Summer Apocalypse

夏の幻

瞳閉じて　一番最初に君を思い出すよ

『夏の幻』(Garnet Crow)

 

A summer illusion

When I close my eyes the first time I remember is you

"A Summer Illusion" (Garnet Crow) 

For some reason a lot of the books I discuss this year seem to feature blue a lot on their covers...

Setsuna no Natsu ("A Fleeting Summer", 2025) is a short story collection by Nanakawa Kanan. The book is named after the title story, but the five stories collected in this book are unrelated, though they all share a melancholic tone. This is my first time reading something by Nanakawa by the way, who debuted via the Ayukawa Tetsuya Award in 2008 and seems to specialize in short stories. I decided to read this book because it was shortlisted for the 2026 Honkaku Mystery Award: the winner of the award hasn't been decided yet at the time of writing this post, but by the time this post goes up, the winner should not only already have been decided, but the actual ceremony will probably have been held too. So perhaps it'll turn out this book actually won the award!  

Setsuna no Natsu ("A Fleeting Summer") was originally published in 2018, and tells the story of two women who are volunteering near a recent disaster site. They're staying at a small inn, where they become acquainted with Nahoko, the daughter of the inn's owners. Nahoko tells the guests about her late uncle Ichito and one of the things he left behind: not a bottle ship, but a bottle "desk", with a book on it. A poem is written on the open pages of the book: "Honey-sweet candy / Oh those dear eyes of yours / A fleeting summer". Apparently, the poem was made in reference to an experience Ichito had when he was in middle school and the explanation is written in the rest of the book, but it's impossible to turn the pages of the book inside the bottle and he would never explain more about the poem to his niece. Nahoko did learn more about what had happened to his uncle in the past. After his father's death, he and his mother moved back to his mother's paternal home village as soon as Ichito finished middle school. His maternal family is related to the Amikura family, who are the most prominent family in the village, owning much land in around nature-rich countryside village. While Ichito initially has trouble blending in with the other children in the village, it's his friendship with Mizuha that soon helps him get used to live here in the countryside with the other kids. Mizuha is a distant cousin, who due to deaths and childless marriages, was taken in (together with her little brother) by the Amikuras as the future heir of the family. The two slowly become closer over the course of the summer, until a faithful day. One day, Mizuha and the local gang of boys were playing in a boat on the lake, when Ichito pushed Mizuha in the water. She became angry, so she swam to the nearby small island owned by the Amikuras. She went into the small lookout house there and sent the boys away, telling them angry to keep away from her property. The boys eventually returned home, but when Ichito learned Mizuha hadn't returned by the evening, he became worried and rowed to the island, to find Mizuha safely there. While they were there however, a tsunami occured, keeping them stuck on the island. The tsunami become more powerful, and by the following day, the village had been flooded and there had even been casualties. But what about this event had prompted Ichito to write a poem about it?

This is by far the longest story in the collection, taking about one-third of the whole book, but it's a very interesting set-up. The flashback scene is by far the longest section and tells a coming-of-age story of a boy who basically falls in love with a girl he meets in the countryside over the course of the summer, until a tragedy hits the village, forcing the girl to grow up and step up as the future heir of the Amimuras. There isn't a clearly defined mystery here for a long time, even if we hear about some casualties of the tsunami. The framing story then brings us Nahoko and her two guests, who start speculating about what the poem can mean. Once they realize the poem hides a message hinting at some crime that had been committed by someone during that summer, they start to speculate about what that crime could've been. The result is a captivating trip into the nostalgic memories of the boy, with small events being used to bring clever theories about what could've happened. The deductions presented utilize clues that are both based on physical clues, but also on the personalities and characterization, and while I'm not always a huge fan of the latter type of clues, I'd say it works out really well here in this tale, and that combined with the physical evidence, I'd say this story does a great combination of these often polar opposite type of clues. The story surprisingly has room to offer multiple solutions, all which color the summer memories of Ichito in a different manner, and it's the last one that hits hardest. The atmosphere of this story is absolutely fantastic though, and that's perhaps true for all the stories in this book: a strange kind of melancholic, cozy atmosphere is present in all these stories, even though they can become quite dark.

Mahou no Apron ("The Magical Apron") is a very short story, where the town's Civil Affairs office is contacted about by a neighbor about their worries about a family of four (a mother with three children) living nearby: the children have been loud lately, and there are worries of neglicence. When the people from the office visit the house in the evening, they find the mother is gone. When they ask the oldest daughter whether their mother is working, she only answers their mother is gone to run an errand: an excuse the civil workers have heard earlier, as the family is receiving an allowance from the town, which of course has restrictions to side-earnings. These segments are interspliced with parts that follow the children's mother as she tries hard to keep the household running while earning money, and while it is hard, the love she gets from the children is what keeps her going. However, the civil servants discover that this is no usual case as they dig further. While the story on its own is pretty memorable, I can't deny the ending is a bit predictable. The misdirection isn't as effective as I would have wanted it to be, meaning the "twist" that came was the one I assumed would be the fake one. It's a good "story" but as a "detective" story, I would have loved a twist that went one step further.

Senyakou ("A Journey of a Thousand Nights") tells the story of Masami, a teenager, who has to stay with his aunt while his mother is travelling abroad to her boyfriend. His mother's family is, simply said, a mess: Masami's mother Eri was the second daughter to grandmother Hinata, who had three children. Divorces, new boyfriends, children running away from home and grandchildren who were adopted eventually led to  a strange household. Even Masumi doesn't really understand what's going on, but his grandmother Hinata passed away some years ago (he never met her), and now he's going to live with his aunt Asano and his cousin Nonno, who's the daughter of his oldest aunt Akari, but has been officially adopted by his grandmother. During his stay, he slowly starts to learn these two family members he barely ever met before, but things slowly start to turn into a nightmare for Masumi when someone starts haunting the house: Akari, who is apparently vivid her mother Hinata took Nonno from her and now determined to get to Nonno.

By now, the 'missing father figure' device is becoming quite apparent in these stories. This story was originally published in 2021 and it's actually only this story and the title story that were originally published elsewere: the other three stories were written especially for this book. This story feels very much like a horror story, almost like Higurashi, with a young man moving to a new environment and while things seem normal at first, it slowly turns into something frightful as an unknown figure starts haunting the house. That said, I had really trouble getting into the story first because of the insanely complex family relations of the family, which also seemed a bit ridiculous at time. The story works towards a climax with a solution that... can be guessed pretty easily. I think author Nanakawa does a great job at presenting this story as a family tragedy, but the twist prepared for the reader is ultimately based on a phenomenom seen very often in real-life, which makes it easy to recognize. The writing and the atmosphere painted in the story does do a lot of heavy lifting in still making this a good story to read.

Watashi to Watashi no Imouto ("Me and my younger sister") follows a primary school teacher, who is fascinated by the school diary one of the pupils writes: Maria writes about a sister... which she isn't supposed to have. The more the teacher starts digging into why Maria would be writing about a sister who doesn't exist however, the more dangerous things become for herself... Another broken family story, because why not? Again, this story has a slight horror tone, as Maria writes extensively about talking with her younger sister, although the records show she has no living siblings.... but she does have a still-born twin sister. It's a bit of a shame that like in the second story Mahou no Apron, the story doesn't rely much on deduction: the truth is often just discovered by the narrator just appearing at the right place at the right time. In this case, the truth is absolutely horrible, and I can't even imagine why Maria would agree to do the thing she did at the end, considering the way we are also told she acted previously. The misdirection, due to an extra layer, works better in this story than in Mahou no Apron, which are both similar stories in terms of length and their focus on family bonds, though both are relatively simple tales.

The final story, Land's End, tells the story of a taciturn, attractive woman who has moved to a small factory town at the far end of Hokkaido, working in a small boxed lunch shop and living in the smallest and cheapest flat she could find. She has no hobbies, no friends, only living from day to day. She also doesn't read the newspapers, so the only news she hears, like the recent murders on women, come from the chatty boss. One day, the woman loses a broach and it's her neigbor who brings it to her: a slightly older man who is very much like her, reserved and with no apparent goal in life. It turns out both have similar interests in music though. They bond, and with every day, their relation changes: he comes buy his lunches at the shop, while she visits him in his room to chat about music. But what brought these two figures to this town, at the far edge of the world, and where will their future bring them?

The most melancholic story of the volume: the narrator seems to have no purpose in life, though we aren't told until the end why, and much of the story is about following her as she slowly starts to bond with her neighbor. It's at the end we learn there was more about these two getting to know each other, and surprisingly, we are presented some pretty decent deductions based on actual physical and otherwise Queen-esque clues. I had expected this to be more like one of those Yamada Fuutarou stories like Taiyou Kokuten where we learn "something had been brewing" beneath the surface of a different kind of story: usually those stories don't really rely on chains of deductions based on actual clues/testimonies, so it was surprising to see it utilized here, and in an effective way too. While the first part of the truth might not come as a huge surprise, I do like how Nanakawa prepared a very well-thought off conclusion based on that truth, a story conclusion that holds a few surprises of its own. The ending is absolutely perfect, not just for this story, but for the whole book itself, with a glimpse into a more hopeful future in an otherwise melancholic world.

As I said, this was the first time I read something by Nanakawa, but the book certainly piqued my interest. The stories all have a distinct vibe, feeding the reader melancholic feelings, but fortuately the stories also always end on... well, perhaps not a hopeful tone, but there's always slivers of light that make it through. Some of the stories here are mystery-wise a bit simpler than I personally like, but the actual stories/syuzhet are always captivating and the better entries in this book also contain surprisingly well-constructed chains of reasoning, while staying true to the more grounded worlds of these stories. This was a very introduction to Nanakawa's work and I expect to see more of their work on this blog in the future.

Original Japanese title(s):  七河迦南『刹那の夏』:「刹那の夏」/「魔法のエプロン」/「千夜行」/「わたしとわたしの妹」/「地の涯て（ランズ・エンド）」

Mecha Mutt Menace

"Well, my friend, robots cannot kill, their prime directive..."

- "I know, I know, I know, it's the first program that's laid into any robot's brain, from the simplest Dumb to most complex Super Voc. But suppose... suppose someone's found a way of bypassing it."

"Doctor Who: The Robots of Death" 

We've seen more and more uses of AI as devices in mystery plots the last few years, though I think the best/most memorable uses of them in mystery fiction are still when they use the gap between real humans and AI to create clues etc. I've seen a few examples in the last few years that worked really well.

Utsugi is a young man in possession of a strange device, left to him by his deceased parents when he was a child, and his "partner" ever since. At first glance, it might appear like a small dog or a black cat: it is roughly the same size and has four limbs. However, its body is completely smooth, and once you look closer, you realize it also has no face. It is in fact a standalone robot with highly sophisticated AI built into it, even though it speaks in a very mechanical manner like "REP / UTSUGI / UKN / ANALYZE / TP8.7", a language which only Utsugi can interpret perfectly. While it is known that the name of the AI is Excimer, other details about "her" are shrouded in mystery, though the technology used to create her and her body suggest they might be the product of some experiment with military purposes. Excimer is a completely standalone machine, meaning it can't interface with other devices directly, meaning they can't safely examine how its built. Excimer only recognizes Utsugi as her administrator, and "friend". This is an important distinction, as it is directly connected to Excimer's purpose: the AI is specifically built to detect murderers and it will treat any murderer who is trying to keep their crime a secret as an immediate threat, prompting Excimer to execute them on the spot with any or all of its installed weapons, including knifes and firearms. Utsugi now runs a detective agency, with Excimer as the detective. Utsugi has no detecting skills himself, but he is needed to interpret Excimer's deductions and more importantly: he has to issue an emergency command to Excimer once Excimer tries to kill a murderer. We follow Utsugi and Excimer as they tackle five cases in Matsushiro Akira's short story collection Tantei Kikai Excimer ("The Detecting Machine Excimer", 2025).

I mean, I guess a black box on legs can be a challenging idea for a captivating cover image, but I am also not a very big fan of the current cover now as it really humanizes the robot too much... I mean, the Jameson-type robots in Ghost in the Shell can be be cute, so it's not like having just the box robot would necessarily be boring... 

The book opens the curtains with Open the Curtain, which has Utsugi visit Shindou on the recommendation of Professor Yakushi, who is examining Excimer. Shindou is an old study mate of Professor Yakushi and runs a company involved in AI technology, so Yakushi thought Shindou would be interested in meeting Utsugi, and more importantly, Excimer. Utsugi arrives the Shindou residence on a warm day, carrying Excimer in a backpack. Because Shindou had not been told much about Utsugi, he at first doesn't understand why Yakushi wanted him to meet Utsugi, but he soon realizes what Yakushi's intentions were once he learns about Excimer. The flagship product of Shindou's own company is not as sophisticated as Excimer, but a lot more practical: SILK is an AI that functions as a controlling system for all of your smart home appliances and technology, allowing you to give verbal or even non-verbal commands to control everything from the lights to the curtains or warming something up in your microwave. As Shindou and Utsugi discuss SILK and Excimer's respective uses though, Excimer starts to act weird: she has detected Shindou is a murderer and is about to kill him, but Utsugi can just stop her in time. But how did Excimer find out Shindou's a murderer during a short chat?

The reader gets a good idea of how Excimer works in this opening story: it is a detecting machine, but that is not Excimer's main purpose. Therefore, she is actually not keeping Utsugi up-to-date on her deductions, and will decide on her own to eliminate a threat. It is only once Excimer's deduction processes have identified a murderer without doubt, that she'll move in for a kill, but it's also only then she agree to tell Utsugi about what thinking process led her to the murderer. That leaves Utsugi with only a very small window of opportunity in which he can have Excimer explain her deductions: if he's too early, Excimer won't explain her (unfinished) deductions, if he's too late in issuing a "don't kill" command, Excimer will already have killed the target. Open the Curtain works as a short, but effective introduction to how this all works, as we see Excimer only become dangerous once enough clues have been shown, and while some clues were a bit obvious to see, I do like one line of clue a lot, as it fitted perfectly with the theme of the AIs. It's a pretty brilliant clue, that is used multiple times in several ways in a very short scene, yet it doesn't stand out at all. It's also a uniquely modern type of clue, which I really like. The aftermath of the deduction scene is also great, and really sets up the tone for the rest of the book. 

Lost and Found introduces us to a new main character: Misa is a student who studies under Professor Yakushi and she's been offered a part-time job as the "scribe" of Excimer: she's to accompany Utsugi and Excimer and write down everything Excimer says and does as part of their research into Excimer's technology. On the day Misa visits the detective agency of Utsugi to introduce herself to Utsugi and Excimer. It turns out Utsugi owns the whole building, using one floor as his own agency and renting the other floors out. Employees of a trading company housed on a lower floor go up to the rooftop during their lunch break. They happen to look down at the empty lot behind the building, where they see a dead man on the ground, with a ladder next to him. Due to building violations, the empty lot is actually inaccessible, as it is completely surrounded by buildings on all four sides. It thus appears the man tried to cross from the rooftop of one building to another, perhaps in a burgling attempt, and then fell to his death, but is that really the case?

This is I think the longest story in the collection, and it's definitely the most complex one. The mystery revolves around whether the victim's fall was an accident (it wasn't), and if it wasn't, who pushed the man to his death? The victim turns out to be an ex-employee of the trading company, who had been fired for embezzlement, so the police suspect he was trying to break into the building via the rooftop: the building opposite the empty lot has been empty for a while, so he could easily get to the rooftop of the empty building, and then use a ladder to climb across the empty rooftop, to the rooftop of the building owned by Utsugi. While Misa and Utsugi did hear a thud during their talk, they soon suspect it was faked to create an alibi, but who then committed the crime? The story's length is used in a good manner, allowing Misa to also act as a would-be detective, offering good suggestions and theories. Her presence is certainly needed, because Excimer won't openly theorize before she gets a chance to kill the murderer, while Utsugi isn't trying to be a detective at all, leaving everything to Excimer or the police (the police works with Utsugi/Excimer, but also know how dangerous Excimer is, so it's a reluctant team-up each time). So having Misa act as a Watson Plus, with her own theories helps flesh out the story a lot, especially, as we later learn, her presence actually does have influence on how Excimer's conduct throughout this case. The solution is not mechanical in terms of how the culprit killed the victim precisely, but it does involve a plot with a lot of moving parts/necessity of good timing and is overall a very competently constructed puzzle. I do like how Excimer is shown as more and more unhinged with each story: here we learn Excimer actually actively occasionally just shows short glimpses of her answer in order to entice the police and Utsugi in letting her meet the suspects personally, which gives her better opportunities to exterminate the murderer once she has identified them! The final reveal of what clue helped Excimer determine the truth of what happened is absolutely brilliant by the way and it is this moment that for me best exemplifies the potential of Excimer as a brilliant, but amoral detective.  

Don't Disturb Me has Excimer examining a past incident, involving the young brother of one of Misa's childhood friends, Fuuka. When they were very young, Fuuka's parents were invited by a friend to stay at their newly opened seaside hotel. Fuuka and her brother Haruto were still very young, and had never stayed at a hotel before. Misa was also invited, as was Riichirou, a friend of Haruto. The trip to the hotel was rather long for the children however, and Haruto was still sleeping when they arrived. Their parents brought Haruto to their hotel room to sleep some more, while the other three children went playing in the neighboring room, which had a connecting door to Haruto's room. The parents went to the lounge with the friends. However, while the other children were playing and the parents were away, Haruto fell down the balcony of the room. While it was believed to be a tragic accident, with the young Haruto waking up alone drowsy in a hotel room and accidentally falling down the balcony, about 15 years later, Fuuka now wonders who of the people at the hotel was hiding their murderous intent from the others. She asks Misa to present the problem to Excimer to see if she can solve this mystery.

Interestingly, Don't Disturb Me is the very first Excimer story: this story was originally serialized in 2024, and the other four stories in this book are written especially for the book release. The story has an interesting angle as it is mostly a flashback, following very young children who get involved in a tragic accident involving the youngest child. It's from this account Excimer manages to figure out the truth of what happened exactly and how anyone could've made Haruto fall from his hotel room, as it was technically a locked room: the corridor-side door not only locks automatically, but was also latched from inside. The connecting door between the two rooms was unlocked, but could be observed by the three children playing in the other room. And the balcony-side too can't be accessed without leaving any traces. The story places some neat clues, though I do think these stories that rely on children's testimonies/interpretation of events can be a bit hit or miss, as it is difficult to write convincingly and yet fairly that a child thought X or Y and that that had effect on the mystery. Especially when they are young and children grow up fast, it's hard to pinpoint an exact age range where you can fairly expect a child to understand or not understand X and incorporate that in a mystery plot. So that always keep bothering me when I read these kinds of stories. The theme of the past mystery however is well incorporated into the framing story of this tale, and it's a very decent entry in this collection. 

You Have Control gives us a huge shake-up and shows us what can happen when Utsugi isn't there to control Excimer. One late evening, Utsugi (and Excimer in his backpack) are walking Misa back to her flat after working on a case. They meet a few of Misa's acquaintances/fellow flat residents along the way, but when they arrive home, they find a cut-off body part: a hand. Utsugi turns out to be bad with bloody bodies and passes out at the sight, but he did this at the worst time possible: Excimer is already determining who the killer is! Misa just has enough time to grab the backpack with Excimer inside and runs to her flat to lock the robot inside her room, while she tries to call the police and Professor Yakushi to see what she should do. Meanwhile, she can hear Excimer cutting the backpack open with her installed knife and trying to break out of the room in order to exterminate the threat (= the killer). Because only the now unconscious administrator can command Excimer to pause her attack and ask her about her deductions, Misa realizes she has only one option left in order to stop Excimer's murderous tendencies: she has to figure out for herself who the murderer is, and convince them to give themselves up so Excimer won't see them as a threat anymore.

The idea of this story is absolutely great, and there's a lot of tension going on as we have seen in previous stories Excimer will not lie to people, but will manipulate them in order to get an opportunity to kill a murderer. I think what is interesting is about this story is that Excimer acts as a "deductive clue" here: in reality, we know that a random murder that happened on the street doesn't mean the suspect has to be one of the people we just happened to meet outside on the street. It could be anyone whom we just happened to not meet in the city. In this instance though, the reader is informed the killer is someone we met in this story, because of Excimer's reaction. Of course, Excimer's deductions are also based on actual clues we saw in the story, but because she's such an advanced AI, the story could still get away with saying Excimer managed to solve the case based on what she saw/heard/sniffed, plus a probability calculation, giving her an edge over us humans in determining wether the killer does happen to be one of the people we met on the street. The murder itself is a bit silly to imagine, as the way the hand got cut off feels almost comic-like, but the premise of the story is just so great and it stays so exciting until the very end, I actually liked it better than the previous story.

The final story, Just a Machine, is not a straight mystery story, but acts as the collection finale. The story starts with the theft of Excimer by an unknown figure, which immediately sets off the alarm bells at the police station and Professor Yakushi, as they are all too aware what harm Excimer can do if she happens to come across a murder on the street without Utsugi's supervision. The story however then starts revealing more about Utsugi and his past with Excimer, and the mystery of how Excimer works. The story neatly picks up some strands of clues planted in earlier stories, revealing something had been brewing without the reader's knowledge, but to be honest, it's not that huge of a deal, and a lot of readers might have guessed the general gist already even if it had not been clewed. I do like how this story acts as a finale to the book.

Tantei Kikai Excimer is a short, but solid collectionthat admittedly is helped a lot by the great premise of Excimer as an unscrupulous detective AI: the stories are their best when her goals and abilities are used to shape the actual mystery plot and the way the story develops. The core mystery plots in this book are overall solid, but sometimes a bit too short or limited in scope, but having Excimer working on them usually does elevate them. It'd be interesting to see how Excimer would evolve, if sequels are to come.

Original Japanese title(s): 松城明『探偵機械エキシマ』:「Open the Curtain」/「Lost and Found」/「Don't Disturb Me」/「You Have Control」/「Just a Machine」 

Mind Over Murder

If I'm not back again this time tomorrow

Carry on, carry on as if nothing really matters

"Bohemian Rhapsody" (Queen) 

Disclosure: I have translated Arisugawa Alice's The Moai Island Puzzle.

Every Saturday, a handful of regulars gather at the bar April in the hopes Jizoubou will visit them again. Jizoubou is a yamabushi, an ascetic hermit who generally conducts his spiritual training in the mountains, but he sometimes comes down to... have a drink in a bar with other people. Because he's just human. Jizoubou's travels bring him to various places, where he meets even more people and for some reason, he has a knack for getting to know people just before a murder occurs in their vicinity. Jizoubou often relates these tales of murder to his friends at April, and as it turns out, it's always Jizoubou who ended up solving the case for the police. Each time, his fellow bar friends try their hand at solving the case too based on Jizoubou's retelling of the events, but none of them ever manage to match the brilliance of the travelling hermit in Arisugawa Alice's 1996 short story collection Yamabushi Jizoubou no Hourou ("The Wanderings of the Yamabushi Jizoubou").

As per custom, publisher Tokyo Sogensha usually adds an English title inside the book, which may be a translation, but often is a completely original title. In this case, the English title is Bohemian Dreams, after the cocktail served to Jizoubou. I wonder who comes up with those titles each time.

 Yamabushi Jizoubou no Hourou collects seven short stories that are all quite short and they all follow the same format. Each story consists of six segments, of which the first and last act as the framing book-ends: the first section sets up how Jizoubou ends up relating one of his old adventures to his friends at April, while the last section is dedicated to a few guesses by his friends, until Jizoubou finally gives the trick away. That means that each story only has four sections devoted them, and as you can guess, each story is pretty simple in structure, usually with one main trick that makes up the mystery. That said, most of the stories are pretty clever considering how short they are, and the overall book is quite enjoyable, even if after a while the stories do feel a bit samey. That does make it difficult to discuss the stories in detail though, as they are really very short: in some cases Jizoubou's story basically ends with the discovery of the corpse. So in this review, I'll only very briefly discuss the stories and highlight the points I liked about some of them.

The book opens with Local-sen to Cinderella ("The Local Line and Cinderella") which is indeed one of those stories that seems to spend all its time on the buildup, and then we learn about a murder, after which the story immediately returns to April, with the bar attendeed trying to guess what happened. In this case, Jizoubou had been s and he managed to catch the last train on a minor local train line back to Akino, the nearest city connected to the major Japan Rail network. He happens to share this last train with the actress Hoshimoto Mai and her entourage: Mai hails from the mountain village of Douno, the terminal station of the local line, and had been visiting her home town. The following morning, Jizoubou learns a murder had occured in the last train in the direction of Douno (so the counterpart to the train Jizoubou took to Akino): a stranger had been found stabbed in the train. Jizobou comes up with an explanation for the murder that is very clever: while the trick itself might sound familiar in some ways, Arisugawa manages to hide it well within the limited page count, and the application of the concept in this specific story is original enough to leave a very positive impression. In a way, the second story, Kasou Party no Yakata ("The House of the Masquerade Party") uses a similar underlying concept for its trick, even if the execution and the surrounding story is completely different. The set-up is prett funny though. Wandering in the mountains and in search for shelter, Jizoubou ends up at a manor where they're having a costumed birthday party, and other guests, assuming he's dressed up, help him inside. During the party, two costumed men are found dead in a room upstairs, one strangled and the other hit on the head. Witnesses had kept an eye on the door, and there seems to be no clear suspect, as only the two victims entered the room until they were discovered. I like the trick here, even if it's more a trick that seems feasible on paper than in real-life. I only realize in hindsight, as I'm writing this, that some of the underlying dynamics of this story and the first story are similar, but definitely not in a way that it's clear right away or that this story feels like a rehash in anway.

Gake no Kyouso ("The Cult Leader on the Cliff") has Jizoubou trying to help a man, whose girlfriend has fallen under the spell of a charismatic cult leader, who resides inside a cave in a cliff. Jizobou assists the man as he tries to find a way into the cave, but this attempt goes wrong and his attempts to save his girlfriend are also rebuted by the girlfriend herself. The following day however, Jizobou returns to find the cave half-collapsed: a bomb had been set off in the meditation chamber, killing the cult leader! But how did the culprit plant a bomb there, as it went off in the morning and his disciples sweeped the room earlier? The solution is simple but well foreshadowed, and I like the setting of a mountain sect/cult leader, as it fits the yamabushi motif of Jizoubou.

Jizoubou easily makes friends, so it's not rare for him to get invited for dinner, but seldom to one where one of the guests ends up poisoned! In Doku no Bansan ("Poisoned Dinner"), Jizoubou is invited by a friend to dinner, which is also attended by some other guests/family relatives. During dinner, one of them keels over, and it turns out his beer had been poisoned. But who did it? I love the trick behind this tale: it's so much not a mechanical trick, but a brilliantly psychological one, but even within the limited amount of pages Arisugawa has, he manages to very convincingly portray these characters in a way, that explains in a satisfactory manner how the murder was committed. I can imagine the same trick used in a full novel, but still, it wouldn't have the elegant simpleness of this version.

In Shinu Toki wa Hitori ("You Die Alone"), Jizoubou tells the story of when two hoodlums tried to pick a fight with him, but he was saved by their former boss: they used to form a gang of organized crime, but their boss has washed his hands clean and started a small bar. His former followers however still haven't quite gotten used to normal life yet. To apologize, the boss invites Jizoubou to his bar and offers him a drink. When the boss goes into his private office for a moment, a gunshot rings. Jizoubou and a former follower enter the office to find the boss shot and signs of someone having fled the office through the back door. Outside however, they can find a pistol, but also witnesses along all the alleys that swear they didn't see the murderer flee their way. So how did the killer escape? The trick behind the vanishing shooter is simple, but the story is quite memorable due to the underlying motive of the murderer: it is established very well, again, despite the limited amount of pages and it's surprisingly convincing. 

In Wareta Glass Mado ("The Broken Glass Window"), Jizoubou is invited to the home of a man hunting for truffles, When his host excuses himself for a moment to retreat to his study, a loud voice can be heard, and Jizoubou and the host's wife hurry to see what's happened: the host is lying dead on the floor with his head bashed in, one window broken and glass lying outside, as well as a book from the collection of the host. The matter seems simple: there was a struggle, a book was thrown at the assaillant and missed, and the host was killed. Or was that really the case? This is an interesting story, in the sense the murderer does something very over-the-top in order to create what is in essence a very simple trick, only made complicaed because of the 'over-the-top' thing. It's a bit silly to go so far, but it works. I wish it was clewed a bit better though, because I think the idea itself is good, only this is an example where I think the limited page count works to the story/trick's disadvantange.  

Whereas the previous stories were all serialized in magazines originally, the final story Tenma Hakase no Shouten ("The Ascension of Doctor Tenma") was written especially for the book release and it is therefore also a bit longer than the magazine stories. Wandering around in the forest, Jizoubou meets with an inventor who has been working on odd creations like a remote controlled boomerang. This inventor is later found dead in the early morning, apparently having fallen to his death from the cliff behind his house/lab. Footprints were left in the snow behind the house and they show how the inventor weaved a path from his house to the cliff, right above the spot where he was later found dead. He was found by someone passing beneath the path on his morning routine and at first glance, it appears this was nothing but a tragic accident, but of course, Jizoubou has different ideas. Because this story is a bit longer, we also have more/deeper theories proposed by Jizoubou's friends at April, which make this a more complex story. The trick revolves around something that seems a bit out of place in the world of this series, especially when we have a travelling hermit as our detective, and the trick itself is a bit simple to guess I think once a certain prop is introduced in the story, so I don't think it's the strongest tale of the collection, even if it's not that different in quality from the others.

Yamabushi Jizoubou no Hourou is a fairly solid, if simple short story collection by Arisugawa. Because each story is very short, there's simply not much room to paint really deep or complex stories, which results in most of these stories ending up as tales that revolve around one single thing, but most of the time, Arisugawa actually manages to make full use of the space he does have to bring satisfying stories with plots that are crafted with consistency and confidence. Few stories in the collection will probably manage to make an ever-lasting impression, but it's a quick and entertaining read that always retains a good level of quality when it comes to the mystery.

Original Japanese title(s): 有栖川有栖『山伏地蔵坊の放浪』: 「ローカル線とシンデレラ」/「仮装パーティーの館」/「崖の教祖」/「毒の晩餐会」/「死ぬ時はひとり」/「割れたガラス窓」/「天馬博士の昇天」 

Tricky Business

Ah Why Why Ah Tell me why you hold me

"Why" (Color) 

Serializations of novels or short stories have become quite rare globally, but the format is still quite viable in Japan, with many novels/short story collections still being serialized first before they are actually published as books. Or in some cases, stories remain in serialized form. Ooyama Seiichirou is an author who specializes in the short story format, and nearly the entirety of his creative output is serialized in magazines in both physical and digital formats first before they get a book release. I have for example discusses his series like Watson-ryoku/The Watson Force, Alibi-kuzushi Uketamawarimasu/The Clockmaker Detective and Akai Hakubutsukan/The Red Museum, which are classic examples of Ooyama first publishing four or five stories in magazines first, before they are collected as one book, occasionally with Ooyama adding one original story for the book release. However, if you take a look at his (Japanese) Wikipedia, you'll notice some of the stories he's been serializing have not seen a collected release yet. For example, in the past I have reviewed a short story in a series where an actor specializing in villain roles turns out to be a gifted amateur detective, and while Ooyama has already released enough stories in this series to fill a volume, it has not seen a book release yet.

The same holds for the series I am discussing today: Wayama Yawa no 5W1H Jikenbo ("Wayama Yawa's 5W1H Casebook") consist of five stories Ooyama wrote between 2022 and 2023 for the magazine Shousetsu Tripper. The fifth story was in fact also announced in as the "final" story in the serialization, making this a finished story, but even now in 2026, there's no sign of a collected release being considered. And that's a shame, for the five stories have been very entertaining! As the title of the series suggests, each story in this series is centered around the five Ws (Who, what, where, when, why) and the one H (how). The series detective is the titular Wayama Yawa, a young, petite woman in her early twenties, who is absolutely fantastic at her work, with the catch being... that she's working somewhere else every time. For Wayama has nothing but admiration for all the kinds of work to be found in our modern society, so she tries out something each time (and always masters the profession in seconds). Each story follows new characters as they get entangled in mysterious incidents (sometimes criminal, sometimes not), with Wayama somehow getting involved too because of whatever new job she's doing now, and of course solving the case in an instant.

In a way, this series reminds me a bit of Awasaka Tsumao's A Aiichirou series: there, the titular amateur detective isn't the focal character either, as each short story focuses on a different cast, and then Aiichirou happens to get involved too, either in his role as travelling photographer, or because he happens to have found a different job for a period. 

Oh, in case you are wondering what the illustration is featured in this review? It is an illustration that accompanies the title page of the first story of this series as featured in the magazine Shousetsu Tripper, though I don't think it is specifically related to Wayama Yawa no 5W1H Jikenbo. At least, I'm pretty sure Wayama doesn't look like that, and none of the other stories have such illustrations.

The first story, Dochira ga Saki ni Shinda ka? ("Who Died First?"), opens in the hospital, where Futagawa Eisuke, director of Futagawa Funerals, drawing his final breath. Present are his wife Tomiko, his nephew Takashi and his wife, and Nagadate Michio, the corporate solicitor. Not present is Eisuke's younger brother/father of Takashi, Yuusuke. Nagadate is surprised Yuusuke isn't present at his brother's deathbed, but Takashi explains he hasn't managed to reach his father at home. Eisuke and Yuusuke never got along and indeed, before their wealthy father died, he wrote a will that put all of his fortune in a trust: Eisuke and Yuusuke would only inherit his money once they were both respectively 62 and 60 years old, to ensure they wouldn't try to kill each other in order to inherit everything. The two brothers therefore started avoiding each other for many decades, wtith Eisuke becoming a succesful funeral director, while Yuusuke remained an unsuccesful painter. Some years ago, their father's inheritance was finally released, but the brothers remained estranged. The day after Eisuke's death, Yuusuke still can't be reached at home, so Nagadate and Takashi drive to Yuusuke's remote home to check up on him, but there they find... Yuusuke dead in the bath tub. It appears Yuusuke too died yesterday, though the coroner can't determine a specific time of death. However, Nagadate instantly realizes the order of the death of the brothers will become a matter of great importance to Takashi due to Eisuke's will, in which he bequeaths one quarter of his tremendous wealth to Yuusuke and the remainder to his wife Tomiko. If Eisuke died before Yuusuke did, that quarter of his inheritance will first go to Yuusuke, and because of his death, then go to Takashi. However, if Yuusuke died first, Tomiko will inherit everything from her husband, while Takashi will only inherit from his not really well-to-do father. The moment Nagadate tells his new employee Wayama Waya about this conundrum however, she senses they have to work fast to prevent a murder from happening...

This story poses a very interesting problem, and in a rather devious way poses a double problem: the title in English ends up focusing on the "Who?", but of course, from the set-up you'll also see the problem presented is very much about "When?". One thing I have to say about this story that holds for all five stories is that these stories are very short, so it's hard to write a lot about them without giving too much away. I really like this story though! Ooyama actually adds this extra mystery at the end by having Wayama declare she sees a potential murder coming, so that leaves the reader with the question of which of the two brothers died first and also the question of who Wayama thinks is going to be murdered and why. There's some very cleverly hidden misdirection in this short tale, and while I don't always like unanswered questions in mysteries, this one has one I can live with very easily, as it really adds an ironic twist to the theme of the tale.

The second story, Doko de Orita no ka? ("Where Did She Get Off?"), a lawyer Shinpei is trying to locate a potential witness who can prove his client is innocent of a robbery. The problem however is that this witness can't be found, even though in theory, locating the person should be easy: according to the client, at the time of the crime, he ran into a woman dressed in ancient garments, like she had just come from the  Heian period. However, despite the police's best efforts, they can't find the woman nor any other witnesses who saw her that day. Until Shinpei discusses the case with his cousin Yuuna, a college student. It turns out that when Yuuna took the bus back home after her exam yesterday, that woman was already on the bus. Yuuna dozed off and woke up just before her own stop, by which time the woman had already gotten off. Yuuna and Shinpei decide to locate the woman and try to interview the bus driver who drove that bus yesterday, but it just so happens yesterday was that driver's last day before the start of his extended leave today after decades of being dedicated to his job. The new driver has not seen the woman in question unfortunately. This leaves Yuuna and Shinpei getting on and off at every stop between the university and the stop near Yuuna's home to see if they can find any clue leading to the woman, but then the new bus driver, a young woman called Wayama Yawa, has a suggestion for them... A relatively innocent story with no real crime as the main mystery, which adds some variety. There's some funny circular reasoning going regarding the woman: the reason the woman was dressed in very traditional garments is likely related to the bus stop where she got off: do you have to deduce why the woman was dressed the way she was and from there deduce where she got off, or do you have to deduce where she got off, and based on that location deduce why she was dressed like that? It's a bit of both of course. While the woman being dressed like that is a bit strange, I think there's one main hint given in the story that allows for a natural, intuitive guess why she's dressed like that. I am more of a fan of the clues that allow the reader to guess at what stop she got off and why, as that is a multi-layered one that also cleverly includes Wayama herself in the mystery.

In Nani wo Takurandeiru no Ka? ("What Has He Planned?"), the narrator is a former test driver who lost his job after gamble problems, but his skills allowed him to secure a very unique job: a transporter. Transport objects or persons from A to B and he's paid enough to accept the fact that some of these jobs aren't always safe. This time, he's asked to drive a wealthy hotel owner called Kureta Kouzou and one of his possessions from Tokyo to Karuizawa. The object in question is the Cretan Cat, a figure dating from the fifteenth century which is said to bring fortune to those who cherish it, and misfortune to those who don't treat it well. It has changed owners during the last few centuries, and has been the possession of some of very succesful people indeed. Kureta had purchased the Cretan Cat for a pittance after its previous owner died, but now two people are after the Cat: the nephew of the previous owner who sold the Cat to Kureta not knowing its true worth, and a high-ranking police official who might even use the power of the police to get his hands on the Cat in order to climb to the top. The driver and Kureta are joined by a hired bodyguard... a young small woman called Wayama. While the driver first thinks this must be a bad joke, he soon learns the woman is indeed suitable for the job, so the three drive off in a car especially prepared by Kureta, racing to Karuizawa via local roads. They get ambushed along the way, but Wayama not only finds a way out, she also immediately deduces which oppenent is behind the operation. 

Again, while this is a short stories, it's cool to see Ooyama use Wayama in all kinds of scenarios, this time in a more action-oriented story. There's of course a kind of hard-boiled atmosphere at play in this story with the first-person narration and a McGuffin in the form of the Cretan Cat, which again is very unique compared to the "everyday life mystery"-esque setup of the previous story. This story spends quite some time on the set-up of explaining who the narrator is and the backstory of the Cretan Cat, so by the time we get to the ambush, there are really not that many pages left to really develop the mystery. Guessing the mastermind behind the ambush is thus not very difficult simply because of the small scale of the story, though I like the motive behind the ambush: it's not simply greed that drives the culprit, but something more unexpected, despite it being fairly hinted at. Of course, that is the main problem of the story as proven by the title, but because most of the story is more focused on the who and how of the ambush, the question of why/what the goal was doesn't pop up until relatively late.

Naze Mainichi Ippon Dake Kau no Ka? ("Why Does She Buy Just One A Day?") is a variant on the famous real-life story of mystery author Wakatake Nanami: she worked at a bookshop when she was in university, and every Saturday a man would appear with twenty 50-yen coins, exchange those coins for a 1000-yen bill and leave again. She never figured out why that man did that, and her story has become the topic of two anthologies with both professional and amateur detectives providing a possible solution to her problem, and other writers have also utilized variations on this problem, like Ooyama here. The narrator works at Trico Mart, a convenience store and due to a lack of employees, often ends up working a shift all alone. For the last few weeks, a woman has been coming to the story every single weekday morning at forty-past-seven to buy one thing: a pencil priced at 95 yen. It is the only thing she buys every time she comes. The question of why has been weighing on the narrator's mind for some time, so he brings it up to the manager, but he has no idea either. The manager does bring good news: he has hired a new employee, a young woman called Wayama Yawa. When the narrator starts "training" Wayama the following day, he soon realizes she's a very fast learner. When he happens to mention the story of the pencil-buying woman, she asks him to guess why the woman would be doing that. The answer he arrives at, and the answer Wayama arrives at however are quite different. While the set-up is basically simply an inverted version of the 50-yen coin problem, I really like the problem presented. The narrator's main theory is actually quite interesting. Obviously, his one will end up wrong, so it's supposed to be a false theory, but I wonder how many people would have arrived at this one: his theory is built on a certain characteristic that is apparently present in convenience store registers, but I wasn't aware of that! The Wayama theory is of course far more interesting: the first part of her theory is pretty easily guessed, but the "jump" to the latter of her theory is a bit more difficult. Mystery fans might guess this "jump" rather easily as it is a trope that's sometimes seen in mystery fiction, but I think an extra hint to guide the step from the first half to the second half just a bit more cleaner, as making that connection is a bit more difficult without knowledge of that trope. Still, I think it's one of the better stories of the series.

The final story is Kyouki wa Douyatte Idou Shita no Ka? ("How Was The Murder Weapon Moved?") is set on the "Labyrinth", a so-called event train consisting of three carriages. The first and third carriage are normal carriages for passengers, but the second carriage has been completely stripped from its seats and instead, walls have been placed in the carriage to create a labyrinth, challenging passengers to find their way from the first carriage to the third or vice-versa. They change the layout of the labyrinth periodically, providing train fans even more reason to take this train frequently. It's the first time Hirokawa Daisuke is travelling all alone (knowing his parents wouldn't like this) and he's been having the time of his life. He recognizes one of his fellow passengers as Ootsuki Shinichi, the famous puzzle designer who also designed the labyrinth in this train. When the train conductor, a young woman in her twenties, announces someone has thrown paint on one of the walls of the labyrinth and that therefore she asks passengers to not use the labyrinth anymore, Daisuke is relieved he already explored the labyrinth. He dozes off. When he later wakes up, the conductor is here again, checking up on Ootsuki, who is sleeping in the seat in front of Daisuke. Or least, it appeared he was sleeping, but Wayama soon discovers Ootsuki is in fact dead, and the syringe cap lying on the floor seems to suggest a certain method of death. Then a passenger from the third carriage makes his way through the labyrinth, telling Wayama he found a syringe underneath his seat. The police soon discover that syringe was indeed used to give Ootsuki a lethal injection. However, an examination of the security camera in the labyrinth carriage show only Wayama made her way through the labyrinth between the time Ootsuki was last seen alive and then found dead, so how did the murderer move the syringe from the first carriage to the third carriage?

An impossible crime as our last story, and one in a rather fanciful setting too! Having worked on the English translation of Ayatsuji Yukito's The Labyrinth House Murders, I of course have a soft spot for labyrinths and I can't conceal my slight disappointment at the realization  Kyouki wa Douyatte Idou Shita no Ka? didn't feature a map of the labyrinth even if it's not directly needed to solve the mystery. This story is slightly longer than most of the other stories, so it has some more room for fake solutions, which is always appreciated. I think this case actually has one of the more outlandish tricks used in Ooyama's books (who is usually fairly realistic, and focuses more on the logic needed to solve the problem), so that actually came as a pleasant surprise, and it really helps sell the unique location. Still, it wouldn't be an Ooyama if the trail leading to the solution wasn't mostly built around logical deductions based on the crime scene and the actions taking by the people involved: a lot of theorizing is done on the reason why the syringe was moved to the third carriage after killing Ootsuki in the first place, and it serves as a first step towards the solution, which is clever, though it immediately points at one single character as the culprit, so it's a bit of a double-edged sword.

By now, you should know that I thoroughly enjoyed this series by Ooyama, and it's such a shame it hasn't been collected yet as a volume, as it can be difficult to obtain the stories now, as you can only find them in the magazines where they were serialized. I really like how unlike a lot of Ooyama's other series, we don't have a series detective (or "detective enabler", in the case of Watson-ryoku) who gets involved in most of their cases because of their profession/expertise (police detectives, alibi-cracking expert, locked room expert): Wayama can be in any role, and her stories can be about anything, from an impossible crime to a relatively cute story about where someone got off the bus and within these five stories, we already got a wide variety of characters, settings and problems. It would be so cool to see this series continued in the future...

Original Japanese title(s): 大山誠一郎　「どちらが先に死んだのか？」/「どこで降りたのか？」/「何を企んでいるのか？」/「なぜ毎日一本だけ買うのか？」/「凶器はどうやって移動したのか？」

The Corpse That Wasn't There

"It's me, Kaiba. And this time, you don't stand a *ghost* of a chance."

"Yu-Gi-Oh!"  

So I met Norizuki twice in my life, and the first time something funny happened (though Norizuki probably didn't realize it), though the Mephisto editor-in-chief sure did and he was a huge help to me...

Norizuki Rintarou's series about the adventures of the fictional writer/amateur detective Norizuki Rintarou and his father Inspector Norizuki finally gets a new volume later this month in the form of Norizuki Rintarou no Fukaku, which also has the English title The Unawareness of Norizuki Rintarou on the cover. The contents of the four-story-volume was recently announced and it turns out I already read half of the stories included. While the final story is an original tale written especially for the volume, I have already reviewed the first two stories in the book: Higisha Shibou ni Yori ("Due to the Death of the Suspect") and Shinritekikashi Ari ("Stigmatized Property") were both originally written as part of guess-the-culprit anthology projects, where the first part of the story would be published and then readers would have time to write in their solutions, before the second half of the story would be published. I read these stories when the volumes collecting these stories were published and enjoyed both of them as fair-play stories where we get to see Norizuki's logic-based puzzles in their full glory. 

The title of the third story included in the volume Norizuki Rintarou no Fukaku however didn't sound familiar to me at first, until I looked it up and learned I actually had the story already in my possession. The story had been written as part of an anthology project running in the magazine Mephisto titled The Finishing Stroke, fousing on stories with final lines that turn things around. I think I did know Norizuki had written something for this anthology project, but I hadn't quite realized it had in fact been a story starring Rintarou. While there's a dedicated The Finishing Stroke book release, which collects this story too among others, I happen to have the Mephisto issue where Norizuki's Tsugi wa Anta no Ban da yo ("You're Next!") was originally published, so I decided to read it (I am not aware of any (major) differences between the original publication and the collected version).

Pater Norizuki is investigating a rather kooky case and as always, he ends up discussing the case with filius Rintarou to see if the writer has some ideas. Komiyama Michiyo, an elderly, wealthy woman was found murdered in her own home: the woman ran several succesful businesses and was always staying in hotels during weekdays for all her business obligations, though she made it a rule to return home for the weekend: she was discovered dead on a Monday. While at first it seems like a robbery ending in death, the fact the murderer actually managed to switch off the security cameras and evade all the cameras in the neigborhood seems to suggest the "thief" had very detailed knowledge about the victim's house, its security measures and thus would have known the busy woman was seldom at home during the week: so why would a genuine thief would have picked the weekend, when the woman was always at home? This alone would just make for an ordinary case, but things took a weird turn when Suzumura Shigeki, an office employee who has made it a habit to jog in the evening after work, made a report about having found the body of a dead woman in the park he always visits: an elderly woman had died recently there due to dehydration, and it was at that same spot he saw an elderly woman collapsed on the ground. At first he thought it was another case of dehydration and tried to wake the woman up, but she was clearly dead and her arms had been tied with zip ties, indicating a crime. As he was out jogging, he didn't have his phone with him and had to report from the nearest public phone. When he and a patrolman returned to the park however, they found no trace of the woman, though it was clear someone had been lying at the place Suzumura saw the body. When he described the face of the woman however, it turned out to be the face of...Komiyama Michiyo, a woman who was already dead by then!

The spooky story reminds in a way of the classic, award-winning An Urban Legend Puzzle in this same series and indeed, while this story does not feature an actual, well-known urban legend/ghost story, the story does start as a genuine scary story, told as the experience of an "unnamed" office worker (Suzumura) who dreams of jogging at night and then running into a ghostly face of a woman and later, Suzumura testifies he'd been seeing that woman in his dreams long before he stumbled the dead body in the park. But ghosts and prophetic dreams can't be real....right? Of course, this is an experiment in logical deduction as are all of the Rintarou short stories and indeed, Rintarou does offer a very logical solution to what happened. As many of the Rintarou stories go (especially those with Rintarou and his father just discussing a case as armchair detectives), the story's cleverness lies in how the story is presented to the reader in terms of how every element is connected, and Rintarou then using clever questions to steer the reader (and his father) towards a subversion of the original presentation, showing how everything had been connected in a different manner in reality. This is also executed satisfactorily in this tale, and while some elements do feel a bit too familiar if you've read a healthy amount of the Rintarou short stories, Tsugi wa Anta no Ban da yo is a pretty solid entry in the series.

It's not a very long story, so there's not much more I can talk about without giving away too much. Looking at the already available three stories that will be included in the upcoming Norizuki Rintarou no Fukaku volume though, I think these were all really solid short mystery tales, with of course the first two being pure guess-the-culprit puzzles seperated in a "problem" and "solution" part, while Tsugi wa Anta no Ban da yo is a bit more open, but feels more unique with its ghost story set-up . I do have to admit that now that I have read three of the four stories, it's likely I won't be picking up a copy of Norizuki Rintarou no Fukaku right away on release just to read that one final original story.. Oh well, I'm sure I'll get to it eventually.

Original Japanese title(s): 法月綸太郎「次はあんたの番だよ」 

The Problem of the Red Rose

"There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it."

"A Study in Scarlet" 

Unsurprisingly, I have quite a few mystery books that have red as the main color on the cover. I wonder what color is the rarest though. Something like purple?

Terada Satoshi is a young detective assigned to the prestigious homicide division of the Metropolitan Police Department with a bright future awaiting him.... until he foolishly left confidential files at the house of a suspect during a house search. The woman living with the suspect posted the files online, making a laughing stock of the police, questioning their capabilities of actually conducting a criminal investigation. Terada wasn't a scapegoat, but the actual person who made the grave mistake of course, so he was severely punished for the deed: he was removed from the homicide division and effectively demoted by his assignment to the Red Museum. Following the example of the Black Museum of Scotland Yard, the MPD has its own Red Museum, where files and evidence concerning cases of which the statute of limitations have already passed are stored in the archives beneath the old brick mansion in Mitaka, Tokyo. His pride couldn't have been hurt worse, as gone are the days of investigating serious crimes, and left are just boxes filled with old evidence waiting for Terada to stick a nice label with a QR code on them so they can be registered into a database. The same old, day after day after day. 

The Red Museum is headed by Hiiro Saeko, an attractive woman but rather emotionally detached, and often referred to as the Snow Woman. Hiiro's rank is superintendent and she's supposed to be in the elite 'career path' within the police, so Terada suspects she must have really messed up too in the past to be stuck here despite her career history, staring at dead cases all day. However, soon after Terada's assignment to the Red Museum, Hiiro orders Terada to look into an old unsolved case they are registering into the database. Once he reports his findings to her, Hiiro manages to solve the case and identify the culprit decades after the murder happened! It turns out that while the Red Museum is storing away old cases, Hiiro doesn't consider all cases dead, and she goes over every case they register, solved or not, to see if she can uncover the real truth. In Ooyama Seiichirou's short story collection Akai Hakubutsukan ("The Red Museum", 2015), we follow Hiiro and Terada as they tackle five cases from the past... and the present.

In 2016, Akai Hakubutsukan had a live-action adaptation, which I reviewed back then. It was a feature-length special, adaptating multiple stories and in the end, I wasn't too impressed because it felt a bit chaotic. But on the other hand, I am a huge fan of Ooyama Seiichirou, which is partially connected to the fact I love short mystery stories, and Ooyama's a master in that form. As I have read most of Ooyama's work already (yes, I know I haven't written the review for the second Watson-ryoku yet...), it was just a matter of time I would get started on the Red Museum series. Actually, besides the television special, I had actually already read one of the stories collected in this first volume of the series, but for some reason it appears I never reviewed it, as I can't find a review of it on my blog. But as the third volume of the series released a few months ago, I knew it was time to finally get properly started on this series.

Pan no Minoshirokin ("Ransom for Bread") is the opening story. It was originally titled Akai Hakubutsukan ("The Red Museum") and is also about twice as long as all the other stories, so it was basically a pilot which was later extended into a full series. As such, it spends relatively much time explaining how Terada came to work at the Red Museum, his first impressions of the cold head of the museum, his meeting with the two other staff members of the museum and portraying Terada as someone who really is proud of having been in the homicide division, looking down at Hiiro as someone who probably has never conducted any real investigation herself and only being in a managerial role. Things of course change with this first case. Terada is sent to transfer evidence from the Shinagawa Police Station to the Red Museum for filing: the evidence is from a case that occured in 1999, when the director of the big bread supplier Nakajima Bread was murdered. Someone had been tampering with products of the company, introducing nails into the bread, which of course led to a huge drop in sales. The blackmailer then sent a letter to the director, demanding for a fortune if he wanted it to stop. The director was to bring the money in a suitcase by car, and he'd be contacted via his phone installed in his car. The police was of course not to be involved, but they were secretly informed and a police detective was hiding in the car's trunk, which allowed him to communicate with the director and maintain radio contact with the supporting detectives. The director was led to an abandoned manor in the forest. When he didn't appear after a while, the detective in the trunk sent supporting detectives in the house as he too entered the building, but they only found the suitcase with money in the house, and the director gone. While they did find an underground passage leading away from the house, they couldn't understand why the money had been left behind. Later, the director's dead body was found elsewhere, making this a murder case. The police soon suspected the ransom money had just been a ruse, an excuse to camouflage the real goal of murdering the director, but the person with the best motive for doing so had an iron-clad alibi and the case was left unsolved.

For some reason I thought this had been adapted as part of the first television adaptation, but I guess they only did the introductionary part and not the actual mystery. Which is a shame, as this is a great opening story. In a way, it reminds me a lot of the short story Y no Yuukai ("The Kidnapping of Y"), the last story in Ooyama's debut book Alphabet Puzzlers. It too deals with a case set in the past, an abduction case (a child in Y no Yuukai, the director who disappears from the house in this story), someone is ordered to drive around in a car as they are directed to deliver ransom money and the money ending up not being retrieved by the culprit, leading to speculations to their real goal. The mechanics behind the case and the way they are solved are completley different though. Pan no Minoshirokin cleverly disguises the main driving dynamics of its plot as a different kind of mystery, hiding the true solution behind a well-designed veil of deceit. Once you recognize the mystery for what it really is, everything falls nicely in place, showing the tight plotting Ooyama is known for. If there's one thing I would fault the story for, it's that it doesn't make as clever use of the series' premise as some of the other stories in the same collection: while the conclusion might feel more impactful because the story took place ago in the past, a lot of how the main mystery would've been solved, would have been the same whether the story had been told real-time (i.e. in 1999) or as it is now, as an account of something that happed long ago. I feel other stories, like the second and the last one in this volume, utilize the concept of these all being old cases to better effect.

Fukushuu Nikki ("Diary of Revenge") is Ooyama's take on a device seen in both Nicholas Blake's The Beast Must Die and Norizuki Rintarou's Yoriko no Tame ni ("For Yoriko"), being about the diary of someone planning to commit murder out of revenge. In fact, these three stories, written by different people at different times, form a kind of series: the diary of Yoriko no Tame ni starts the day after the diary in The Beast Must Die ends, and Fukushuu Nikki´s diary starts after Yoriko no Tame ni's diary ends! The diary in question is of Takami Kyouichi, a student who vows revenge for the death of his ex-girlfriend Maiko. The two had broken up some months ago, but one day, he suddenly got a call from Maiko who wanted to see him. When he went to her place, her body was found lying in the garden outside of her apartment building, having apparently leapt to her death from her balcony, but Kyouchi suspects there's more behind her death and based on evidence found in her apartment and the fact she had been pregnant when she died, he theorizes Maiko had been murdered by her current boyfriend, who wanted to get rid of her and the baby the easy way. Kyouichi feverishly starts to look for clues to identify this boyfriend so he can kill him, detailing his thinking process in his diary. After he managed to execute his plan, his diary was removed during a burglary in his apartment building and the diary was sent to the police, who of course wanted to have a talk with him: he died in a car crash while running away. 

Both Terada and Hiiro read through the diary, which seems like an open-and-shut case as the murderer confessed to every detail, from motive to how he planned the murder, in his diary, but to Terada's surprise, Hiiro seems dubious about the "truth" behind this case, as she notes a few strange discrepancies within the diary's account. The result is an excellently plotted tale of mystery, where Ooyama managed to plant so many clues and foreshadowing in a surprisingly short diary: the diary hides an intricately designed plot that, despite the diary's short length, allows for clever red herrings, multiple solutions and a neat conclusion to it all. I actually recently did go through The Beast Must Die in anticipation of this story, but I liked the clewing in this story so much better and the way the plot is constructed so much better, being much closer to the type of mystery I like (Ellery Queen-like plotting).  

Shi ga Kyouhansha wo Wakatsu made ("Till Death Do The Conspirators Part") is about a murder exchange, a trope very dear to Norizuki Rintarou, so these two stories do make it feel like Ooyama had him in mind while working on this book. Terada is out driving when he becomes witness to a tragic incident involving a truck hitting a car. The lone driver of the car is hit fatally, but in his dying words, he makes a confession to Terada. Twenty-five years ago, he was involved in a murder exchange: he wanted to kill somebody, but he'd become the main suspect, so he swapped his murder with someone else, allowing both of them to obtain perfect alibis for 'their' murders. While the man manages to explain they committed the murders one week after another, Terada unfortunately couldn't make out the names the dying man was trying to convey and by the time the emergency services arrived, the man had already passed away. The man is easily identified by his wife and his driver's license and so Terada and Hiiro start looking into a death that occurred twenty-five years ago in his circle, for which he would've been a suspect if not for a perfect alibi. They learn his wealthy uncle had been murdered, supporting the claim of the murder exchange and leading to the next question: who killed the uncle and who was the person they ordered a hit on?

This was the main plot of the (first) live-action special, but whereas I remember nothing about the plot from the special, I think it is a great story here. The story certainly starts out in an open manner: you know there have been two murders twenty-five years ago, one being on the rich uncle, but Terada's investigations into murders in the same time window lead to two possible candidates, where someone was murdered and there had been an obvious suspect in the possession of a perfect alibi. Here the fact this series is about cases set long in the past helps develop the mystery, as what makes this mystery hard to solve is the fact you can hardly expect someone to remember what they did on a certain day at a certain time twenty-five years ago, and how are you going to prove that? So it's neigh impossible to prove either of those suspects committed the uncle murder, and yet... Hiiro is not the type to give up easily and despite these setbacks, she boldly proposes a theory that proves with whom the traffic accident victim swapped his murders and how the other murder was committed. At this point of the series, Terada is still hoping he can one day return to the homicide division and as he was the one to hear the dying man's last words, he also wants to show Hiiro he's a better investigator than she'll ever be due to his hands-on experience, but of course, we all know who's better at this...

Honoo ("Flames") is a relatively short story and the one I know I had read before, but for some reason I never wrote a review for it. Hiiro draws Terada's attention to an essay written by a photographer, whose family died in a fire: when she was in elementary school, she had gone off on a school trip, only to return an orphan. It was only later she heard the horrible truth: her aunt (sister of her mother) was going to stay at their home for a day because she and her boyfriend had a horrible breakup and they needed to talk things over to calm things down. Her mother, pregnant with a sibling, and her father had also been present. A fire broke out and the burnt bodies of her father, her mother and her aunt were found in the ruins. It turned out that all three of them had been poisoned before they were consumed by the fire, leading to the conclusion the jilted boyfriend killed everyone after their chat went wrong. The case was never solved, but Hiiro seems quite interested in the account of the now-adult photographer about her childhood. As said, this story is relatively short and features few characters, making it a bit easy to guess how everything falls into place eventually, but it is a neatly constructed mystery, with a lot of subtle clewing. This is the second time I read the story, but it only made me realize how well the story is written, as so many little passages and comments take on a completely different meaning once you know the truth.

Shi ni Itaru Toi ("A Question Unto Death") has a great premise: the Red Museum is asked to release the files and evidence on the death of a man found near the Tamagawa River twenty-six years ago to the homicide division of the MPD, as the exact same murder has occured: from the location of the body to the location of the wound, down to the fact a blood sample of an unknown person (the culprit?) was left on the clothes of the victim. The police fear the same murderer has striked again and thus need the old files to compare, and Hiiro of course hands over the files, as she too recognizes the eerie similarities between the cases. However, Hiiro is then approached by an old friend in Internal Affairs, who wants Hiiro on the case too: because the new body is too similar to how the body was discovered twenty-six years ago and there's no reason why the original murderer would go such lengths to replicate their own crime, he suspects the new murderer might be just a copycat, and more importantly, a copycat with precise knowledge of the police investigation twenty-six years ago, as the new murder also mirrors the old murder in ways not reported in the media and only known to people involved in the investigation. Hiiro accepts the task and starts investigating both the murders in the past and the present, while the homicide investigation too tries to find a connection between the two cases, focusing on the blood samples found at both crime scenes.

And as I am writing this, I learn there was actually a second adaptation of this series, and that second installment was based on this last story. This story introduces an interesting way to have Hiiro involved in an on-going investigation while also keeping her firmly tied to the work of the Red Museum. The mystery basically revolves around the matter of why the two murders are nearly identical down to every point: if it was the original murderer coming back again after twenty-six years, why would they mirror their own crime down to such detail, even down to something that obviously hadn't been planned originally (the bloodstain left on the victim)? On the other hand, if it's someone copying the murder, how did they get hold of such details and once again, what is the goal in mimicking an old unsolved crime, especially as it wasn't even a high-profile crime (i.e. not the type of murder to attract copycat killers in the first place)? The answer Ooyama has prepared for this question is fantastic: he provides the murderer with an incredibly original motive for this mystery to occur, and while it does require one character to be not quite sane for this story to work, the payoff is great, with a twist that will take the reader by surprise, not only because it's so unexpected, but alo because it's surprisingly well-clewed despite of the out-of-left-field-ness. This is the kind of surprise I'm reading detective stories for!

Akai Hakubutsukan shows once again why Ooyama is so well appreciated as a master of the short mystery story. All the stories except for the pilot/first story are pretty short in page length, but he always manages to pack the plots full with clues and foreshadowing that lead to surprising twists, all the while without telegraphing the solutions too much. I think the series works best when it makes actual use of the fact we're investigating old cases now, with limited options to doing reinvestigations. As I mentioned before, the third volume was released late 2025, but given how much I liked this first volume, I think catching up won't take long.

Original Japanese title(s): 大山誠一郎『赤い博物館』:「パンの身代金」/「復讐日記」/「死が共犯者を分かつまで」/「炎」/「死に至る問い」 

The House on the Cliff

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

"Saturae" 

Huh, guess this is the third Monzen review of this year on this blog within just a few months. Pretty rare for me to do reviews of the same author in such a short period of time.

Back in 2024, the bookshops Shosen and Horindou published a facsimile release of Monzen Noriyuki's Shi no Meidai ("A Proposition of Death", which was technically published as his fourth novel, but can also be considered his first novel (see the post for more about that). A "upgraded" version of this  facsimile release was also offered, as it included a booklet with a completely new, original short story by Monzen himself. Tsukiatari no Ie ("The Building in the Cul-de-Sac") isn't long at about fifty pages (which is usually around the lower page range of most Japanese short stories I read), but the set-up is rather memorable, and I think it deserves a brief discussion here.

he book opens with Ninomiya Seiji, a man in his early twenties, arriving at a small building near the sea, built in a clearing in the woods, only reachable by following an overgrown path from the nearest parking spot through the wood for five minutes. The concerete building, slightly bigger than a shed, was used by ama (free-divers, usually women) as a spot to get dressed, rest, and warm up, but has been long abandoned. Inside, Ninomoya finds his employer, Inuzuka. Ninomiya served time after killing a person, and once he was free, it was Inuzuka who was willing to hire him at his construction firm. Ninomiya owes a lot to Inuzuka, as he only still treated him as a decent human being despite his past, and he wasn't a truly bad person either. That said, Inuzuka isn't a truly good person either, and he's been duping people into far-too-costly reconstruction projects. Ninomiya has stood by his friend's side for a long time, but fearing Inuzuka might go too far with his criminal endeavours sooner or later, Ninomiya wants out. Inuzuka agreed, but Ninomiya had to do one last job for him.

And thus Ninomiya arrives at the building, where Inuzuka explains Ninomiya is to keep an eye on a person, who is being held captive. The building consists of two "rooms": entering the building leads to the larger entrance room. In the back of that room, is a smaller room, which has no windows and can only be accessed via the door in the entrance room. The prisoner is being held captive in the smaller room, which is locked with a key and also barricaded with a heavy, sturdy-looking barricade bar, which is held in place with four metal hinges on the wall and the door itself. Ninomiya is to not communicate with the prisoner at all, whether it's him starting a conversarion or the prisoner, but also not treat him badly.  The task will last for seven days. Ninomiya hasn't quite sized up the situation, when Inuzuka also locks the outer door of the building, meaning Ninomoya himself is also locked up. Inuzuka assures Ninomiya he'll come pick him up in seven days, and that someone will bring food for both Ninomiya and the prisoner twice a day (both the outer door and the inner door have a small door near the ground, meant for air intake, through which food can be pushed inside).

At first Ninomiya adheres to his assignment, not talking to the prisoner and keeping to himself. Food is also properly delivered around noon and the evening, so he has not to worry about being hungry. The prisoner however is surprisingly quiet, which makes Ninomiya wonder whether there is a prisoner inside. Fortunately, after some time he does hear a person inside. As the hours and days pass by however, Ninomiya starts to wonder. Who is the prisoner? Perhaps Inuzuka has kidnapped someone, and making Ninomoya a scapegoat, keeping him prisoner too so he can be the fall guy. Ninomiya starts to wonder out loud and even starts to talk to the prisoner, who very occasionally answers with short replies. Ninomiya also keeps a diary, detailing the little that happens during these seven days.

Seven days later, the murdered bodies of Ninomiya and Inuzuka are found: Ninomiya in the entrance room, Inuzuka's body in the locked room, which is still barricaded.

So we have an interesting two-folded mystery here: why is Ninomiya asked to watch a prisoner, while he's being kept imprisoned in the building himself too, and how come both Ninomoya and Inuzuka end up dead in the house (with Inuzuka being inside the room where the prisoner was). It's a very short story, so　I do think some details should have gotten more attention, but on the whole, I did enjoy this story a lot. The first two-thirds of the story read as a thriller, as Ninomiya starts to get more doubts about the task he has been given by Inuzuka, slowly realizing he might be set-up for some huge crime and trying to negotiate with the prisoner in the room to see if they can get out together. But then we shift to a police investigation after the seventh day, in which we not only learn that Ninomiya was mudered, but that also Inuzuka was found dead in the locked room (and Inuzuka died hours before Ninomiya too). While I have only read Monzen's novels, I was both surprised, and not surprised, to see he included diagrams in this story too: he always makes very detailed diagrams and floor plans for his stories, as he studied architecture and it's often an important motif in his mysteries. One could say the same here, though I wasn't that surprised by the "architectural" deception going on in this story: it was in fact the whole deal about why Ninomoya is being kept captive together with the prisoner that presented a fun mystery. Not completely fairly clewed perhaps, but an interesting, and most importantly, suspenseful plot nonetheless.

As this was written exclusively for the Shosen/Horindou facscimile release of Shi no Meidai, I doubt this would be collected in a short story collection if Monzen would decide to write more short stories in the future. I personally would be interested in his short stories though, going by what Tsukiatari no Ie brought! He apparently has at least three other short stories published, so I might try and see if I can obtain them/get copies of them.

Original Japanese title(s):  門前典之「突き当たりの家」