Snow Job Too Small

"X marks the spot."

"Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade"

Guess it'll be starting to become warm again by the time this post goes online. I actually read this book during one of the hottest summers in Japan...

Six men and women nearing their thirties each make their way to the mountains near Otaru City in Hokkaidou to arrive at the Deep Snow House, the private residence of Tachihara Shigeru, retired teacher, photographer and self-proclaimed inventor. This group of six used to be in Shigeru's class in high school and have been invited to a small gathering at his home. Almost a year ago, they had a class-wide reunion, but Shigeru had an accident then, falling off the stairs at the restaurant they were eating/drinking at, which left him unable to walk. His former pupils received an invitation to visit him at his home and stay for a few days for skiing, but as they arrive, they do find it odd they are only six of them here, especially as some of them weren't even that close with Shigeru. When they arrive at the house, they are shocked to see Shigeru after the accident: he wears a mask, sits in a wheelchair and can't talk, having to use a computer-generated voice coming out of a robot to speak. As they talk things over, Shigeru explains he didn't send all these letters and that he never had any plans to have any parties at his home. While everyone wonders who then sent these letters, Shigeru says his former pupils might as well stay. However, strange events occur and when they look into some of Shigeru's private files, they find clues indicating a plot: for over a year now, a "pusher" has been active in Sapporo City, pushing people from stairs and elevations out on the streets, in malls and everywhere, injuring people severely. Notes on Shigeru's computer seem to suggest Shigeru suspect his fall wasn't an accident, but also engineered by the pusher, and that this pusher is one of his students, more precisely, one of the six students now present at his house. What is going to happen at this house, especially as a snow storm prevents anyone from leaving in Nikaidou Reito and Kuroda Kenji's Killer X (2001).

Killer X is the first novel in a trilogy, but also the second novel in a tetralogy. That might sound confusing... and it kinda is. So to explain: in 2000 publisher Kobunsha published the novel Hakuginsou no Satsujinki ("The Killer of the Silver House") by the author "Psycho Jun", an pseudonym to signify two collaborating authors. A quiz was set-up, and participants had to guess who these two writers were. 233 people made a guess, with only 8 getting it right. It was eventually revealed that the writers were Nikaidou Reito and Aikawa Akira. The next year, Killer X was published, this time a book written by a duo operating under the name "The Queen Brothers" (the name that Nikaidou and Aikawa were planning to use originally). It was later revealed this pen name belonged to Nikaidou Reito and Kuroda Kenji. Nikaidou Reito and Kuroda Kenji would pen two more novels in this series. So the first novel was by the duo of Nikaidou and Aikawa, and the remaining three novels by Nikaidou and Kuroda. The four books also all share the same theme of being closed circle mysteries set in ski resorts, so are often referred to as the Ski Mystery Tetralogy. So far so good. 

The confusing thing however is that there's also a binding factor only present in the three novels by Nikaidou Reito and Kuroda Kenji. Killer X is not only the title of the first book, it is also the name of an in-universe character. Killer X is a (fictional) mascotte figure created by a stationery maker and hugely popular. The titular Killer X is a former monk, and stationery and other merchandise featuring Killer X usually feature a visual of him, accompanied by English sentences with trivia about X, like  "X Is Monk" (sic) or "X Likes Cooking". Killer X as a character appears in three of the Nikaidou/Kuroda novels, thus these three books specifically are also referred to as the Killer X Trilogy. In Killer X, one of the characters is a huge of Killer X, and as it is the title, you can also guess the Killer X character is in fact connected to the mystery.

I have no idea how Nikaidou and Kuroda divided their work and planned out this novel, but I can say one thing: they were enthusiastic as hell. The book is not short, though very readable because of the simple prose, but it's crammed full with all things mystery readers like. The closed circle situation set-up of a house isolated from the outside world due to a snowstorm is of course very, very traditional, but there's plenty more of that to come, like a masked host who used a computer-generated voice to speak with his guests, who even denies he invited them, mysterious letters, a dark backstory of a person who randomly pushes people in the city, a mysterious companion to the host who seems to have secrets of her own, a group of high school comrades who aren't quite just friends anymore because of time passing but also because of personal history... There's a very detailed floor plan of the Deep Snow House too, which immediately gives the reader all kinds of ideas of how murders could occur there... The suspense parts of the book work well, and you can constantly feel something will go wrong, because somehow, not everything fits.

As a mystery novel, it's perhaps not exactly what you'd expect it to be. I at least had hoped for some bombastic locked room murder situation (and solution) from Nikaidou, which I didn't really get here. What I did get is a very complex, tangled web of narratives that is slowly unraveled. The story jumps between perspectives and times, showing us glimpses of one character in the present, but then for example jumping back to the perspective of the pusher while they are committing one of their crimes, only to jump to another character soon before arrival at the house etc. Keeping a keen eye for how everything is connected is not only necessary to solve the mystery, I'd say you also need to pay attention simply just to keep up with the plot due to all the jumping around. 

When the snow prevents anyone from leaving the house (note: nobody actually goes skiing in this book despite it being called the Ski Tetralogy!!), the mood becomes suspenseful, but also very slow, because little actually happens for a large part of the novel. It's mostly the ex-students trying to figure out who and why they have been gathered at the house of Shigeru, with a focus on the tripping accident of Shigeru some time earlier, when they were having a class reunion at a bar and Shigeru tripped down the stairs on his way back from the bathroom. So a lot of the actual criminal investigation is aimed at the past incident, while the present-day events are more about the building suspense of finding out what is happening in the first place, though slowly but surely, things are about to occur in the present-day too Ultimately, the mystery behind Shigeru's fall in the past is fairly simple, but also very adequately clewed (some of the clewing is even quite cheeky!) and I do love how it very naturally connects to the many other plotlines going on this book. Keeping all of the narratives in mind can be a challenge, but once this part of the mystery is solved, you can slowly see how a lot of the seperate narratives you have been reading come together. There's some great misdirection going too in regards to the motive, and I really liked how that was done, even if it sometimes borders on the unfair. The more memorable parts of Killer X is definitely how in the end all the disjointed fragments we saw are given their proper context,  though obviously, I can't really explain that without spoiling that/explaining too much in detail. The device of Killer X as a character was alright, though I am surprised they decided to use it as the title of the book too, as Killer X's role in the book isn't that important on its own. I am interested to see how Nikaidou and Kuroda will use Killer X in the following two books.

Oh, and there's one more thing to note: the very ending of this book does reference, and I suspect even spoils the previous book (Hakuginsou no Satsujinki by Psycho Jun = Nikaidou Reito and Aikawa Akira). I haven't read that one yet, but they discuss a certain character in a way that makes me think it's a fairly major spoiler? It might just be something revealed to the reader at the start of that book, but you might want to read them in order just to be safe.

Killer X was perhaps not the kind of mystery I had expected as a collaborative effort by both Nikaidou Reito and Kuroda Kenji, but I did enjoy the book overall. It is never revolutionary in the way it handles mystery tropes, but you can definitely feel both authors are confident in their art and used to playing with the familiar tropes of the genre to come up with something that is very recognizable as a mystery story, yet also bringing enough energy to also pack this "Definitely A Detective Story With All The Usual Twists" with a few good ideas of their own. This was a decent enough read, and it does make me interested in the other two novels, which I fortunately already have in my possession. 

Original Japanese title(s): 二階堂黎人、黒田研二『Killer X』