winged angel flying in the sky above him... The guard is later found by students passing by. Asahina of course can't help herself and decides to investigate herself (with Mamoru/Wataru as her Watson). This is another story where I think it would've been better had it been created in a visual medium. While I think the solution on its own is okay, I think asking the reader to deduce it based on the hints is a bit too much, while it would've been much more natural if the story had been told in a visual format. The attack on the guard (which is kinda impossible because he was hit on the head while climbing up the ladder and he didn't see anyone on the diving board before he was knocked out) is connected well to the guard seeing floating angels, but it's still a story that has trouble feeling really satisfying. 

The final story, Chashitsu ni Kieta Shoujo ("The Girl Who Disappeared In the Tea-Ceremony Room"), has Asahina wondering whether he should tell Mamoru about Wataru taking his body over each time he's hit on the head, but before she can make a decision, she and Mamoru stumble upon a new case, and a very personal one too: Asahina sees a brown-haired girl rummaging through her desk in the classroom! Asahina and Mamoru give chase, and they eventually find the girl running into a remote part of the campus, which is walled off and ends in a cul-de-sac where the tea-ceremony room is, a small building used by the tea ceremony club. Mamoru is sent inside the room by Asahina, but it appears there's only a tea ceremony club member inside, who is far too tall to be the girl Asahina saw. A swift look across the room also shows there's no place for the brown-haired girl to hide inside. Asahina then decides to check behind the tea-ceremony room too (she makes sure Mamoru goes the other way around the building), but they only find a delinquent student trying to smoke in secret. But as this part of the campus is completely walled-off, how did the girl escape if she's not in the tea-ceremony room nor behind it? Impossible disappearances are pretty much a staple of the mysteries set at Koigakubo Academy, as other books also feature them (especially the Kirigamine Ryou series), and even with that in mind, I'd say this is a pretty good story. The solution is very simple, but also quite clever: it would have been pretty interesting on its own as it makes good use of the unusual setting, but Higashigawa manages to tie a very unique clue to it too, giving it another level of depth. Just don't come here expecting some real resolution regarding the Mamoru/Wataru plotline.

Overall though, I'll need to be honest and say that Asahina-san to Himitsu no Aibou is probably my least favorite short story collection set at Koigakubo Academy until now. I love the Kirigamine Ryou stories with the overly-enthusiastic Kirigamine and the weird disappearances and other impossible crimes(?) she encounters, and I was really surprised by how fantastically Kimi ni Yomasetai Mystery ga Arunda was set-up with multiple meta-level stories, but in comparison, the plots of Asahina-san to Himitsu no Aibou seemed a lot simpler, with less finesse going on in regards to how the mysteries were planned. And I guess I never got really invested in the Ranma 1/2 / Touch-esque subplot of Mamoru and Wataru (hmm, now I think about it, it does have a Shonen Sunday vibe to it), so that wasn't really something that kept me interested. I'm always in for more stories set at Koigakubo Academy, and it was fun seeing familiar faces pop up in the background, but I guess I did expect something more 'grand' for the twentieth anniversary of the setting. Let's hope the next one is more memorable.

Original Japanese title(s): 東川篤哉『朝比奈さんと秘密の相棒』：「名探偵、密室に現る」/「殺人が未遂だった話」/「生徒会役員室の攻防」/「天使はプールサイドに浮かぶ」/「茶室に消えた少女」

A History of Murder

Step by Step あせることなんてないのさ

「Step by Step」(Ziggy)

 

 Step by Step, no need to be impatient

"Step by Step" (Ziggy)

Personally, when it comes to titles of short story collections, I actually prefer those with an original title, rather than being named after a story featured in the collection.

Sashichi is an okappiki, a kind of private detective who is hired by a doushin, the official Edo-period police detective, to serve as the doushin's eyes and ears on the ground in the capital of Edo. The woman-loving Sashichi works in Kanda and is known all around as 'the doll Sashichi', as his handsome face resembles those of Kyoto dolls (kyouningyou). Married to an older woman, with whom he often bickers, Sashichi runs around town, solving mysterious crimes as they happen, usually assisted by his two footmen Tatsugorou and Mameroku. The crimes Sashichi encounters are set in the world of the lowest classes, from merchants, actors to simple restaurant owners, but that doesn't make his mysteries less appealing: from a serial killer who targets women who have lately become models for illustrations hagoita paddles, to a series of murders that appear to mimic a serialized story, there's more than enough to do for Sashichi in Yokomizo Seishi's short story collection Meigetsu Ichiya Kyougen - Ningyou Sashichi Torimono-chou Kessakusen ("Kyougen on A Full Moon's Night - The Doll Sashichi Torimono-chou Masterpiece Selection", 2023). 

While Yokomizo Seishi is now best known for his creation Kindaichi Kousuke, and the books starring him, Yokomizo had other long-running series before he created Kindaichi after World War II: one of them is Yuri Rintarou, but his greatest success, and the series people knew him best for, was the Sashichi series. This is a so-called torimono-chou series, a historical detective series starring a character in a role close to what a modern police detective is. Readers of Japanese fiction in translation might know Okamito Kidou's Hanshichi series, which was the pioneer in that genre. Mind you, when I say historical, I don't mean Yokomizo really minded historical accuracy very much. While the 17(!) stories found here are definitely set in the past, and often do interesting things because they're not taking place in the modern world, the language used is fairly modern, and these stories are really easy to read. 

The Sashichi stories are really short, meaning they were pretty easy to write, and Yokomizo wrote 180 of them between 1938 and 1968! For this volume, editor Suekane Yoshimi selected the 17 stories he deemed as the best ones mystery-wise, and he also penned a very informative afterword, where he goes over every single story and explains precisely why they were chosen for this book and the unique points of each of them. Usually, I discuss all stories in a short story collection in detail, but 17 are just too many, and while the selection itself is varied enough, the stories are usually very simple in set-up and besides a core plot, feature a lot of "series tropes" (Sashichi being a womanizer, him bickering with his wife etc), so it's pretty hard to say something substantial about them without basically telling the whole story.

But I think Suekuni's afterword does a fantastic job at pointing out the more interesting points of these stories. Most importantly, or at least, what I thought the most engaging, is the fact that you can recognize ideas in some of these stories that would later be developed further in some of the more famous Kindaichi Kousuke novels. Some of these tricks in the Sashichi series are a bit simple, and because of the very short length of the stories, often it feels like clues are introduced just moments before the denouement, but at the very least, they are plotted as proper mysteries and often feature just enough of unique historical elements, ranging from popular culture like kabuki to women's sumo wrestling, to keep the reader engaged. But it is really seeing how for example one of these stories utilized a trick that you'd later see developed in much more interesting form in the Kindaichi Kousuke novel Gokumontou. Mind you, I don't really mean you see "proto-versions" of the trick in these stories, like how Agatha Christie's The Second Gong became the longer Dead Man's Mirror, but it's more like you see Yokomizo tackling a trope from mystery fiction here, which you'd also would see in a Kindaichi novel later on in his career. You can thus see him grow as a mystery writer, trying ideas out here and returning to them a decade, or more, later. 

And Yokomizo does also come up with interesting situations with his historical settings. In a few cases for example, there's a killer who removes the arm or hand of a victim, but in a world where you don't have fingerprints or DNA testing, why would a killer remove such part? In a contemporary world murderers might do that to hide the identity of their victim, but why would someone do that in the Edo period? Some of the answers provides are memorable because they are based on historical facts, so that make these stories feel firmly set in this setting, while others feel like they could have been easily rewritten to have taken place in a contemporary setting. Among the 17 stories are for example the first Sashichi story Hakoita Musume ("The Girls on the Hakoita"), where three young women have been featured as models for the art on hakoita paddles die one after another, with their own paddle lying next to thier bodies. In Ikiteiru Jiraiya, a thief thought to have died returns, but this time, the "non-violent thief" has committed murders. Or did he? In the title story Kyougen on A Full Moon's Night, Sashichi visits a party, where he is asked by a mysterious woman to pass on a note to one of the other guests, but later this guest is found dead, and three different clues found on his body, point to three different suspects. Horimonoshi no Musume deals with someone trying to identify his granddaughter, whom he has not met but does know has a certain tattoo on her back, but then two women with that tattoo appear before him. As Suekuni also points however, sometimes the underlying trick/solution does feel familiar to some classical Western mystery fiction, with Yokomizo adapting similar concept to the Edo era.

Personally, I thought having 17 of these stories in one volume was a bit overkill, but overall, Meigetsu Ichiya Kyougen - Ningyou Sashichi Torimono-chou Kessakusen is a fun, and especially very readable short story collection, that gives you a good idea of the torimono-chou subgenre and whereas Okamoto Kidou's Hanshichi series felt rather Holmesian, I would say Yokomizo's plotting in this selection of stories, is definitely closer to the puzzle-type plotting like Christie. Personally I found this book especially interesting having read a lot of Kindaichi novels, because you could really tell how Yokomizo first experimented with some ideas he'd later revisit, but even without that knowledge, the stories here are entertaining, even if quite simple. On the other hand, if these are really the best of the best in terms of mystery plotting of Sashichi, I can't say I am very interested in reading the other 150+ stories.

Original Japanese title(s): 横溝正史『名月一夜狂言  人形佐七捕物帳ミステリ傑作選』:「羽子板娘」/「名月一夜狂言」/「戯作地獄」/「生きている自来也」/「出世競べ三人旅」/「鶴の千番 」/「春色眉かくし」/「彫物師の娘」/「春宵とんとんとん」/「狐の裁判」/「当り矢」/ 「風流女相撲」/ 「たぬき汁」/ 「遠眼鏡の殿様」/「呪いの畳針」/「ろくろ首の女」/「初春笑い薬」

The Poet and the Lunatics

"One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off."

"Letter from Chekhov to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev"

I like this cute cover!

Publisher Tokyo Sogensha has been offering a fantastic platform for mystery writers who haven't been published yet for decades now with the prestigious Ayukawa Tetsuya Award: the award includes a publishing contract for the winning manuscript, and writers like Ashibe Taku, Asukabe Katsunori, Aizawa Sako, Aosaki Yuugo, Amon Junichi, Ichikawa Tetsuya, Ichikawa Yuuto, Imamura Masahiro, Houjou Kie and many more have all made their professional debuts by winning this award aimed at novel-length works. In the meantime, Tokyo Sogensha has also provided a platform for short stories, which would also be rewarded with publication in their literary magazine. 2022 was the last time this award was called the Mysteries! Newcomer Award, as it is now called the Sogen Mystery Short Story Award. The last winner of the Mysteries! Newcomer Award was Mamon Kouhei, with the short story Lunatic Retriever. This short story is included in Mamon's 2024 short story collection Bokura wa Kaishuu Shinai ("No Pay-Off for Us", 2024), which provides a nice showcase of his mystery plotting skills, as well as his talent for writing characters.

The book opens with Gaitou Interview ("Street Interview"), which offers a seemingly harmless mystery: Kirito is approached by classmate Fujiwara, who needs some help, and Kirito is known for having a very keen eye for details. Fujiwara's sister was recently interviewed on the street about a few topics, like the trend of younger people not reading newspapers anymore. Her sister thought the interview went well, but after it was broadcast, people on the internet started bashing her sister for giving stupid answers, and some even just bad-mouthed her appearance. Fujiwara doesn't know what Kirito can do, but hopes he can somehow make it stop. After a careful examination of the street interview video, Kirito is however indeed able to miraculously stop the bashing. This is a unique kind of mystery, as it doesn't involve any real crime, but it is set-up in a convincing manner, even if some of the clues are introduced too close to Kirito's proposed solution to resolving this matter. It's a mystery you could imagine happen in real-life, and I really like how the story eventually wraps back to Kirito's own backstory of how he became known at school as a kind of detective.

Kaeru-Goroshi ("The Murder of a Frog") is about the comedy duo Frogs in the Well, consisting of Shougo and Mitsunori.  Shougo is introduced to Miki, a great fan of the duo, via a mutual friend, and the two start seeing each other more often, eventually leading to them dating officially. While the two comedians have been working hard on their act, they never had their big break, until they finally manage to win first place in a prestigious comedy contest, which results in them getting more offers for appearances on television. The two are not used to their new succes, getting drained by the constant stream of gigs and to make things worse, Shougo is suddenly rejected by Miki, who, despite still being fond of him, somehow can't stand being with him anymore. It's during this period a comedian from the same agency, who has been in the trade for a very long time without any succes, finally wins his first contest. Masuoka Hideki never had much success, but he was always super nice to his juniors at the agency, so everyone is beyond happy for him, and they all gather at the offices of the agency to celebrate his long-awaited award. They all have something to drink and after a while, people walk in and out the room to make phone calls and smoke, but when Mitsunori goes out on the balcony on the third floor, he spots a dead Masuoka on the street below, and lying next to him, is a squished frog. Considering Masuoka just won an award and had his big break that very night, it doesn't seem likely this is a suicide, and suspicion falls on all who were in the building at the moment, but because it is not clear at first when Masuoka left the room and died, it is difficult to establish who was where when, and therefore who has an alibi or not. After reading the first story, I had mistakenly assumed this book would not feature murders at all, so this was a pleasant (?) surprise. Mamon spins a very Queen-esque whodunnit tale, where you use the various physical clues sprinkled across the tale to cross out suspects off the list, and there are some clever twists hidden in this process too, but what is the most memorable about this story, is definitely the motive for the murder. While a motive is a very subjective thing (one can find a motive satisfying, while someone else not at all), I find Mamon's efforts in presenting this aspect too as a fair-play mystery, and the way he set-up the motive with foreshadowing quite memorable. Considering how the whodunnit-part clewing went and the way the motive was so thoroughly foreshadowed, I can easily imagine this same short (very short!) story be fleshed out into a full novel, and it would've worked as well.

Tsuisou no Ie ("The House of Memories") is a very short story, where a father and his two adult children visit the home of the grandfather, who recently passed away. While going through his stuff, the narrator realizes something odd's going on: he has vivid memories of visiting his grandpa's study, which had bookcases filled completely with books. He hadn't visited his grandfather at home for many years, especially not because they had a fight a few years ago, but he knows his grandfather kept on buying books and that he never ever sold his books... But where have all the books his grandfather had bought after he last visited him, have gone to, as the bookcases in the study were already completely full back then? Cute little mystery that may have a very simple solution, but it just works very well with the theme of childhood memories.

Hayami Shirou wo Oikakete ("Chasing after Hayami Shirou") is a two-party mystery, where the narrator first tells how his classmate Hayami Shirou once saved him from a false accussation at school: trash had been thrown around the pool, and because the narrator had a fight with the teacher of the swimming club at the time, he was accused of the vandal act. Hayami however very ingeniously, and swiftly proves who the real culprit was. The narrator and Hayami now go to the same high school, and Hayami's talents are once again needed, when the football (soccer) club find their storeroom ransacked, with balls and other equipment stolen. The stolen items however are found the following day, having been left somewhere on the school grounds. The way Hayami deduces who the culprit is, and why, is clever and I do like the clues are based on physical senses that usually aren't featured as strongly in written fiction, though at the same time, that is also why the story kinda falls flat for me, as we read a lot about these senses, but while your mileage may vary, I did find it hard to believe how "exactly" for example a character could recognize a lingering smell. I do like the little twist at the end of the deduction process that allowed Hayami to point at the one and only culprit, and the motive works well in this school setting too.

Lunatic Retriever is set at a college mixed dormitory, which has one 'famous' inhabitant: Yoshida Haruka won a literary award at age 20 and has been publishing books these last two years. She's also quite arrogant and doesn't mingle much with the other students living in the dorm. However, that doesn't mean her death isn't a shock. On the day a solar eclipse happens, she is found dead in a storeroom inside the dorm. The storeroom was originally a smoking area inside the common room, with two doors (one opening in, the other door opening out). Before the eclipse, people tried going to the storeroom to get something, but found both doors locked for some reason. After the eclipse, the students find it odd the doors are still closed, so they force the doors open. They not only learn the doors were "locked" because they had been taped tight with duct tape, they also find a dead Haruka lying on the floor, as well as a burning stove. The room being taped shut and the burning stove suggests Haruka committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning, but on the other hand, they also are of the opinion Haruka would be the last person to commit suicide. But if it was murder, how did the murderer escape the taped storeroom? This is a very dense story, with a lot to offer: a taped locked room, Ellery Queen style deductions to determine who the murderer is, and we even have a solar eclipse... Because of the clue density, we even have room for multiple people presenting their theories, and interestingly, I think that in terms of the locked room mystery, the final solution isn't even as impressive as the earlier ones. What is really memorable about this story however, is the ending, when we are confronted with what is thematically an absurdly shocking revelation. It is a funny, meta-level observation that in a different work could have catastrophic implications, but it works in this short story setting and gives you some food for thought regarding the mystery genre, while also still functioning as a mystery story itself. The theme, in hindsight, can be found in other stories in the volume too, which wraps things up nicely.

This is the first time I read anything by Mamon Kouhei, and while I am generally more a fan of short stories, and I did enjoy the short stories found here, I have to admit they left me wanting for more, for stories that show the same type of plotting, clewing and ways in identifying whodunnit, but with more room for depth and that is also the case for the motives, there are some really originaly character motivations at display here that result in interesting mystery settings, and I'd love to see Mamon for example trying to do a longer detective novel with such themes. So I'll keep an eye out for Mamon's future output!

Original Japanese title(s): 真門浩平『ぼくらは回収しない』 「街頭インタビュー」/「カエル殺し」/「追想の家」/「速水士郎を追いかけて」/「ルナティック・レトリーバー」

The Bear Detectives

Look for the bare necessities, the simple bare necessities
Forget about your worries and your strife

"The Bare Necessities" (Phil Harris, Bruce Reitherman) 

While I am not in direct contact with current members of the Kyoto University Mystery Club, as a former member I do still follow their social media. Personally speaking, my favorite activity at the club were the sessions with whodunnit/guess-the-culprit scenarios: these were short mystery stories written by club members which were clearly divided in a "problem" and "solution" part. The idea is that everyone is first handed the problem part, which traditionally ends with a Challenge to the Reader. The participants get about 45~60 minutes to read the story and (logically!) figure out who the culprit is of the story. If you think you know whodunnit, you can discuss that with the author and they'll tell you whether you got it right or wrong, and after the initial session is over, the author hands out the solution parts to everyone. In a way, the stories do tend to be a bit formulaistic in form, often following Queen-style deduction methods to prove who the culprit is (the culprit knew fact X. Y is proven to not have known fact X, therefore they can't be the killer), but it's exactly the type of mystery story I love, and it was great seeing different members using this form to tell different tales. And while these stories remain "private" for the club generally, I still liked seeing the KUMC social media account briefly tweeting about once in a while about how they did this or that story this week, and how it was received at the session.

Because of that, I still remember how last year, the KUMC account posted how one of their members had written a Danganronpa fanfic as a whodunnit scenario. As someone who enjoys the quirky mystery game series, I was of course intrigued by this concept, as at least in the year I was at the KUMC, people always opted for "original" settings (i.e. not based on existing IPs). But as with most of these stories, I assumed I'd never get a chance to ever read it as I wasn't an active member anymore, and you generally only get to read the story the time it's read at a club session. However, a few weeks ago, I learned the author, Kunou Junki, had actually self-published their fanfic late 2023, selling it at doujin markets. Which was cool, but again, I wasn't really in the position to visit those doujin fairs to pick the booklet up. It was apparently received pretty well though, and Atsukawa Tatsumi even mentioned the story in his ongoing column on mystery fiction, praising it as a whodunnit scenario and as a Danganronpa fanfic. But then.... a few days ago, Kunou announced they were finally selling the fanfic via Booth. So I finally got to read it.

Danganronpa FF - Ame no Kigou, Soshite Happy Birthday ("Danganronpa FF - Rain Code, and Happy Birthday", 2023) is set at the aptly Doujin Academy, where a group of students, each being extremely skilled in a very specific field, are held captured by Monokuma, a cute-looking, but horrifyingly sadistic robotic bear who has set up a game of death among the students. If a student kills a fellow student, a class trial will be held, in which the participants must decide (vote) on a culprit. If the students manage to identify the real culprit, the latter will receive "punishment" (be executed) and the game will continue (more of these rounds) until there are two survivors left, who are free to go. However, if the real culprit manages to elude suspicion at the trial, they are the one will be released, and all the rest of the students will receive "punishment". Monokuma has been feeding the fears and desires of the captured students, making some of them desperate enough to want to kill their fellow students in an attempt to escape Doujin Academy, but fortunately, up until now, the remaining students have been able to correctly identify the real culprit each time, allowing the rest to survive while the real culprits have been executed. At the start of Danganronpa FF, about half of the initial group of students is already dead, either having become a murder victim, or having been executed as a murderer.

The story is told from the POV of Yomikura Suzu, the Ultimate Narrator, who has been acting as a kind of Watson to Aizawa Seishun, the Ultimate Detective, who has been the MVP in the class trials until now: not only has he been solving most of the murders, he is also trying to figure out a way to escape from Monokuma's prison. After the latest execution, Aizawa hopes to set a plan in motion that will allow them to go against Monokuma, and he decides to rope in Yomikura as his accomplice. While the gymnasium is closed off during the night (22:00 - 08:00), all other rooms in the school are accessible, and Aizawa has found out the dressing rooms in the corner of the lecture hall, in front of the passage to the gymnasium, do have cameras, but no microphones, and are also completely soundproofed, so he spends the whole night discussing his plans with Yomikura there, assured Monokuma can't overhear them. When they leave the dressing room the following morning however, they are shocked to find two murdered bodies lying in the lecture hall and that they have been penetrated with a spear. There's also a bloody trail leading from the gymnasium, through the passage, to the lecture hall. A new game of life and death begins, as the remaining students need to figure out who the killer is, or else they themselves will be executed.

Save for the occasional pastiche, I generally don't read fanfics, so I have no real idea of what the standard is, but I sure found Danganronpa FF to be a very effective one. It starts already with the great cover art and the next page introduces you to the various school rules of Doujin Academy, which will be a familiar sight to those who have played the original Danganronpa games: there are the general rules that explain under what conditions a student can escape the school, but also rules about the night time, about ownership of student notebooks and even about how many people a killer may kill (as in: you can't just kill everyone and win the game in that way.). Most of the rules are exactly the same as the games, so it really feels like this is a story set in that world, even if we're now at Doujin Academy. While the characters are original, the characters have concepts that would seem to fit perfectly in the Danganronpa world, from the Ultimate Narrator, to characters like The Ultimate Twin, the Ultimate Ninja and the Ultimate Mountaineer. This story is set after half of the cast has already been wiped out, so it's a bit of a shame some characters are only mentioned briefly by name only, and I'd love to have seen more of them (I wonder of Kunou is planning more stories/"chapters" set in this world?). However, I do have to say that for the most part, you don't really need much prior knowledge of Danganronpa to enjoy this story as a tale of mystery: the essentials are explained adequately (especially with the rule book at the start of the booklet) and ultimately, the mystery really revolves around these specific murders, committed at this specific point in the ongoing story, so no knowledge is necessary about what happened before, or what happens later or about Danganronpa in a meta way. In Danganronpa terms: this is a specific chapter, with its own case.

As a pure whodunnit mystery, I have to say I was surprised how dense this was. It's been a while since I did a 'real run' of a whodunnit scenario, so I'll be the first to admit my deductive senses aren't what they used to be, but Danganronpa FF seems about a full step more complex than the usual KUMC whodunnit scenario, making it unlikely anyone could have gotten all the points within the usual session time (though perhaps they held a longer session than usual). So yeah, this is a really deep whodunnit story following the Queen format, where you can logically deduce who the killer is by identifying criteria the killer must answer to, and then figuring out who of the suspects answers to all of those criteria. Some of these criteria are relatively easy to notice, allowing you to cross off some names early, but others are really cleverly done, and I am the first to admit that I wasn't even close to the answer model provided by the detective at the end. There are quite a few (very devilish!) twists and turns in the long deduction process (which is why I think it would have been difficult for someone to solve all of the story during a normal club session), but for Ellery Queen logic-lovers, this is really great stuff  and I love a lot of the logical processes shown in this story (the initial step alone of the long elimination process is already really good!). What is even more commendable is how cleverly Kunou makes use of the Danganronpa setting. A lot of the things pulled off here in terms of logic only make sense in a Danganronpa-inspired world, with the school rules and Monokuma antics and stuff like that. So I really agree with Atsukawa here about Danganronpa FF is satisfying as both a mystery story, and a Danganronpa fanfic.

The third act of Danganronpa FF wasn't originally part of the scenario presented at the KUMC, as after the initial murder problem and the subsequent solution part, we are treated to what is basically an in-depth essay on the Danganronpa games as mystery games. If you have played the games (or you don't care for spoilers at all), there are some interesting points made (ha, I hadn't expected Kunou to quote Morooka's academic work on shin honkaku mystery and games!), but it is certainly a part that 'takes you out of the story', so your mileage on this closing part may vary. This part has no direct influence on the logical parts of the mystery, so you could choose to ignore it if you wish to do so.

At any rate, I did really enjoy Danganronpa FF - Ame no Kigou, Soshite Happy Birthday, as both a really well-plotted whodunnit scenario as well as a mystery story written with a lot of love for the Danganronpa franchise. Danganronpa FF was apparently also a reason why Kunou was asked to pen an original whodunnit story for the Mystery Carnival event of publisher Seikaisha held last week. I haven't read that story, but I do hope I get to read more of Kunou in the story, as what I have read here really makes me curious to what more they can come up with. Hopefully, we'll see more of them in the future!

Original Japanese title(s):　久納淳生 『ダンガンロンパFF　雨の記号、そしてハッピィバースデイ』