Secret at Mystic Lake

 "Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water"

"Be Water, My Friend"

First one of the new year!

The one thing I do hate about writing about Japanese translations of Chinese mystery novels is how I always have to look up the readings of each single name in Chinese and how to transliterate them into pinyin, as obviously, in the Japanese translations, they usually simply use the original Chinese characters and transliterate into Japanese pronouncations. It's not a lot of work, but I always have to get that out of the way before I can actually get started on the post...

In the suburbs of Shanghai lies the manor of the Lu family. Their spacious house used to be a state library and is located inside a former park, with a large lake next to the house. While the park and the lake had originally been left open the public when the former family patriarch bought everything, they eventually closed it off. After the patriarch's death, his widow (and second wife) Wu Miao remained the de-facto head of the clan. The sons Lu Ren (son of the first wife) and Lu Yi and Lu Li went their own directions, and still live in the same house with their own families too. Lu Ren in particular was well-known in society, as he was a philanthropist acting as the representative of the Lu family. One chilly winter morning, Lu Ren's grandson found a strange object near the semi-basement storehouse outside. When his father Lu Wenlong realizes his son was playing with an umbilical cord, he immediately goes to the storehouse. However, the entrance to the semi-basement storehouse is below ground level, and the stairs that lead down have been flooded due to the heavy rain the last couple of days. As the stairs lead two meters down and there's tonnes of water blocking the door right now, it has been impossible to open the door the last two days. But wanting to know what is going on, Lu Wenlong borrows a water pump to get all the water away, and when he enters the storehouse, he finds his father lying dead on the dry floor! He's been suffocated, and his mobile phone lies broken on the floor. As you can't suffocate yourself, it's obvious this is a murder, but the odd thing is that Lu Ren's estimated time of death is just one day earlier, so after the stairs had been flooded. Even supposing Lu Ren had gone inside the storehouse himself before the door was blocked by rain water, how did the murderer then get inside to kill Lu Ren, and get outside again? 

When later another member of the Lu clan is murdered in a locked room and another umbilical cord is found, the voice actress Zhongke, who rents a room in the Lu house, becomes terrified and wants to leave Shanghai and quit her job, but that fortunately for her, she is also personally chosen by the popular manga artist Anzhen to become the main voice actress in the upcoming animated adaptation of his most popular work. Anzhen also happens to work for the police as a sketch artist, and has in the past helped solve crimes. Not wanting to lose her, Anzhen declares he will solve the series of murders in the Lu household to relieve Zhongke of her fears. But will it really be so easy to solve this mystery in Sun Qinwen's Lindongzhiguan (2018)?

Sun Qinwen is a Chinese mystery novelist born in Shanghai, who is known as the Chinese king of the locked room mystery. Originally debuting in 2008 with a short story, he continued specializing in the short story format, publishing with the pen name Jiding. It wouldn't be until 2018 when he would publish his first full-length novel with Lindongzhiguan, under his real name Sun Qinwen. I had heard his name mentioned before in the comments of this blog, so I had been interested in his work for some time, but his work was not available in a language I could read (except for one short story translated to Japanese, but only via Kindle). Fortunately, 2023 finally brought us a Japanese translation of this novel: Gentou no Hitsugi ("Coffins in the Cold Winter") was translated by Ai Kousaku, and marks the first time Sun Qinwen got a major release in Japan. And I sure hope more follows.

One thing I immediately noticed was that this was a very straightforward mystery novel, with "obvious" mysteries in the form of locked room murders. You might think this is a strange thing to notice, considering everything I read for this blog is... mystery. However, the last few years, I have read a handful of mystery novels that were originally written in the Chinese language (usually as Japanese translations), and oddly enough, few of them were actually clasically-structured mystery novels. Part of it might be because I had read a few of the Taiwanese Soji Shimada Mystery Award winners: those novels played more with mysteries that were built on intertwining narratives/consciousness/memories of events. That is a reflection of Shimada Souji's own preference, I suppose, as he acts as the final judge for that award and he himself too soon moved away from classically structured puzzle plot mysteries and started focusing a lot more on memory/narrative-focused mysteries. Lu Qiucha's Yuan Nian Chun Zhi Ji was awesome, but very deeply imbedded in classical Chinese philosophy while Chan Ho-Kei's The Borrowed (13.67) was great too, but could differ in tone greatly depending on the story, so Lindongzhiguan in comparison felt very refreshing as a Chinese mystery that really just did nothing but be a classic puzzle plot mystery, focusing on a clear impossible crime. And it was a good one too!

The first murder, in the semi-basement storehouse, is defnitely the most memorable one. The premise of a room that is sealed by water is really cool. And yes, it is a huge design flaw if you have a storehouse to keep food safe so you can survive in times of (natural) crises, but the stairs can get flooded, blocking the door of said storehouse. But anyway, as normal and essential water is for our usual life, it's probably hard to imagine right away how much water is needed to flood a stairs that go two meters down ground level, and the sheer weight that body of water has. But as the storehouse was found dry when Lu Wenlong discovered his father's body, it is also clear the murderer didn't just open the door and let the stairs flood again after committing the murder. The phone that was broken by throwing it on the floor also indicates the murderer had actually been in the storehouse, so how did they get in, and out? The solution could've been hinted at better I think: basically the detectives find something while looking for something else, and that something is a major clue to solving the water locked room. I like the solution though! It is a bit silly, but the right kind of silly because a locked room murder isn't realistic in the first place, and just visualizing it is really funny. Practically speaking, I am not completely sure how feasible this is, but I don't care, this is the kind of imagination I like to see in mystery fiction!

A second murder occuring inside the house, in a bedroom, is relatively simple. Someone is murdered inside their bedroom, while someone else had been sitting in the hallway in front of that room. After a loud cry, the door is unlocked from the inside, and when the witness goes inside the room, they find the victim lying dead beneath the bed, but sees nobody else in the room. The solution is an interesting variation of a trick I have seen somewhere else, but in a completely different context, and used for a completely different purpose. I quite like the idea here, but at the same time, I don't think it works quite well here: the location of a bedroom simply doesn't seem convincing enough for this trick to work, it'd need a different kind of room to really be convincing, I think. I do wonder if Sun Qinwen came upon the idea by reading that one comic I was thinking of, for I do think this is a great example of how to completely transform a trick. Visually, it reminds of that comic, but it leads to a completely different purpose and execution. Like, I can imagine how reading the comic could've jogged Sun's mind to arrive at this different conclusion. 

The third murder is absolutely horrifying when you realize how it was done. Or perhaps, the murder itself is already horrifying, as it involves a decapitated corpse. Outside in the park, next to the lake, were three suspended cabins with glass floors. They were suspended above the lake, to give the feeling of floating above the freezing water and were originally open for rental when the park was still open to the public: most of them were removed after they closed the park, leaving only three for private use. One of these cabins had been dropped into the freezing lake by burning the metal suspension wires with acid. Inside the cabin however, a decapitated man was found. The cabin itself however had been locked with a padlock by someone else, and she swears the victim had been alive and well when she left him there (as part of their SM play), and that she had the key with her all the time. So how could the murderer have gone inside the cabin to murder the victim, and why did they also drop the cabin into the lake? Some of the logistics of this murder seem a bit iffy, but man, I love the main idea of this murder, and specifically, the reason why the victim ended up without his head. Imagining the scene is just terrifying, and incredibly memorable. Again not really a fan of how Sun Qinwen drops hints regarding the howdunnit however, he has cool ideas for locked room murder tricks, but the way he clewes the path to the solution to them often feel like the clues come out of nowhere, or Anzhen asks the police to check something very specific simply because he just happens to think of it, without a real prompt.

The whodunnit aspect becomes more prominent at the end of the book, and it's a mixed bag. Style-wise, Sun Qinwen does seem to follow the Queen school, with a lot of emphasis on deductions surrounding the actions the murderer took at the crime scene, and comparing those conclusions to the pool of suspects. Some of these conclusions are ones we see fairly often in this style of mysteries, so you might already recognize them as "oh, this is going to be used to identify the murderer" as soon as the element is introduced in the story. Not really a big fan of the ones we see more often, though there was a more interesting at the very end, though I like it more for the idea than the actual execution. I think the idea is really cool, but it needed much more robust clewing to feel fair in hindsight. As I read it now, I can kinda see how Sun Qinwen thought he had indicated that clue enough, but even then, it still doesn't feel convincing enough to feel "fair" in hindsight. I also don't think the identity of the murderer works completely. Ultimately, a lot of the plot also depends on luck, especially of having certain characters act in that particular way at that certain time, and the exact dynamics behind some of the locked room murders (the exact things and order the killer did to accomplish the murder) and while I can wave that away one time, each of these murders had a lot of these aspects, so it feels like the plot is constantly giving the murderer lucky brakes just so the mystery could work, rather than the murderer actually planning out an... executable plan with little room for failure. So there is stuff I like when it comes to how the plotting does allow for Queen-like deductions, but not all of it really works, and the identity of the murderer seems to raise a few more questions than answers when it actually comes to the matter of executability.

The book works quite well as an introduction to Sun Qinwen's works by the way. There are some minor references to his other works (thanks, translator's notes!), and we also learn bits and pieces of Anzhen's own past, and how he might be involved in a bigger mystery himself too, it is a great first work to read. The story that ties into the umbilical cords is also pretty awesome, somewhat reminsicent of Mitsuda Shinzou's work in the way it ties into old family ceromonies and things like that, with a touch of horror, though I think it was very underplayed here. It should have been used far more strongly, as it has so much potential!

So on the whole, I did really like Lindongzhiguan. The locked room mysteries shown in this book have exciting elements, which at least do convey to me why Sun Qinwen would be seen as a major locked room murder specialist in China. While I don't think his whodunnit angle in this book works completely, it too has elements that are inspired, so I do hope to read more his work in the future. A short story collection in particular would be very, very welcome!  

Original Chinese title(s): 沁文 "凛冬之棺"