Murder as a Fine Art

「真実はいつも一つ！」

『名探偵コナン』

 

"There is always only one truth!"

"Detective Conan"

I don't think I have many books with a grey cover...

Maya Yutaka is not an author you're going to read if you want something conventional. Ever since he made his debut in 1991 with Tsubasa Aru Yami - Mercator Ayu no Saigo no Jiken ("Darkness with Wings - The Last Case of Mercator Ayu"), you can detect a theme in his works, and that is deconstruction. Maya obviously loves the mystery genre, but it's his love that also allows him to deconstruct the familiar tropes and themes of the genre. Post-modernist themes like the Late Queen Problem are subjects that play a big role in Maya's work, and notions like the truth or the detective, which seem like very "obvious" themes in the mystery genre, are transformed, transfigured and molten into new shapes in Maya's books. His books are seldom straightforward, and will turn the conventions of mystery fiction around just to mess with you, whether it's by not providing a clear truth at all (like in the infamous Natsu to Fuyu no Sonata) or just delving into Late Queen themes like multiple truths/interpretations in Sekigan no Shoujo.

Maya Yutaka's 2011 short story collection Mercator Kaku Katariki ("Also Sprach Mercator") collects five stories that basically are all about Maya deconstructing the classic mystery tale with a great detective. As the title suggest, we are once again treated to an appearance by Mercator Ayu, who first appeared in Maya Yutaka's debut novel Tsubasa Aru Yami - Mercator Ayu no Saigo no Jiken ("Darkness with Wings - The Last Case of Mercator Ayu"). And yes, that is a very suggestive title. The very arrogant and self-centred private detective Mercator Ayu has since returned in several novels and short stories and in the past, I had read the first short story collection, but that one was actually still quite like a collection of normal mystery stories. Not the case with Mercator Kaku Katariki however. I can tell you right away: if you want to read a conventional mystery story, you need to walk away now, as you won't find anything remotely like that in the pages of this book. Maya plays with the reader in these stories, and does everything you won't expect of a mystery story. 

And in a way, it's incredibly fun. But you definitely need to be in the right mindset for this.

It's also very difficult to write about these stories, precisely because more often than not, they're not really meant to be normal mystery stories. They almost feel like punchlines, building on Late Queen problems and other post-modernist themes regarding mystery fiction and taking their conclusions to the extreme. So while the stories start out in familiar ways, the part that is usually the "solution" to a mystery is changed in these stories, concluding in very surprising and subversive ways.

The opening story Shisha wo Okosu ("To Wake the Dead") for example starts very conventionally: Mercator is hired to investigate the death of someone, who died one year ago, while he was staying with some friends in an old house up for sale just outside the town. They had been drinking, and he had been resting in another room, and it appears he just fell out of the window, killing himself. Mercator is now to see whether it was really an accident, as the friends still feel something was off. While they are waiting for Mercator and Minagi (a mystery author who acts as Mercator's Watson/slave), they quickly realize the death wasn't quite normal, and they start to suspect each other, but then Mercator arrives and he... solves the case? I do really like some of the deductions Mercator presents in this story. They do remind you that Maya was indeed a member of the Kyoto University Mystery Club, and he utilizes some clever Queen-like deduction chains to slowly point towards a surprising truth behind the death one year ago. Only... that's not all. Once the dust has settled, Mercator basically turns everything around in a way that completely renders this a non-mystery story in essence. I like the idea, but this first story proves right away this isn't really a mystery collection.

The second story Kyuushuu Ryokou ("A Trip to Kyuushuu") does something similar: Mercator forces Minagi to open a file on his own computer, which turns out to contain a virus. Because Minagi's manuscript has been wiped, Mercator offers to present Minagi a plot for a new story. They walk out of Minagi's apartment, but just near the stairs, Mercator notices a weird smell from one of the neighboring rooms, and when he peeks inside, it turns out someone's dead inside. Mercator and Minagi look around the room, trying to figure out why Minagi's neighbor is dead, as this will serve as Minagi's new story. Again, this story features a few nice short deduction chains based on the physical evidence they find, but ultimately, it's all building up to a climax that can only be described as a punchline, and any feeling of catharsis of learning the solution is washed away immediately. It's quite funny and I do think this particular story is the closest to a "normal" detective story, but still very subversive. 

The third and fourth story Shuusoku ("Convergence") and Kotae no Nai Ehon ("A Picture Book Without Answers") can't even be explained properly, as both are truly something you have to experience yourself. In Shuusoku, Mercator and Minagi are invited to a small island with a mini-cult to investigate a break-in, while in Kotae no Nai Ehon, the murder on a teacher is the subject of an investigation. While again both investigations do feature clever deductions that would've been great in straightforward detectives, Maya then decides near the end to tie explosives to the story, blow it up, gather the pieces and then set fire to them just to finish them off. The conclusions of both stories will infuriate you if you want a normal detective story, but that's what makes them so interesting as experiments regarding the set rules and tropes of mystery fiction. Kotae no Nai Ehon in particular is daring with what it tries to do, and truly something you can only pull off once, though I like the surprising elegance of what is done in Shuusoku better. These two are the must-reads of the collection, just for their craziness.

The final story Misshitsusou ("The Locked Room House") is a short short, involving just Mercator, Minagi and a dead body they find one morning in the house they are staying at. What follows is a short conversation-only story that once again ends with a ridiculous resolution if you'd think about it from a "mystery genre" point of view, though at this point, I think a lot of readers can guess what Mercator will do considering how outrageous he's been behaving all this time. The title of the collection is Also Sprach Mercator, and that is certainly a theme running through all these stories: ultimately, it's Mercator who decides what the "truth" is and how each story will end.

I did enjoy Mercator Kaku Katariki a lot, but it's not something I would want to be reading all the time. It worked for me, precisely because I had been reading a lot of formal mystery stories at the time, and so I had a lot of fun seeing those same tropes played with in such a daring way. I do think this collection is the most accessible work written by Maya where he addresses these deconstructive themes. Something like Natsu to Fuyu no Sonata just requires a lot more dedication from the reader, while Mercator Kaku Katariki is actually a very short and light-weight read. This is not a book I can unconditionally recommend to mystery fans, but if the idea of playful deconstruction appeals to you, I think this will be a very fun read.

Original Japanese title(s): 麻耶雄嵩『メルカトルかく語りき』:「死人を起こす」/「九州旅行」/「収束」/「答えのない絵本」/「密室荘」

Choosing Sides

A place for everything and everything in its place.

(Saying)

Time for my single anthology review of the year... And yes, it's a bit late this year...

Disclosure: I am a member of the Honkaku Mystery Writers Club of Japan. However, I didn't vote for the stories this year.

Every summer, the Honkaku-Ou ("The King of Honkaku") anthology is published, collecting the best honkaku short stories published the previous year, as selected by the members of the Honkaku Mystery Writers Club of Japan. The selection of short stories basically acts as a counterpart to the Honkaku Mystery Award, which is awarded to the best published book each year. Short stories are usually published in different magazines or online, which can make them difficult to obtain at a later stage, so having all the chosen short stories collected in one book is quite convenient. The Honkaku-Ou format was started in 2019, as the previous format also included the year's best mystery-related essays chosen by the Honkaku Mystery Writers Club, but while not every year was as strong as others, I do think the last two years had really strong contenders, some of them I'd even consider candidates for my own best-read mysteries of those years. So I had been looking forward to the 2023 edition too. 

Honkaku-Ou 2023 (2023) opens with Imamura Masahiro's Aru Heya Nite ("In A Certain Room"), and apparently, this is the first short story Imamura wrote that is not part of a series. Oh, and another disclosure message: I translated Imamura's Death Among the Undead and Death Within the Evil Eye. This is, interestingly, considering his other works, an inverted mystery and opens with a scene where Kengo tries to talk things over with Yuuka his... girlfriend? ex? and things go horribly wrong, ending with her death. Because he snuck in the apartment building, he figures he might get away with it if he can spirit her body away for a while, and he's just done stuffing her body in a suitcase and about to leave the place, when an attorney appears at the door, who says he has an appointment with Yuuka, as she wanted to discuss something with him regarding a rather pesky stalker. Kengo pretends he's Yuuka's brother, hoping to fool the attorney long enough to get out of here, but the attorney seems to notice a lot of little things that add up to a big truth while he's in the room... This is a rather short story, and it's one I like better for the turnabout climax at the end of the inverted mystery, when things inevitably go wrong for Kengo, than for the build-up. While I like the big "twist" you often have in inverted mysteries that is presented here (when you realize the murderer made a truly fatal mistake), the minor mistakes and faults the attorney notices in the build-up feel less strong, and don't really give that satisfying feeling you often have even with smaller points like in Columbo. Not a bad story by any means, just a bit underwhelming on the whole.

Yuuki Shinichirou was featured in the 2020 edition of this anthology, and returns with the oddly-titled Koronde mo Tada de ha Okinai Fuwadama Toumyou Soup Jiken ("The 'If Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade' Fluffy Egg Pea Sprout Soup Incident"). This time we follow a kind of Uber Eats driver, but one of the shops he works for is rather special: the restaurants is also actually a detective agency. By making very specific orders via the app, clients can engage the detective/cook's services, who uses a select number of trusted Uber drivers to visits to the clients to gather the necessary information to solve the case. This time they are working on a case of a dead woman found in an apartment building that went up in flames. While people were watching the smoke outside, a woman saw another woman who mumbled "Good for him!" and then ran into the building. Later this woman was found dead in one of the apartments, which was occupied by her ex, who escaped from the fire in the building in time. Because of his connection to the victim, police are of course investigating him, but as the woman was seen going into the building herself, it doesn't seem it was his fault she died, but why did she go inside in the first place? At first sight, I thought the idea of an Uber-detective-service sounded fun, but I didn't think it was really used meaningful here. I assume this story is part of a series, but the way the story was told with bits of the driver returning to the cook to discuss the case didn't help the pacing of the story. The fire incident itself is not super complex and I think many will guess early why the woman went to the building herself, but I liked it enough, so I thought it was a shame the story read a bit awkward.

Shiotani Ken's 20XX-nen no Shuki ("Accounts Dated 20XX") consists of a series of reports written by different people, portraying a unique dictatorship led by the Great Leader X, who guides the strictly-led nation. The first account is from A, the director of Camp 33 in the Kanto region, a training camp where men are trained in several skill fields. His account to his superiors says nothing is wrong at the camp, but the next report already introduces to B, the replacement of A, as A was caught lying in his reports. B reports on the death of K, an injured man who had been sent to the camp to recover, but who accidentally died during his stay at the camp, a fact A tried to cover up. More letters follow, which slowly delve into the secret behind K's death. This was a short, but fun story, with each letter changing your views on what was said in the previous letter. It's not really fair play puzzle in that sense, as the writer of each new account always knows much more than the reader, but it's cool to see how the case changes and events described in earlier accounts can suddenly take a completely different meaning. The world described in these letters give this story both a very large, and small scale: apparently this is a North Korea-esque society, but at the other hand, all we see of this world is through these letters, which are all about events occuring inside a special training camp, so ultimately you don't see that much of this unique society. This would be cool to see in a full series.

According to Yagi Jun's own introduction, Chikusare ("Fatal Blood") was written as a horror story, so he was surprised it got picked for this anthology. It's about a sister, who joins her younger brother and his two children on a camp, as his sister-in-law is too busy with work to go with them. During their time outdoors, the sister remembers how there's a shrine in the forest here, with a cursed stone which can cut ties between people if you put the blood of the one you want to cut ties with on the stone. But as time passes by, she starts to see her younger brother act suspiciously with a cloth with some blood on it... This is indeed more of a horror story than a straight puzzler, revolving around the sister's suspicions about her brother's actions. Not bad per se, but also not really what I expect to read in an anthology like this. Had it been written more as a straight mystery story, I think I would have liked it better, because the last revelation is good, but the hinting/foreshadowing is a bit weirdly paced because it's more a horror story.

Araki Akane's Doukou no SHE ("Fellow Traveller SHE") is about Yuuko, who is going to kill somebody. She boards the night bus with just a kitchen knife inside her coat pocket, ready to strike when she arrives in Tokyo. The woman next to her however almost immediately notices the knife, and says she'll tell the driver, but Yuuko places the knife against the woman, Ruri, and tells her to stay quiet. The bus makes its way towards Tokyo, occasionally stopping at rest areas. During one of these stops, the passenger in front of Yuuko and Ruri says his phone and wallet was stolen from his bag in the overhead rack, and when they look around, the wallet is found inside Yuuko's bag! Yuuko knows she didn't steal the wallet, and immediately suspects Ruri pulled the stunt off to get out of her predicament, but how did she manage that while being kept at knife-point? A very thrilling story, though mystery-wise it is a bit... convenient? Like, I know people doze off in a night bus, but would nobody have noticed what was going in with that bag considering what was done with it in order for the wallet to end up in Yuuko's bag? The mystery of the smartphone is better, and I like the final turn of events regarding Yuuko's intended murder overall very much too though.

Shirai Tomoyuki's Moterean no Tekubi ("The Hand of the Moterean") starts with a group of three looking for crystallized fossils on the island of Posta, the realm of Gods. Once upon a time, an alien species called Moterans lived on the island, but they are now all extinct, and having been in the ground for so long, the three think they might find fossils turned into gemstones here. They eventually do find a cut-off hand, which is a bit weird, so they dig even further and far deeper in the ground, they stumble upon an arm. When they dig dozens of meters further, they find a body with a missing arm, and also signs they were naked when they died. This however leads to a very puzzling question: how did this Moterean's body end up like this on Posta Island, naked, and with their hand and arm at completely different depths in the ground? The one Shirai story I ever read was pretty gross and I hear that's his thing, but that was fortunately not the case here. This was an interesting archeological mystery. While I think the 'big' twist in the middle wasn't as surprising as it was probably intended, I liked the theories posed as to how parts of the fossil ended up seperated so far. The scale of the story encompasses thousands of years, so it's a weird "murder mystery" in that sense, but I really liked how this was used to come up with a very surprising explanation for the fossil being like that, as the misdirection really takes advantage of the unique setting.

Michio Shuusuke's Hariganemushi ("Horsehair Worm") is part of a series where each story includes a QR-code to a Youtube audio file, where you get to hear a specific scene/moment from the story. I think this is a pretty cool idea, but on the other hand, it's not really used in a meaningful manner in this specific story. I guess that's because the prose story has to work on its own, so you can not really have the audio track be the actual solution or a vital hint, but still, it's little more than a gimmick now. In this story, we follow a cram school teacher who is stalking one of his students: he has given her an USB charger, but in fact it's a listening device, and the last few days, he's been following her to her home, and listening from his car to the sounds from her bedroom. While doing this, he learns more about her home situation, which is quite grave with an abusive step-father. Things eventually explode in the household, but there's nothing the teacher can do. But what did really happen in the house, and what was it he was actually listening to? I think the problem with this tale is there's no real surprise? It's more a thriller than a detective story, as even at the end, when a detective-like figure explains everything, it doesn't feel like an explanation, because the teacher heard all of this himself and... there was no mystery or anything. The audio track you get to listen at the end, is also just part of a scene the teacher was listening to, with the exact same phrases, so all the audio track offers is just... hearing the scene acted out.

Overall, I think Honkaku-Ou 2023 was not as strong as previous entries. The last three years, there was always at least one story I really, really liked, making the whole collection worth reading, but while there were stories I simply liked in this year's edition, I don't think any of them were really must-reads. I think my favorites are Shiotani's story for having a unique premise and a good build-up to the solution, as well as Imamura and Shirai's entries for their more focused story-telling, but even then, it's not like I think these alone make this really a worthwile read. Oh well, I guess there's always next year!

Original Japanese title(s): 『本格王2023』: 今村昌弘「ある部屋にて」/ 結城真一郎「転んでもただでは起きないふわ玉豆苗スープ事件」/ 潮谷験「二〇XX年の手記」/ 矢樹純「血腐れ」/ 荒木あかね「同好のSHE」/ 白井智之「モーティリアンの手首」/ 道尾秀介 「ハリガネムシ」

Door to Death

One year ago, I asked about whether anyone knew about any interesting honkaku-focused Discord servers, and as it appeared there wasn't one yet, I decided to open the Honkaku Discord server myself. And today it's been active for exactly one year! At the time, I hoped the server would attract about perhaps thirty members after some time, but to my great surprise, that number was reached much faster than what I had expected, and the Honkaku Server has been a fun place to talk about mystery fiction, from not only Japan, but across the world and in different mediums, from books to games. We've also been doing regular book clubs, even of stories and novels written by fellow members. I haven't really name-dropped the server lately here, so I guess it's about time I do it again, as you're sure to have a great time there if you like chatting about mystery fiction!

Invite link: https://discord.gg/z3HMSmf8qd

Vampire Bats and Scaredy Cats

The world seems full of good men—even if there are monsters in it.

"Dracula"

I have to admit, as much as I like reading short story collections, I really don't like writing reviews for them because they either become too long, or I try to discuss them too briefly...

The last few months, I have been reading the Charles Bertrand stories by Kagami Masayuki, an author who debuted in 1999, but died very young in 2013, having only published three novels and one short story collection, and a handful of uncollected stories. While the uncollected stories were eventually collected, and published posthumously in 2022, it's still a shame this writer who was strongly influenced by John Dickson Carr published so little, His main detective is Charles Bertrand, a character strongly modeled after Carr's Henri Bencolin character, both being former spymasters and current Paris magistrates. I felt the Carr influence very strongly in the first two novels I read (especially the first!), with stories with grandeur focusing on locked room murders and other impossible crimes set in the interbellum and I would definitely recommend a Carr fan (who can read Japanese) to try and trace the Kagami books if possible (they are not in print anymore). The third novel is going for rather a hefty price in the used market though at the moment, so after reviewing the first two books, I skip now to the fourth and final book published during Kagami's life-time: Shibarikubi no Tou no Yakata ("The House with the Hanging Tower"), a 2011 collection featuring five stories with the Paris magistrate Bertrand and his American nephew and assistant Patrick Smith solving a series of impossible crimes, all with a supernatural theme.

While visiting England when he was younger, Charles Bertrand got involved in an old-fashioned duel to the death, but in a very different form than usual. Henry Goodfellows had been accusing Francois Manolisque of being a fraud psychic, whil Manolisque claimed he could make an astral projection of himself and thus commit acts far away from where his physical body is. And thus, the challenge was born: Francois Manolisque declared he would kill Goodfellows, but his astral body would do the job, while his physical body remained in his own home, commonly known as the House with the Hanging Tower, tied up and observed by witnesses. On the night of the duel, Manolisque is put in a suit of armor, and tied to a chair and put inside an underground room in the house. Five witnesses, including Bertrand, keep an eye on Manolisque in the coming hours, until the designated period is over. They check at intervals whether Manolisque is still there. The dagger with which Manolisque declared he would kill Goodfellows is also kept safely inside a box by these five men: with one having the key, another person knowing the code to the combination lock and one physically watching the box itself. Hours fly by and nothing seems to happen, and when it's past the deadline, the five witnesses enter the room again, but to their great shock, they find Manolisque dead inside the armor. And what's more: he's been shot to death, even though the armor is completely intact and nobody ever heard a shot. Meanwhile, Goodfellows is also found dead inside his home thirty miles away, and he was stabbed to death. Shockingly, they learn Goodfellows had shot at his assaillant, and the bullet found in Manolisque matches Goodfellows' pistol, while when they open the box, they find the dagger is stained with blood. At first sight, it seems Manolisque did indeed manage to send his astral body to Goodfellows and that they eventually killed each other, but is that really the case?

The title and opening story Shibarikubi no Tou no Yakata ("The House with the Hanging Tower") is also by far the best story of the book, and I don't mean that because the rest is so awful. It's just a really neatly constructed story that isn't super long, but full of details that help set-up the puzzle and the solution. I don't really get the title to be honest: while there is a dead person eventually found in the tower of the house, the main mystery is of course how Manolisque could've ended up shot to death while he was inside a suit of armor, in a room that was observed by five different people, and how he could've killed Goodfellows at the same time, who was in his own home thirty miles away. I don't think the solution is super surprising, as there are just so many elements necessary to facilite the solution, it's likely you'll think of at least one part of the solution yourself, and from there you could work your way through the whole thing, but the construction o the whole operation is really good, with a keen eye for detail and clues, and the result is simply an incredibly solid impossible crime.

Jinrou no Kage ("The Shadow of the Werewolf") details the first time Patrick assisted his uncle in his investigations. At the time, Paris had been shocked by a series of abductions of young women. When the first woman was found dead, her body was covered in countless of wounds, with the fatal wound being a bite that crushed her throat and people of Paris starting to call the murderous kidnapper the Werewolf. When the wife of Duke Loreine is threatened too, police officers are posted around the duke's home, but they are unable to prevent a tragedy: The wife is staying inside a locked room by herself, but when she doesn't react to calls by the maid and she and the duke look through the keyhole, they find the wife's been decapitated! They manage to open the door, but while the maid has gone to call for reinforcements, the duke is attacked and bitten too, and the "Werewolf" escapes with the wife's head, But how could the werewolf have entered the house, and the victim's room, and later escaping, without the police noticing? The story is rather simple, and a lot of elements have a few similarities with another Kagami story I read recently (* I basically read all of them "recently" as I acquired the books soon after another), so that made the solution probably a bit easier to guess than normal. More a story that is enjoyable due to the pulpy shock factor than being a highlight of the collection.

 

In Wendigo no Sasayaki ("The Whisper of the Wendigo"), Irene Simpson hopes Charles Bertrand can help her uncle Abner, who is apparently being threatened by the widow of Joseph Desbitt, brother of Arthuer Desbitt whom many years ago, helped Abner on his deer hunts in Canada, but who disappeared mysteriously. In fact, it was only recently Joseph too visited Abner, hoping to learn the truth behind the disappearence of his brother, but he could not believe what Abner had to tell: according to Abner, the two had gotten lost on their way, and one night, they were attacked by something that he believed was the Wendigo, and it was the Wendigo who took Arthur's life. Joseph obviously didn't believe this story, but he was later also found dead under mysterious circumstances in Abner's home, which prompted the visit of Joseph's widow and a help to come to Abner to find out what really happened to the Desbitt brothers, and they are not willing to play nice with Abner, who in turn keeps denying any fault. The widow and her companion are allowed to stay at the house, but the following, the companion is found dead in the garden of the Abner residence, but the death is impossible: the man must've dropped from a tremendous height, but considering his location, he obviously did not fall from the clock tower from the neighboring lot. The only explanation seems to be... a Wendigo lifting the man up in the sky and dropping him. Or is it? I think I like the basic idea behind how it was done, but the clewing is a bit sparse, and there's not that much synergy with the Wendigo/Canada backstory, so as a whole, the story feels a bit chaotic? I think I'd have liked the main trick to the impossible fall better if it had been used in a different story where the reveal is set-up a bit better and where *a certain thing* doesn't feel like it came out of nowhere.

The last two stories do feature Charles Bertrand, but are at the same time also directly inspired by two John Dickson Carr stories: Vampire no Tou ("The Vampire Tower") is based on the (backstory mystery) of He Who Whispers, while Circe no Shima ("The Island of Circe") is based on The Burning Court. I haven't read the last one, so I don't know how similar the two are, but Vampire no Tou is very similar in terms of set-up, about a man falling of a tower while he was alone there, and the entrance being watched, and also focusing on a woman who is rumoured to be a vampire. While the actual solution is a bit different from He Who Whispers, it's still very similiar, and if you're familiar with the Carr book, I think you can guess a lot in advance. So I am guessing Circe no Shima is similar. It is about a mysterious woman (a witch) who is seen to commit a murder in a room, but who then disappears completely. Technically, it's a good, solid impossible crime story, but I kept wondering about how much of this would be similar to The Burning Court, so that did distract me. I am fairly sure that someone who has read The Burning Court, might enjoy this story better as a kind of pastische/homage (not to say the story is bad, but I kept wondering how much of it was just mirroring the original story).

This book features insert illustrations by JET, who also did manga adaptations of works by Ellery Queen and Yokomizo Seishi. The art is truly amazing, and you can really see how Bertrand was based on Bencolin!

In the end, I do think Shibarikubi no Tou no Satsujin was the weakest book by Kagami I have read. While the title story is great, and it alone makes the book worth reading, the rest never reaches the same heights. The middle two are a bit 'okay, they're not really bad, but not really memorable either' and the two stories directly inspired by Carr stories, or at least the one I knew, was better, but stayed a bit too close to the source material, taking away some of the surprise. While the art is awesome, I wouldn't say this book is top priority if you want to read Kagami.

Original Japanese title(s):  加賀美雅之『 縛り首の塔の館』:「縛り首の塔の館」/「人狼（ワーウルフ）の影」/「白魔（ウェンディゴ）の囁き」/「吸血鬼（ヴァンパイア）の塔」/「妖女（キルケー）の島」

The Losing Game

「兄は兄。僕は僕ですから」

『内田康夫DSミステリー 名探偵・浅見光彦シリーズ「副都心連続殺人事件」』

"My brother is my brother. And I am myself."

"Uchida Yasuo DS Mystery - The Great Detective Asami Mitsuhiko Series: The Fukutoshin Serial Murder Case"

Last year, around this period, I had a short run of reviews of old Nintendo DS detective adventure games... I've only got one for this year though.

I think there's some kind of rule for licensed Nintendo DS games based on the works of famous mystery novelists to have insanely long titles, because after the Nishimura Kyoutarou and Yamamura Misa games, we also got Uchida Yasuo DS Mystery Meitantei Asami Mitsuhiko Series: Fukutoshin Renzoku Satsujin Jiken ("Uchida Yasuo DS Mystery - The Great Detective Asami Mitsuhiko Series: The Fukutoshin Serial Murder Case") in 2009. As the title tells you, the game is based on Uchida Yasuo's long-running Asami Mitsuhiko series: Mitsuhiko is a freelance writer for a travel magazine, who travels all across Japan to touristic destinations, and of course, he often ends up getting himself entangled in murder cases. Not rarely, he ends up being a suspect too, though the local cops usually regret detaining Mitsuhiko whenever they learn he's the younger brother of the current head of Criminal Affairs of Tokyo's Metropolitan Police Department. While the series is adapted quite often for the small screen, as far as I know, this Nintendo DS game is the first and only time the series got a game adaptation (with an original story). The story starts familiar enough: Mitsuhiko teams up with a new photographer (the player), but he also receives a letter from a girl, whose father recently passed away. This Senkawa Akihiko was one day found dead in his bed by his daughter Mafuyu, but while the police has deemed it a suicide, she can't believe her father would leave her all alone in the world. Senkawa worked in the sales department of the car manufacturer Y, so while working on his article, Asami also visits the Y headquarters along the Fukutoshin Metro Line to see whether there could be a different reason for Senkawa's death. He soon learns three months ago, Nakamori, a co-worker of Senkawa was murdered, which quickly puts a different light on Senkawa's death, and so Mitsuhiko starts digging in Senkawa and Nakamori's past.

I'll just refer to this game as Uchida Yasuo DS Mystery to keep it short. The game is, as you'd expect, an adventure mystery game of the command-style variety, where you use standard commands like "Talk" and "Go to" to visit various locations and talk with various characters to gather information. At key moments you'll be asked questions to show you're on the right track, or you have to solve small puzzles like figuring out a code. Nothing surprising here, though I must admit that right from the start, I was rather pleasantly surprised by the production values of this game. While it's not big AAA-title for the DS, I have to admit I had never expected it to be this good: there are official tie-ups with for example the Tokyo Metro Fukutoshin Line (which had only opened completely one year before the game's release) and Mercedes-Benz, there is a fair amount of animated characters and the voice work! Most characters are voiced, some by very big names like Ootsuka Akio and Tani Ikuko, and a staggering amount of scenes is voiced, not just some key scenes, but also minor scenes. The Nishimura Kyoutarou and Yamamura Misa games looked a lot cheaper than this and to be honest, I have seen enough non-licensed "for gamers" games that aren't produced with as much care as this game. Though, the music is quite... boring.

And as a mystery adventure game too, Uchida Yasuo DS Mystery is very, very boring. It's a shame the story and gameplay isn't as interesting as the production values would suggest. The story does hit all the usual Asami Mitsuhiko tropes, like Mitsuhiko being seen as a suspect by the police until they learn who his brother is, Mitsuhiko being scolded by his mother Shizue for loafing around and not marrying, we visit Karuizawa in a short segment to have our obligatory "tourist destination trip" and where we learn a bit about a local tourist spot and of course, the mystery plot focuses more on entangling human relationships and their motives, rather than solving tricks, so if you're an Asami Mitsuhiko fan, you might be satisfied with that alone (and yes, I do realize this game is of course also marketed to exactly those people, and not mystery gamers per se). I do have to say I am kinda disappointed the game is so Tokyo-centred. I get they got the Fukutoshin Line deal, but the way every location happens to be near around one of the Fukutoshin stations and one plot point was tied directly to the line felt a bit forced. But when translated to an actual interactive game, this story just doesn't really work in a way to be interesting. All you do is just go from one location to another and go through the conversations in order. The segments where you need to answer some questions correctly to show you've "deduced" something to proceed are just questions asking you repeat the little fact you learned five minutes ago, and the few puzzle segments where you solve a code aren't fun either. The game has multiple endings (bad endings), but as far as I know, they are all just directly choice-dependent, like choose to go to location A first means instant bad ending, location B first and you're fine. Which isn't really interesting either. 

The story itself I have to admit, was surprisingly on-par with other Asami Mitsuhiko books I have read. The game scenario is credited to the Asami Mitsuhiko Club by the way, the official fan club run by author Uchida Yasuo himself (it was disbanded in 2015 after 22 years). The books are not really the kind of puzzlers I prefer to read, but at least fans of the series will probably like this as it doesn't stray from the formula and feels like a genuine Mitsuhiko tale. At its core, the story does have things I do like, regarding how the whole series of murder is set up, though motive-wise, things feel a bit weak, and that way they tried to make the murderer feel symphathetic (because it's a human drama-focused mystery) didn't work at all for me. Not sure if the writers actually were trying to portray them as sympathetic, or were just overdoing the "explanation of the motive", but it was a really weird climax... Some parts felt a bit forced though, like the trip to Karuizawa, but at least we got to visit... Uchida Yasuo there.

Which was odd. In this game, Asami Mitsuhiko is actually well-known as the amateur detective, because the in-universe Uchida has written the books based on his adventures and those have been adapted for television too (like in the real world). He's at least famous enough for people to recognize him occassionally, and for Mafuyu to write him a letter in the first place. And yet there'd still be police detectives in Tokyo who don't know him? Or somehow Mitsuhiko's editor doesn't keep a better eye on him, considering Mitsuhiko's tendency to skip work to work on a case? The choice for the player being Mitsuhiko's photographer was also a bit weird. At the end of the game, you're actually being ranked for how good of an assistant you were to Mitsuhiko, but the rating system is a bit vague for that. You're ranked based on answering the questions correctly or doing the right suggestions to Mitsuhiko, but... "Mitsuhiko's assistant" isn't a character in the books, so you can't really know "how" you're supposed to act. I'm not sure why they didn't have you be Mitsuhiko himself...

But in short, the only thing Uchida Yasuo DS Mystery Meitantei Asami Mitsuhiko Series: Fukutoshin Renzoku Satsujin Jiken has going for it as basically its production values. As a mystery game, the story feels like an Asami Mitsuhiko tale, but it's not fun at all to play as a game, with too much hand-holding and not really requiring the player to ever think for themselves about the case and mysteries. Now I am starting to wonder whether there are actually games based on existing mystery novel series that are interesting on their merits as video games?  Perhaps I should try YAKATA Nightmare Project, based on Ayatsuji's House series one day...

Original Japanese title(s): 『内田康夫DSミステリー 名探偵・浅見光彦シリーズ「副都心連続殺人事件」』

Dead Man's Hand

"It's good to be the king."

"History of the World: Part 1"

To be honest, I really dislike writing posts on books I feel... very indifferent about.

Disclosure: I translated Norizuki Rintarou's short story The Lure of the Green Door.  

A group of four gather in a karaoke box. While at first, this might seem like a normal gathering of friends, we soon learn the four barely know each other. But they have one thing in common: they all have someone they want dead. The four agree to exchange murders: by trading murders, they can secure an alibi for themselves when the person they want dead is murdered by someone else for them. Of course, they will have to commit a different murder in return. By having four people exchanging murders, they hope to fool the police completely, as a simple 1 - 1 trade might be discovered. They use a pack of cards to decide who gets which target and the order in which the murders have to be committed, as well as exchanging basic information about the intended victims with the would-be murderer. And in time, the game starts. Inspector Norizuki gets involved in one of these murders, but the discovery of a playing card leads to his son Rintarou realizing a murder exchange might be hidden beneath the murder. Can he and his father figure out who the murderers are in Norizuki Rintarou's 2011 novel King wo Sagase ("Find the King")?

King wo Sagase is at the moment the latest novel in the Norizuki Rintarou series featuring the same-named Norizuki Rintarou, a mystery novelist who sometimes assists his father Inspector Norizuki in difficult cases, mirroring the Ellery Queen/Inspector Queen dynamic. While a few short story collections followed afterwards, this is still the last long adventure of Rintarou, and also the last book I hadn't read of the series, so I guess I finally caught up, even though the Norizuki Rintarou books are among the first I ever discussed here.

The theme of the book is a murder exchange... which strangely enough a rather common theme in Norizuki's writings. The short story [Libra] Shukumei no Majiwaru Shiro de ("At the Castle where Fates Cross") is about a murder exchange too and is apparently a kind of proto-version of King wo Sagase, while one of the earliest non-series Norizuki's I read, Double Play, also tackles the same theme, While not about a murder exchange, I also have to think about the short story Abekobe no Isho ("The Switched Suicide Notes"), where the wrong suicide notes are found with the wrong people. You do get a sense that Norizuki likes... people swapping things.

This book does take on a different form than most Rintarou stories and the other novels, because it is about a murder exchange, and therefore takes an inverted mystery form in at least the first third/half of the book. We are told about the meeting of the four conspirators right away, and see them dividing the playing cards that decide who will kill who and in what order, after which we follows some of the murderers committing their crimes. When Inspector Norizuki and Rintarou become involved, it doesn't take them too long to start suspecting some kind of exchange is going on based on the clues they found, and I have to say it was this part which does feel a bit rushed, because okay, how swiftly would you usually really connect two or more seemingly unconnected murders by suspecting a murder swap? But I guess the realization has to come at one point for the book to shift gears, as from this point on, we focus more on the Norizukis investigation into the suspected murder exchange.

It's here the book takes a surprising turn. The book starts out as an inverted mystery story and we as the reader already know there really has been a murder exchange, but some things in the criminal plan go wrong, which quickly allows Inspector Norizuki and Rintarou to focus in on the murderers, who of course wish to escape the claws of justice. They come up with a plan to fool the Inspector, and this is basically the main mystery of the book: we already know who the murderers are and the murder exchange, which was the "initial" line of defence, has been exposed, so now they have to come up with a new line of defence using the cards they have been dealt. This becomes a more conventional puzzle, but I wasn't really a big fan of the overall plot, I think. I'm not really sure why. I think part of it is that it feels very much like a puzzle: a lot of the mystery demands of you to remember the real names of the four murderers, their nicknames they use among each other and the cards they were given at the start of the story and at times it really just feels like a sudoku-esque puzzle where you need to determine symbols A/B/C. And after reading other murder exchange stories by Norizuki, I guess some of the surprise of the twist lacked impact, as a lot of it did feel familiar in terms of themes. There is an interesting twist in theory, but it's basically portrayed in a rather cumbersome manner, and after at least two other stories with the same theme, little of King wo Sagase really surprises.

Perhaps someone who hasn't already read Norizuki's other murder exchange stories will enjoy this one better, but for me, King wo Sagase was just too short, with too many elements that feel too familiar to really impress me. In general, I also think the short stories with Rintarou are better as puzzlers, so I guess that this book was fighting an uphill battle with me, but while it's my last Norizuki Rintarou novel for now, it's sadly also probably my least favorite, not because it's actually bad, but having read all the other works in this series, it just doesn't manage to surprise as much, nor does it provide a deductive chain as entertaining as other Rintarou stories do manage to offer. I'm glad I have read all the Rintarou books now though, and I hope new short stories will come!

Original Japanese title(s): 法月綸太郎『キングを探せ」

Phantom of the Knight

"Only you can put the king in check, vigilante. Move according to the rules, or it's the end of the day."

"Batman: The Animated Series"

I wish we could return to the schedule of having three or four new Detective Conan volumes a year instead of the barely two we get now...

It's been about six months since we last saw a new Detective Conan volume so here we have volume 104. I am not really sure why they didn't time the home video release of this year's theatrical release, Kurogane no Submarine, with this volume, as there's a gap of over a month now even though they are usually quite good at timing these kinds of releases, but this is the way things go, and what do we have this time? A very, very disappointing volume indeed, that is only kinda saved by one story, but also not really. The volume opens with The Knight Was Witness, where we learn Inspector Shiratori is participating in an amateur chess competition. His girlfriend Kobayashi is there to cheer him on, as is fellow teacher Wakasa, and their pupils the Detective Boys. They also run into Kuroda, the Managing Officer of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police (so Shiratori's superior), who also turns out to be quite the mean chess player. During the first round, someone plays Amazing Grace, which seems to unsettle a few of the players, who say something similar happened last year too. During the down-time between rounds, a few players who finished their games early chat and have some drinks, but then one person in the room suddenly has his drink shot into fragments by an crossbow arrow! Kuroda and Conan run into the hallway in the hopes of finding the assailant, but they onyl find a second victim in the men's bathroom, who not only has an arrow shot in his stomach, but next to him lies his belongings.... and a keychain figure of a Knight's piece, which Kobayashi had gifted Shiratori earlier.  He claims he lost the figure and that he had been making a call at the stairs. Security footage confirms nobody took the elevators after the victim arrived at the floor, limiting the number of suspects to three, plus Shiratori, who seems to be the main suspect considering his keychain was found next to the victim. But what are those blood smears in that magazine of the victim?

A dying message of course, and not a very interesting one either. Wordplay dying messages are seldom my favorite, and one major clue that serves as a kinda twist is telegraphed with such enormous lights, it's hard to miss. The story also seems only to be an excuse to serve as a prologue to the next story: Kuroda sees Conan solving the riddle of the Knight so fast, he decides to confide to Conan about an incident he got involved with 17 years ago in the United States, involving a bloody knight's piece...

And fans who have been reading Conan this whole time of course know what Kuroda's finally going to tell Conan about, as we have been getting hints about a murder case involving a wealthy person that occured 17 years ago for a long time ago, and we know the incident also involved Rum, the second-in-rank in the Black Organization that created the drug that shrunk Kudo Shinichi to his current child-form, forcing himself to play the role of Conan. We also know other suspicious figures were involved one way or another with this case, but not exactly how, so in The Truth of 17 Years Ago, we finally get the story told completely, via flashbacks of both Kuroda and Rum themselves, who has plans to assassinate a certain person involved with this incident. The case involves the death of the wealthy Amanda Hughes, an elderly lady with both financial and political powers, who is also an amateur chess player who recently became friends with a young, but very talented shogi player. She has caught the attention of a certain crime organization however, who plan to assasinate her at her hotel, where the shogi player is also staying. She indeed ends up dead, and others fall victim too to the organization, but Amanda left one curious message as she died, leaving lipstick on her watch and smearing her blood on a knight's piece on her chess board. Kuroda now hopes Conan can solve this message for him.

While this incident taking place 17 years ago is important in Conan-lore as it connects several characters to each other, and also clarifies the actions and motives of a lot of the characters finally (we only got hints and fragments telling us about that before), The Truth of 17 Years Ago is not a very interesting story mystery-wise. Not at all. The fact we got another dying message involving a knight's piece one after another doesn't really help, but the message as Conan solves it doesn't even really tell either Kuroda much, nor the reader: because the reader is also shown flashbacks of Rum (who was involved in the murder 17 years ago), we know exactly what occured when Amanda died, and while Kuroda and Conan didn't know, the message that is decyphered doesn't tell them much in the first place, and it tells us the reader absolutely nothing noteworthy, as we already know the contents of that message via Rum's own flashbacks! So as a mystery, the story isn't interesting at all. There's a secondary plot, where in the current day, we see Rum bossing his sniper assassins Chianti and Korn around to assassinate a certain person, but this plot point also didn't really work for me, because for some reason Conan, after hearing about Kuroda's story, somehow guesses an attempt at this person's life might be made this very moment, and while that is, miraculously, really the case, there is no way Conan could've known that Rum would attempt such a thing on that day at that time, and not on any other day. The created tension thus feels very fake, and ultimately, this story offers nothing mystery-solving-wise. It is just a gigantic lore dump. Which makes this story a must-read for people who want to follow the story, but that is the only reason why you'd be reading this story.

The Ghost Tale of the Man-Eating Classroom is set at Teitan Elementary, where a new transfer student in the class next door has been telling the kids the tale of a ghost who roams classrooms, demanding for food or else it will cause fires or destroy pots and things. Some kids believe him, though Conan is of course sceptical. But then, during lunchtime, the flower bed just outside the classroom catches fire! While Haibara manages to quickly stop the fire with water from a vase with flowers, Conan suspects it's certainly not a ghost who set fire to the flower bed and he even has an idea of what people in the class might have a reason for causing an incident, but on the other hand, nobody saw anybody near the flower bed before the fire started, and besides some burned chips, he also can't find evidence somebody set up some time-mechanism to set fire to the flowers (so the culprit wouldn't need to be there at the time the fire started). The story is... okay? I don't think the fire incident meshes that well with the ghost story (which is more about a ghost demanding food or else it gets hangry) and there's no way you're going to figure out howdunnit based on the hints given, but I think that as a whodunnit, it worked surprisingly well, because the howdunnit feels very natural in relation to the culprit (i.e. the actual means available to that person to create this incident), as well as the whydunnit. As in, the way the incident was started fitted well with the classmates of Conan as we know them from previous stories and also with their characters, so it didn't come out of nowhere. But still, the actual howdunnit is a bit lacking in clues, and there's just no way you'd arrive at that conclusion based on those hints.

Volume 104 ends with the first chapter focusing on Heiji and Kazuha taking the train with... Momiji (Kazuha's rival in love) and her butler, who seems to get involved in a rather mysterious incident while on the train. I am actually curious to how this story will develop further, but we'll have to wait for next year, when the next volume is released...

Anyway, Detective Conan 104 was not one of my favorite volumes of this series. The main story is important lore-wise, but not interesting at all as a standalone mystery tale, and the other two stories which are fully included in the volume are not very memorable either, either because it's another far-fetched dying message, or simply because it was a story that is intentionally not very big: you usually have such "smaller" stories after bigger event stories, which The Truth of 17 Years Ago technically is, and while I understand not all can be as good in bringing a lore-important, action-packed story while also providing a good mystery as volume 100's The FBI Serial Murder Case, this is the other end of the extreme, where it focuses so much on finally conveying some context to an event that had been hinted at over the course of many years, to the extent it forgets to be interesting as a standalone mystery too. Let's hope volume 105, scheduled for next year (probably when the new film releases in April), is better!

Original Japanese title(s): 青山剛昌 『名探偵コナン』第104巻