Scent of Danger

Soup du jour / Hot hors d'œuvres
Why, we only live to serve
Try the gray stuff, it's delicious 

"Be Our Guest" (Beauty and the Beast)

In general, I'm not a big fan of anthologies, which is probably why I only get to use the anthology tag once a year...

Disclosure: I am a member of the Honkaku Mystery Writers Club of Japan. I didn't vote for the stories this year though. Or any year since I became a member.... Since I basically never read short stories published seperately, I only read them when they are finally collected in a full volume or... in an anthology like this one.

The members of the Honkaku Mystery Writers Club of Japan vote on the best mystery novel published in the year and award the work with the Honkaku Mystery Award. This usually leads to the book in question getting a nice new obi to make sure you know it won the award. The Club members also pick the best short stories published in a year, but these are usually published in different magazines etc.  That is why the Club also publishes annual anthologies that collect the selection of chosen short stories of that year. The anthology got a new, smaller format in 2019, and because I also reviewed the 2020 edition last year, I guess that most people guessed that it was likely I would get around to Honkaku-Ou 2021 ("The King of Honkaku 2021") eventually. And in the same sense that the fact that I'm discussing this book isn't a surprise, it also sure isn't a surprise if I tell you that this volume, at the core, isn't much different from the previous volumes: Honkaku-Ou 2021 provides a nice collection of mystery stories and some of them are really good.

Cozy Boys, Arui wa Kieta Izayakaya no Nazo ("Cozy Boys. Or: The Mystery of the Disappearing Izakaya") is part of a series by Fuefuki Tarou, focusing on the Cozy Boys, a small club of people in the publishing industry who gather in a cafe to talk about mystery fiction while enjoying tea and cake. Today, they have a real mystery however. Mystery writer Fukurai Shouichi has a rather vexing problem: last night, Shimamura Etsushi was murdered, an editor/critic who had connections with everyone in the industry, and was hated by everyone in the industry. As someone with a connection to the victim, Fukurai is also questioned by the police, but he oddly has no alibi: he went out drinking last night, going from one bar to another, but while he can remember the first two he visited with a friend, both of them have very little memory of the third izakaya they visited, which would have been around the time of the murder. Fukurai has been going around the area looking for the mystery izakaya, but can't find it, so he hopes his Cozy Boys friends can help figure out where the elusive izakaya is. As the title suggest, this is more like a cozy mystery and the story unfolds through the discussions between the various people present in the cafe. It's the kind of puzzle where it's quite possible you'll just think of the solution instinctively, but the way the story is presented, with everyone trying to piece the location of the izayakaya together based on the vague memories of Fukurai is done competently.

I don't know if there's some rule, but the previous two anthologies had historical mystery stories too, and Hanyuu Asuka's Tomurai Senju ("Thousand-Armed Mourning") is part of that tradition. Set in 1184, the story follows Taira no Yorimori (half-brother of Taira no Kiyomori) as a detective. Yorimori is invited by Minamoto no Yoritomo in Kamakura. Yorimori has been a good friend of Yoritomo and his daughter Oohime, so he's surprised to see Oohime in a very depressive, and enraged mood. It turns out that the young Oohime had been married off to Yoshitaka in a political marriage, with Yoshitaka basically being a hostage of Yoritomo. Oohime had loved her husband though. One night, a maid loyal to Oohime overheard a discussion of Yoritomo and his men about attacking the family of Yoshitaka and this information was relayed through Oohime to Yoshitaka. He miraculously escaped from the Minamoto manor, but was eventually hunted down by pursuers and killed. An act which Oohime has not forgiven her father. Yoritomo however is slowly growing afraid for and of his daughter. Oohime has been isolating herself in her own quarters since the death of her husband, but for some reason she manages to always appear right in front of her father whenever he speaks of Yoshitaka, even when he's in completely different part of the manor or speaking privately with his wife. He fears Yoshitaka's spirit must have gotten hold of Oohime, but Taira no Yorimori can think of a less supernatural way by which Oohime can pull this impossible feat off, and he even manages to uncover a deeper plot behind all of this. This is a story that makes very clever use of the historical setting to create a convincing semi-impossible situation, but it's the deeper plot that hides below the surface that makes this a fairly memorable story, as the hints are rather subtle, but really start to stand out once Yorimori points them out.

Furuta Ten's Kao ("The Face") is part of a series revolving around an incident where someone started stabbing other people in the subway. From what I understand the focus lies not on the actual incident, but on the various people who got involved one way or another. In this story, we follow high school student Ikebuchi Ryou, who was present in the subway during the incident and hurt his leg while trying to escape from the station. Ryou was once the ace of the tennis club, but he had been in a slump the last few months, and with the injury on top of that, things at first looked grim, but he's been slowly recovering and hopes he can regain the position of ace again. The dramatic story of a young talent who got hurt because of the stabbing incident and the path back to rehabiliation has also been made into a documentary by Noe Hibiki, a member of the newspaper club who once exposed a pollution scandal. However, it seems that there's more behind this story, because while Hibiki is following Ryou in his daily life with her camera, she starts asking questions about the stabbing incident and little by little, Ryou notices that her questions seem to lead to a conclusion he had never thought of himself. It's not a story where you'll be solving a lot yourself, as the focus lies more on the slow build to Hibiki's reveal, though this story might be more interesting of the other stories, as I assume that all stories in this series will intersect in some ways.

Each of the stories in this anthology comes accompanied by a message from the author, and on the page Fue wo Fuku Ie ("The Piper House"), Sawamura Ichi explains that this story was originally written for a special feature with ghost stories, and that he added a twist, first making you think it's a normal ghost story only to reveal it's actually a mystery story. Which... of course doesn't work if you're reading this story in a mystery anthology, as he himself notes. And indeed, with the context of this being a mystery story, the tale of a family of three coming across a strange, empty manor in their neighborhood isn't half as creepy, as you 're already prepared and waiting for some twist. And knowing a twist will come, it's kinda easy to guess what the twist is. It's a story that would've worked quite well without knowing it's a mystery story, but that's impossible here.

Shibata Katsuie's Stay Home Satsujin Jiken ("The Stay Home Murder Case") is a story that screams 2020, as you can tell from the title. If someone will be reading this fifty years later, they'll probably have to look up what's so special about 2020, unless we're dealing with COVID-70 by then. Due the state of emergency in Tokyo, maid cafes in Akihabara have to close too, but some cafes still maintain contact with their customers through livestreams. The narrator is one of those customers, and of course always present whenever a maid of the cafe Happy Bloom is doing a livestream. The day after one of those livestreams, the manager of Happy Bloom is found dead in the (closed) cafe, and the maid who found her boss, swears the door was locked from the inside when she went in the cafe that morning. The boss' own key is also found inside the cafe, meaning he was killed inside a locked maid cafe. The narrator is dragged around by Fugashi, a legendary maid who is also a gifted amateur detective who has solved cases in the past and who was asked to look into Happy Bloom because something  had been going on there. As a locked room mystery, this story is fairly simple, but it makes clever use of the maid cafe setting and with all the little references to how life was in 2020, it will make for an interesting read in the future too.

Kurai Mayusuke's Hannin wa Itta. ("Thus Said The Culprit.") has an interesting, and ambitious angle: it thrives to be both a pure whodunnit, and an inverted mystery. So while we see how the murderer commits the crime at the start of the story, we also have to guess who the murderer is despite having seen the murder scene ourselves! Yasuda Hiroshi is found murdered in his house, having just returned to Japan that evening, has he had been working abroad for a while. Earlier that evening, he had met with his friends and the girl he had promised to marry after he'd return to Japan, but to the great shock of everyone, he had declared he wanted to distance himself from them for a while and even the marriage was off. Given that his friends are very close and were thus betrayed by him, every single one f them had a reason to kill him, and because basically only them (and the victim's aunt and cousin) knew he had returned that day, it seems likely one of them did it. Inspector Shishidou, known as "Sphinx" of the Metropolitan Police Department is put on the case, and as her nickname implies, her method consists of asking everyone a lot of questions. A very cleverly written story: the way the inverted part of the story is incorporated into the whodunnit plot is done surprisingly well, and it really rewards you to reread that part again once you're done. The story unfolds like a classic whodunnit puzzler, with the story requiring the reader ot identify what the murderer must've done and using that information to cross off names of the suspect list. The manner how the whodunnit plot (where the reader doesn't know who the murderer is) and the inverted part (where the reader does know what the murderer did and what they talked about with the victim) is used very cleverly to make a very puzzling riddle.

My absolute favorite of the volume however is Houjou Kie's Amulet Hotel. The two novels Houjou has written until now all involved supernatural elements like time travel to present very cleverly written, puzzle-focused whodunnit stories, but in her first published short story, we have a setting that is not supernatural, but definitely not normal either. When a guest of the Amulet Hotel's annex complains that the door to his room can't be opened and it turns out even the owner's master key can't open the door, they break the door down: the door had been blocked by a serving cart jammed beneath the door handle. Inside the room, they find a murdered man and an unconscious employee of the hotel. Normally, this is time to call the police, but not in the Amulet Hotel: the annex of the Amulet Hotel serves a very special kind of guest, the kind of guest who likes their privacy very much, who doesn't like the police and who will make use of the special hotel services like having guns delivered to their rooms. Everyone is a criminal here, so whenever anything happens here, the Amulet Hotel will "clean up" themselves. But while the Amulet Hotel does cater to the criminals, there are still rules they expect their guests to obey to, and the most important one is that they should never ever inconvenience the hotel. Hotel detective Kiryuu is asked to figure out whether the unconscious employee in the hotel room killed the guest, or whether someone else did and if so, how the locked room was created and once they know what happened, they will deal with things properly. What follows is an insanely densily-plotted mystery story with a lot of ideas stuffed in a relatively low page count, but it works. It reminded me of Houjou's debut novel Jikuu Ryokousha no Sunadokei, which I also described as having an incredible number of ideas: this is basically the short story variant. Which starts out as seemingly a locked room murder mystery turns into a very amibitious "which of the three" whodunnit puzzler with a lot of clever clues that remind you that Houjou was a member of the Kyoto University Mystery Club and thus used to writing whodunnit shorts with twist and turns. I can't really mention all the ideas here because it'll spoil the experience, but a lot of the ideas implemented here could also have served as the basic idea for one single story, but Houjou somehow manages to stuff multiple of those ideas in one story, and still make it work. The setting of a hotel for criminals is also used in various clever ways, leading to a mystery story that only works because of this unique setting, as all the characters have their reasons to act very differently than in a "normal" hotel. Fans of whodunnit puzzler short stories should definitely take a look at this one.

There have only been three volumes in this format, but I think that Honkaku-Ou 2021 might be the best year yet, with all the stories being amusing on their own, and a few really nice ones included too. Not one of the stories included feels out of place, which occasionally happens with anthologies.There's quite some diversity too, from historical dramas to a story that is clearly written during the pandemic, and we have pure puzzlers, but also a horror-focused story. Amulet Hotel is definitely the star of the volume, but the book is on the whole quite consistent in terms of quality. I am not a fan of anthologies in general, but reading books like these once a year at least allows me to try a few authors I might want to keep an eye on.

Original Japanese title(s): 『本格王2021』笛吹太郎「コージーボーイズ、あるいは消えた居酒屋の謎」/ 羽生飛鳥「弔千手」/ 降田天「顔」/ 澤村伊智「笛を吹く家」/ 柴田勝家「すていほぉ～む殺人事件」/ 倉井眉介「犯人は言った。」/ 方丈貴恵「アミュレット・ホテル」

The Flying Stars

"One must follow one's star, wherever it leads."

"Death on the Nile"

The cover art is apparently just based on the title of today's book, but it's a shame it didn't try incorporate element from the various stories included more prominently, because I like the comic-esque style...

Now I think about it, I believe that most short story collections I read and review here are usually collections of stories that have been published/serialized elsewhere first. Usually the stories are published overa period of one or two years and then collected and sometimes, I have even read one or two already before they're all bundled in one volume. This makes Aman Junichi's 2021 short story collection Hoshizora no Palette, which also features the English title A Palette in the Starry Sky on the cover, a somewhat unique read for me, as it's a direct-to-book release, with four all original sories never published elsewhere before. This is also the first time I read anything by Aman, but as an Ayukawa Tetsuya Award winner, his name had always been one I kept an eye on and after glancing through some reviews of this book, I realized his writing style would probably appeal to me so I decided to dive in with his latest work which features four unrelated short stories.

The opening story Kuroi Achilles ("The Black Achilles") is set at Kokonoe High School, where Kousuke, Eimi and Yuki (whose father is police inspector) have formed a little detective club. You'd think there wouldn't be many myseries around an ordinary school, but one day after school, they are witness to a daring robbery: a masked figure snatches a thick envelope from a student and makes a run for it. The victim cries the envelope has all the money members paid for the upcoming trip of the Badminton Club, so a group of students run after the thief. When the thief takes the path up the hill surrounding the school, they think they've got him, but to the chasers' great surprise, the thief leaps off the hill,, only to land safely on a mat prepared on the roof of one of the school buildings. The thief quicky pulls the mat away and makes their escape through the school, while the group of chasers has no choice but to take the long way around back to the school grounds, but it's too late of course. To prevent similar thefts, rules are changed so clubs have to collect money from their members for trips in classrooms under the supervision of teachers, but despite these precautions and the presence of a police detective, the thief strikes again! Like the last time, the thief's escape route leads to the path on the hill, but this time people are of course prepared for his leap back to the school building. The thief however keeps on running up the hill, but just as the chasers manage to come closer, they're in for another surprise: the thief had prepared a zip-line leading from the hill into the empty warehouse right behind the school. Once again, they have to take the long way around, but as the warehouse is locked from the outside, they are sure they have their thief now. But inside they find a dead thief, stabbed with a knife. As the warehouse was locked until the police arrived and the only "open" entrance was the window several meters up the ground from where the thief zipped inside, it seems nobody could've killed him.

This is a fantastic story considering its length. It's not an extremely long short story, but so much happens within its limited page count, complete with false solutions. It's also surprisingly densily clewed, with many minor hints that ultimately explain who committed the murder, which also helps you figure out how the impossible murder in the warehouse was committed. The clewing that leads to the murderer is definitely the highlight of the story: it's classic Queen-style plotting with a lot of clues that point you to specific characteristics the murderer must answer to, but this process plays out across several vectors here, and in terms of information density, it's almost like you've read a story twice the length, even though nothing feels rushed or underdeveloped. I hope this becomes a proper series, because I like the characters and the setting of this!

After an unfortunate accident with their car, Hiromu and his uncle end up at an outdoor log cabin campground in Natsu no Hokuto Shichisei ("The Big Dipper in the Summer"). At dinner they meet most of the other staying guests, but when they return to their own cabin, they run into a horrified woman who says she found a dead woman in her cabin after waking up after her nap. But strangely enough, and to the camp site owner's great surprise, he doesn't recognize the woman who found the body. According to the woman, she's the guest staying in Cabin 2 and when she arrived here earlier this day, someone else helped her at the reception, but the owner says he's the only one working here and that he didn't know about her at all. Whatever the case, the police needs to be contacted, but it's then they find out the phone line's been cut and both the time, weather and the fact that Hiromu's car is lying flipped on the one single road means they can't get help this night. Fortunately, Hiromu's uncle is a former police officer (well, technically, he was in Accounting) and he decides to take over for the moment, but both he and Hiromu are aware that there's something wrong with all the guests and the owner here, and it's clear that the murder is related to their secret, but what? 

After the impressive first story, this story was a bit disappointing. This is best read as a closed circle thriller perhaps, as a lot of the story focuses on Hiromu and his uncle knowing something isn't quite right about all the people here and the two of them slowly trying to figure out what's going on and why there was a body left in someone's cabin. There are some memorable moments: the explanation for why the body ended up there is a bit confusing in this medium, but I have to admit I wasn't reading that concentrated so perhaps it would've been more of an "Aha!" moment, but the idea itself I like. The ending also brings things together in an interesting way, giving more depth to a story that otherwise features a bit too much coincidence and people acting in a way that is obviously only meant to facilitate the plot.

Tanima no Cassiopeia ("Cassiopeia in the Rift") has a story-within-a-story structure, and starts with the horror novelist Raitsu Unmo showing his friend Goetsu Akira (a mystery novelist) a manuscript for a detective story he was sent. The story is about a murder committed in a small bar in a tenant building: just before opening hours, one of the female companions working there was found murdered in one of the dressing rooms. While initially, the case looks very simple as only the bartender and the other female companions were inside the bar, while security cameras show nobody else went to that floor around the time of the murder, but a close investigation into the alibis of everyone shows nobody would realistically have had the time to commit the murder after the victim had gone to the dressing room. While Goetsu is reading the story however, he also notices the story he's reading is very similar to an acual murder case that happened a while ago, and he starts investigating the real case too, which leads to a surprising conclusion. This is definitely the other highlight of this volume. This is again a densily plotted story, with the "story-within-a-story" featuring a seemingly straightforward semi-impossible murder set inside a small bar, but once again Amon shows that it's possible to write complex, well-clewed mysteries even with simple settings and it should come as no surprise that the story-within-a-story structure is used to add an extra dimension to the puzzle that really makes this a memorable read.

The final story, Byouin no Ningyohime ("The Mermaid Princess in the Hospital"), is set at an university hospital, where a female nurse was found dead, having fallen from the rooftop of the lab building. Yukari, who works at oral surgery, was practically witness to the death, as the victim fell right behind her, and it turns out she knew the nurse too. At first, it was assumed she committed suicide, but soon after the police learns the victim cried out when she fell of the rooftop, which doesn't seem to indicate a will to die. The curious fact the victim was clenching her bicycle key in her hand as she died also puzzles the police. Murder is suspected, but the investigation quickly shows nobody went on the roof with the victim and that she should have been all alone when she fell of the roof. If this was a murder, how the murderer arrive on the roof and get away again completely unseen? This story didn't quite work for me: it's basically built around two ideas that could've worked alone, but I don't think joining them really adds something to the plot, at least not in a way that provides synergy. The howdunnit aspect of the murder is a bit unbelievable, as it requires the victim to be very very gullible even if I think the mechanics behind the idea are okay.

As my first encounter with Aman Junichi, I think Hoshizora no Palette was quite amusing. While not all four stories in this book were of the same level, the two highlights of the volume are really good and told me I really should read more of Aman. The four stories are quite puzzle-focused, so if you're into that kind of mystery stories (like me!), you'll find a lot to like here, though I have to say that this volume is also quite diverse in terms of story backgrounds, so I think any mystery fan should be able to find something to like here.

Original Japanese title(s): 安萬純一『星空にパレット』:「黒いアキレス」 /「夏の北斗七星」 / 「谷間のカシオペア」 / 「病院の人魚姫」

The Inner Circle

"A donut hole in the donut's hole."

"Knives Out"

Okay, with Inugami in title and the familiar -kan no Satsujin (... House Murder(s)), the title of today's book sounds a bit too familiar for mystery fans, I think.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Serizawa Hiyoko and her personal maid Tsuyuri Shizuka travel through a wintery cold to the manor of Serizawa's uncle, who married into the Himuro family to attend to a curious ceremony to be held at the house. As of late, Himuro Takamine has been become involved with the Society of Man, a shady new religion who has convinced the man to hold the Ritual of the Dog at the manor. Hiyoko's excuse is that she'll be visiting her cousin Meiko, but in fact Hiyoko has been sent by her grandmother to keep an eye on things to see what her uncle is getting himself into. Upon arrival however, Hiyoko is surprised to see that Meiko herself too is determined to participate in the ritual which is supposed to call down the spirit of Takamine's late wife. The ceremony is held in a specially-built dome-like structure in the house, basically consisting of three circles within each other. Facing the structure from the front, the first door leads to a curved outer corridor which leads to the exact other side of the circle. There a second door leads inoto the second corridor (the second ring), which curves back to the front. The final third door leads into the inner circle of this structure, where the temperature is freezing. The ceremony will have Meiko praying here in the middle for hours on. However, in order to deter people from disturbing the ritual, a grotesque safety measure is built into the building: each of the three sliding doors leading deeper into the structure has a guillotine blade built into it, attached to a box on the inside of each door. Three persons are to lie down in those boxes and be locked inside, with Meiko in possession of the key. Unless Meiko herself uses the lock to free the people lying in those boxes first, anyone forcefully opening the sliding doors will decapitate the people lying in the boxes and who'd be so desperate to kill three humans to interrupt the Ritual of the Dog?

But the unthinkable does happen! While there are people standing guard outside the structure during the ritual, they suddenly hear Yuuri, Meiko's friend lying inside the first box (attached to the first door), cry out. Sensing something is wrong, Hiyoko and Shizuka approach the door only to witness how the door is slid open, decapitating Yuuri. Realizing someone inside the structure slid the door open, Hiyoko and Shizuka make their way deeper into the structure, finding everyone in the boxes is dead, decapitated by the guillotine doors. But when they arrive at the center, they are shocked to find Meiko standing in the middle, but she too has been stabbed to death and was frozen in her standing position. But there's not a single sign of the person who opened the guillotine doors from outside and there are no other exits out of this structure. But what surprises Hiyoko the most is that Shizuka confesses she was afraid this would happen: three years ago, when she worked as a housekeeper at the Yukishima family, the Society of Man had erected the same structure for the Ritual of the Dog and there too someone had managed to penetrate the triple-layered locked room. As Shizuka recounts the events that occured three years ago, she slowly pieces together what happened this time in Tsukihara Wataru's Inugamikan no Satsujin ("The Murders in the Inugami House" 2019).

This is the third novel in Tsukihara Wataru's series set in the late 1800/early 1900s Japan starring the maid Shizuka, a very capable housekeeper of Russian descent who at times has a tendency to fall out of her role and mock her superiors, but who nonetheless is extremely good at what she does, and that includes some occasional detecting. I hadn't read any of the earlier novels before (yep, I never read things in order), but starting with this novel didn't seem to problematic at all. I don't even know whether Shizuka is also working for Hiyoko in the other novels, or whether she's working somewhere else each time, but at the very least, you can start with Inugamikan no Satsujin without worrying too much.

I picked this one entry up because the premise sounded interesting, with a triple-layered locked room murder mystery, with a structure with guillotine doors and shady ceremonies. If you ask me what I think of the book now I have read it though, I have to admit I'm torn. It has some really neat ideas, mostly with the enigmatic structure and the guillotine doors, but at the same time, the story has characters act in rather unconvincing manners in order to make the plot work, and some of logistics behind the murder plot are rather iffy upon scrutinization, so the book doesn't quite manage to completely win me over. But to start with the fun parts first: I love the utterly nuts idea of a building with guillotine doors which force you to commit a murder if you want to open it. In the book they say they can't believe anyone could be so desperate or crazy to use those doors, but as the reader, you of course know it's soooo going to be used to kill everyone in those boxes. This is where you also realize that this book is more focused on presenting the core mystery problem with an interesting murder situation, rather than focusing on really providing a firm foundation to explain why this structure exists in the first place: if you really wanted nobody to disturb the ritual, you could just lock the doors without human sacrifices and the story hardly explains why the ritual demands the middle of the structure to be freezing cold, or why the structure is built inside another building, or why it has that particular circle-within-a-circle-within-a-circle layout. Tsukihara simply came up with an idea for a triple-layered locked room murder, and ran with it. Don't think too hard about it and just accept there's a building with guillotine doors.

The book starts in media res, with Hiyoko and Shizuka discovering the deaths inside the structure, and afterwards, the story follows a dual narrative structure, with chapters alternating between the ones set in the present (starting with the build-up to the discovery of the murders) and chapters set in the past, when Shizuka was working for the Yukishimas and the same Ritual of the Dog was held with similar results. These chapters are titled almost the same and often, events and conversations appear to be echoed between the past and the present, yet at the same time, as this is a mystery, the reader is of course aware that it isn't a coincidence that deaths occur whenever the Ritual of the Dog is held by the Society of Man, and the plot will have you wondering why this ceremony is being held again and what the true purpose is of this insane ritual. The events in the past are very similar to the ones in the present, with a figure opening the killer doors from within and ultimately finding the girl who had been praying inside stabbed. While the narrative of the past is intricately connected the narrative of the present, I have to say that in regards of the mystery plot, things get a bit rushed here, with events that seem barely possible in terms of the timeline and by the end, you're more puzzled about whether all that could really have been done and also about the motivations for some characters to act like that. 

The narrative in the present has a more solid mystery plot and forms a nice contrast with the one in the past, but here too you are left wondering about whether it was really worth it for the culprit to do all of that for those causes. I'm not the kind of mystery reader who usually fuzzes too much about character motivation, but it's really rare for me to me to think a book could have come up with a more convincing reason to explain character actions, because I'm usually very willing to just roll with the plot. The problem of the murderer opening the guilotine doors from the inside and then disappearing from the structure is good though, with some nice moments that don't just focus on the howdunnit, but also have Queenian moments that focus on the question why some objects/circumstances are the way they are and the logical implications from that.

Inugamikan no Satsujin is a pretty short novel, and due to its dual narrative structure, it has to go through events pretty swiftly, which has both benefits and drawbacks. It goes straight to business, throwing a very odd building with guillotine doors at you and people locked up boxes and frozen corpses and more, and it ultimately uses these elements to weave an entertaining locked room mystery, but at the same time, it also rushes through some details which make you wonder, hey, do things really work the way it was just said here? I enjoyed Inugamikan no Satsujin as a short read as it has some genuinely memorable moments and ideas and will also pick up some other adventures with Shizuka later, but at the same time, it's also a book that left me wondering about what it could also have been with perhaps fifty pages extra to work out some of the more rushed parts of the murder plot and the underlying motivations.

Original Japanese title(s): 月原渉『犬神館の殺人』

番外編：Death Among the Undead Released

Doing announcements of announcements is like shooting myself in the foot, because I'm always left with nothing to say in the actual announcement... It's common practice to make an announcement of an upcoming major announcement, or at least it's like that in the game industry, but I guess you're not supposed to give away everything during the pre-announcement.

So now that Locked Room International has today published my newest translation of Masahiro IMAMURA's 2017 debut novel Death Among the Undead (original title: Shijinsou no Satsujin), do I have anything to add to my original announcement post not even two weeks ago? No, not really.  Pointing out that Death Among the Undead was an unprecedented monster hit that became the first title in history to conquer the first place in all the major Japanese annual rankings of mystery novels, and that it has since become a multimedia franchise, with a manga adaptation and an excellent live action adaptation would just be repeating myself. Raving about how it introduces a completely original take on the closed circle situation and locked room murder mystery is all I have been doing here ever since I read the book back in 2018. It is the book you need to read if you want to know in what (amazing) state the Japanese mystery novel is now currently, but yes, it's all been said here before.

Though I am really excited the book is out now! I assume most people reading this are regular readers of this blog, so they'll be aware that probably about 85% of the books I discuss here are not available in translation (English or any other language) and it's not uncommon to see comments on articles here where people voice their wishes for a translation. And I can safely say that at least on this blog, Death Among the Undead was by far the most wished-for title. Heck, when I reviewed the third novel in the series released only a few weeks back in Japan, the comment section once again had people wishing for a translation of Death Among the Undead. As it hadn't been formally announced yet by Locked Room International, there wasn't much I could say then though. Anyway, it's awesome that the book is now indeed available in English translation now, and that I got to work on it myself!

Edit: Publishers Weekly's starred review is also up!

For those who have read previous translations of Japanese mystery novels published by Locked Room International, this might be a slightly surprising work. Like Lending the Key to the Locked Room released last year, Death Among the Undead is a fairly recent work, as opposed to the early shin honkaku novels from the eighties Locked Room International did before (not to mention the even older The Ginza Ghost and The Red Locked Room). Death Among the Undead follows the classic tropes of the murder mystery, but at the same time it's unmistakenly a contemporary work, a murder mystery written within the current zeitgeist and presenting familiar-looking ideas in a brand new context. I myself love this book, as it really shows the potential the puzzler mystery story has and that there's stll a gold mine of ideas to be explored for the genre. This Locked Room International version features a special introduction by Soji SHIMADA by the way!

Anyway, I can only hope you'll enjoy the book as much as I did back in 2018! It's such an important work in the context of contemporary Japanese mystery fiction, I really recommend you read it even if the premise of the book sounds a bit... uncanny, because Death Among the Undead is an excellent example of how far the Japanese mystery novel dares to go, and how at the same time it still manages to hold onto our beloved classic tropes and structure firmly. And I'm really repeating myself now, so that's it for today! Enjoy Death Among the Undead!

The Case of the Photo Finish

It seems his skin was sweet as mango, 

when last I held him to my breast

"Grim Fandango"

Never been to Kagoshima even though I lived relatively close there for a while...

Disclosure: I translated Shimada's 1985 short story The Running Dead. Different series though!

It's very early in the morning, before sunrise, when a writer decides to step out on his balcony again and indulge in a rather bad habit of his: spying on people. He has a look inside other apartments with his binoculars and he thinks he's lucky when he finds a half-open bathroom window, and inside he sees a woman in her bath tub. A little while later though, he realizes the woman hasn't moved at all and that she's kept her window open despite the cold. Eventually, the body does move, only to reveal a horrible sight: the woman's face has been torn off. The writer makes an anonymous call to the police, who find the dead woman in the tub. Even the veterans among the team had never seen someone with the skin torn off the face and the eyeballs removed. The victim is Chizuru, who worked as a companion at a night club. During the investigation into Chizuru's movements on the night of her murder however, they stumble upon a great mystery: around the estimated time of her death, she was also witnessed in the Hayabusa Night Train from Tokyo to Kagoshima. Several witnesses had seen her on that train that left on the evening of her death, and some even saw her after the time of her murder. Was it her ghost that took the Hayabusa or did her body somehow teleport from a riding train back into her apartment? It's Inspector Yoshiki Takeshi who has to make sense out of this in Shimada Souji's 1984 novel Shindai Tokkyuu Hayabusa -  1/60 no Kabe ("The Night Express Hayabusa -The 1/60 Second Wall).

Earlier I have reviewed Izumo Densetsu 7/8 no Satsujin ("The Izumo Legend 7/8 Murder", 1984) and Kita no Yuuzuru 2/3 no Satsujin ("The Northern Yuzuru 2/3 Murder", 1985) on this blog, which were respectivally the second and third novel to feature the character of Yoshiki Takeshi, a Tokyo-based police detective. This series was initially conceived as Shimada's take on the so-called travel mystery, a sub-genre that focuses on, obviously, travel. The genre is strongly associated with trains and brilliantly fabricated alibis that make full use of complex railway schedules and other characteristics of the subgenre include the stories often being set in popular tourist destination/region outside the capital Tokyo and involving references to local habits, folklore and legends. Shindai Tokkyuu Hayabusa -  1/60 no Kabe was the first novel in this series, but yep, I never read things in order. The series is quite succesful, having about 15 novels with the latest being released in 2019, though I am not sure whether later Yoshiki novels are also written to invoke the travel mystery genre.

Though the first pages of this book seem to invoke Edogawa Rampo more! The discovery of the horribly mutilated victim could have come right out of a Rampo story, with its theme of sexual voyeurism which ends in the discovery of a murder victim. It's a technique Rampo used a lot in his stories, and you'd almost expect the foe of this villain to be some kind of serial killer with a crazy name like The Magician, The Dwarf or The One-Eyed Clown. Once the intitial horror has passed though, you're confronted with a familiar sight in mystery fiction: the unrecognizable corpse. The story's main mystery revolves around the question of how the victim Chizuru could have been seen by multiple people in the Hayabusa Night Express, even after her estimated time of death, while her body was back in Tokyo lying in her bath tub in the early hours of the day. Readers are of course likely to immediately become suspicious of the identity of the corpse, but Shimada of course knows the familiar trope and doesn't play this one straight, and it can be quite tricky to figure out what's really going on here. The reason for the skinned face is quite ingenious actually, and perhaps one of the better ideas of this novel.

While the police is investigating Chizuru's private life and the men with whom she had affairs, it is discovered that Chizuru was seen on the Hayabusa express to Kagoshima (the other side of the country) on the night of her murder and some even saw her leave the train. And it aren't just eyewitnesses: people on the train spoke with her, and one of them even took a picture of the beautiful woman (hence the title The 1/60 Second Wall). The mystery of who this Chizuru was, whether she was the real one and or a fake and the connection to the dead body in the tub back in Tokyo is what drives the plot of this book... in theory, though a lot of time is actually spent by Yoshiki to just find out more about Chizuru, so he also travels to her home town to learn more about her family and life before she moved to Tokyo on her own. It results in a mystery novel that at one hand does have an alluring problem of a victim who is seen alive in a train while the medical records say she was dead at that time, but the narrative seems to not dwell on this too much: rather than really proposing new theories or going over time schedules to see how it could be done, Yoshiki spends more time chasing after more 'tangible' leads like the men in Chizuru's life and her estranged family, which might be more realistic, but it weakens the 'ghostly' part of the story a bit. In the end, it never felt like the book really managed to sell the problem of how Chizuru could be at two places at the same time, both alive and dead, as the core mystery. It just felt like Yoshiki going here and there asking questions about the victim's past, rather than about the current situation.

Ultimately, a tricky plot is unveiled of course that manages to explain everything. While the underlying concepts might sound familiar, the execution is done well, using a lot of misdirection and the use of the train theme to create a good variant on the idea and to make the mystery of the dead and alive Chizuru possible. The plot does have to take a few shortcurts to become possible though, which means that the motives for some people to act in certain ways to allow the mystery to come alive, feel a bit underdeveloped, or at least not very convincing at this point. One character in particular just feels like a walking plot device, doing things solely so the mystery can be constructed. And it's perhaps I just happened to pick these specific novels these last few years, but the writing of the women in the last few Shimada novels I have read all have a distinctly negative undertone. It does kinda undermine the core mystery plot I think, because I think the ideas how this and that were done to create a particular mystery and the clues leading up to the solution are okay, but then the characters, and especially the women, have to act in certain, often forced ways to make that mystery possible.

At the end of my post on Kita no Yuuzuru 2/3 no Satsujin, I wrote "I will probably read the first Yoshiki Takeshi novel first before I decide whether I'll read more of this series," but to be honest, I still don't know whether I will continue. Shindai Tokkyuu Hayabusa -  1/60 no Kabe is a perfectly passable travel mystery that has a few really good ideas, but at times it also felt it focused on parts of the story I myself didn't find as interesting as other parts, so it didn't quite manage to win me over to think of it as a must-read. There are some other novels in this series that appear to be fan favorites, so I might try those in the future, but for the moment, I think I'll take a break with this series and be content with having the first three novels.

Original Japanese title(s): 島田荘司『寝台特急「はやぶさ」1/60秒の壁』

The Unnatural

冷えた空から溶け込む淡い雪

すべてはこの大地の中すい込まれゆくのですね

「冷たい影」（Garnet Crow）

 

From the chilly skies, comes falling light snow that melts away

You see how everything is being swallowed by Mother Earth?

"A Cold Shadow" (Garnet Crow)

Has it been three years already? One of my favorite mystery reads of 2018 was the Sharaku Homura manga series by manga artist Nemoto Shou: originally this impossible crime-focused puzzle mystery manga had been self-published under the doujin circle name Sapporo no Rokujou Hitoma at comic conventions and other events, meaning the comics had only been available to a limited audience. In 2018 however publisher Bungeishunju (Bunshun) made the series available as e-books through all the major e-book storefronts in Japan. At the time, they published three volumes, each bundling 4, 5 issues and I devoured all three of them (reviews of the first, second and third volume here). The adventures of the clever girl detective Sharaku Homura and her assistant Yamazaki "Karate Kid" Yousuke were absolutely brilliant, combining Scooby Doo/Edogawa Rampo-esque set-ups with villains dressing up in creepy/silly costumes to scare their victims, with cleverly written and illustrated impossible crime situations. From locked rooms to impossible disappearances, the series had everything and what was surprising was both how clever the set-ups were, but also the focus on the visual aspect. Panels would hide clues in subtle ways, and you wouldn't notice until you get to the end and you see all the page references that point you back to the exact corresponding page/panel where you'll see the necessary clues had indeed been there all along for you to see.

Nemoto Shou has kept working on new issues all this time, with a new release every six months or so, so when I was notified that the fourth volume had released last week (late August), I was both surprised, and not really surprised. I knew that there'd be enough material for a fourth volume, but I hadn't expected the release to be dropped so suddenly. It was a welcome surprise of course. Kaiki Tantei Sharaku Homura 4 - Hagoromo no Kijo ("Sharaku Homura: Detective of the Uncanny - The Ogress With the Robe of Feathers" 2021) collects the next five issues of the comic, but readers who have been around on this blog for the last few years, will probably recognize the subtitle of this volume. For while this fourth volume was released last week, I have already reviewed three of the five issues collected in this book in the last three years. Which perhaps tells you how much I enjoy reading this series, as I honestly couldn't wait for the collected volume and wanted to read the individual issues as soon as possible each time they were released. Anyway, I already wrote extensively on the title story Hagoromo no Kijo ("The Ogress With the Robe of Feathers") in the past, and it is still one of the most memorable "no footprints in the snow" impossible crime story I have read in recent years and is definitely the must-read highlight of the volume, so it's no wonder it has been made the title story of the volume. For details, I recommend you read the review of the issue, but it's a very densily plotted mystery story with a great fleshed out backstory, false solutions and a truly original explanation for the impossible crime that appears to have been committed by a floating ghost. Two years have passed since I first read it, but it is still a brilliant impossible crime story that fans of that particular sub-genre should read.

I'll also be leaving the links to Kourei Yashiki ("The House of Necromancy") and Youtou Shikabanemaru ("The Demon Sword Shikabanemaru") here, so I won't discuss these stories in detail here anymore. These two stories don't involve murder, but other types of impossible situations (a jewel disappearing during a seance even though everyone had been tied to their chairs, and a sword that starts bleeding suddenly) and I liked the first one especially.

So for this post, I'll only be looking at the two issues included in volume 4 I hadn't read yet. Spriggan is the weird one of the collection. After purchasing a haunted jewel, the jeweler Uehara Yuuji is, well, being haunted. The jewel used to be part of a collection of a jewel collector who, in an attempt to protect his jewels from a robber, swallowed them, but was then murdered and cut open by the robber to get the jewels out of his corpse. Afterward the murderous thief was caught, the jewels were sold off by the victim's family to various parties, but every new owner has since been haunted by the ghost of the murdered collector who wants his jewels back. Since his purchase of one of these jewels, Uehara has been hearing voices around his house too, but his employees think it's just a prank of someone who must've heard about his latest purchase. Still, Uehara hasn't had any sleep since, so he decides to stay in a hotel for a while. Staying in a room on the third floor, he decides to take a nap, when suddenly he's awakened by an alarm clock he didn't set, followed by a ghostly figure opening his room door, stealing the jewel and knocking Uehara out. Uehara asks Homura to help him figure out how the ghost managed to get inside his hotel room: his room was on the third floor, with no other buildings in the neighborhood, the hotel doors lock automatically and the keycard to his room had been lying on his desk all the time and the code is changed every time a new guest arrives, meaning old keycards used by previous guests won't work on this door. The story is rather short, so Homura pretty much figures the whole thing out once she had a look at the room, though I have to say I didn't like the solution that much. The main clue hinting at how the ghost managed to open the door is slightly lacking, meaning it's difficult to come up with how the whole thing was pulled off exactly if you do recognize the significance of the main visual clue. The manner in which the impossible crime is 'dressed' and presented to Uehara/the reader is rather clever though, adding an extra layer of mistifying mystery even though at the core the problem is fairly simple. The way the title Spriggan connects to the actual contents of the story is absolutely weird though.

Kageboushi ("The Shadow Man") tells about a series of mysterious nightly abductions of people living in Block 1 of Nanjou-ku, Shimoyama City by a mysterious Shadow Man. Homura is one of the victims who is taken away during her sleep, only to wake up in a creepy forest with the mysterious Shadow Man. After some banter the Shadow Man decides to hang her down an old well, where Homura faints, but when she wakes up, she's back in her room again. It turns out more people in the neighborhood have had similar experiences during their sleep, but nobody knows why the Shadow Man is doing this. There doesn't seem to be any link between the victims besides their address, as there are male and female victims, of various ages and of various professions. The mystery first focuses on the missing link angle, which ultimately leads to the question of who and why. The matter of the missing link is so simple in its concept that I completely missed it. It's actually cleverly hidden because if you don't realize a certain fact first, you won't see the missing link at all because it doesn't seem likely. Not a very complex mystery, but it's worked out very competently, and the story even has an extra surprise by adding a Challenge to the Reader after the main mystery is solved, asking you to solve a riddle that had been hidden beneath the main story. This one is probably easier to solve than the main mystery, but still entertaining. No impossibilities this time though.

On the whole though, Kaiki Tantei Sharaku Homura 4 - Hagoromo no Kijo is a pretty solid volume. Of the five issues collected in this volume, I think the three issues I had reviewed already were stronger on the whole than the two issues I hadn't read yet, but overall the quality of this mystery manga is still very high, and the title story alone makes this volume worth the read. It's a phenomenal mystery story, and the other stories included also show off quite well how fantastic the visual medium of a comic works with the mystery genre. As these are self-published comics, assuming Nemoto won't stray too much from his release schedule, I guess we can expect a new volume in about three years.... but I'll likely keep my eyes wide to see if I can read the individual issues earlier than that, because the Sharaku Homura series has yet to disappoint so I'd rather read new issues sooner than later!

 Original Japanese title(s): 根本尚『怪奇探偵・写楽炎 4 羽衣の鬼女』

Murder is no Fairy Tale

"Boys, be ambitious!"

William S. Clark

I love the unique cover art style for these books!

One of my favorite reads last year was Aoyagi Aito's Mukashi Mukashi Aru Tokoro ni, Shitai ga Arimashita ("Once Upon A Time, There Was A Body", 2019), a wonderful short story collection where Aoyagi used famous Japanese fairy tales to tell fantastic tales of mystery. While each of these stories would start in the exact same manner as they have been told for generations, Aoyagi would always add a deadly twist to the tale, transforming the fairy tale into something that was familiar, while also subverting expectations at the same time. What was equally interesting was that Aoyagi embraced the magical fairy tale worlds of each individual tale: mystical crane birds, talking fish and magical tools were all used to bring very unique, but also fair murder mystery stories which made full use of the supernatural imagery from the original stories. To my surprise, the sequel to this book was released very soon after I posted my review of Mukashi Mukashi Aru Tokoro ni, Shitai ga Arimashita and I didn't notice it until a few months later! As you may tell from the title Akazukin, Tabi no Tochu Shitai to Deau ("And On Her Way, Little Red Riding Hood Met A Corpse" 2020), this new short story collection presents four fabulous mystery stories based on European fairy tales. Unlike the previous volume however, this book also features an overarching storyline: the titular Little Red Riding Hood is travelling across the world with her basket with food and wine, but on her way, she keeps getting involved with murder cases. Because Little Red Riding Hood is in a hurry, she always finds herself forced to solve the crimes herself so she can continue her journey.

In the opening story Glass no Kutsu no Kyouhansha ("Accomplices of the Glass Slipper"), Little Red Riding Hood meets Cinderella at the river as she's washing clothes, lamenting that her stepmother and stepsisters are going to the ball of the prince, while she has to stay at home. A witch passing by decides to help the two girls out and uses her magic to give Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella wonderful dresses and a pumpkin carriage. On their way to the castle in the pumpkin carriage however, the two run over a man. In a panic, they decide to bury the body besides the road and continue their way to the ball, where Cinderella manages to impress the prince. But then a report comes that a body has been found in the forest and then Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella recall they never cleaned their carriage...

A hilarious opening story, which starts out as an inverted mystery story because it's Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella who run over the man in the carriage and try to keep their murder a secret at the ball. This part serves as an interesting introduction to the 'magical' aspects of this series, as we are clearly shown what the limits are of the magic used, and how it can be used to erase the evidence of their crime in rather simple manners. As the story progresses however, we learn the forest where they ran over the man holds more secrets and that's where this story really starts to shine: many minor events and remarks made over the course of the story suddenly form one connected line together, revealing a plot that had gone unseen until the last quarter of this story. This secondary plotline is also firmly built upon the various familiar elements from the Cinderella folk tale. It's a well-plotted intrige hiding beneath the more hilarious inverted mystery story, where Little Red Riding Hood shows you that she really isn't the young girl who got fooled by a wolf in disguise once.

In the opening scene of Amai Misshitsu no Houkai ("The Fall of the House of Sweets"), Hansel and Gretel manage to shove the evil witch into the oven in the candy house... and then the two children plot to kill their stepmother, who had been the one who had convinced their father to leave them in the forest. They manage to lure their stepmother to the gingerbread house by lying about money being hidden here and pull a cabinet down on her, crushing her beneath it. The two children return home to their woodcutter father who is delighted to see his children back safely. Little Red Riding Hood, who is travelling through these woods, is invited to stay for the night. But as the woodcutter's wife is gone now, they go looking for her, and eventually, with the guidance of the Guardian of the Wood, they find the gingerbread house, the witch in the oven and the wife beneath the cabinet. Because the gingerbread house was completely locked from the inside, it is suspected that the wife and the witch must have struggled and that eventually, the wife was crushed by the cabinet toppling over her. Little Red Riding Hood soon notices that Hansel and Gretel seem to know more about this house than they should, but how could they have killed their stepmother even though the house was locked from the inside? Again a kind of inverted story, though we don't actually see how Hansel and Gretel manage to lock the candy-house from the inside. The story is focused a lot on explaining on the 'mechanics' of the gingerbread house and the magic the witch used to create it, and at first it does seem impossible that Hansel and Gretel could've locked the delicious crime scene, even if it's made out of magic: the limits of the candy magic used are clearly defined. The solution is perhaps not as surprising as you'd expect it to be, but fair, it certainly is, and the locked room mystery here is certainly unique, as how often are you going to read a mystery about a gingerbread house!?

Nemureru Mori no Himitsutachi ("Secrets of the Sleeping Forest") is a rather unique story as it doesn't seem to have one clear defined mystery at first. Little Red Riding Hood's journey brings her to a land where a beautiful princess has been sleeping for four decades in an abandoned castle due to a curse of a witch who hadn't been invited to the ceremony to celebrate her birth. The royal family is no more, but in their place the Prime Minister is ruling the city-state until princess Aurora awakens again. Little Red Riding Hood happens to help out the Prime Minister who got stuck in the woods in his wheelchair and she is invited to spend the night at the Prime Minister's residence, where she is told the tragic story of the princess. The following morning, the Prime Minister's loyal servant Troy hears his son Melai is being accused of a murder which occured last night, but Melai denies the crime, saying he had been helping with extinguishing a big fire in an atelier in town last night. Meanwhile, a party is sent to the castle to do the monthly check-up on the princess, but they find her gone from her tower room! How are all these events connected? Well, in a convoluted way! This is an entertaining mystery story where you have a lot of threads that don't seem connected at all, but which ultimately are all brought together to form one cohesive storyline, but don't expect to solve this yourself, as while it all makes sense with the power of hindsight, it's pretty farfetched. It's amusing though, with a few semi-impossible elements to the story and there's a bigger secret behind all these chaotic events that make this story feel quite grand. The link with the Sleeping Beauty is at times a bit weak, as a lot of the story takes place in town, revolving around people who don't actually appear in the Sleeping Beauty tale, but at the same time, there are moments where it does make very good use of the unique magical elements of the fairy tale to create the complex plot of this story.

In the final story Shoujo yo, Yabou no Match wo Tomose ("Girls, Light the Match of Ambition!"), Little Red Riding Hood finally arrives at her destination, a harbor town which also houses the headquarters of the famous Little Match Girl's matches factory. However, Little Red Riding Hood's enemies know she's coming, and manage to capture and imprison her. Meanwhile, we also learn the story of the Little Match Girl who managed to climb her way up to the position of the director of one of the best-known match factories, but how are the tales of these two girls connected? The core mystery of this tale is quite different from previous ones, being closer to the strategic thrillers like Death Note or Spiral, as Little Red Riding Hood faces the problem of how she's going to escape her prison, and town, without giving up on the goal of her journey. There's an impossible angle to this mystery, as at one point Little Red Riding Hood does manage to escape her prison without the reader knowing how, but while this mystery is presented in a fair manner, it's still kind hard to solve this yourself. It would probably work better in a visual format. The highlight of this story is definitely the storyline of the Little Match Girl and her link to Little Red Riding Hood, which isn't really a mystery story on its own, but it makes for a great finale of a fun book.

Akazukin, Tabi no Tochu Shitai to Deau is in a way very similar to the previous volume, but also quite different. While the stories collected here are still wonderful retellings of familiar fairy tales to add a murderous twist while at the same time making fantastic use of the magical elements of those stories, this volume adds an extra dimension by having an overarching storyline with Little Red Riding Hood's journey. The stories are also more varied in terms of style: Mukashi Mukashi Aru Tokoro ni, Shitai ga Arimashita was definitely more focused on impossible crimes, but here we have inverted stories, mysteries where you don't even immediately see what's the matter and even a 'logic game'-esque story where Little Red Riding Hood has to outwit her foe and manage to escape her prison and still be able to accomplish her goals in town. In terms of plot quality, I think the previous volume is more consistent, but I still enjoyed this volume a lot, perhaps because it is definitely intended to be a bit different from the previous volume despite using the same core format. I for one can't wait for a third volume. I wonder what kind of fairy tales will follow! Arabian Nights?

Original Japanese title(s): 青柳碧人『赤ずきん、旅の途中死で死体と出会う』:「ガラスの靴の共犯者」/「甘い密室の崩壊」/「眠れる森の秘密たち」/「少女よ、野望のマッチを灯せ」