A Tiki Scare is no Fair

"And now for our next number. An original based on an ancient Voodoo chant: Mamba Wamba!"

"Mamba Wamba and the Voodoo Hoodoo"

Live and Let Die is one of those James Bond movies that were always shown on television back when I was a child, so I've seen the film sooooo often and I always think of it when I hear the word Voodoo. Also: watch Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated! It's really good.

Theodore Roscoe's Murder on the Way! (1935) starts in the studio of our narrator Cartershall, who is working on a painting of his girlfriend Pete (Patricia). The two are suddenly visited by the solicitor Maître Pierre Valentin Bonjean Tousellines - Comte de Limonade, who informs Pete that her relative Uncle Eli recently passed away. Uncle Eli was Pete's guardian after her father's death, but his nasty character drove Pete away and Eli later moved to his chateau Morne Noir in Haiti. Because Pete is one of the persons named in the will, and the will specifies that prospect beneficiaries need to be present at the reading after the funeral, she and Cartershal make haste to Haiti to bring their final respects to Uncle Eli. Eli Proudfoot was found with a bullet in his head at his estate, but despite the swift arrival of both Eli's doctor and Maître Tousellines at the scene, no culprit nor weapon was found. While the Garde d'Haiti assumes suicide, some locals fear Eli's death was a murder committed by good ol' Voodoo zombies. The belief in the local voodoo traditions is so strong, that Eli had arranged for a stake to be driven through his coffin at his funeral, to make sure he would not be brought back a zombie. Upon arrival at Morne Noir, Pete and Cartershall meet the other people named in the will, a colorful, but highly unsavory lot who would've fitted perfectly in the Moss Eisley cantina. At the reading, they learn that all these people have been put on a numbered list. The highest-ranking person on this list will enherit the whole estate twenty-four hours after the funeral, provided that this person has remained on Morne Noir all that time. With Pete ranked last on the list, it's clear she'll have no chance of inheriting anything, but the people have hardly retreated to the chateau when one of the party is killed, and a lot more deaths follow in the next twenty-four hours...

When I think of mystery stories that revolve around last testaments with complex conditions that become the motive for a murder case, I always think of Yokomizo Seishi's work, like for example Inugamike no Ichizoku. Wills that seem to be written exactly so every potential heir will have a darn good reason to kill the others off. Funnily enough, I still remember the first time I encountered this trope in mystery fiction, back when I was a child. The Scooby Doo, Where Are You? episode A Night of Fright is No Delight (1970) has a similar plot, where Scooby-Doo is named one of the heirs of Colonel Beauregard Sanders, but the heirs will only inherit if they stay the night at the haunted mansion. People weren't killed in that episode of course, but the Phantom Shadow did target the rival heirs one by one like you'd expect.

I thought a lot about Scooby Doo! while I was reading Murder on the Way, because I think this novel is really chaotic and fast-paced. It feels exactly like a Scooby Doo! cartoon, always rushing, with something happening every few seconds even if it doesn't always make sense. Once the first murder is committed, the story doesn't stop even once. The bodies don't even have time to cool off, as people are murdered one after another in rapid succession. Some of them 'just' with a good ol' pistol shot, others in more fancy manners like err, what happened in the billiards room. It's very silly actually, as we also find Lieutenant Nemo Narcisse and his men of the Garde d'Haiti at Morne Noir right from the start. Despite the presence of these 'guards' in the house though and their constant ordering around of the remaining heirs, people keep on getting murdered and most of the time, it's just because the guard left their post and the murderer quickly did the deed. Which is ricidulous. There are a few murders which are a bit more interesting, like a dissappearing person from a cramped subterranean corridor and a locked room murder where a man was shot in the head and a fire was started, even though the corridor door was guarded and the door to the connecting room sealed with planks. This locked room murder is pretty simple though and the story fails on actually selling the impossibility: very early on in the story, it is revealed there are in fact hidden passages in the chateau Morne Noir, but because of the breakneck pace of the story, there's little time to consider each death to the fullest. The possibility of the existence of a hidden passage is hardly considered by the time we get to the locked room murder, which undermines the whole mystery because it's already been established it's perfectly possible there's just some hidden door somewhere. The story also tries to sell the mystery of how the dangerous rival heirs constantly manage to get their hands on loaded weapons to threaten the others with, but if you've already established there are hidden panels in this house earlier, the narrative should at least go over the possibility weapons are kept in such hidden spaces. Murder on the Way! is clearly written as a suspenseful pulp thriller and it works perfectly as such (cliffhanger after cliffhanger after cliffhanger), but if the various mysteries are supposed to be elements used to convey the creepy atmosphere to the reader, then these mysteries should also be considered in more detail, because now I kept on thinking 'Yes, but you hardly talked about this or that possibility despite earlier events, so I don't really see what's so baffling about the situation given the (few) details we've been given at this point.' I doubt anyone will have any real trouble figuring out who the murderer is though, as long as you don't let yourself be distracted by the speed at which the plot is running.

The use of voodoo and zombies as a theme in this novel was also a bit disappointing. Early on, the use of voodoo as a theme is awkward: for example it's said that some people think that Uncle Eli was killed by a zombie because there was no pistol found at the crime scene.... which doesn't make any sense as a logical line of reasoning (no pistol does not equal zombie). The mystery revolves completely about the absence of a pistol, but there's nothing that even remotely ties this to the local belief of zombies, yet the narrative pretends like this makes absolute sense. Zombies are mentioned a few more times later on, but most of the time, it's used more like a magic phrase which is supposed to strike fear in the reader, rather than making narrative sense. It's pulp of course, and perhaps I shouldn't have expected too much of it, but interestingly enough, all the mysteries I've reviewed on this blog involving zombies have been so much more entertaining and or informative. Gabriel Knight - Sins of the Fathers (novelization of the same-titled videogame) is more a horror-mystery, but explores the theme of Voodoo both in the sense of authentic ancient African religions as well as the New Orleans kind in a far more gripping manner. Yamaguchi Masaya's masterpiece Death of the Living Dead is technically not about the Voodoo-kind of zombies, but about the living dead (murdered punk becomes the living dead and tries to solve his own murder while hiding the fact he's a walking corpse) and is an excellent example of how to truly incorporate the theme of the living dead with the fair play mystery, as it features an ingenious puzzle plot making full use of the supernatural premise. The same holds for Imamura Masahiro's Shijinsou no Satsujin, which is the zombie-themed mystery novel all others need to be compared to (or movies!). The story about a series of murders going on in a hotel during a zombie outbreak is fantastic, merging the movie trope of hordes of brainless zombies with the crafty puzzle plots and logic-based deductions of the Queen school. With Murder on the Way!, voodoo and zombies are more like window dressing, like in a Scooby Doo! episode where you may have a specific ghost, but practically speaking it could have been any ghost with any appearance. It's only near the end when the zombie theme becomes more prominent, but even then it's used in rather predictable ways.

Oh, and a small note about Roscoe's writing style. His prose is entertaining to read, but the racist tone is hard to ignore if you read it as a modern reader. Some of it may be the mores of the time, some of it may simply be Roscoe himself. Most characters are reduced to single-point caricatures in general (the German is the "Nazi"), but the tone is especially noticable when Roscoe's describing the black population of Haiti. Murder on the Way! is definitely a product of its time. 

Murder on the Way! can be an amusing read though, despite all I've written above. It's a pulpy mystery thriller that tries to keep you on your toes from start to finish, features a unique setting with its zombie-fearing Haiti and the plot also features a few alluring murders and other impossible situations. But you really need to switch your mind off and just enjoy the ride, for if you pause even once, you'll start to realize there's also a lot that raises question marks in your head. I'll also admit that I had hoped that this novel would be something it never intended to be: a fair play puzzle plot mystery that actually made good use of the theme of voodoo and/or zombies, a story which would really incorporate supernatural "zombies" as a vital element to be considered in the logical reasoning necessary to solve the murders. I may be spoiled in that respect, because the titles I mentioned earlier are truly masterpieces of the genre that showcase how zombies as the supernatural can work perfectly in a well-plotted fair play mystery, while Murder on the Way! obviously only intended to use Voodoo/zombies as a horror element. If you're just looking for a very active and busy mystery story, Murder on the Way! is a safe choice, but I can't help but feel there's wasted potential here.

Bad Chemistry

街中冷えだしてagain, new fallen snow 

君の体温胸にしみるよ

「今日の君と明日を待つ」（Garnet Crow）

 

The city starts to get cold again, new fallen snow

But your warmth envelops me

"Waiting for Tomorrow With The You of Today" (Garnet Crow)

If this year had been normal, I'd have reviewed the Detective Conan film The Scarlet Bullet right about now, as the home video usually releases around this time of the year. The film's been postponed to next year, but I guess today's topic feels a bit like the Conan films.

A worrying growth in crimes that are extremely difficult to detect for conventional police detectives due to the ingenious, but evil of use science and technology has led to the creation of the Scientific Investigation Unit within the Metropolitan Police Department. But even the specialists attached to this unit are not able to bring much light in the case of a serial bomber: two bombs have already gone off in Tokyo, but not even the SIU is able to figure out what the bomb actually is, as they can't find any trace of the material that used as the explosive at any of the crime scenes. Superintendent-General Hoshina of the Metropolitan Police Department decides to resort to a very unusual measure: he calls his own grandson Kyou back from the United States and adds him in an advisory role to the SIC. Kyou is only twelve years old, but a true genius who has gotten multiple university degrees and assisted police investigations over in the States with his knowledge of science. In Japan, Kyou is partnered with... Kugayama Kyou of the SIC. While the two share a name, Kugayama's not at all like young Kyou: Kugayama is the lazy rookie in the SIC, who's usually only answering the phone whenever everyone's out, or simply playing videogames. Young Kyou however quickly shows his worth when one look at the latest bombing scene gives him a clue, and eventually the two Kyou's solve the case. But more mysterious cases that require the brilliant mind of young Kyou await them, and slowly the two also learn of the existence of a criminal mastermind who's been planning these crimes in the 1995-1996 manga KYŌ.

KYŌ was created by the duo Takashige Hiroshi (story) and Minagawa Ryouji (art), who are probably best known as the creators of the action series Spriggan. While Spriggan was serialized in Shonen Sunday (like Detective Conan) however, KYŌ was not serialized alongside that other mystery series with a child-detective in Sunday: KYŌ was serialized in Shougaku Go-nensei ("Fifth Graders") and Shougaku Roku-nensei ("Sixth Graders"), magazines aimed at elementary school students of specific grades (series in these magazines "move up a grade" too whenever a new school year starts, so you don't miss out on series as you grow older). That's perhaps why the series features a brilliant child as the protagonist, and the series' focus on science, for hey, if you study well and choose a career in the exact sciences, you'll be able to solve these crimes yourself too!

Well, not really, unless your name is Yukawa Manabu, for the first thing that came to mind when I read this manga was that the plots here are similar to those of the short stories of Higashino's Galileo series: the criminals in KYŌ all make clever use of very specific applications of scientific phenomena to create impossible crimes. The first bomb case for example is 'impossible' because the police can't find any trace of the explosive at the crime scene and don't even know how a large amount of the explosive could've been brought to each of the scenes unseen, while there are some other minor gems in subsequent stories too. In the second story for example, a man is apparently boiled to death in his own apartment which was locked from the inside, while the third story is about a man who was found frozen in his hotel room. And not just frozen: it was clear the man had been instantly frozen to death as he was still standing! The methods used to create these impossible crimes is also of a rather epic scale when it comes to mystery fiction, using specific machinery or resources to be able to produce the wanted scientific phenomena. Interestingly enough, I had to also think of the Detective Conan films of these last few years. The criminal schemes there have been featuring a lot of explosions as well as significant growth in scale, and in that sense, the stories in KYŌ were a bit like if the Detective Conan film formula would be used for a regular series. 

As a mystery manga, KYŌ's a bit predictable in the sense that often you'll have some vague ideas about how the crime was committed, but ultimately, these impossible crimes all rely on scientific phenomena that you'll probably not think of immediately,  so it's more about the surprise of learning how some natural phenomena could be used for criminal intents, rather than this being a series with the intention of actually challenging the reader with solving the crime themselves. The story set-ups are interesting though (seriously, the concept of a man being frozen instantly is awesome), but the focus is completely on the howdunnit, not on the whodunnit, and the plots also feel a bit repetitive in the sense that each story follows the same formula of young Kyou almost instantly having some idea of what is going on and then the criminal using low-level thugs to scare Kyou off, and then older Kyou trying to get the two of them out of trouble. It's also a bit silly to see what kind of crazy ideas these criminals come up with for relatively small goals (relatively speaking to the actual method), but that's part of the fun!

The series is also very short. It consists of five stories (each comprised of two chapters), and that's it! It's all collected in one volume and while the story does reach a certain conclusion, and it actually manages to portray an overarching story across the limited length involving the mastercriminal the Professor, it definitely feels more like a set-up for something larger. KYŌ is very compact and surprisingly well-planned for such a short series, but this is a case of a series that would've benefitted from more chapters, if the following plots had also become more diverse. As it is now, it doesn't outstay his welcome, but you're kept wondering whether this was really all they could get out of the concept.

But as a single volume release, KYŌ is fairly entertaining material. Compact, to the point and strongly focused on telling its story through the limited number of chapters, while at the same time featuring a few interesting murder situations. Worth a read if you happen to come across the volume.

Original Japanese title(s):  たかしげ宙（原作）皆川亮二（画）『KYŌ』

Phantom Rhapsody

「論理の旋律は必ず真実を奏でる」

『スパイラル　～推理の絆～』

"The melody of logic will always play the truth"

"Spiral ~ Bonds of Reasoning~

Huh, another mystery about time travel... rather many of them this year...

As far as I can remember, all the mystery videogames I discuss here on the blog are adventure games, with novel games being a subgenre within the adventure genre. That's not surprising of course: a mystery is a carefully plotted narrative with clues and build-up, and what genre of videogames would fit better than the narrative-driven and puzzle-focused adventure game? Games like the Ace Attorney series have you wander around collecting testimony and evidence which you use to solve contradiction-centred puzzles to move the plot forward (in a Columbo-manner), while a novel game like Kamaitachi no Yoru takes on a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure form to allow the player to find the correct route to the solution. Some series will focus more on telling a story than allowing the player to actively solve a mystery (like the Tantei Jinguuji Saburou series), some may focus almost completely on having the player solve a mystery (like Return of the Obra Dinn). But ultimately, these are all games that fall firmly within the broad adventure genre of videogames.

Which is what makes the Nintendo DS game Sigma Harmonics (2008) unique, for this is not 'just' a mystery adventure, it's also a role-playing game, a unique combination. Of course, given that the developer is Square-Enix (of the influential Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series), the fact that this is a Japanese RPG doesn't come completely out of nowhere and given that the JRPG is often a story-driven genre, one can probably imagine that the combination of genres could work. I remember this game was mentioned in a comment to a post early in this blog's lifetime. I think I expressed my interest in the game then, but I only bought it a few years later, and then even more years passed before I actually played it. With this blog over ten years old now, I estimate Sigma Harmonics had been on the list for almost nine years now.

Earth is always threatened by the existence of twilight demons who want to change the flow of time to bring forth destruction, but they find an obstacle in several clans who have vowed to protect Earth with their special powers. High school students Kurogami Sigma and Tsukiyumi Neon belong to such families. The Kurogami family specializes in "tuning" the world, which allows them to repair the changes in time made by the demons. The Tsukiyomi family specializes in combat, allowing deities to possess them during battle. Demons are usually sealed away in the Crack of Time, with the Seal located in the Great Clock in Kurogami Manor, meaning the clans only have to fight the occasional escaped demon. One day however, the Seal is broken and Sigma and Neon awaken in a completely destroyed world, a world where the Kurogami family has been extinct for several generations. They realize that the demons must have changed the past so the Kurogami family died out, resulting in the new present. With "their" present now gone, Sigma and Neon follow the trail through the Cracks of Time to find out what happened to the Kurogamis. They learn that several generations earlier, the whole family died out in "The Kurogami Family Tragedy", a horrible murder case. Because demons are banished into the Cracks of Time, they can not directly affect and kill people in the 'real' world, but they can influence people's minds to give them a nudge in the evil direction and have them kill other people. Sigma and Neon too can only observe short fragments of past events through the Cracks of Time, but this does allow them to solve the murders: by figuring out the truth behind the murder case and identifying the person acting under the demon's influence, they weaken its hold on the timeline, allowing Sigma and Neon to fight the demon and fix the timeline again. However, the demons don't give up easily and keep on picking new murderers and methods to ensure The Kurogami Family Tragedy occurs, while Sigma and Neon are willing to risk everything to recover their own future.

Fighting demons? Changing timelines? Cracks of Time? Definitely not the usual themes you encounter in mystery stories, though far from rare in RPGs. Sigma Harmonics sounds completely nuts as a detective story at first, but it works better than you might expect at first. The gameplay loop basically consists of three elements: an Exploration (adventure) mode, a Battle mode and a Reasoning mode. Each chapter starts with an introduction of the people who lived in Kurogami Manor back then, followed immediately by the murder scene. Then you move to the Exploration mode, where you guide Sigma and Neon as they wander around Kurogami Manor in search for clues. Because Sigma and Neon are stuck in the Cracks of Time, they are only able to see short fragments of the events and conversations that occured back then, so they first have to puzzle together a timeline of the incident for themselves using these so-called "Sound Inscriptions" scattered across the manor and by finding evidence for themselves. As they wander around though, they also encounter minor demons in the Cracks of Time, which Sigma and Neon have to battle (win a fight, earn experience, level up, learn new moves/become stronger, the usual RPG stuff). Once Sigma and Neon have gathered all the necessary evidence, they can start deducing how the murder was committed, and who the murderer is by combining all the facts they found. The story then moves on to the chapter boss battle and after that, the next chapter. Rinse and repeat as the demons cause a new murder in the next chapter.

Sigma Harmonics has a really interesting concept full of potential, but the execution is highly uneven, and on the whole, I can't really recommend the game wholeheartedly. To start with the good: the Reasoning system is fairly original, and the way the mystery part of the game links up to the RPG system is really good. At the end of each chapter, you need to deduce the truth behind the case by answering self-posed questions and placing the various facts you learned throughout your search of the manor on a board, which allows you to generate new insights. For example, you may want to determine who has no alibi, and you accomplish that by combining the Sound Inscriptions that tell you that [A was seen by B], [C, D and E were all together] and [F was not there]. Interestingly, the game will proceed even if you pick the wrong answers/facts at certain times. While you'll be wanting to generate the right answer, the game actually also allows for you to generate false hypotheses, making this a tricky mystery game as the game won't immediately tell you you're wrong, but allow you to build upon your wrong premises. This is something few mystery games allow for, though I've discussed games like Trick DS, Trick X Logic and Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments in the past that do similar things. The brilliance of this lies in the subsequent encounter with the demon possessing the murderer: the chapter boss' strength is directly influenced by how close to the truth you came during the Reasoning section. If you arrived at the completely wrong conclusion, you're in for an impossible fight, while deducing the complete truth weakens the boss so much you can beat them in two or three hits! This synergy between the mystery plot and the RPG battle mechanics is absolutely fantastic, making it really rewarding to solve the crime as best as you can. You can easily defeat the bosses even with minimal character leveling as long as you make sure you identified the correct murderer/murder method.

The RPG battle system has a neat idea behind it too, for those interested in JRPGs. During battle, Neon is the one who will be fighting demons while possessed by a deity, but it's Sigma (the player) who can control her actions, as Neon isn't conscious while she's possessed. Each attack runs on a cooldown timer, so after using a certain move, you need to wait for the timer to recharge again. These timers are connected to a music equalizer and Sigma has the power to change the background music during a battle to change the equalizer and the speed at which certain attack piles recharge. Sigma is also able to change the deity who's possessing Neon during a battle, which also alters her attack style. Interestingly, Neon's apperarance and personality also change when she switches "jobs" and this is also reflected in her dialogue in and outside of battle, giving you different "flavors" of Neon to team up with in the story.

The game also has fantastic production values. The setting of a semi-futuristic Showa-era Japanese manor looks great, somewhat similar to 1920s manors like the Kagetani Manor in Kohakuiro no Yuigon and the Kinema Mansion in Glass Rose. The 3D models of the main characters belong to the best ever put on the Nintendo DS system (the polygon count is crazy!), the music is fantastic and there's some solid voice acting too. Few games on the DS look and sound so good.

So it's such a shame the game is literally filled with small to major annoyances that ultimately bring this game down. It's like the designers decided to make every little thing you do slightly annoying, but it all adds up quickly. Interacting with evidence/Sound Inscriptions isn't just using your stylus on the touchscreen directly, no, it's having to go through a menu first, and then select the "Examine" command each and every time. Some evidence is clearly indicated on the screen with a hotspot; but others aren't for some sinister reason, so you can never be sure what can be interacted with or not unless you try that for every little thing on every screen. Sometimes, evidence can only be interacted with/seen if you're standing immediately in front of it, while in other times, you don't need to do that. Evidence/Sound Inscriptions are also scattered across several timeslots: you may start at 15:00, you search the manor for all the evidence/Sound Inscriptions of that timeslot, then jump back to 14:00, search the exact same-looking manor for the evidence/Sound Inscriptions of that timeslot etc. It's very, very boring as nothing changes between timeslots except for the locations of the evidence/Sound Inscriptions. Random encounters with demons have a load time of a few seconds, which quickly add up. And then you have the so-called Karma demons which wander around the manor in all timeslots. They are incredibly strong (stronger than most bosses) and usually can't be beaten the first time you play this game. The idea is that you evade them as you search the manor for evidence, but that's all they are: an annoyance that force you to take a roundabout route through the manor simply because you can't beat them. It just takes more time (and don't get me started on the Karma that suddenly spawn right in front of the door of the room you're currently in). Karma don't add anything to the game, and don't even give unique rewards if you do manage to defeat them. The Reasoning system can be very finicky about where you need to place your evidence (and restarting a board is cumbersome), while the Battle system is pretty vague about how changing your Job/BGM changes your options during a fight, so usually, you just stick with the same job/BGM with the strongest moves. With enemies that mostly do the same despite different appearances and little room for implementing real strategies, things get very stale soon.

Storywise, there's also a lot of room for improvement. Overall, the story can be pretty interesting: each chapter/alternate timeline features a different murder case, with different people becoming the murderer or victim, and with different murder methods. It's pretty neat how these chapters also link up: some clues carry over to the next chapter, sometimes previous chapters work as misdirection because events seem similar and overall, you can definitely sense that each chapter adds something as you move towards the finale. The mystery plots themselves are not very complex, but as you only see fragments of the case (through the Sound Inscriptions), it can be pretty tricky reconstructing what happened exactly and overall, I found them adequately satisfying, even if a bit vague at times. But the overarching story is also very vague most of the time. A lot of the background story and details are only explained in a sort of encyclopedia hidden away in the menus and never mentioned in the main storyline. Some of these details are indeed trivial and fit perfectly there as an extra, but a lot of is pretty crucial to understand the main storyline of Sigma Harmonics. And even with those hidden extra story explanations, the story lacks cohesiveness. The ending is also utterly nuts. What starts out as a minor time-jumping mystery RPG... well, the transformation in tone and scale in the last chapter, that's like jumping from the first episode of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann straight to the last one. It's like the writer didn't even care about the worldbuilding of Sigma Harmonics anymore and decided to go out with a bang, even if it didn't make any sense or lacked set-up.

Simply said, Sigma Harmonics is a flawed game. The production values are absolutely top-notch, and the concept of mixing the mystery adventure genre with a RPG certainly has potential and it does result in some fine moments in this game, but there are just so many game design choices that don't seem to make any sense, like they were only made to irritate the player. One or two of these misses wouldn't have killed the game, but when every little thing seems to be designed in a way to be just the right kind of annoying, you end up with a game that can't be recommended to everyone. Only try if you're really, really interested to see how the deduction mechanics work in this game or how a mystery RPG could work. This is exactly the type of game that could improve a lot from a remake treatment.

Original Japanese title(s): 『シグマハーモニクス』

The Adventure of the World Series Crime

Just some minor musings this time, but while I was writing my article on the extremely long-running Puzzle Game ☆ High School last week, I started thinking about the many mystery series I read. Look up a random review on this blog and chances are that I have more reviews from the same series ready, or I've expressed the wish to read more of the series. Some series I've been following forever: 82 posts have been tagged with Detective Conan as I'm writing this, while other series I've only started with and will get back to sooner or later, like Katou Motohiro's Tsukaeta Mon Gachi! novel series. Some series I'm completely up-to-date (like Ayatsuji Yukito's House series), other series I am reading at the pace that fits me best, but in general, I have relatively few reviews here of books that 1) either don't belong to any series in the first place or 2) where I only read one volume and decided I wouldn't return. There are here of course, but they're definitely in the minority.

What is it about series that attract me? Of course, each series has its own flavor and atmosphere, and (usually) a unique cast of recurring characters with a protagonist who's often also the detective character, so at a micro-level, I could write about each and every series and describe what I like about them, but for someone who doesn't really care about characters that much in mystery fiction, I do read a lot of mystery fiction that focus on recurring characters. In general, I don't care that much about characterization or character development as long as the core mystery plot is great, though of course, having both would be the optimal case. Still, the percentage of reviews here of non-series works is pretty low. So I do have a tendency to return to the same characters (and story style) again and again.

There are of course different approaches to recurring characters. Detective Conan has a rom-com style which does focus on character drama, but also features a thriller-like overarching story. I read most of the Toujou Genya novels in a relatively short period of time, but as a character, Genya never changes, so there it's really the excellent plots and the atmosphere I enjoy. With Puzzle Game ☆ High School, I indicated that while the mystery plots could be a bit too straightforward, I still liked the series because it used the focus on the lives of the protagonists Daichi and Kazuki not just as character drama, but because each phase of their lives also presented the reader with different type of mysteries, from non-crime high school stories, to stories about maternity when Kazuki's pregnant and 'regular' murder mysteries when the two have their own detective agency. So in a way, it's still the 'mystery plot' that brings me back to these series and not the idea of seeing what happens to these characters.

And there's of course just the element of expectations. When I pick up a new volume of Conan, or try a new volume of Mitsuda's Toujou Genya series, I know the kind of stories I can expect (usually then: Ashibe Taku's Morie Shunsaku series is about an attorney, but honestly, he is able to find himself in an insanely diverse situations). And I'll be the first to admit that whenever I don't know what I'm going to read next, I'm more inclined to just continue in a series, than to try something new, even if by an author I already know. So it definitely is a short-cut for me, knowing that I can probably expect a certain standard of entertainment from the work. But that does perhaps make this blog feel very... repetitive, I guess? Because you're always seeing the same names.

Anyway, I don't really have a point to make this time. Just the thought of 'Huh, I read a lot of series.' But perhaps people here have something to comment on series? Series they like and why, or about whether factors like length, the time investment and the general intention to stick with a series to the end play a significant role in deciding whether they're going to try a series or not? Or how a series format can help or hinder a detective plot? There's probably more I could get out of the topic, but maybe another time!

Tomorrow Is The Last Time

"Well, what if there is no tomorrow? There wasn't one today."

"Groundhog Day"

For some reason, I always mix up Nishizawa Yasuhiko and Yonezawa Honobu in my head. They write completely different type of stories, but I always have to make sure I'm thinking of the right name/right titles when it comes to these two.

The last few years, Hisatarou has been spending New Year at his grandfather Reijirou's place. One shouldn't imagine a nice family gathering though. Half a lifetime ago, Fuchigami Reijirou was a horrible father, always drinking and gambling. When his wife died, his oldest daughter Kamiji and youngest daughter Haruna both left, leaving Reijirou and the middle daughter Kotono all alone. Kamiji and Haruna both cut ties with their old family, got married and took the name of their husbands. Reijirou at some time planned to commit suicide together with Kotono, but heaven had different plans for him: he won a fortune at the horse races, and with the money, Reijirou and Kotono started their own restaurant, which would eventually grow into the nationwide Edge Up restaurant chain. Both Kamiji and Haruna tried to rekindle their old family bonds after this, but Reijirou never forgave his daughters for leaving him and Kotono. However, recently the elderly Reijirou has softened up, as he has started to think about his inheritance. Obviously, loyal Kotono will inherit all of Reijirou's belongings, but she has no children of her own. Reijirou therefore wants Kotono to legally adopt someone to become the Fuchigami heir. The obvious candidates are Reijirou's grandchildren: Hisatarou and his two older brothers (the three sons of Kamiji) or the daughters of Haruna.  But there are also other candidates, like the secretaries of both Kotono and Reijirou. The New Year gatherings are therefore used to get on Reijirou's good side by Kamiji and Haruna, who both hope their own child will be chosen.

For as long as he can remember, Hisatarou has had the curious ability to get stuck in time-loops. Once every few weeks, he'd get stuck like in Groundhog Day: he'd live through a day and at the strike of midnight, he'd find himself back at the start of the same day. Nobody else is aware of this time-loop and in general, everyone acts the same in every loop unless Hisatarou does something significantly different which alters the stream of time. It's thanks to this ability he passed the entrance exams for school, because he happened to get stuck in a loop on exam day and thus became aware of the questions in advance. Hisatarou can not actively control this ability however and the time-loop happens completely random. Soon after New Year, Hisatarou finds himself stuck in another of these time-loops, but to his great shock his grandfather Reijirou is murdered during the second loop of the day, even though nothing happened the first time. Hisatarou realizes he must've done something wrong in the second loop which ultimately led to his grandfather's death, so he tries to prevent Reijirou's murder in subsequent loops, but each time, unforeseen happenings eventually result in his grandfather's death. From experience Hisatarou knows he will relive the same day for a total of nine times and that the ninth loop is final, so he has to find a way to prevent his grandfather's murder before he gets unstuck again and advances to "tomorrow" in Nishizawa Yasuhiko's Nanakai Shinda Otoko ("The Man Who Died Seven Times", 1995).

You don't have to read much of Nishizawa's work to realize that the incorporation of science-fiction and fantasy elements is the defining feature of his writing style. I never reviewed Nendou Misshitsu ("Psychokinetic Locked Room!") properly here even though I read it for a book club once, but that was a really unique short story collection where people had psychokinetic powers, but that still allowed for fun and fair locked room murder mysteries, despite the fact people could literally lock a door from the other side with mumbojumbo powers. Nanakai Shinda Otoko is perhaps Nishizawa's best-known science-fiction mystery novel. I've had the book for years by the way, but I didn't really get into it for err, reasons.

Anyway, the time loop is a popular trope in mystery-themed videogames, but not so much in "traditional" novels. Obviously, the Groundhog Day-type of time loop is very closely related to videogames in general. Say, you play a game of Super Mario Brothers and you fall in a pit somewhere. If you restart the level, the player (=you) are experiencing a loop: you went 'back in time' to redo the level (restarting a part), while retaining your knowledge of the previous loops. Eventually, you learn to get past this part, partially due to the knowledge gained through the loops. The player is thus always time-looping. There are also mystery games that make use of this meta-looping, that build on the idea that a player can die and redo a part. In Rei-Jin-G-Lu-P for example you must die several times first to gain the knowledge that allows you to get past that part. The Kamaitachi no Yoru games aren't formally about time-loops, but it does give you hints in the bad endings that allow you to make the right choices afterwards.

It's pretty interesting to see this trope used in a 1995 mystery novel though, and I have to say Nishizawa did a really great job. While the story is essentially about a young man reliving the day his grandfather dies over and over again, the overall tone of the novel is fairly lighthearted and comedic. The first time Reijirou is murdered, it's very easy to guess who killed the man, so Hisatarou's plan is to keep them busy during the second loop so the murder can't be committed. This action however puts the other people in the house "off-course" too, and the Butterfly Effect eventually still results in Reijirou's murder. It's funny to see how Hisatarou tries to gently pull the strings of everybody to coax them into doing what he wants them to do each loop, and how these actions still manage to result in his grandfather's death. The story has a bit of a slapstick element to it, but at the core, it's still a detective. At the start of each loop, Hisatarou reflects back on the previous loop to see what went wrong and the reader can think along too and identify the little thing Hisatarou overlooked.

While the murders each loop won't feel very weighty on their own, there's definitely build-up to the climax. Hisatarou has to make sure that on the ninth and final loop, his grandfather does not die and to do so, he has to remember all that has happened the previous loops and use that to his own advantage. The clues are hidden across the various loops and it's nice to see how everything comes together at the end, with scenes in one loop turning out to be of importance to reinterpret events in other loops. But even after everything seems to have settled down, there's more for Hisatarou to do, as over the course of the nine loops, he also encountered a few events that still puzzle him and this is where the novel really goes all-out in utilizing the loop structure to its fullest, bringing all the scattered hints across time together to reveal a surprising truth. What I like about it that ultimately, this final mystery is only visible to Hisatarou and the reader: the mystery only arises because we were all able to experience the same day several times from various angles, while for the other characters, there was never a time loop and each day only happened once. It's a very interesting way to create a mystery plot, and it was handled well in this novel.

And I think Nanakai Shinda Otoko's merits also lie in its accessibility. "Science-fiction mystery" might sound hard to grasp at first, but this novel is written in a way that makes the time loop plot device surprisingly easy to understand, even if you're not familiar with the trope. To then write a mystery story that does make use of the time loop in a clever, fairly-clewed manner, but without getting overly complex or too science-fiction-y, is probably easier said than done, but Nishizawa succeeded with this novel. A very amusing novel that can be surprisingly cleverly plotted despite its accessibility.

Original Japanese title(s): 西澤保彦『七回死んだ男』

Last Song

Time after time
君と出逢った奇跡

「Time after time～花舞う街で～」（倉木麻衣）

 

Time after time

The miracle of having met you

"Time after Time ~In The City of Dancing Flowers~" (Kuraki Mai) 

2018's Honkaku Mystery Comics Seminar, the seminal study which explored the history of mystery manga, points to the trio of Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo, Detective Conan and Q.E.D. Shoumei Shuuryou in the early-to-mid nineties as the watershed moment that really popularized the genre. These series are serialized in magazines with boys as their primary audience (though the magazines are also widely read by girls and I think especially Conan has more female fans than male). People therefore might have a tendency to associate mystery manga with a male audience, but Honkaku Mystery Comics Seminar also clearly shows how mystery manga first flourished in magazines aimed at girls. The seventies and eighties were the formative period for originally written mystery manga with puzzle plots (not adaptations) and its champions were mostly women too. I have been exploring this formative period the last year with for example Takashina Ryouko's Murder series, the mystery tales sometimes featured in Maya Mineo's Patalliro! and Yamada Mineko's Alice series.

It came as a shock to everyone when it was made public in May this year that manga artist Noma Miyuki had passed away at the young age of 59 earlier that month. Noma was probably the greatest veteran of mystery manga: her long-selling Puzzle Game ☆ High School started in 1983 and was still running in 2020 until her sudden demise, meaning the series had been running for over 35 years! It pre-dates the three watershed series by a decade, and while Puzzle Game ☆ High School may not have been the commercial succes like Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo and Detective Conan with countless of adaptations, videogames, merchandise tie-ups etc., it has remained a reliable cornerstone of the puzzle plot genre since it started with a loyal fanbase. It's no wonder so many mystery authors (not just of manga) responded to her sudden death, because she's been in the industry for so long and considered one of the giants because of Puzzle Game ☆ High School.

Earlier this year, I posted a short article on the first two volumes of Puzzle Game ☆ High School. At that time, I of course never could've guessed that Noma would pass away a few months later, but I had been reading the series on and off, and in the last few months, I've finally finished the complete original 34-volume series which ran between 1983-2001 (I read the bunko release, which is 18 volumes long) and I think it's about time I'd pick a few of the highlights from this lengthy series which I've grown to like a lot. But first a short introduction. As the title suggest, the series starts with a high school setting: Hazuru High School is a school with numerous school clubs and circle with an extremely high degree of autonomy and these clubs are exclusively governed by the student council: not even the school administration can interfere with these afterschool activities. Second-years Kazuki and Daichi are two childhood sweethearts who start their own new club: the new Mystery Club is also joined by Kazuki's best friend Mimei, a girl who can find out anything about everyone at school, and the shy first-year student Takuma, who also dabbles in stage magic. The Mystery Club's goal is to solve mysteries, of which there are plenty at school. From poisoned Valentine chocolates to blackmail attempts on clubs to vandals who paint the water in the pool red: Hazuru High School's unique club environment is also a breeding ground for countless of mysteries.

What makes Puzzle Game ☆ High School so unique however is that while it starts out as a high school mystery series, soon several sub-series are introduced that are set in different periods in the lives of Kazuki and Daichi. These chapters are published not in chronological order, but the series jumps back and forth time. The Puzzle Game ☆ Jr High School chapters for example are of course set during junior high before Kazuki and Daichi were officially dating, but there's also Puzzle Game ☆ Pre-Stage, which is set after Kazuki and Daichi are graduated from high school: Daichi is in college, but Kazuki is doing all kinds of part-time jobs to obtain various qualifications and diplomas for their joint dream. Puzzle Game ☆ The Professionals actually makes up the bulk of this series with thirty chapters: by this time Daichi and Kazuki are in their mid-twenties and have opened their own detective agency. These chapters tend to be the most interesting plot-wise, and often start with Takuma, who is now a journalist, hiring Daichi and Kazuki to help him in some investigation. It's in these stories where you understand why Kazuki was doing all those part-time jobs in the Pre-Stage chapters as Kazuki is always going undercover and I'd say that in terms of tone, The Professionals chapters are the most like the stories in Conan or Kindaichi Shounen. But there's more: at one point the  Puzzle Game ☆ Next Generation chapters start, which focus on Hinako, the ten-year old daughter of Daichi and Kazuki! Hinako is a child-model who not only has inherited her looks from her parents, but also their sharp brains and she tends to get involved with crimes in the model and entertainment industry.

This focus on the chronology is what really sets this series apart from series like Conan and Kindaichi Shounen. Sure, Hajime might be 37 now instead of 17, but that's one single jump in time: Puzzle Game ☆ High School however is built around the notion that we see all these protagonists in various stages in their lives and the various sub-series all have a different theme and tone that fit the ages of the characters: the classic High School chapters for example seldom feature murders and focus solely on the students of Hazuru High School (you hardly see any teachers or adults around, as most of the 'crimes' are kept inside the school), while the Pre-Stage chapters make use of the idea that Kazuki is doing all these part-time jobs to introduce a diversity in settings. I only named the main sub-series above, but there are eleven titled sub-series, and they all feel distinctly different, even if they all feature the same protagonists. The three Puzzle Game - Maternity chapters for example all focus on mysteries revolving around pregnancies, while Puzzle Game ☆ Hong Kong Connection is like full-blown HK crime thriller. But as I said, these chapters are not published in chronological order, so for example the reader had already seen Hinako appear several times as a ten-year old detective before the Maternity chapters were published, and it's fairly common to see a few The Professionals chapters followed by a Jr. High chapter. The story The Goddess of Fortune makes interesting use of this plot-device by the way: the first chapter of this two-parter is about a money theft at Hazuru High School. While the school is sealed off immediately, the student council can't find the money even though it's a pretty large sum (meaning the bills are bulky). Kazuki and Daichi of course figure out the hiding spot for the money, which is actually quite clever. They identitfy the thief, but they can't figure out why that person out of everyone would ever want to steal the money The second part of The Goddess of Fortune is set six years later, when Kazuki and Daichi have established their own detective agency. The thief is finally released from prison, but now they finally learn why the thief committed the crime. This second part is not as surprising plot-wise, but it's a nice story that transcends time (and sub-series). The mini-series Tea for Two also spans across time: three tea-themed stories, one for every year in high school. The first one is the best: Daichi is living on his own now his parents have to move to the US for work, and he becomes a customer of a nearby cafe specialized in tea. Daichi and Kazuki learn that the wife of the owner died in a car accident nearby some years ago and Kazuki remembers she did saw that two bouquets and some drinks had been placed at the accident site out of respect. But when Kazuki visits the place again, she notices how one bouquet has been removed, but why, and why only one bouquet? The solution is perhaps a bit easy to guess, but it's a nice short mystery you of the type you aren't likely to come across in other mystery manga soon.

In general, the stories in Puzzle Game ☆ High School are fairly easy to solve for yourself, also because Noma is playing the game very fairly and offering fair-play puzzle plots. She definitely set the template for successors like Detective Conan, Kindaichi Shounen and Q.E.D. Shoumei Shuuryou, coupled with the series set-up with a regular cast of main characters and recurring characters and an internal chronology, with characters sometimes re-appearing after a few years. But while the stories may be a bit simple at times, there are still quite a few stories that stand out: as I'm writing this I can already see I'm not going to mention all the titles on my list, because there are just too many. In my earlier article, I already mentioned The Secret of the Red Pool in my first post, a fantastic school mystery about they mystery of why someone would throw red paint in the swimming pool, ruining the water. The motive for this 'crime' is both original and fitting the setting. Yasashii Hanzai ("A Gentle Crime") is set at the school festival, which has been threatened by a bomber. The gang of the Mystery Club eventually reveals a rather surprising truth lurking behind this truth. It's the type of story you might see in Q.E.D. or C.M.B. but not told like this.

Most of the series consists of The Professionals chapters and some of these stories take on a rather large scale: in the three-parter Tokibus Tour, Daichi and Kazuki are hired by Nonose, their former student council president who is now a lawyer. One of his firm's clients owns a touring bus company, but rumors have it that these touring buses are used to sell stolen art: potential buyers are given instructions to board certain buses on certain days and then the thieves will somehow contact them. The client has information that a recently stolen painting will be offered on one of the buses soon, and Daichi and Kazuki decide to go undercover by planting allies in and outside the bus to figure out who the thieves are and where the painting is. The story features a lot of familiar faces from the high school days who help out Kazuki and Daichi by pretending to be normal passengers and as a kind of ransom story like you'd see in Kindaichi Shounen (like the Shinsengumi story), it's fairly entertaining. The two-parter Panic in Hospital feels like Detective Conan movie: Daichi, Kazuki, Mimei and Takuma are visiting Nonose in a private clinic. At least, that's their excuse, because their real reason to come is to spy on one of the other patients. During their visit however, the clinic is taken over by an armed gang who take everyone on the floor hostage. Kazuki happened to be disguised as a nurse at the time, and with the help of the real nurses and doctors, manages to keep up the game and given some freedom to go around the floor to 'check on the patients.' As time passes by however, she starts to suspect that the gang's real goal isn't the ransom money.

There are some other minor gems in The Professionals: Listen to the Eternal Song is a fantastic everyday life mystery, where at a small party in a karaoke hall, Kazuki notices that the young man in the room opposite theirs is constantly repeating the same old song, but he does not sing and just sits there looking at the television. The young man is also visited by an elderly man, who seems to have a minor argument with him. The gang follows the man when he leaves the karaoke hall, only to find he's gone to another karaoke hall, where he plays the same song again! The explanation for this seemingly meaningless act is touching and very original. A Small Affair puts Mimei in the spotlight: her appearances in the series tend to be minor as Daichi and Kazuki are the main detectives, but she's not a founding member of the Mystery Club for nothing. In this story Daichi is investigating a doctor who's selling inventory to a dealer. He follows the dealer to his home and instructs Kazuki to tail the dealer by telling her where the dealer lives. When Kazuki arrives at the apartment the following morning however, she finds the man has moved everything away. She doesn't manage to pry information from the estate agent, but Mimei miraculously manages to find out where the dealer has gone too. It's pretty easy to guess what Mimei did differently than Kazuki, but the set-up is really good. In Worthy Juniors, Daichi, Kazuki, Mimei and Takuma are invited to the school festival by the current members of the Hazuru High School Mystery Club, who are dying to see the 'legendary' gang. Their project at the festival is a mini-murder play: a room has been changed into a murder scene and it's up to the participants to guess who the murderer is. But it turns out that the body in the room is really dead.  The reason why there was a real dead body in that room is quite original and it's really fun to see how these new members of the Mystery Club seem to have some of the guts the original members have.

The chapters with Hinako can be fun too: the single chapter Puzzle Game ☆ Angel is about Hinako's first model gig as a baby for a wine company. The night after an event of this company visited by Daichi, Kazuki and baby Hinako, the son of the company's owner is found murdered at home: a burglar stole several bottles of the wine collection of the father and killed the son. Hinako however helps Daichi and Kazuki solve the case despite being still a baby. The plot is based on a certain Columbo episode (not the one about wine...), but the punchline is completely original and really funny. Hinako relly shows of her own deductive skills in Police Station Chief for One Day, where she and her boyfriend Juri (also a child actor/model) are made "boss of the police station for a day" in a campaign to bring youth crimes under the attention. Naturally, this usually just consists of participating in all kinds of events during the day, but Hinako manages to stop a crime-in-progress that nobody had even suspected simply by combining all the information she hears over the course of the day.

There are more chapters I really though worthwhile, but this post has been going for too long now. As I mentioned earlier, the original series ran from 1983-2001, but the series continued more-or-less non-stop with other publishers and other magazines. These various series too focus on different phases in Daichi and Kazuki's life: some return to the high school setting, some continue telling stories about their lives as professional detectives etc. Puzzle Game ☆ Mystere was the eight follow-up series which had only just started when Noma passed away (she had only finished the first chapter), so unfortunately this is where the series stops.

Anyway, Puzzle Game ☆ High School turned out to be a very entertaining mystery series with a clear focus on puzzle plots that are perhaps a bit simple at times, but the plot idea of jumping through time and seeing everyone grow really gives this series its own face. The sheer diversity in plots is also very memorable, while the fact the series ran in Hana to Yume (a magazine aimed at girls) also allows it to tackle very different themes than the mystery series than run in boys magazines (even if it can feel a bit too melodramatic at times). Puzzle Game ☆ High School is a series that really grows on you due to its enormous scale in story and the focus on the growth of the characters while also constantly offering different kinds of mysteries to the reader. I do intend to read the post-2001 series one day, but for now I'll take a break to let it sink in a bit.

Original Japanese title(s): 野間美由紀『パズルゲーム☆はいすくーる』(花とゆめ版）

A Virtual Murder

"To Silicon Valley, huh? Now, let me get this straight. You made up an arcade game, is that it? What is it? One of those mind-numbing, blast-the-enemy space ships gizmos? Or, perhaps it's the one where one little face goes running around eating up all the other little faces."

- "Oh, of course not. Stop it. This is very fresh. It's a whole new technology and they call it virtual reality."

"Murder She Wrote: A Virtual Murder"

Still haven't played any VR videogames....

Xuni Jietou Piaoliuji ("A Wandering Tale In The Virtual Streets") may have been written in 2009, but it is set in the not-so-distant future year of... 2020 (ahem). While Taiwan has recovered mostly from the major earthquake that hit it in 2014, not everything is back the way it was. With city development projects concentrating on the east, Ximendeng, the popular shopping district in Taipei, never quite recovered from the blow, with most of the shops closed or moved away, leaving a ghost town behind. It is not forgotten however, and there is even a government-backed project by the company MirageSys to resurrect Ximendeng. Virtually, that is. In this computer-created recreation of Ximendeng as it was in 2008, customers can walk around, go shopping in the various shops manned by both NPCs and real people (purchases made are sent to your real address) and even go see movies. Plentiful of log-in booths are set across Taiwan, where people can log in and enter the virtual world simply by putting on a VR headset and haptic equipment. At the moment however, Virtual Ximendeng is still in the testing phase, with Luhua as one of the main testers. One day, Luhua is asked to oversee a server stress test by Yanshan, head of development, as he has added a new system to track client activity. Various beta testers log into the Virtual Ximendeng over the course of the day through the 800 VR booths to see if the system can handle varying streams of traffic, but Luhua and Yanshan stumble upon a problem at the very end of the stress test, when they notice that while the new client system says there are 0 clients logged-in, the old system says there's still one active client virtually shopping. Luhua and Yanshan both enter Virtual Ximendeng to see if they can find this zombie client and they split up to search the large virtual shopping district. Eventually they find their problem: a dead person. While the original system simply tracked log-ins and log-outs, the new system tracks eye-activity to determine whether a client is active, which led to the difference. Unfortunately this means that the man they see lying dead in the virtual world, is very likely to be dead in the real world too. They quickly find out which booth is still in use, and after a call to the police, a man is indeed discovered dead inside the booth. Because there was no sign of a third party having entered the VR booth itself to kill the man while virtually shopping, it is believed that the victim was actually killed by a person inside the virtual world. Someone must've hit the man very hard on the head inside the virtual world, and this virtual trauma was replicated by the haptic equipment, killing the man in real-life. While at first both Luhua and Yanshan seem to have an alibi for the time of the murder, suspicion towards Yanshan grows when the police unveils a tragic connection between Yanshan and the victim. Luhua however can not believe that her boss would kill someone inside his own creation and hopes to find out who really killed the victim.

In 2009 Xuni Jietou Piaoliuji ("A Wandering Tale In The Virtual Streets") became the very first winner of the Soji Shimada Mystery Award, a Taiwanese award obviously set-up with the help of Shimada Souji. Entries have to be unpublished works written originally in Chinese (though there are no restriction where the author's from) and several publishers around the world are involved with the project, with the winning works being translated and published in several countries, including Japan, China, Taiwan and even Italy. In the past I have reviewed the Japanese translations of Chan Ho-Kei's The Man Who Sold The World (second Soji Shimada Award) and Hu Jie's Who Shi Manhua Dawang (third Soji Shimada Award), and this time too, I have of course read the Japanese 2010 translation of Xuni Jietou Piaoliuji, titled Kyogi Gaitou Hyouryuuki. The Taiwanese author is Chongwu Xiansheng, though I'll go with their English name as featured in the Japanese translation: Mister Pets.

A comment posted a while back reminded me I still had this novel lying around and funnily enough, it meant I actually got to read this book in 2020 (*I actually read this book soon after that comment, but I always have this long backlog of unpublished posts). Which makes the depiction of virtual reality in this book a bit silly, as it's just a few steps further than we are now. The technology depicted in this novel is recognizable enough that you don't really feel it's science-fiction (the various elements are definitely possible now even for consumers), but the way it is all put together to create an actual virtual shopping district where hundreds of people can actually walk around and do their shopping and hanging around does make it like it's still a few years ahead from 2020. It's quite different from the virtual reality as depicted in Okajima Futari's Klein no Tsubo, which was published in 1989, but the things shown there are still not possible.

I quite like the premise of this tale: a mystery plot revolving around a murder in virtual reality and a 'game-esque' world has a lot of potential, and most readers will probably anticipate some trickery involving how the real and virtual world interact or cross each other (or don't). The problem I had throughout a very large part of the novel however is that the virtual world as depicted in this novel doesn't really make much sense practically. Virtual Ximendeng is conceived to serve its purpose in the plot, to creae the situation of a 'murder committed in a virtual world' but it doesn't take a genius to notice how silly it is to have a end user haptic system so powerful it can emulate a virtual lethal hit or blow. What purpose could such a system ever have in a world that was designed to be a shopping district? Why in heavens would the developer ever think: "Let's introduce a force feedback system in this virtual world. And have it replicate every stimulus to the character exactly. Even if the blow is lethal to the user." It makes no sense whatsoever. What if someone in the Virtual World would trip and fall on their head? You could say, 'but it's a bug' but no developer would even program a virtual reality in such a way that this could be possible in the first place: this has to be an explicitly programmed feature, but it has no sane reason for being there. In the story, they make it a point to say that the physical strength of every client logged into Virtual Ximendeng is reduced by 20%, so any action done in the virtual world is only at 80% strength compared to the same action in the real world. But why would you adopt such a system for what is basically a shopping hub in the first place! It becomes clear that the deadly haptic system was only added to facilitate the possibility of a murder in virtual reality, but there's no internal justification for such a thing to be even considered by the developers, let alone exist and being implemented in a beta of Virtual Ximendeng! The story is also a bit abritrary in regards to what data could possibly be overwritten afterwards to confuse the investigation, and what couldn't. It's not really convincing when the police says this part can be easily overwritten by a third party, and that other part can't, while both systems aren't really explained in detail to the reader. Overall, the idea of a Virtual Ximendeng is alluring, but it could have been fleshed out much better to make for a more convincing setting.

The plot does make better use of its virtual environment in regards to how/when the murder was committed, though the implementation of the 'rules' of the virtual world is fairly bland: it's pretty clear one feature of Virtual Ximendeng will be used the moment it is introduced in the story, and it is used in a pretty straightforward manner. I like the idea, and I've seen it in other virtual reality/fantasy-related mystery stories too, but the way it was used here is a bit simple. What is done isn't particularly original and you can also find similar tropes in mystery stories in "normal" settings, but the act itself is well-translated into the new context of a virtual world. Yet, it remains fairly basic, and while it may be more surprising to people not familiar with videogames 'grammar', the moment the 'device' that only could exist in a virtual world is introduced, you know it's going to be used in one way or another. Ultimately, I do think this is a mystery story that does make good use of the fact it is set in such a virtual world (killing someone inside Virtual Ximendeng to kill them for real, making use of the rules of the virtual world), but especially with such a 'non-standard' setting, it's better to have justification for every element in the Virtual world that is explicitly different from the real world, and that's where this story trips a bit. Especially when the truth about the murder is revealed at the very end, you're left wondering why in heaven the developer would add in all these features and parameters to the client avatars and connect all virtual input to a force feedback system in the real world.

The plot also has another surprise hidden within the investigation, though I think that one is telegraphed pretty early on. Feels more sprung on the reader than on the in-universe characters, and ultimately, it doesn't really do *that much* to strengthen the core plot of the murder in the virtual world, though it does help flesh out the background story, so your mileage on this may vary here: I think I would've preferred a short(er) story focusing only on the murder in Virtual Ximendeng.

So for me, Xuni Jietou Piaoliuji didn't quite live up to its potential. The setting of Virtual Ximendeng is definitely interesting, and there are some good things done here, but too much of the plot feels... contrived isn't exactly the word I'm looking for. Most of the mystery novels I love are in a way contrived, but I feel that the novel struggles a bit with presenting the underlying logic of the workings of Virtual Ximendeng, which are fundamental to making the murder possible in the first place. Perhaps it's easier to accept if you're not familiar with virtual reality/games, but I had difficulties getting into the story because the way Virtual Ximendeng is explained just didn't click with me. A different reader may find this a more satisfying experience.

Original Taiwanese title: 寵物先生 "虛擬街頭漂流記"