The Japanese Fan Mystery

"Somehow she had never thought of a Japanese as capable of emotion. It struck her suddenly that just because their eyes were shaped differently, (sic) was no sign they possessed no tear-ducts" 

"The Door Between" 

Being asked to vote for a list of best mystery novels (both Japanese and foreign) of all time resulted in a long, long discussion and a lot of politics at the Mystery Club. It sounds fun in theory, but just imagine the efforts needed to compress everybody's opinions and favorites in two lists of ten titles. Keeping in mind that the publisher of the list asked several other mystery circles, as well as famous writers, to vote too, 'our' list included quite a lot of strategic choosing (No need to 'push' a certain famous title, because it will come up anyway). Which explains why Christie didn't make the cut in our list. And Queen has a very, very ambigeous spot in the list. But skipping dinner and talking for about four hours about all kinds of detective fiction is... actually closer to hell than heaven. Glad we're done.

And talking about Queen: I read The Door Between recently. Karen Leith is an award-winning novelist who spent most of her life in Japan before moving to New York. She usually walks around in a kimono, her house is full of objects she took with her from Japan and even her house-maid is Japanese. She is engaged to Dr. McClure, a renowned cancer specialist. One day, Dr. McClure's daughter Eva pays Karen a visit, but she discovers Karen in her room with her throat cut open. Furthermore, the door to the room was under constant observation by Eva herself, and all other exits were locked from the inside: The conclusion: a locked room murder! Or, as the police thinks: Eva did it, because if all other exits were locked from the inside, only Eva who was alone near the door could have done it. A shady private eye Terry believes in Eva's innocence though and tries to proof it.

Oh, and this is an Ellery Queen novel, so he appears in there somewhere too.

This is a weird Ellery Queen novel. It was originally serialized in a women's magazine it seems, and heck, does it show. Not to look down upon them unconditionally, but this novel is very different from the previous Queen novels (the nationality novels and Halfway House). The story follows the adventures of Eva, with all the drama surrounding her being a suspect and love triangles and I don't know. Heck, inspector Queen and even Ellery for some time act more like the antagonists rather than the protagonists! I concur that this was also kinda present in Halfway House, but I at least had a lot more fun overall with that novel than with The Door Between.

Which was also because I was not too impressed by the puzzle plot. This is pretty much a locked room puzzle (if one accepts Eva's innocence because she is the poor little female protagonist who needs protection from everybody), but the road to the solution never feels as satisfying as the pure logical elimination method employed in the earlier novels. Ellery mostly guesses. And to be honest, I wasn't too impressed by the solution either. The Door Between is quite far removed from the nationality novels, which makes it that much ironic that the Japanese title of this novel translates to The Japanese Jay Mystery and is considered an unofficial part of the nationality series. Which it really, really isn't. It would have been better if they had done that with Halfway House...

And I know this novel was written in another time and actually, if one keeps that in mind it might not even be that bad, but I made quite a lot Marge Simpson groan imitations as I was reading The Door Between because of its Orientalist views. Like the quote above. Which is really just the tip of the iceberg. It's a parade of all kind of Orientalist remarks by everyone and the book also features some interesting sentences written in romanized Japanese. I really should borrow the Japanese translation one of these days to see what they did with that!

I just read The Door Between as I've read most other Queens and I'm just picking up the last few ones I missed, but man, would I have been disappointed if I had read this thinking this was a nationality novel! I am happy I read this now, because this would have left quite a bad impression on my thoughts on Queen, I think.

「愛せなくていいから、ここから見守ってる」

"He would never have had such a thought if he had been kneeling with other men upon a floor. But he saw all men walking about like insects"

"The Hammer of God"

Backlog is reduced to two book reviews. And I don't think the booklog will grow that much the following days, as I have trouble getting through the two books I really have finish before next week as is, so the beast is almost slain!

Besides the usual books, I've already discussed games and movies this month, so now it's time for an audio drama! (I think it's unlikely I will ever use the musical tag again. Unless I go to the Gyakuten Kenji musical by the Takarazuka Revue next year...)

Yaneura no Sanposha ("The Stroller in the Attic") is the third audio drama by Momogre/Kikka based on Arisugawa Alice's Writer Alice / Criminologist Himura series after 48 Banme no Misshitsu and Swiss Dokei no Nazo. I already reviewed the original short story in the past: a night prowler is active in the city of Osaka. His victims are all women and he has the weird tendency of cuttig his victims' hair and taking it with him (No idea why I am seeing this fetish so often lately...). The police has no idea who the maniac is, until they find a connection between this case and the murder of an old landlord. Two points of interest are found in the old man's diary: one is that the man had taken up the same habit like Gouda Saburou in Edogawa Rampo's famous short story The Stroller in the Attic: the landlord used to climb up the attic to peek at his tenants rooms! The second point of interest in the diary is that the landlord also claimed that during one of his attic strolls, he had seen evidence that one of his tenants was the infamous night prowler. The police suspects the man was killed for finding out too much and sees this as a chance to catch the night prowler. The problem: the landlord identified all of his tenants through some kind of code and the police has no idea which of the tenants is the maniac. Criminologist Himura drags along detective writer Arisugawa Alice, as an 'expert' in solving codes.

This was originally a short story, so I was kinda surprised this story was selected for an audio adaptation. In fact, the only reason I can think of is that this story touches very briefly on how Himura and Alice met. And I do mean very briefly. Besides that point, I actually don't think this story was a very wise choice, actually.

At one hand, I did enjoy the original story and it has been made into a faithful audio drama. As a big fan of Edogawa Rampo and the original The Stroller in the Attic, I loved how this story played with similar themes and actually turned it around: in the original story, the titular stroller eventually tries his hand at murder, while in this story, the stroller becomes the victim of one of his viewing objects. It's a surprising subversion of the original story and the code used in the landlord's diary is also strongly connected with Rampo's story, which makes it the much fun. Also, the original story was fairly short, so I was quite surprised to see that the full length of the drama, around fifty minutes, was filled perfectly, without feeling too dragged out, nor too fast-paced.

One thing I thought was a missed chance in the original story, was the fact that there were no alternative solutions proposed. In Ellery Queen's dying message stories, you are often presented several wrong interpretations until the final, right answer is given. I think it would also have been better for this story if multiple interpretations had been explored more thoroughly.

This is a point I had addressed already in my reviews of the earlier Arisugawa Alice audio dramas: some types of stories are just better suited for a purely audio adaptation than other types. And I don't code-cracking stories are particularly fit to solve with just your ears and head. Or at least: I can't decipher a code just listening to the coded items. I really need to see them before my head starts to process them. And I think that the visual plays a large part in this story anyway, as it deals strongly with voyeurism. It is a story that deals with what the reader sees, with the feeling people get from secretly looking at other people, from peeping. It's this subject matter that makes this story feel much more suitable for a visual medium (and I count a novel as a visual medium, to an extent). Or that might be me just nitpicking. Though I really do have to say that I had the same feeling too when I listened to an audio adaptation of Rampo's The Stroller in the Attic.

There are stories where misunderstanding (mis-hearing something) plays a large part, and then I think an audio-drama would be perfect. There are probably codes cracking stories that probably work better if you actually hear them, but few mysteries nowadays are actually written to be heard, so that explains why a lot of codes are in fact more visually-focused, I think.

It seems that Momogre/Kikka has already a new Arisugawa Alice audio adaptation (alliteration, engage!) scheduled for next month of a story I haven't read yet, so kinda looking forward to that!

Original Japanese title(s): モモグレ　（原：有栖川有栖）　『屋根裏の散歩者』

"Objection!"

「ぼくの名前は、成歩堂 龍一。３ヶ月前に弁護士になったばかり、今日は始めての法廷だ」

『逆転裁判』

"My name is Phoenix Wright. I became a laywer just three months ago and today is my first time in court" 

"Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney"

Ever since I played first played Gyakuten Saiban (Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney), I've considered it as one of the most memorable detective stories ever. Heck, I easily rank the series as more fun than a lot of 'conventional' detective fiction (books) and I always find it a shame that even though a lot of mystery blogs out there do seem to discuss movies (and occasionally audio dramas), they very seldom discuss videogames. The medium might be different, but it is certainly not one unfit for the genre and it is a shame a lot of readers seem to miss out on great stuff, just because it is in a slightly different medium (the same for detective comics like Conan by the way). The Gyakuten (Ace Attorney) series really offers a unique experience, which everybody should have tried.

I had missed seeing the Gyakuten Saiban live action movie when it was first shown in the Netherlands earlier this year, so had I wait for the home video release. Which was last week. In the near future, crime rates have risen so high, that a new judicial system has been implemented to cope with the problem. Under the Initial Trial System, trials will last for a maximum of three days, as to speed up the process. In these trials the prosecution and defense only have to focus on the question of the defendant's guilt, with the actual punishment being determined at a later stage. With the high turnover rate in this world, trials have also grown out to be a kind of high speed consumer good: trials are open to the public to view and the battles between prosecution and defense remind of the gladiator games in ancient Rome. Enter rookie defense laywer Naruhodou Ryuuichi, who has taken the grand case of defending Ayatsuji Mayoi (Maya Fey), who is accused of murdering her sister, who also happened to be Naruhodou's boss at the law office. Will Naruhodou be able to turn the case around and find the real murderer?

Gyakuten Saiban is a condensed version of the first game and a mighty interesting movie too! It is an actual good movie based on a videogame, though still not without its faults. One problem might be the fact that it tries very hard to fit in most of the first game in its two-hour run and especially the first 20 minutes of the movie can be hard to follow if you're not familiar with the original source, I think. It runs at a very high speed, with lots of happenings and most of all: Gyakuten Saiban features its own, particular and unique world, which might be hard to get into if you have not played the game. The above mentioned Intial Trial System is one, but Gyakuten Saiban also features some very unique character appearances (almost all of them being faithful reproductions of the game, including Naruhodou's spiky hair) and a distinct sense of comedy. The summary above might sound very dark and gloomy, but Gyakuten Saiban is definitely a comedy. It might hard to catch all that in the first half of the movie. Are you able to get into this world view, then you're in for a treat. A great comedy-detective with its own face and featuring some of the most memorable scenes in detective fiction. And a lot of fingerpointing!

If one is to compare this movie to the Takarazuka Revue musical, I would say that the latter actually feels closer to the videogames though. Despite the singing and dancing and added romance plots. Visually, the movie is much closer to the original, but the motions of the characters in the game were reproduced more faithfully in the musical. Which doesn't make it better automatically though: it's just that the dialogue and movements of the characters are much closer to the game in the musical than in the movie. Overall, the movie works much better as a stand-alone product though.

As a fan of the game, it is almost impossible for me to not compare it to the original. So I won't even try. The game is naturally quite a bit longer, so a lot of the human relations (Naruhodou - Mayoi, rival prosecutor Mitsurugi and police detective Itonokogiri) feel a bit downplayed in the movie, as there was just not as much time spent on it as in the games. But the visual designs of the characters made it all over perfectly and while the set design is very different from the more colorful videogames, I really like the darker look to the world, with the bright characters running around there. Director Miike also made use of a very cool way of showing the audience the evidence used in the trials, which is a crucial concept in the original game. It is one thing to say someone is wrong and to show him the supporting evidence for that, it is another thing to actually throw the evidence at that person's face. And the occasional use of the music from the videogame in the movie soundtrack is fantastic. At the right moments, you'll hear the great music that is so much a part of the Gyakuten series.　

I have mentioned countless of times that I absolutely love the Gyakuten videogame series. Heck, in a not-so-distant-past, I even wrote my bachelor's thesis about the use of role language in these games! The great thing about the detective plots in these games is the way they are told. We have locked room murders, seemingly impossible crimes and other 'grand' tropes, but there are also 'normal' poisoning cases and seemingly ordinary murder cases here, but even these latter 'simple' cases are made memorable because of how Takumi Shuu, the original creator, wrote the stories.

He mentions it in this essay, but there is an inherent contradiction in detective fiction: readers want to solve the mystery themselves, but they also want to get surprised. And now try to change that into a detective videogame. Players want to get surprised by the mystery, but the game must also be beatable, the player must be able to complete the game themselves. With fighting games, you might expect a player to train, but that is more difficult with detective stories. Well, Takumi wrote all of his stories focusing on contradictions. No matter how big the case, if we look at his storytelling as a sort of grammar, then the smallest unit in Takumi's storytelling is the contradiction.

How is this implemented? In 'normal' fiction, the reader is presented with a big problem (i.e. a naked body found in a department store), with the detective going here and there looking for clues and presenting his conclusions in the denouement. In the Gyakuten games, there is still the big problem, but the road towards the final solution is cut into little pieces, the contradictions. You assume the role of Naruhodou in most of the games and during the trials in the game, witness make statements which usually contain something that contradicts the evidence you have. Why did that witness say he was watching TV, even though I have a report that there was a power shortage? Why did that witness say the defendant hit the victim with his right hand, even though he is left-handed? These may seem like small problems, but eventually, these little problems lead back to the main problem (usually murder). So the player is expected to solve these little contradictions one by one, which in turn slowly lead towards the truth. If a conventional detective works towards the solution of a problem once, than the Gyakuten games are a constant series of little solutions, that in turn lead to the solution of the main problem (like this).

What makes this so fantastic is that the player is never bored. Everytime you manage to explain a contradiction, you find yourself in the particular situation of having brought forth a new contradiction by solving the previous one (and usually, these new situations are not particularly saving your case). You are constantly challenged with new problems that you need to solve on the spot, and your back is against the wall practically all of the time. There is a sense of pressure and with constantly changing circumstances, this is a prime example of presenting a detective story, which often can be quite boring if sticking to the murder-investigation-denouement model, in new and exciting ways.

ADDENDUM: The way the characters keep throwing new evidence towards each other, leading to new contradictions and views on the murders is reminiscent of the way Columbo often spoke with his suspects: coming up with small contradictions, allowing the suspect to present a plausible explanation, which in turn led to new contradictions. In that sense, it is not new per se, but the tempo of Columbo and Gyakuten Saiban is very different, with the little confrontations regarding contradictions in Columbo being more of a tool, while it is a fundamental part of the storytelling in Gyakuten Saiban.

Anyway, sorry for this sidetracking, but this type of storytelling is also present in the movie, which makes it a very interesting kind of detective movie: it is much more action-packed than a movie like Green for Danger or The Devotion of Suspect X, and I don't mean action-packed in the sense of the Sherlock Holmes movies. It is action-packed because the detective plot is presented to the viewer with a distinct rhythm, which allows those with a quick head to think along (or even out-think) the protagonist, which is one of the joys of detective fiction. But unlike 'conventional' detective movies, where you have to wait until the ending, Gyakuten Saiban keeps you on the edge of the seat, constantly bombarding Naruhodou and you with new problems to solve. Like the videogame, this feels like a new format for detective movies, very strongly related to thrillers/adventure movies, despite being an orthodox detective movie!

Hmm, this review definitely lost its direction halfway through. But anyway, this is definitely a must-see for fans of the videogames and it works as a standalone comedy detective movie too, though it might be hard to get in the beginning. If you're able to get accept the unique world of Gyakuten Saiban, then you're in for a great movie which brings a new dynamic to detective movies!

Original Japanese title(s): 『逆転裁判』　

「Justice for True Love 君だけのために」

「人はなぜ傷つけるくせに 許されたいの?」

『君がいるから・・・』　(西脇唯)

"Why do people hurt other people, even though they want to be forgiven?"

"Because you're there..." (Nishiwaki Yui)

Backlog... growing... Doesn't seem to stop.... Must write to reduce.... write to reduce...

All well, I get to borrow the TV a little week longer because of circumstances, so I guess less detective fiction, more games this week. Note to myself: I still need to write the reviews, because playing games only stops the initial problem from becoming worse.

The first words in Norizuki Rintarou's Yoriko no tame ni ("For Yoriko") set the tone for the story: August 23, 1989. Yoriko died. The 17 year old daughter of Nishimura Yuuji was found strangled in a park near her school. The police think it was the work of a sexual maniac who has been active in the area for some months now, but Yoriko's father has doubts about this line of investigation and a long search leads him to whom he thinks the real murderer is. And after stabbing 'his' murderer to death and leaving a note explaining everything to his wife, Yuuji commits suicide. Or at least, he tried to commit suicide, but he was saved in the nick of time, though still in a coma. Writer/detective Norizuki Rintarou gets his hand on the final words Yuuji left behind before his suicide attempt and discovers some hints in the manuscript that point to a totally different truth behind the death of Yoriko.

Norizuki Rintarou is a writer who is strongly influenced by Ellery Queen. The use of a writer-detective protagonist with a police inspector as a father is a clear example of this, but Norizuki is also a Queen-reseacher who specializes in what he calls 'the Late Period Queen problems': meta-problems concerning the role of the detective in fiction, as addressed by Queen himself in many of his later novels. To reduce it to two main points: the detective (and the reader) can never say with absolutely certainty that he has access to all of the hints and clues that lead to the truth. Except for the (meta) explanation that the writer at one points abritrary decides that the story should end and thus isn't going to offer any new hints. So the solution the detective offers at the end of a story can never be guaranteed to be correct. The second point is that the detective himself is not a omnipotient figure with no relation to the murder drama: his presence alone already has presence on the actions of the other players of the tragedy and who is to say that the real murderer hasn't calculated for the interference of a detective through the use of false hints?

Many of the New Orthodox writers in fact deal with these Late Period Queen problems (Maya Yutaka for example), but with Norizuki it kinda stands out because he seems to be mostly exploring this theme in his novels and not in his short stories. His short story collections are very much like the stories in The Adventures of Ellery Queen, stories that focus on the puzzle element. Norizuki's novels however deal more obvious with the darker themes of Queen, and therefore feel very different from the short novels. With the exception of the first novel in the writer Norizuki Rintarou series maybe. Maybe. It's a grey-line there. Yoriko no Tame ni is definitely more like Namakubi ni Kiite Miro than Yuki Misshitsu.

So, what do we have in Yoriko no Tame ni? It starts with why the character Norizuki Rintarou is involved with the case in the first place. He is in fact asked to investigate the case because he is a famous detective. People are bound to starts rumors if a famous detective is on the job, and certain people have an interest in covering up the scandal surrounding the death of the young schoolgirl and her murderer. So Rintarou is initially only asked to acts as a rumor-starter, because of his function as a detective. He is just a polital tool . Which deals with point 2 mentioned above, the influence of the detective on the story and the reactions of the characters.

Also related is the puzzle plot in this novel. Which is actually quite vague and weak. Rintarou starts to have doubts surrounding Yuuji's deduction after reading the manuscript, but it is based on one sorta-defendable point and another fairly weak point. The rest of the story is also based on a lot of guesswork and a bit of psychological analysis, which is very different from the early pure-logic-based Queenian stories as we see in Arisugawa Alice's Student Alice stories. It also makes Yoriko no Tame ni feel more like a Higashino Keigo story than a Norizuki Rintarou story, to be honest. But as said, it can be explained as Norizuki purposely avoiding 'hard' evidence, as that is more easier to fabricate than psychological analyses. If one can't trust the evidence, all the detective can do is hope his reading of the suspects is correct. Because of this, there are also less 'big' detective tropes in Norizuki's novels like closed circles and locked rooms (both available in Yuki Misshitsu though, and a locked room in Ichi no Higeki, but not as a main problem in the latter). The novels focus more on core families and bigger human relations and the drama that springs forth from that.

A lot of academic literary research on detective novels like to play with the analogies between reader=detective, writer=criminal and text=crime in the genre. In that sense, having a detective doing his investigation by reading a text (Yuuji's manuscript) could also be considered an unbelievably meta-plot device. Or maybe I am seeing too much into this. Fact is though that Norizuki seems to like this plot device of having his detective reading texts, as this is also used in the later Ni no Higeki. A more direct influence might be Shimada Souji's Senseijutsu Satsujin Jiken, which features a similar plot-point (and with Shimada being a major influence in Norizuki's rise as a professional writer).

In the afterword to this story, Norizuki 'confesses' that Yoriko no Tame ni was actually 'just' a lengthened version of a short story he had originally written during his years in the Kyoto University Mystery Club. The title and the beginning and end are the same, with only the middle part being fleshed out more to bring it up to novel length. It's fun to see that he already worked with Queen problems then, but like one can sense from this review, I am not that enthusiastic about it. Which is why I wrote this lengthy about everything but the actual story. I find Yoriko no Tame ni interesting as a Norizuki Rintarou novel, but not as a novel per se. Though I am probably quite alone there, with international versions being published of this book and this week rumors of a possible South-Korean movie version even popped up.  

Yoriko no Tame ni is admittedly a page turner, it hits all the right emotional switches and the final scenes contain enough revelations to entertain a fan of the genre. In fact, most readers won't probably catch the nonsense I wrote above and will be able to enjoy it as a Higashino Keigo-esque, core-family-centered drama mystery. But for me, it's just too different from Norizuki's puzzle short stories and that is what I like about him.

Original Japanese title(s):  法月綸太郎　『頼子のために』

Prescription: Murder

診てみて。はやくよ！ 

いや、でも、診た感じで、脂肪のおかげで、内臓までは届いてないんですよね。

マジで？ 

えぇ、よかったですね、デブで。 

「さされた男」 (サンドウィッチマン） 

Take a look! Now! 

- But from what I've seen, the knife hasn't reached the organs because of your body fat. 

Really?! 

- Yes, you're lucky to be a fatty. 

"The Stabbed Man" (Sandwichman sketch) 

A doctor solving impossible problems? Surely we're talking about Black Jack?!

No, we're not. We're talking about Sam Hawthorne. But to start off with a small correction: I said earlier that Edward D. Hoch's Ellery Queen pastiche The Circle of Ink was the first Hoch I ever read. Now that I think about it, I had read Hoch's Queen pastiche The Reindeer Clue (in The Tragedy of Errors) before. Which still meant that I only knew Hoch from his Queen pastiches. So I picked up Sam Hawthorne no Jikenbo I ("The Casefiles of Sam Hawthorne I") last weekend to fix that blind spot in my education. This is a Japanese version of Crippen & Landru's Diagnosis Impossible in theory, collecting the first thirteen stories of Hoch's Dr. Sam Hawthorne series, with two important differences. One is that this first volume also contains the short story The Long Way Down as a bonus, which is not part of the series. The second point is that while there are only two collected volumes of the Dr. Sam Hawthorne available in English, the whole series is actually available in the six volumes of Sam Hawthorne no Jikenbo. Which probably means that I am going to read the whole series in Japanese, as it make take quite some time before the rest of the series is collected in English!

Sam Hawthorne is an old family practitioner, who tells the reader about the adventures he had when he was still just a young doctor, starting in 1924 in Northmont, a New England town. You'd think that this would be a quiet little town, but for some reason all of the world's most brilliant criminals seem to have gathered here, if the amount of seemingly impossible crimes is something to go by. Men who disappear from covered bridges, kids disappearing from schools, a murdered man found in a just-sealed time capsule, not the kind of crimes you would expect in Northmont. It is at least as unsafe here as in Cabot Cove. The inhabitants are just lucky that young Sam is quite good at solving the impossible.

The stories are quite short and I don't think I could write about them without giving too much away, so I'll write a bit more generally about them. My favorite stories of the collection are The Problem of the Old Gristmill (documents disappearing from a safe which was being transported on a train), The Problem of the Haunted Bandstand (a man being stabbed to death in the middle of a bandstand, with the murderer disappearing in front of the eyes of the band and the public), The Problem of the Voting Booth (a man being stabbed while inside a voting booth with observers everywhere), and the bonus track The Long Way Down (a man jumping off a building, but not reaching the ground until almost four hours later!). These stories, but the others too, all show what a great imagination Hoch had, presenting the reader with fun and alluring impossible crime situations.

The first word I had in my head after finishing this volume was craftsman. Hoch's output was tremendous and that may be a reason why most stories are constructed very similar. A lot of the impossible crimes center around a person being under constant observation, with a murder/disappearance happening in the only moment the person escapes observation. Even the hinting in most of the stories is very similar, with the stories being easier to solve as you read more of them, as you start to see parallels in the ways Hoch tells his stories and how he plants hints.

But this is not a bad thing. With many writers, this could be a serious flaw, but Hoch was a craftsman. Tremendous effort went into each story in order to give the reader something new every time. The problems might be very similar abstractly speaking, but the situations he came up are sure to pique anyone's imagination and you always feel like you have gained something by reading the stories.

Which is also because Hoch slowly builds up the town of Northmont as he was writing the stories. There is continuity in these stories, with characters from the town reappearing, with events in the past being referenced to, with distinct references to the time and place of the stories (1920s New England), creating a living setting for Hawthorne's adventures. It makes the stories feel much more personal. And on the other hand, it makes things really disturbing, as the ratio of supercriminals in this little town is very alarming.

Anyway, this is a very entertaining collection of impossible crimes and I will definitely pick up the rest of the series!

By the way, there is an audio drama available of The Problem of the Locked Caboose, produced for the EQMM podcast. It's a fun one, so I recommend a listen!

Original title(s): Edward D. Hoch 『サム・ホーソーンの事件簿』I: 'The Problem of the Covered Bridge' 「有蓋橋の謎」 / 'The Problem of the Old Gristmill' 「水車小屋の謎」 / 'The Problem of the Lobster Shack' 「ロブスター小屋の謎」 / 'The Problem of the Haunted Bandstand' 「呪われた野外音楽堂の謎」 / 'The Problem of the Locked Caboose' 「乗務員車の謎」 / 'The Problem of the Little Red Schoolhouse' 「赤い校舎の謎」 / 'The Problem of the Christmas Steeple' 「そびえ立つ尖塔の謎」　/ 'The Problem of Cell 16' 「十六号独房の謎」 / 'The Problem of the Country Inn' 「古い田舎宿の謎」 / 'The Problem of the Voting Booth' 「投票ブースの謎」 / 'The Problem of the Country Fair' 「農作物祭りの謎」 / 'The Problem of the Old Oak Tree' 「古い樫の木の謎」 / 'The Long Way Down' 「長い墜落」

「世界はそれでも変わりはしない」

「教えて下さい・・・運命とは定められたものでは・・・」

『幻想水滸伝』 

"Tell me the answer. Is fate unchangeable?"

"Suikoden"

My way of dealing with a slightly worrying backlog of half-written reviews is apparently writing reviews on other material and pretending there is not a pile waiting for me. I have a nagging feeling that this is not the right solution.

April, 28th. The time: slightly before 10:00 AM. The location: Tokyo, Shibuya. In front of the Hachikou statue, across of the famous Scramble Crossing, stands Osawa Hitomi with a big suitcase of money. Precisely as ordered by the kidnappers of her sister Maria. Plainsclothes are naturally all over the place, keeping an eye on Hitomi and the money. Everyone is on edge. Will the deal be succesful? Will Maria be released? Will the police catch the kidnappers? With Scramble Crossing being one of the busiest, if not the busiest crossing in the world, will the police be able to protect Hitomi from any possible harm from the kidnappers?  But as the clock slowly nears the all-important 10:00 AM, nobody in the city even expects that this will become the most dangerous day in the history of Shibuya. The day a terrorist organisation threatened to set a deadly virus free in the city.

Nobody does. Not Minorikawa Minoru, a hotblooded reporter on the search for a new scoop in the streets of Shibuya. Not Kanou Shinya, a young and idealistic rookie detective who is also one of the plainsclothes watching Hitomi. Not Endou Achi, an ex-gang leader who has just spotted a particularly nice-looking girl in front of the Hachikou statue. Not Osawa Kenji, father of Hitomi and Maria and a renowned virus researcher, who is on hold in his home. And not Tama, a mysterious person running around in an animal suit, who seems to have lost his / her memory. These five persons are all gathered in Shibuya and little to do they expect that their destinies are intertwined and their actions will eventually save the city. Thus begins the amazing game experience that is 428 ~Fuusa Sareta Shibuya de~ ("428 ~In A Sealed Off Shibuya~").

428 gained quite some fame as one of the few games to have scored a perfect score in the Japanese game magazine Famitsu. Starting it as a Wii game, it got ported to the PSP, PS3 and even iOS recently. I will start off with saying that this is not a proper mystery game. Yes, it is developed by Chunsoft and it is a sound novel, which should naturally remind players of fantastic mystery games like Kamaitachi no Yoru and Trick X Logic. But this is not a mystery game. You are not solving a murder, you are not trying to find evidence that points to the criminal. No. None of that. And despite that, and despite my rule of keeping this a detective-fiction focused blog, I still make an expection for 428. Because it is definitely one of the best games I have ever played and more people should know it. And it has just enough ties with the mystery genre.

So what makes this game so special? It's just a sound novel adventure, some will say. You know, where you read a lot of text and you sometimes get to make a choice that influences the outcome of the story. Which is totally true. The same holds for 428. What makes this such a special game, is the way the story is told. There are five protagonists like I explained above. They all have their own goals, their own lives at the start of the game. You, as the player, can start with any scenario and see what happens. But, and this is a major but,  do realize that every scenerio is connected to each other. Just like how time is a continuous flow of small actions, just as how a butterfly at one of the world can cause a storm at the other end, realize that anything you do in one scenario, has possible effects on some other's story. It is a bit like the famous The Simpsons episode, 22 Short Films About Springfield, with interlinking storylines that develop simultaneously.

The earliest example of this interesting way of telling the story is when you start with police detective Kanou's storyline and see a suspicious man heading for Hitomi. Thinking he might be the kidnapper, Kanou arrests this man. But it turns out that this man is in fact Endou Achi, who was only trying to hit on Hitomi! In this case, both scenarios end with a Game Over: Kanou having made the wrong arrest, while Achi ends up spending the whole day at the police station. This is the very first instance of this interconnectedness in the story, but now imagine that this holds for all five protagonists. All storylines happen simultaneously and hurrying in a taxi with one protagonist for example, might lead to a traffic accident with another protagonist on the run for a hitman! The smallest actions can have tremendous effects on another person's life and it is up to the player to make the correct choices, to influence the destinies of all five protagonists so they will save Shibuya.

It's a brilliant idea and worked out even better! There are about 100 different endings (most of them bad endings) and everytime you try to make just the right corrections, just the right choices to ensure that every persons' scenario can continue. But the bad endings never really feel that bad actually, with a lot of the early bad endings just being hilarious, while others always give you a fair hint to what choices you have to make to continue the story. To help you, the scenarios can be viewed as a handy flow-chart, where you can see every development in every storyline at every point in time (which is also handy to see which scenario is likely to have influence on another). In fact, I contend that it is actually better to get a lot of bad endings in this game. By coming across all the bad endings, you as the player realize how every little action, how every little word can have effects on others. Realizing that everything has meaning really makes this game a special experience.

And the story is just fantastic. The writing is witty, fun and if you think about the amount of endings and possible scenerios, it is just mindblowing! And while I said that 428 is not a proper mystery, there is a bit of a fairly hinted mystery as the story nears its ending, with the terrorist attack under its way and the five major protagonists (and great supporting cast) moving to save the city. There is a spin-off sequel anime series, CANAAN, but I strongly you not to see it before playing 428, as it will spoil some of the best parts of the game.

Would this system work as a proper mystery game? Not sure. Chunsoft already played with the concept of multiple characters in Kamaitachi no Yoru X3, but the storylines were not intertwined as heavily as the ones in 428. The amount of detail (in time) in every scenario also makes a narrator=criminal trick a bit difficult, though one might possibly conceive something with a closed circle situation and multiple protagonists, changing their destinies in ways so they don't panik and start killing off each other. Or something like that. I am definitely not a creative writer.

While Kamaitachi no Yoru portrayed its characters with blue silhouettes, 428 makes use of real actors and still photos. Which really bring the city of Shibuya alive. The actors actually acted for these photos by the way, saying their lines, moving as if they were shooting a movie, all to ensure that every emotion would come across. And I would say that they succeeded. It is kinda strange if you realize that they filmed every scene, meaning they could also have made 428 in an actual movie. Yet not one actor's voice is heard throughout the game.

The funny thing is though, I bought the PSP version about two years ago and I loved it then. In fact, it is the first sound novel I ever played, before Trick X Logic and Kamaitachi no Yoru. A quick search on this blog actually showed that I already mentioned playing this game in December 2009 (which means it's almost three years ago!) 428 is what got me hooked on the genre. Or at least, on Chunsoft's sound novels. And I had played it on-and-off between then and now, but for some reason I never got around to actually finishing it. Maybe I just didn't want it to end. Maybe I wasn't borrowing a TV where I could play it on a bigger screen. Of course, if I hadn't met a friend who borrowed me her TV, I might not have finished this game this week, which in turn would mean that I wouldn't have written this post, which...

I can only conclude this post by repeating that 428 really is a very special game. The sense of satisfaction you get from succesfully changing everyone's destinies so they help each other in accomplishing a greater goal is undescribable. Realizing that anything you do might have the greatest positive effects on someone else's life is a very mysterious feeling, a feeling a normal novel could never conveyed this good. This is a prime example of having writers and developers knowing exactly what they want to accomplish with their story, what they want to tell the reader/player and coming up with the perfect medium to convey that message.

Original Japanese title(s): 『４２８ ~封鎖された渋谷で~』

「扉の前で立ち尽ちつくすちっぽけな背中に気づいて欲しい」

There is not much to go on m'sieur

- On the surface, no. But what lurks inside the subconcious? If the door can only be opened...

Are you serious m'sieur? I thought your interest in psychic detection was purely academic..

"Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars"

I usually just play the association game in my head when looking for opening quotes and posts titles, but I kinda forgot I had bought two books with the word door in the title. As if I can come up with that many mystery-related references to doors...

Paul Halter is a favorite in the mystery blogging world it seems, and I too enjoyed The Night of the Wolf immensely. Though I also have to admit that I actually remember very little of it. Only that it was awesome. Anyway, it was about time to read some more of Halter, so why not start at the beginning, with his first novel?

Welcome to post war England! Welcome to a small unnamed village, where we find the three befriended households of the Darnleys, the Whites and the Stevenses. The titular door of Halter's La Quatrième Porte (The Fourth Door) refers to the door to an attic room where Mrs. Darnley had supposed committed suicide (which was completely locked) some years ago and since then it has been said that she haunts the room. The rumors chase away tenants in the Darnley house at a regular pace, until the arrival of the Lattimers. Alice Lattimer claims to be a psychic and says that Mrs. Darnley was murdered. In an attempt to contact the ghost of Mrs. Darnley, Patrick Lattimer agrees to spend the night in the attic room, which is sealed with wax and the imprint of a rare coin. The next the door opens however, the corpse of a total stranger lies on the floor.

When in doubt, refer to Monty Python. So I guess I think this novel is ... splunge ("it's a great-idea-but-possibly-not-and-I'm-not-being-indecisive!"). I am not sure how to put my thoughts about this novel into words. But as this blog still hasn't implemented direct psychic transmission, I guess I will have to try. The main "problem" I have with this novel is... that I had already guessed the set-up and the solution of the locked room mystery, before I had even opened the book! (No, this is not an attempt at making it look like something impossible)

Seriously, the first idea that popped into my head when I first glanced at the cover, looking at the words The Fourth Door was the correct one! There is joy to be found when you read a detective novel and you slowly build your own theory as to what happened, but it is a bit boring to see that the first, the most simple and basic thoughts you have about the novel turn out to be correct. Like Takumi Shuu points out, there is something inherently contradictory to the detective novel, as readers want to get surprised by the writer, but they also want to solve the mystery themselves. In this case, I wasn't surprised by the solution, but I also didn't feel challenged by the mystery as I already had an idea by the time I opened the first page! I couldn't even feel smug about it, as it wasn't as like I had solved it based on the text. Most of the time while reading the book, I did try to find hints to disprove my gut feeling, but all in vain. This is probably a very personal experience and the trick might be fun if you haven't seen it before, so you probably want to check other reviews for somewhat more objective views on it.

I had already seen variations on the same trick several times before, which an sich is not that rare and that doesn't instantly mean that a trick will turn out to be disappointing in another novel but to be honest, I thought that the variations I had seen were implemented better in those cases too. Which ties in with another 'problem' of La Quatrième Porte. For someone hailed as the modern Carr, there is awfully little atmosphere in the novel. Everything was described in a drab, boring way and little is done with the supernatural angle of the story. Sure, they talk about ghosts and stuff, but it feels like it is quickly disposed as a solution to the impossible murder and the absence of pressure, of fear is really a loss for such an impossible murder.

Though, and here I go to what I liked about the book, there is a perfectly good reason for the sober way of narration of the novel. It is tied to the narrative structure of the book, which is really fun. Halter utilizes a really amusing method of introducing his series detective Dr. Twist and I would say that the narrative structure is definitely the most memorable part of this novel. Twist appears in a very surprising way and while Halter's method of having a meta discussion with The Great Old Giants is different from the method of authors in the New Orthodox movement, one can feel the same kind of education and meta-conciousness among all of these writers.

The problem here is that this narrative style does explain the sober narration, but that doesn't make the narration more compelling. Here we have another contradiction, because what Halter wants to achieve with his narrative style, does inherently not mesh well with what he should achieve with the plot. In the end it depends on what the reader deems more important, which is again quite personal. Like I said, I thought it a shame the narration didn't succeed in conveying the supernatural to me, but I can definitely see why that happened and I think that Halter at least succeeded in coming up with a very entertaining narration style for his story.

As both writers focusing on impossible crimes, both Paul Halter and Nikaidou Reito are often called modern Carrs (though the latter seems to prefer the moniker Japanese Halter) and they do have their share of similarities. Impossible crimes, stories set in post-war societies ('the good old days'), the supernatural, you'll find them in both authors' novels. Nikaidou, despite his focus on impossible crimes, is walking along the other side of the supernatural/grotesque side of things though, aiming more at Edogawa Rampo than Carr as a writer. And despite my reservations about the direction Nikaidou has been heading for the last few years, I do feel that Nikaidou knows what he is aiming for as a writer, the sort of story he wants to write. I am not sure whether Halter is really aiming to be an modern Carr and there is little I can say based on the on novel and one short story collection I've read by Halter, but La Quatrième Porte does fall a bit short of Carr because of its somewhat ambiguous goals, in my opinion.

So, yeah. I think La Quatrième Porte is splunge. Monty Python, saving people with a limited vocabulary since 1969.