The Moonstone Castle Mystery

誰だ？とびっきりのrivalは

どこだ？まじりっけなしの勇者たち

正々堂々 Say say do 

「くすぶるheartに火をつけろ!!」（影山ヒロノブ）

 

Who? My greatest rivals are  

Where? Heroes who aren’t impure

Fair and square, Say say do

"Light the Fire in Your Smouldering Heart!!" (Kageyama Hironobu)

A lot of the modern Japanese honkaku and shin honkaku works I discuss here, are written on the shoulders of Giants, and not alongside those Giants. By which I mean, many contemporary Japanese puzzle plot mystery novels are written with the concepts of Golden Age detective fiction in mind, but few are them are really "copies" in the sense that you'd mistake them for books actually written in the Golden Age and in fact clearly, build on the concepts. For yes, you may see the familiar tropes of Golden Age detective fiction from locked rooms to alibi tricks in these books, but there are numerous points that show that contemporary puzzle plot novels are indeed, contemporary, written in a completely different context than the books written in the actual Golden Age, besides the fact that many of these books are set in Japan of course. Take the time setting for example: many books are simply set in "the present", which in some cases means a full century since GAD! Normal consumer technology like smart phones and tablets are normal for us now as series like Detective Conan use them a lot in their puzzles, showing how fair-play puzzle plot mysteries don't only work in ye olde Golden Age with limited technology, but how one go beyond that. And then there's the meta-angle: a lot of contemporary mystery fiction from Japan is aware the genre didn't appear out of nowhere, but that there were Giants in the past, often building specifically on their works or themes. The Decagon House Murders (disclosure: I translated it) isn't even shy about its inspiration, featuring characters who have nicknames taken from Golden Age detective authors and a lot of early parts of the book revolving around their discussions of mystery fiction. But also think of the post-modern Late Queen Period problem, a theme Ellery Queen wrestled with in some of their later books, and which is incorporated in the works of Norizuki Rintarou and Maya Yutaka. Some books play with these meta-themes, subverting your expectations based on the work of the Giants, some try to develop a theme further. And another angle that shows these books are indeed not limited by the notion of what is "A Golden Age Mystery" (TM) is of course the way how mainstream it has become to incorporate supernatural or scifi elements in contemporary honkaku and shin honkaku mystery fiction: from fantasy settings like Wonderland (alice) or a world where alchemy exists to actual ghosts and other yokai existing, modern Japanese mystery does a lot to explore the idea of how broad the concept of a "fair play detective story" can actually be by using settings you simply didn't really see often in actual Golden Age mystery fiction.

And then there's Kagami Masayuki, who in the early 2000s basically said "Screw all of that, I am going to write the Golden Agiest mystery that ever existed!" (*unsourced quote).

Kagami Masayuki debuted in 1999 as a mystery author with several short stories he wrote for anthologies, but it was in 2002 he made his "big" debut with the full novel Sougetsujou no Sangeki ("The Tragedy at the Twin Moon Castle") and would continue on writing three more books and more short stories, but he died suddenly in 2013 in his early fifties. A short story collection collecting his uncollected stories was released posthumously, as recent as in the second half of 2022, making his bibliography list only five books long, which is a shame going by what's found in his first novel Sougetsujou no Sangeki. In a way, this book is incredibly refreshing because of the fact it really sets out to emulate a Golden Age mystery novel, and especially the work of John Dickson Carr. Carr's influence can be sensed throughout the whole book, but the interesting past is that Kagami, unlike many of his comporary fellow mystery authors, takes on this challenge of doing a Golden Age mystery novel on those terms alone. He faces the challenge face-on, with no narrative trickery, no fantasy or sci-fi background, no focus on comedy, no Late Queen Problems or meta-discussions on the state of honkaku mystery fiction. This is Kagami, saying "I am going to write 1930s style mystery story, exactly like Carr would have done and do it on those terms alone!" I have seldom read a contemporary Japanese mystery novel that is so... straightforward in tackling this theme and the result is surprisingly good!

Patrick Smith is an American with a mother of French descent and after studying in the old continent, Patricks moves to Paris, as that's where his uncle Charles Bertrand, a brilliant magistrate feared by all criminals, works and Patrick becomes Bertrand's assistant and chronicler. It's these books that lead to Patrick receiving a letter in 1931 from his old professor Neuwanstein, who is currently staying in the Twin Moon Castle, one of the castles in the Middle-Rhine region in Germany near the Lorelei. The Twin Moon Castle is the property of the Oelschlägel family, an ancient clan with a history going back many centuries. Traditionally, daughters are born in the family, and often twins too, and indeed, the current masters of the family are Karen and Maria Oelschlägel, and professor Neuwanstein is currently taking care of Maria, who is prone to having rather fierce mood swings. Other guests at the castle are the Hollywood actor Kurt Reinhart and his entourage. Reinhart has made it big as a "bad guy" actor in gang movies, but he actually grew up in the Twin Moon Castle, as his parents used to be servants here. When he fell in love with Maria however and tried to woo her, he and his parents were thrown out the castle. He's now back with his manager and a director, ostensibly staying at his old home while doing research on German castles for an upcoming film, but it's clear that's not his real goal, and professor Neuwanstein fears he's here to cause trouble and take revenge for what happened to him and his parents in the past. An unsuccesful attempt at poisoning led to the professor writing to Patrick, begging him and Bertrand to come to the Twin Moon Castle to investigate. 

Due to prior engagements, Bertrand is unable to go at once, so he sends Patrick in advance. At the dinner table however, Maria lets a bomb explode when she announces she's going to marry Reinhart and that's she's pregnant, which infuriates her sister Karen. The two fight and argue, and it's clear this will take a while. The following morning, Patrick wakes up to find a small group standing in front of the doors of the two towers that flank the main castle tower. On the left side stands the New Moon Tower, but the group is at the Full Moon Tower to the right. Last night, after their fight, Maria had retreated to the tower room at the top of the Full Moon Tower, but she hasn't been seen since and the tower door is locked and bolted from the inside. They break the door open, walk up the winding staircase to find the tower room door also locked from the inside. When they break that open too, they stumble upon a horrifying sight: a decapitated body lying on the floor. When they take a closer look, they find she was not only decapitated, but also de-handed, and near the body, they find the head and hands lying burnt on the floor. Only one window is open, but that one is facing the back of the castle, which is basically a thiry meter drop to the ground, which is then only three steps away from another 100 meter drop down to the Rhine. Considering Maria had her hands and head cut off and those parts were burned, it is clear she did not commit suicide, but how did the murderer escape as the tower door and the room door were locked from the inside, and the only open exit was a window looking down a very deep fall down? Or was the murder the work of the Black Knight, a legendary Oelschlägel ancestor who was killed by a gang of robbers, but who returned as a knight riding a flying horse to kill the men raping his daughters in the two twin towers and whose suit of armor is standing in the tower room to this day?

1930s setting, a medieval castle near the Lorelei, twin towers, a legend of a flying knight, suits of armors in the tower rooms, decapitations... Yep, you can tell whom Kagami was inspired by.

This is a pretty long novel, but it's stuffed with a lot of mystery goodness. The first murder (yes, first), is definitely the best: a woman murdered in a tower room, which is locked from inside, inside a tower which was also locked, and it is clear it was a murder due to the way in which they found the body, with its head and hands cut off and burned. The way the murder seems to mirror the myth of the flying knight who killed the ruffian raping his daughter in the tower room centuries ago is of course an added goodie. Basically the whole situation is absolutely fantastic as a whole, the high point of the novel. The trick behind this gruesome double-locked room for example makes great use of the unique setting, and while I personally would have liked to see an additional clue, it's still properly clewed and quite surprising. The motive behind why Karen was killed however is perhaps a bigger surprise, as it ties in fantastic with the way the murder was committed and why the murder was committed in a locked room in the first place. For this part alone, this book is already worth the read, because everything behind this murder works so well together in a way that is almost shocking, from method to motive and the whole appearance of the murder.

After the first murder occurs, Bertrand arrives at the castle, but not alone, as he's accompanied by Von Stroheim, a police inspector of the Berlin police force, but also an old friend and foe of Bertrand. During the Great War, Bertrand was an intelligence officer and his path crossed that of Von Stroheim many times, and during this skirmishes, they learned to respect each other very much. But Von Stroheim has never stopped seeing Bertrand as a rival, and this murder at the Twin Moon Castle seems like a good opportunity to see who is really the cleverest of the two. Von Stroheim arranges so he and Bertrand can also stay at the castle and in three days, they are to see who will come up with the more convincing explanation for this murder. At least, that was the original plan, but then more murders occur during their stay. And considering the castle is called the Twin Moon Castle and at this point, only one murder has occured in the Full Moon Tower, you can of course guess the next one happens in the New Moon Tower, and yep, it's another locked room murder. This time, they find the tower room of the New Moon Tower locked from inside, and when they peek inside, they see the decapitated head of the victim lying on the floor, with the key of the room in his mouth. The body, sans head, they find stuffed inside the suit of armor that belongs to this room. This locked room situation isn't as good as the first as a whole, though it has a lot of interesting ideas. Some parts miror the first murder in an interesting way for example, feeling like a "twin" to the other, but some parts seem overly... complex while the murderer really didn't have to do all of that to achieve the same effect. I think a lot of the seperate elements of this second murder are good and as a mechanical locked room, it has memorable parts, but it would have perhaps worked better in a different context, but here some parts of the whole operation feel like they were only done because of the whodunnit angle of the book: a lot of this part is used later in the novel as hints to identify the murderer, and because of that, Kagami has the murderer do a lot that basically only serves as a way to lay a trail of clues, but it feels a bit too artificial here, because you wonder why the murderer go all that trouble from their POV. 

Surprisingly, even more deaths occur after this second tower murder, but they are fairly minor in comparison, and only the third one deserves a minor mention, just because how ridiculous (in the good sense) it is: as a murder trick, it's hardly realistic, but it's so funny to just visualize and as it's not the main problem of the book anyway, it can get away with being a bit silly. As a whodunnit, I think it's pretty easy to guess who did it, especially with the aforementioned clewing and some other parts that stand out a bit too much, but that's not really a problem here: it's the why and how that really make Sougetsujou no Sangeki a worthwile book. 

But the most memorable part, at least for me, was again the way it really sets out to be a Carr-like mystery novel, not just in terms of exterior style, but truly as a work that could've been written in the 1930s. It loses many of the familiar tropes of shin honkaku mystery fiction from the meta-tone to having a true 1930s place/time setting and does not try to really subvert existing mystery tropes and the way it valantly takes on the challenge is fantastic, as the end result is really the kind of novel you'd expect from a 1930s Carr, and it's overall a good one too! Had you told me this was a 1930s novel, I would have believed it. The most meta the book ever gets is Bertrand mentioning being a friend of a certain Dr. Fell from London, but that's it.

So I think Sougetsujou no Sangeki does a great job at what it sets out to do: to present a locked room mystery like John Dickson Carr would've written in the 1930s, and on those terms alone. The result is a book that feels refreshingly old-fashioned, especially considering all mystery stories with supernatural/sci-fi elements I have been reading recently, and especially the first locked room murder situation is a memorable one, so on the whole a fantastic first novel. At the moment, all of Kagami's novels are out of print and only the recently published short story collection is easily available, so I'm a bit dependent on whether I see these books passing by for a reasonable price, but you can bet you'll see more Kagami discussed here!

Original Japanese title(s): 加賀美雅之『双月城の惨劇』

The Creeping Creatures

    月光も　凍てつく森で   

   樹液すする　私は虫の女

「蛹化(むし)の女」（戸川純）

In a forest where even moonlight freezes

I drink sap from the trees / I am an insect woman

The Insect Woman (Togawa Jun)

Before I forget it again: here's the semi-regular "Hey, there's a Honkaku Discord server so join it!" message!  

Mount Otome lies just outside of Shimoyama City and is nearly 2000 meters high. 120 years ago, a man called Kichibei went up the mountain to look for mushrooms, but after making it to one of the higher points of the mountain, he fell off a cliff, but he miraculously survived: he happened to land on a protruding part of the steep rock wall, halfway down the 100 meter fall down to the ground. This ledge was small however, and nothing was growing on it. With no tools available, Kichibei could not climb back up, nor down the steep rock wall. Opposite the ledge was a cliff, and from that point eventually other villagers saw Kichibei was stuck on the ledge on the opposite rock wall, but nobody knew the exact way to the cliff above Kichibei, and there was too much of a distance between the cliff and the ledge to get food and water to Kichibei. Eventually, Kichibei had to survive by eating cicadas landing on the ledge, which didn't help his state of mind: Kichibei eventually jumped off the ledge, thinking he had become a cicada himself.

120 years later, and a duo of illegal loggers on Mount Otome are attacked (fatally!) by a Cicada-Man. Hearing rumors of the Cicada-Man roaming Mount Otome, Furuba, a teacher at Shimoyama Middle School, decides to ask the help of girl detective Sharaku Homura and her Watson Yamazaki "Karate Kid" Yousuke in a matter that has weighed on his mind for decades. Furuba loves mountain hiking, and forty years ago, he climbed Mount Otome. On the way to the mountain lodge, a little building where hikers can rest and buy food, one has to pass by the cliff opposite "Kichibei's Ledge" as it was called nowadays. When Furuba made it to that point however, he noticed a man lying on the ledge and from the way it looked, the man was very much dead. But Furuba also noticed other particular points: two trails of footsteps could be seen in the snow on the cliff above the ledge, both trails leading to the very edge of the cliff. One was obviously of the victim, but the other set of footsteps seemed to suggest someone came up from behind, and pushed the victim down! But both trails only lead to the edge, and none go back into the woods, so where did the attacker go? Furuba also notices a few footsteps in the snow surrounding the victim on the ledge, which he first assumes belongs to the victim, but upon second thought, he realizes the footsteps are in rather odd places and pointing the wrong way. The footsteps thus appear to belong to the attacker, but if so... where did the attacker go, for they are not seen on the ledge? Furuba would eventually get help from the people at the mountain lodge, but he never figured out the mystery behind the footsteps, and unfortunately, by the time the police came, the snow was already gone, washed away by rain. 

Furuba decides to confide this story to Homura forty years later, because the rumors of the Cicada-Man gives him a frightful thought: a Cicada-Man would have been able to simply fly away from the ledge after attacking the victim! Furuba brings Homura and Karate Kid along on another trip to see the ledge for themselves and it so happens the other people who were with Furuba when they found the body forty years ago are also on the mountain today. After a preliminary investigation, the three stay at a small hotel on the mountain, but during the evening, the hotel manager is called by someone calling themselves the Cicada-Man, telling them to check the private onsen (hot spring bath) to find a "nice" surprise. The surprise is a guest who has been stabbed in the back! But the bathroom was completely closed and locked from the inside, making this a locked room murder, Who is the Cicada-Man and why is it killing all these people?

Ever since I first started reading the Sharaku Homura (Sharaku Homura: Detective of the Uncanny) series by manga artist Nemoto Shou in 2018, I've been a big fan of this brilliant, fair-play mystery series. This is a self-published series (a dojinshi) about the adventures of the girl detective Sharaku Homura and her assistant Yamazaki "Karate Kid" Yousuke, combining Scooby Doo/Edogawa Rampo-esque set-ups with villains dressing up in creepy/silly costumes to scare their victims with almost devilishly delicious impossible crimes. Starting 2018, major publisher Bungeishunju (Bunshun) had been making this series available to a wider audience by publishing e-books bundling multiple issues. At the moment, Bunshun has published four volumes with these impossible crime-focused puzzle mysteries, but at the core, this is still a self-published series, so Nemoto Shou has also been publishing newer issues on his own, which eventually will get bundled again probably. Semi-Otoko (2023) or The Cicada-Man is the latest issue in the series, a massive 170-page comic which Nemoto has published on his own Note page (available here). It's also one of the best stories in the series I think, coming quite close (though just not as good as) the phenomenal Hagoromo no Kijo ("The Ogress With the Robe of Feathers").

The story is really long for this series' standards, with a 100 page set-up which introduces three major mysteries (the ledge murder, the bath room murder + one more thing), but there's also a lot of other things going on, and what is definitely the most impressive about this story is how immensely dense it is. A lot is going on, but it never feels boring, nor does the plot meander: basically every single page will be crucial to the mystery one way or another, and it's a sheer delight to read such a mystery-focused story. Had this been a novel instead of a comic, it would definitely be rather lengthy story in order to cover all the plot set-ups, clues, foreshadowing and other brilliant plays by Nemoto. The fact he can make it appear so easy due to the visual medium, is not just because of the medium, but because Nemoto is just that good at presenting his plots in that specific form.

Few mystery stories, regardless of medium, will be this focused on the mystery in fact. Nemoto somehow manages to not only present multiple core mysteries, but also play with fake solutions: characters will not only propose solutions that you as the reader may be thinking about to, but also properly discard them based on evidence. As I mentioned earlier, basically every page will be used one way or another to help the mystery, and it's surprising how many of the panels are also used to provide evidence how certain solutions can't work! Discussing fake solutions and also having proper evidence to prove them wrong has always been a strong point of Nemoto's plotting, but with a story 170 pages long (the part until the Challenge to the Reader is about 100 pages), you can bet he can do a lot more with that. And yes, as per series tradition, there's of course a Challenge to the Reader, for if there's one thing Nemoto likes, it's writing fair-play mystery fiction. As always, you'll come across a lot of page references during the denouement, pointing you back to all the pages where you completely overlooked the clues upon initial reading. A lot of the clues, as per custom, are visual, with some of them really good.

Surprisingly, my favorite part of the story was the locked bathroom murder. While it happens relatively late in the story, and I honestly didn't like the initial reveal of the solution, I became more and more impressed by it as the explanation continued. The trick itself is quite original (though I guess I know a variant on it quite well) and while at first I thought it was a bit unfair, Nemoto soon proved me wrong as yes, he had laid down a lot of clues pointing to that solution (especially visual clues), and I had simply completely overlooked them. And keeping in mind how he clewed the solution, and the surprising solution itself, I think this will be one of my favorite locked room tricks I'll read this year. Another prime example of how mystery fiction isn't just about a solution, but about the path towards that solution. The ledge murder is one that has a trick that feels a bit silly, but I have to admit it was clewed properly and considering the specific conditions, I can imagine it happening like that, so overall a good idea, though on the whole not as impressive as the bath room one, even though the ledge murder is the "main" mystery of the whole tale.  The story has more to offer, and it'll surprise you how very little things that pop up very early in the story, come back at the end in very unexpected ways. I am just repeating myself at this point, but the way Nemoto plotted this tale, not just in terms of "a mystery & solution" but especially in terms of clewing and foreshadowing, is excellent.

So yep, Semi-Otoko is definitely one of my favorite mystery reads of this whole year! I think it'll take a while before Nemoto has done enough issues to make a fifth volume, but I am sure this will be the highlight of that volume! As I said earlier, you can read it for free from Nemoto's site (available here), so be sure to do so!

Original Japanese title(s): 根本尚（札幌の六畳一間）「怪奇探偵 写楽炎　セミ男」

Radio Suspect

Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon 

Or asked the grinning bobcat why he grinned? 

Can you sing with all the voices of the mountains?

"Colors of the Wind" (Judy Kuhn)

One of the traditions of the Kyoto University Mystery Club is the whodunnit story, where a member will write a two-part mystery story (the problem and the solution) and challenge the other members to solve the problem part based on the clues in the story. This game is usually done in a physical format, i.e. the session leader hands out a printed copy to every person participating. With everyone having access to a computer, printer and photocopier (either at home or campus) nowadays, this is of course very easily done, but this wasn't the case when the Mystery Club first started. The earliest Mystery Club whodunnit stories were done, well, basically manually: members wrote their stories by hand (because even word processors weren't available then) and usually, the leader had to read the story out loud themselves, with everyone in the room just listening carefully to the story. It's a thing that's always interested me, because I like mystery fiction in all kinds of media, yet I haven't experienced much mystery media that was specifically created for as an experience to listen to. Sure, I have listened to audio dramas etc., but few of them were original audio dramas, and even fewer actually feature a mystery plot that makes use of the audio format.

So I had been curious to the game Unheard - Voices of Crime (Steam/Switch) for some time now, as it was a mystery game that focuses a lot on audio. In Unheard, you play an "Acoustic Detective" who is tasked to look into a few past cases, but from a sound-based angle. As the Acoustic Detective, you can review a case by listening in on conversations of all the related parties of a case, taking place during a period of  of 5 ~ 15 minutes long. You are also provided with a tablet with a floorplan, where you can see where everybody was at a certain point of time. As the detective, you need to solve the mystery of each case, ranging from theft, bombings and murder, by eavesdropping on everyone, figuring what everyone's doing and thinking at what time, and finally figure out, whodunnit, all based on audio clues only.

Well, that's not entirely true, as the floorplan (a visual clue) for each case is also very important.

 

Anyway, Unheard - Voices of Crime is a very short game, but it's pretty interesting, and certainly has an original angle. In essence, Unheard - Voices of Crime is quite close to other deduction-focused mystery games like Return of the Obra Dinn and The Case of the Golden Idol: you are shown a certain scene playing out (in the case of Unheard, you mostly listen to a scene), and from the clues picked up in that scene, you are asked to deduce certain facts, like who is who. In the case of Unheard, you'll be handling a few cases which are all about something quite different, from a theft to a bombing, but you are usually given two major tasks: one is to identify every person you hear in the case, and secondly, figure out who did it (and usually a few sub-questions). Each new case you'll be given a list of names, but you don't know which names belong to what voice. On the floorplan you'll see indications where a certain speaking voice is coming from (the sound source), but you don't know who this person is initially. So it's up to you to deduce the identities of everyone who plays a (speaking) role in the game. Sometimes, it's as easy as simply overhearing a conversation where the two persons address each other by names, but in other instances you'll have to do a bit more thinking yourself, like deducing a name by eliminating the other possibilities (by assigning the names to others). As the Acoustic Detective, you can only overhear conversations (or people talking to themselves) if you move your icon to the same room, near the person(s) speaking at the right time, meaning that if you are listening to character A talking in one room, you might be missing out on an important conversation going on in a different room. Fortunately, you can always rewind (or fast-forward) in time, and by eventually listening to everyone speaking, you can connect all the dots and figure out who is who through all the clues dropped in those conversations. The audio makes some use of binaural audio by the way, so it's recommended listening to the game with headphones. The game was originally Chinese, but has full English and Japanese localizations, so the audio is also in those respective languages, which must have been a rather big task for a relatively small scale game.

Identifiying each character however isn't enough, as each case is... about a case. A case that needs solving. This second part of each case is the trickier part of the game, because you are tasked to solve for example a bombing just by listening to everyone, but it's not like there's a character who says out loud "I am the bomber, I am now pushing the button to set the bomb off!" You thus have to listen to all the conversations going on, and try to pick up clues to indicate what exactly happened. I described this as tricky, because all you have are sounds, which leads to some interesting mystery solving segments. For example, you can't see two persons passing objects to another, you can only see sound sources on the floorplan approaching each other and them greeting each other. So the game does require you to think a bit differently than you're likely used to in most mystery games. It's definitely what makes Unheard a unique experience, because this kind of focus on audio is basically never seen in mystery fiction, even though it has so much potential.

I do have to say though, that the potential is also not really fully explored in this particular game. It's really short with just a handful of cases (of which two are basically tutorials), and most of the mystery of each case can really be solved by just... listening at least once to every conversation made. A lot of the initial mystery of each case just comes from the fact you haven't listened to anything yet, but once you have heard all the conversations playing out across the floorplan, you'll already have figured out 75% of all the problems you need to solve each case. There's not really a change in gameplay or clever ways to make the puzzle-solving more challenging: it's basically just each case becoming more difficult because there are more characters who talk more across a longer period of time, meaning there's just more to do each time. The 'explanations' of each case once you've solved it are also very meagre, basically only repeating a few key lines, and fleshing out the explanations/the proof might have given each case just a little bit more impact.

But on the whole, Unheard - Voices of Crime was a pretty fun game, and because I picked up during a sale, I definitely think it was worth the price of admission, if not only for the very unique experience for a detective game. I hope we see more of these kinds of games, because there's so much potential for audio-based mystery fiction (with plots that actually make use of audio as clues/tricks etc.) and while I always thought the audio drama would make the most sense for that, Unheard shows that a game format is also very capable of using audio to present a fun, puzzle-focused mystery.

Uncivil War

"Avengers... assemble."

"Avenger: End Game"

So I will never forget that when I watched Avengers: End Game in theaters, just before Captain America said the line, a kid in the audience cried "Assemble!" just before Captain America could, kinda drowning him out...

Official crossovers between different mystery series from different authors are not non-existent, but they are certainly not common. And most of the time, you can guess that these crossovers will follow the familiar comic crossover pattern, which even people who don't read comics will be familiar with due to its usage in for example the Marvel Cinematic Universe: heroes first have a confrontation with each other due to a misunderstanding or shenanigans cooked up by the villain, and eventually the heroes work together to take the villain down together. But what if you had a crossover with various detectives who aren't series detectives? What if you had detectives with different powers (deduction methods) who would compete. Who would be the best one? That is the question in Nitadori Kei's Suiri Taisen ("The Great Deduction War", 2021), which also has the less interesting English title of Who is the Best One?. The grandfather of the two cousins Yamato and Meguru (the narrator) was a big fan of mystery fiction, and when he obtained a Christian relic, he saw his chance. He contacted several churches across the world and invited them to participate in a special game of wits, in which the winner would be awarded the relic. Yamato and Meguru were to help out with the game, but their grandfather passed away just before the game starts, meaning now they have to lead it together with the family attorney. What they had not expected however, was that the various churches across the world would send almost superhuman (or even non-human!) detectives to represent them in the big war for the relic. Yamato and Meguru had perhaps at best hoped for a Father Brown-esque person to participate in the mystery game their grandfather came up with, but instead, we have a detective who can detect lies just by listening to someone speaking, a detective with super-heightened senses who can see, smell, taste, hear and feel the smallest details, a detective who can "clock up" his brain to consider every possibility within seconds and there's even a detective AI! Who will be the greatest detective of them all when the game starts!?

Okay, this is one of those books that I basically bought based on the title alone, and a quick look at the blurb. Having detectives with different work methods duke it out sounds like an amazing premise, and whereas in series, you often end up with a foil detective who obviously isn't going to beat the series detective, or you have the crossover where "everybody has to win" at the end, having a single (standalone) work with different detectives, and giving them all a reason to want to win the game individually (because they are all hired to win the relic), sounds exciting, right? I had only read one other work by Nitadori before this one, Jojutsu Trick Tanpenshuu, which was a comedic book where each story featured a feat of narrative trickery, but with a much moodier cover and a more "serious" set-up, I was curious to see what Nitadori would do with the idea of a "war" between the detectives.

Though it takes a while before we get to the war! For the first half of the book is used to introduce the various detectives from the different countries, with all but one of the participants getting their own chapter/short story where we see them solve a case in their home country, using their own unique powers. The opening chapter for example introduces us to Charlotte, the "operator" of the AI Detective Judas, which can solve cases with its computing power, of course if and only if the correct and relevant data is entered in the program. Her case involves a rather interesting decapitation case inside a room which only one person had the key to, but it doesn't appear he is really the murderer, so how does this work out? This is a pretty clever locked room mystery, but it's not really realistic. I think the trick is brilliant actually, and like it a lot, but I hadn't really expected this trick in this book, and especially not as the opening story. I can imagine myself accepting it easier if this had been presented in a comic format or something like that, because I'm not sure whether this really works like this physically, and 'reading' the trick somehow feels less convincing than seeing it. The other introducing chapters are all relatively short, and usually revolve around a one-trick idea that is used to show off the different powers of the detectives. The Ukrainian detective Bogdan Korniyenko for example has "Clock Up" (no, he's not a Kamen Rider), meaning he can speed up his thought process and consider countless of theories and possibilities within a second (though this takes a physical and mental toll, of course). This not only means he can solve cases relatively fast, but he can also do things that normally would take hours and even smaller actions, like stumbling over something, could be avoided if he starts Clock Up to take the best actions "during" the fall. Maria from Japan has heightened senses, which is not super interesting because it basically only means she can find small clues normal people usually can't, while Brazilian Mattheus can detect someone lying with a 100% accuracy by listening to them. Each of their cases of course introduces an element that requires their specific powers to find certain clues or to make certain logical deductions, but I think that as a standalone story, the first one (AI Detective) is the most memorable, and the others are more "functional" than really memorable, so I'll not write more about them.

In the second half of the story, the detectives arrive in Hokkaido, where they are to participate in the game to win the relic, with the cousins Yamato and Meguru, and the attorney Yamakawa organizing the 'war for the relic', even though Yamato and Meguru don't really know what the game was their grandfather planned before his unexpected death: they only know the idea is that there'll be a battle of the wits between the detectives and that the winner will receive the relic. The detectives and the organizers are all staying in cottages in a snow-covered camp, divided in two sides by a river, but the snowfall is pretty heavy, covering large parts of the camp. The first day is just the arrival, but the following day, they find the attorney Yamakawa murdered in his room. It appears this is the game of wits, and the detectives are all eager to solve the murder of Yamakawa and obtain the relic for their employers. What follows is an entertaining back-and-forth of different theories about who the killer is and how the murderer managed to kill Yamakawa without leaving clear clues (like footprints in the snow). Each detective is intent on winning the relic, and because they all have different powers and don't work together, they all obtain different clues, which allows them to come up with different theories which of course point at different people. It reminded me a bit of Yamaguchi Masaya's The 13th Detective, which was originally a game book and at the start of the story, you can choose one out of three different partner detectives, who will lead you down a different path and allow you to find different clues (disclosure: I translated Yamaguchi Masaya's Death of the Living Dead). Here too you have different detectives competing, each holding on on clues only they have, with for example Mattheus being able to detect any person lying but of course not willing to share that information, or the AI Detective being able to make certain calculations no person can. Because the crime scene is on one side of a river, with an observed bridge, and some people staying in cottages on one side of the river and others on the other, there's also a nice "is it an impossible crime?" angle to it: if the murderer is one of the people staying on the side of the crime scene, how did they come up with an alibi (an impossible alibi [time] angle), and if the murderer was on the other side of the river, how did they make their way to the crime scene unseen (an impossible alibi [space] angle). This whole set-up is defnitely the best part of the book, with one case offering many solutions because everyone tackles it from a different angle, and while some solutions are a bit too simple, others are quite interesting and could've been used as "real" solutions too. And because we got the introductions of the abilities of the various detectives earlier, it also feels 'fair' in the sense we don't hear about Mattheus' lie detector ability midway.

Though I have to say, I was a bit disappointed not all the detectives' abilities are equal. An ability like having better senses, or have an AI do complicated calculations are still on the realistic side of things, and even a person being able to think faster is okay, but Mattheus can literally just sense people lying as if it were a mutant power, and a fifth detective introduced in the second half of the story has a power that is really far beyond anything realistic, so the balance is kinda off. The book is set in an, on the whole, realistic world, so having supernatural powers, rather than slightly better than normal human powers, felt a bit weird. The tone of the book is also a bit weird at times: it is not as blatantly funny as the other book by Nitadori I read (Jojutsu Trick Tanpenshuu), and most of the time definitely more serious, but there's also a lot of light-hearted banter, pop culture references and other comedic touches like the cheeky attitude the AI Detective has towards Charlotte, but it's not always funny, so like the detective powers, it sometimes felt like Nitadori didn't know exactly what the exact tone or setting of the story was supposed to be.

I have to admit though that when the battle for the relic has been fought and the war is over... the ending is not nearly as satisfying as the preceding parts. Of course, with all these detectives competing for the relic, the book needs to work towards a conclusion that gives everyone *something* and still resolve the matter of who gets the relic, but the final solution presented to the reader is not nearly as clever as some of the solutions presented earlier, and on the whole, it's not a solution I like in general. Sure, there were clues, but I have seen Nitadori use the same type of clues in this book and Jojutsu Trick Tanpenshuu in more convincing ways, so it was a bit disappointing to see a less impressing example used for the final solution. It's of course difficult to come up with different solutions for the different detectives, and a final solution to surpass those ones too, but the way it suddenly shifted towards this final solution was just too abrupt, and feels less polished compared to the much better build-up to this moment.

But despite a somewhat disappointing ending, I do like Suiri Taisen, as the parts introducing the detectives and having them compete each other is really fun. It's a book that worked because it was a standalone book though, because you really can't guess who will win and how, but I wouldn't mind seeing for example Bogdan Korniyenko return in his own book. Not all parts of the book are as good, so it's not a book I love unconditionally, but certainly worth a read!

Original Japanese title(s):  似鳥鶏『推理大戦』

Once Upon a Thriller

"The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat."

"The Masque of the Red Death"

There's something comforting about reading a book by someone you used to read a lot, but haven't in a while.

Oh, wow, my last review of a Higashino Keigo work dates from 2014? It's been a while! Higashino is an author I read a lot in the earlier days of the blog, and I am still of the opinion he's a great choice for those studying Japanese and who want to try to read their first books completely in Japanese, because his writing is really smooth and easy to understand (somewhat like Agatha Christie in English). But yeah, I haven't read very much of him lately, which can be attributed to two factors, I guess. One is that Higashino, especially nowadays, as a mystery author, is definitely more a 'broad entertainment' writer. Which isn't a bad thing per se, considering his huge success both in Japan and abroad, but Higashino's mystery stories are often written for a much broader audience than 'just' readers of mystery fiction, and his books are often written more as mainstream entertainment stories. Great material that lends themselves for countless of adaptations and the focus on human drama in his books are of course an element that have made him popular, but I have to admit I generally don't enjoy those stories as much, because I am a very boring reader who is content with just a puzzle plot and don't per se need human drama. Of course, I don't think all his earlier work is perfect and his later work rubbish, because I really don't (I love The Devotion of Suspect X!), but there's definitely a general shift towards the type of story I'm not looking for, so I hadn't really been reading his books the last few years. Which brings me to a second reason: only a handful of his works are available as e-books and he's one of the few authors still in print (and selling really well) whose works are basically almost only exclusively available on paper. So then comes the matter whether I really want to add one of his books to a physical book order, and often his books just end up lower on the priority list.

Anyway, so I finally got around to reading a book by him again. Kamen Sansou Satsujin Jiken ("The Masquerade Mountain Villa Murder Case") from 1990 is one of Higashino Keigo's earlier mystery novels and while the period setting definitely feels like late eighties/early nineties, in terms of style it feels quite modern, in the sense I could definitely imagine if Higashino had written this book with the idea of it getting adapted for the small or silver screen eventually. Of course, this book was written long before he became the super popular author he is now, so that's of course not the case, but you can definitely recognize how even among his earlier works, you can find mystery novels that were really written for a much broader audience than those who exclusively read detectives, being much closer to a thriller or a suspense novel, with a good dash of human drama. The book is set a few months after Takayuki lost his fiancee Tomomi, whom he first met when she caused a car accident that ultimately injured her more than her 'victim' Takayuki. They got to know each other after the accident, growing closer and getting engaged. The plan was to hold their wedding in the mountain villa of Tomomi's parents, a place they visited each year, but one day, after making arrangements near the villa for her wedding, Tomomi had a deadly car accident, driving her car of a cliff-side road. Several months later, Takayuki is invited by his parents-in-law to come to the mountain villa, as they intend to stay there a few days as they do every year, and the couple Nobuhiko and Atsuko would be honored if their son-in-law would come too. Other guests include Tomomi's brother Toshiaka, Tomomi's cousin Yukie, Tomomi's friend and mystery novelist Keiko, and Nobuhiko's secretary and physician. 

However, during the first night, two armed men manage to sneak inside the mountain villa and they take everyone hostage. The two men are bank robbers, and they had actually planned to stay in this villa for a day until their boss could pick them up. The mountain villas in this neighborhood are just holiday houses and often nobody's staying there, so the bank robbers hadn't expected to find any people in this villa when they picked it as their temporary hide-out a few days ago and made their own false keys. The two men decide to just stick to the plan and hold everyone hostage inside the house, keeping them all in the living room, while observing them from second floor balustrade. But as the stress starts to build among the hostages and they hope to find a way out, they start to realize that some of them don't think that Tomomi died in an accident, but that her death was orchestrated, and furthermore, those people think that the person behind Tomomi's death is right here! The two bank robbers are quite interested in this story as they have nothing to do anyway while waiting for their pick-up, but the following morning, after everyone was allowed to stay in their own room (one bank robber remaining in the hallway to watch all doors), one of the guests is found murdered in their room! At first it seems only the bank robbers could have commited the murder, but why, and nobody really believes they did it, so who of the house guests is wearing a mask and the real murderer, and how did they do it because they were all locked up in their rooms?

Ongoing hostage situation, mystery revolving around Tomomi's death and an actual murder occuring under semi-impossible circumstances? Yep, there's plenty of thrills going on in this book, and that's probably its best part. It doesn't take long for the two bank robbers to show up in the villa and take everyone hostage, and while the hostages are being held captive, one of the bank robbers gets really interested in the story of Tomomi's death, and how Keiko, Tomomi's best friend, suspects her friend didn't *just* drive off a cliff, but that somehow someone arranged for that to happen, and that it's likely that this person is someone Tomomi trusted, meaning one of the house guests. This is of course not really helping the team spirit, especially as more curious things are going on. The hostages, while being watched by the robbers, have some freedom, and some of them try to cook up plans to warn the police: two policemen have already come round the house, inquiring very obviously whether the people here had spotted the two bank robbers on the run, though obviously, the robbers held them under gunshot and made them lie about that. Still, they realize there might be someway to escape the villa and warn the police, but curiously enough, they find some of their attempts to warn the outside world, like a message written in the sand outside, erased by someone. Because none of the bank robber mention anything about their attempts, it seems they didn't discover the message, but who did? When the second night, one of the house guests is murdered in their room, the bank robbers swear they didn't do it, and after some debating, it does seem unlikely the victim would've let any of the robbers in their room during the night without making any noise and one of the hostages was also kept in the hallway, with the bank robbers, as an extra insurance, but she too says she didn't see the robbers go the room, so how was the murder committed and is the murderer then one of the other house guests? The story basically never lets you, or the hostages, rest, as there is always *something* going on, and that's why I mentioned earlier how this would be perfect as a television film.

How does the book fare as a mystery novel? Well, it's a bit uneven. There are some interesting parts, like Tomomi's death, or the semi-impossible murder in the villa, but a lot of those elements don't feel very satisfying as a mystery novel, because the clue-to-solution time is often rather short, so you don't really get that "Aha, so that's how it was!" feeling due to the short build-up time. The facts regarding Tomomi's death for example are given you in small bursts throughout the book, but the really important facts come relatively late. The focus of the book is more on the suspense angle, but I also feel like small things, like spreading the hints out more, or like a little diagram of the villa itself, would have helped the book a lot. The way the hostage situation with the bank robbers, and their involvement in the murder is eventually resolved is more interesting, though again, while certainly guessable, it's not like there were really well-spread hints or clues regarding the climax. Funnily enough, the bunko pocket release of the book includes a commentary essay by Orihara Ichi, who considers Kamen Sansou Satsujin Jiken to rank among Higashino Keigo's best three books, but he also hates the book. Why? It happened to feature the exact same trick Orihara himself had used in a manuscript he had been working on! Orihara tells how he bought the book on release and halfway through started to fear the worst, and it came true, and as Higashino's book was already released and all, he had to abandon his own book. Interesting to hear how two authors arrived at the same idea in a similar time period and you can tell how frustrated Orihara was when he knew the thing he had been working on had already been done just a bit earlier by Higashino.

I have the bunko pocket release, a format which generally comes with a slipcover like most Japanese books, but for some reason my copy came with a second slipcover. And the art on it is actually very nice and in terms of style, I prefer it to the actual cover, only.... I don't know how this cover is related to Kamen Sansou Satsujin Jiken. The girl on the cover is far too young to be any of the women in this boo, and the room itself is not like any of the rooms in the mountain villa described in the book. I mean, this room doesn't invoke any notions of a mountain villa or a hostage situation or anything like that, right? I guess the mask is the one thing that comes from the title of the book,  but that's like a really tiny, tiny connection. I know that a few other Higashino pockets came with second slipcovers in the same style if you bought them at Tsutaya, but this book wasn't bought there, so I don't really understand this second cover....

Do I think Kamen Sansou Satsujin Jiken is one of Higashino's best three works? Probably not. Mind you, it's a short, but thrilling read from start to finish, and taken as a work of entertainment, it is a good work, offering a suspenseful story with a lot of story developments and mysteries both in the present and past. Looked at it as a mystery novel solely, it does feel like it could've been much more if the book had been a bit longer, as some of the better story elements of this book would've benefitted from more "runtime" allowing for more depth, It's not a book I would go out of my way for to recommend as one of Higashino's best, but if you're looking for something short, but fun to read between some 'bigger' mystery novels, this is a good palate cleanser. Nothing to ambitious, but basically a popcorn flick.

Original Japanese title(s): 東野圭吾『仮面山荘殺人事件』

The Lion's Smile

For every up, there's a down. For every square

- There's a round?

"The Sword in the Stone"

Wow, has it been three years since I last did a double Detective Conan and Kindaichi Shounen post?

As basically every year the last decade or so, the new Detective Conan film Kurogane no Submarine seems to be extremely well received, both by viewers in terms of the actual contents as well as financially, once again breaking the earnings record set by last year's film (The Bride of Halloween). I will have to wait for the home video release though, so as every year, I'll have to be content with the latest Detective Conan volume released simultaneously with the film. Detective Conan volume 103 was released mid-April and starts with the final two chapters of A Troublesome Triple Collaboration. Previously, Conan and the Detective Boys ended up at a family restaurant in the evening, where very coincidentally, three very unlikely pairs were having dinner too: for some reason Inspector Shiratori is joined by patrol officer Yumi, while Yumi's boyfriend is having dinner there too with patrol officer Naeko, while her boyfriend Chiba is joined by Inspector Shiratori's girlfriend Kobayashi. The discovery all three pairs are there, in secret, with a different partner obviously leads to a lot of angry faces, but during this, a murder occurs at the family restaurant: a group of four friend regularly meet up, and today they were at the family restaurant where one of them works. One of the women however is poisoned during their get together, but it seems impossible for anyone to have poisoned her specifically, as she picked her own food and several people handled the plate before her. As an impossible poisoning story, it's... nothing special. I like the basic idea of the how, though there's a bit of luck concerned when it comes to actually hiding the trick, and overall, it's just... too basic. Part of the story is dedicated to the mix-up between the couples, so that leaves little room for the mystery.

Oh, and let me tell you right now: this volume in general isn't really interesting, at least, not mystery-wise.

Which you wouldn't expect right away, considering the second story features Sera! The high school detective takes Conan back to the hotel she's staying, when they learn a new arriving guest on the same floor found a strange code on a sheet of paper in his room. It turns out the code is similar to the coded messages sent to two other hotels earlier: when the people at those hotels failed to solve the code in time, rooms in those hotels were blown up with explosives! Ran's mother Eri happens to be in the hotel too, as she's their corporate lawyer and she manages to arrange for Sera (and Conan) to work on the case in secret, as soon after the coded message is found, the hotel is called by someone who treatens to blow up a room here too unless they solve it. Even the sub-plot of Sera's "sister" pushing Sera to solve the case because she can't risk being seen if the hotel needs to be evacuated doesn't do much to change the fact this is just another code-solving story, and this one is really nothing remarkable. The identity of the bomber is also hilariously simple to guess, so there's just nothing memorable to this one.

In Two Attendants, the Detective Boys go to the beach with the assistant teacher Wakasa, with Okiya joining them too as he can drive there (and because Conan doesn't really trust Wakasa with Haibara). They enjoy the Kamen Yaiber sausage at a beach restaurant, but after the break, the owner of the restaurant is found strangled in the employees room, with one of his employees asleep in the same room. But why would the murderer go to sleep in the same room after strangling his boss? Part of the story also involves Okiya and Wakasa both trying to probe each other, but the core mystery is a bit disappointing, once again. I think I like the core idea of how the strangling was done, that certainly, but the story kinda tries to avoid focusing too much on it too early, making the first half of the mystery feel very slow and unfocused, as the mystery part ("what is the puzzle?") feels undeveloped. A shame, because I do like the "big" reveal in terms of how the murder was committed, as it's something that works best in the manga format.

Kaitou KID's Crown Magic is the last story in the volume, and starts mid-res, with Conan having cornered two Azusas from Cafe Poirot, with one of them obviously being the phantom thief KID in disguise. We then jump back in time a few hours, when we learn Suzuki Jiroukichi has made a new KID trap, with a jewel-embedded crown as the lure. Jiroukichi's trap is mainly built around a special corridor in front of the room where the crown is kept: the corridor is flanked by wind blowers and small enough so everyone has to crawl through it, rendering KID's usual tricks with his glider and cards useless. Of course, the crown does disappear after a sudden arrival by KID in the room, and it's up to Conan  to solve how he did it. Only... this has to be one of the least interesting acts of magic ever done by KID, because there's no way this trick could've fooled anyone for say longer than a minute. I can accept it working the initial moment, but the trick is so simple with so little misdirection going on, it should've been discovered immediately, or there should have been a secondary phase to the trick to flesh it out, but this shouldn't be the main and only mystery.

So overall, a rather disappointing volume, with none of the stories in any way memorable. I guess that's because the next volume seems to feature a very important story according to the preview, so this is the calm before the storm, but considering the slow pace nowadays, I guess this calm will last for like half a year before the storm finally arrives...

My last Kindaichi Shounen review also dates almost 8 months ago, when I discussed the first two volumes of Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo 30th, or The Case File of Kindaichi 30th, a limited short series to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the franchise. And with short, I mean short, as the series was only four volumes long. The Oninohe - The Grave Lion Legend Murder Case starts with the 17-year old Hajime having no ideas for his summer project on Japanese folklore, so he joins Miyuki's project: she was planning to visit the village of Oninohe, where Tsumugi, a former elementary school classmate moved to. They have a rare local legend about a Grave Lion, holy beasts that calm the raging dead, and this year, Tsumugi is selected to perform the Lion Dance in a village ceremony. Miyuki and Hajime, and also Saki (2),  thus visit the small village and are invited to see Tsumugi perform the dance, but during the ceremony, which requires all villagers to be present, one of the few teenagers in the village is poisoned to death via a poisoned knife hidden in the back of his seat. Later, another teenager is also found murdered. Saki has recorded most of the ceremony and the surroundings with his trusty camcorder, but none of the suspects seems to have been able to arrange both murders. And what is the link between the victims, and a certain incident that happened some years ago?

A traditional Kindaichi Shounen story if there ever was one, with Hajime, Miyuki and Saki visiting a small village, an Old Friend of Hajime and Miyuki being there, an impossible mystery revolving around the suspects having an alibi for the time of the murder, Saki's video footage being a vital clue and of course An Incident of the Past. The series was of course always very much a 'by the numbers' series, and in that regards, this story is nothing special. I do think that mystery-wise, it's a bit too lean? I really the main trick of the story, where the murderer created an alibi for themselves during the ceremony, but that's basically only one impressive idea, and it's actually fairly small scale. A few more murders occur in the story, but those utilize fairly simple ideas and concepts, and ultimately, the story feels a bit dragging because the main idea is the only one that actually feels unique enough. Had this been a short story, with only the main trick, I would have loved this so much more, but not as much now, as a story that spans two volumes.

The final volume of Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo 30th , also contains a short two chapter story titled Greetings from the Gentleman Thief, which has old series regular the Gentleman Thief threatening to steal a painting. The main focus of this story is actually just fanservice, as a lot of familiar faces make a short appearance in the story, but there's also a short mystery with Hajime quickly deducing how the Gentleman Thief managed to steal the painting as announced, and the trick is pretty good, so that's a plus.

So overall, I can't say the latest volumes of Detective Conan and Kindaichi Shounen were really high points in either series. Of course, considering both series have been running for thirty years (Conan's 30th anniversary is next year!), I guess you can't expect all volumes to be absolute bangers, but still, I can't deny I'm disappointed this time. Conan's next volume at least seems to be important plot-wise, while Kindaichi will now return to the  Kindaichi 37-sai no Jikenbo ("The Case Files of Kindaichi, Age 37") series, so let's hope the upcoming volumes are more fun.

Original Japanese title(s):  青山剛昌 『名探偵コナン』第103巻

天樹征丸（原）、さとうふみや（画）『金田一少年の事件簿30th』第3, 4巻

The Unseen Door

 "My thanks! I find the dead no acquisition, And never cared to have them in my keeping."

"Faust" (Bayard Taylor tr.)

I read this book in December, but the book is set during a heated summer, which by the time this review is posted, should be approaching...

Yabusaka Ichirou had a birth defect that manifested in his childhood, affecting the use of his fingers. He however did not give up, and overcame his defect and became the well-known illusionist the Mephisto on Stage. When the condition of his fingers worsened again, he had to give up the mantle and he left Japan for many years, but he managed to recover once again, and is now ready for his great comeback. Young Mikikaze and his older sister Mikiko have become family friends of the Yabusakas in the period since Ichirou, his wife and child have returned to their family home to prepare for his comeback: Mikiko, a writer for the local town magazine, happens to be friends with Ichirou's assistant and sister-in-law Haruka, while Mikikaze, a teenage boy with a very weak heart, is one of the best students at Ichirou's magic school. The Minami siblings are of course invited to the big comeback show of The Mephisto on Stage in a hall in Sapporo, but the great magician has an extra surprise for a small group within the audience: fifty guests are randomly picked based on their ticket numbers to come to the special second half of the magic show, held at Yabusaka's own home, which has a special stage hall. Furthermore, he will show off an incredible piece of escape magic on their way. The Mephisto on Stage has one of his special guests tie his back, another guest has to sign a piece of (frail) Japanese paper tied to the rope, and then he is put inside a coffin, which is locked with a padlock on the outside, with the key being given to another guest. This guest is to hold on to the key, while the guests are brought in a tour bus to the Yabusaka manor, while the tied-up and locked-up Mephisto will be driven to the home by his assistants. He has a microphone on him allowing him to do some small talk while they're being brought to his home, and of course, the idea is that he'll escape from the coffin when the second half of the show starts. 

Mikikaze and Mikiko are among the lucky ones to get invited to the show, and like the other guests they arrive a bit earlier at the house. The other guests are entertained by Mephisto's assistants in the garden, while Mikikaze and Mikiko, as family friends, wait with the rest of the family in the parlor, while the coffin with Mephisto in it is brought to the stage hall in the manor, where he is left alone for the final part of this escape act. The house is also brimming with reporters who are going to write about the big comeback of Mephisto, hanging around in the hallways that surround the stage hall. Speakers are placed in various rooms in the house, allowing everyone to hear Mephisto talking to everyone via his microphone. At first, his escape act seems to go as planned as he chats along, but suddenly, he cries out and then there's no sound anymore. When the family realizes this is not a part of the show, they run to the show hall, but find the double doors locked from the inside, as are the side door and the backstage door. When they eventually break inside, they find an empty stage hall with not a living soul inside. For in the center of the room, stands the coffin, but for some reason, the coffin is now locked from the inside with the padlock. When they open it, they find Yabusaka Ichirou, stabbed in the chest with a stake. The big comeback of the Mephisto on Stage has become the death of the Mephisto on Stage, but it doesn't take long for everyone to realize the whole situation is impossible: the victim was found in a coffin locked from the inside, the stage hall doors were also all locked from the inside, and there were reporters walking around the hallways around the stage hall, so how did the murderer get away without anyone seeing them? This alone seems quite baffling, but it doesn't take long for more locked room mysteries to occur within the Yabusaka manor. Mikikaze is intent on solving the murder of his magic mentor, but will his heart hold in Tsukatou Hajime's Misshitsu Kingdom (2007), which also has the English title Kingdom of the Locked Room on the cover?

Misshitsu Kingdom is a book I had wanted to read for ages, and it was the book that made me really aware of Tsukatou's name in the first place. This book was mentioned in a mook edited by Arisugawa on locked room murder mysteries, and the title and description sounded interesting, but by the time I learned of its existence, the book was already out of print. Besides a random short story, my 'real' start with reading Tsukatou was only two years ago, with Aru Egypt Juujika no Nazo ("An Egyptian Cross Mystery", 2019), followed by the John Dickson Carr-inspired John Dickson Carr no Saishuu Teiri (John Dickson Carr's Last Theorem, 2020). Some of Tsukatou's earlier novels had also been made available as e-books at the time, but his most famous books, like Misshitsu Kingdom, were not available for some reason. But late December 2022, those books were finally put on digital storefronts, so I picked up Misshitsu Kingdom immediately. At the time, I didn't know that this book also stars Mikikaze by the way. Mikikaze stars in Tsukatou's novels with Ellery Queen-inspired titles (Aru Egypt Juujika no Nazo ("An Egyptian Cross Mystery"), Aru Girishia Hitsugi no Nazo ("A Greek Coffin Mystery") and Aru America-Juu no Nazo ("An American Gun Mystery"), but he's older there, having had a heart operation and working as a freelance photographer. In Misshitsu Kingdom, we have a much younger Mikikaze, who still has a very weak heart, meaning he often has to rest between events and his older sister Mikiko always keeping an eye on him, because her young brother's heart could stop beating any second.  

Misshitsu Kingdom is also a very long book, clocking in at 1200+ pages, while most of the Japanese novels I usually read here, have a page count between 300-500, so that's somewhere between at least two-four times as long! And don't worry, that's not 1200 pages spent solely on the triple locked room situation explained above, as there are a lot more locked room mysteries that occur throughout the book, though not all are murders. Though that brings me immediately to what I thought was the interesting part of the story, and definitely the thing that made me love this book. This book is undeniably about locked room mysteries, but also not, and it's the latter part I love. Sounds confusing, so I should explain. To start with the first part of that sentence: this book has a distinct occult atmosphere, with a murder happening inside the house of a magician, a triple locked room murder no less, and the sheer impossibility of this bizarre scene, of a man dressed as Mephisto staked inside a coffin, reminds me of the earlier books with Nikaidou Ranko, with the gothic/occult vibe. This is also seen in some of the other locked room situations, with the murderer seemingly disappearing in an impossible manner from rooms within seconds and it doesn't even take long for Mikikaze to refer to the murderer as the Anti-Mephisto on Stage, as the whole thing feels like theatrical, like a magic act, but used in a way to kill the real Mephisto. How did the Anti-Mephisto on Stage manage to pull of these acts? Well, the funny part is, that isn't really the focus of this book. At least, not the how. Sure, there are segments where we examine the physical evidence, and this allows Mikikaze to solve the various locked room mysteries, and like I have seen in other impossible crime-focused Tsukatou works like John Dickson Carr no Saishuu Teiri and Kiseki Shinmonkan Arthur - Kami no Te no Fukanou Satsujin ("Miracle Inquisitor Arthur - The Impossible Murders By The Hand of God"), his locked room mysteries tend to rely on fairly mechanical tricks. It's a shame the book doesn't feature many diagrams, for I feel some locked rooms would have felt more fair with a better presentation of the situation. But still, for a book that is titled Kingdom of the Locked Room, you'd perhaps be surprised how simple some of the locked rooms are, and I think only two, maybe a third one, are really memorable, and that's often not even because of the technical merits. The way they are hinted, I think most of them are pretty hard to really solve yourself (though again, diagrams would've helped!) and personally, I'm not a really big fan of these mechanical tricks, though I have to say the third locked room mystery has some really good mechanical ideas: there are a lot of moving parts in that situation, but they all serve a specific purpose, and the way they work together is really clever, especially when it comes to the matter of a certain witness.

But what is there to like about the book then? Well, while the locked room mysteries themselves invoke Nikaidou or for example Carr, the segments in between are surprisingly much more like an Ellery Queen story! In a way, this book allowed me to make a connection in my mind between the aforementioned 'impossible crime' focused Tsukatou books I had read, and the three books with Ellery Queen-styled titles with Mikikaze, because Misshitsu Kingdom sits right in the middle, with its focus on locked room mysteries, but also large investigation scenes and discussions that play out like an Ellery Queen novel. Long ago, I reviewed Ooyama Seiichirou's Misshitsu Shuushuuka ("The Locked Room Collector"), a really cool short story collection where Ooyama employed Queenian-type deductions to solve locked room murders. Misshitsu Kingdom does this in a very different manner, where the solving of the locked room murders themselves is still very "technical" similar to Carr or Kitayama Takekuni's work, and while Mikikaze often manages to solve (large parts of) the how of the locked rooms fairly quickly, the investigation then moves to the why. Why did the murderer create a locked room situation in the first place? Why go through all the trouble to create one, and why use this specific trick, and not for example a different one? What merit has choosing this option over the other one, or were there other factors that forced the murderer's hand? The triple locked room murder for example is, in hindsight, surprisingly simple and I can even imagine some people really disliking this solution, but I really like it because the build-up with discussions regarding the why (this was done) are really good, justifying the simple solution. There are also other very Queenian aspects to the mystery: the stage hall of the first murder for example wasn't just a locked room, but for some reason the furniture had been moved and all glass objects in the room had been removed. But why? This is of course the type of mystery you often see in Queenian mysteries (the crime scene with something strange done by the murderer with an unknown reason), but it is certainly not the only Queenian element you will feel throughout the book. There is even the matter or Later Queen Period problems, where Mikikaze starts to suspect the murderer counts on the police figuring certain things about the various locked room mysteries, which makes it almost impossible to guess whether they have found a real clue, or whether the murderer had already counted on the police on finding it. But I love all these Queenian aspects of the book, as it allows for the type of deductions a reader is more likely to make themselves (like I wrote about in this editorial), compared to the 'figure how this thread and needle were used to lock this door from the outside' type of mystery. And of course, these type of deductions are also more interesting in the way they tie to the whodunnit question, as often, Mikikaze will notice things that allow him about the choices the murderer made or the actions they took, to zero in slowly but surely on the murderer.

The Ellery Queen-type of novel, I very much associate with the pure whodunnit, using a chain of deductions to allow you to eliminate the suspects one by one, and identify the one and only murderer. As a whodunnit, I think Misshitsu Kingdom is very much like what I said about the first locked room murder: at first sight, the identity of the murderer is almost ridiculously simple, and again, I can guarantee some people will not like this solution, but I can't help but admire some of the hints laid out to point to whodunnit. I probably missed all of them, but some are really cleverly hidden, though some are really not worth mentioning. For example, the final act of the book basically tells you straightout who the murderer is with the police basically coming across the equivalent of finding camera footage of the murderer buying the murder weapon and smiling at the camera, and that's pretty disappointing, but then Mikikaze starts pointing out other clues we came across throughout the narrative, and a lot of those are really good, hints that seem so obvious in hindsight but which you don't notice beforehand. That said, I don't think the identity of the murderer is hard to guess, but to actually find the corresponding hints Tsukatou laid out is a lot more difficult, though unlike the early Queen novels or for example the Student Alice novels, this isn't really a super long chain of reasoning that allows you to eliminate suspects of a list until you get to the last one, but more like different kind of clues spread across various events that happen to indicate a certain person.

And while the book is really very long, I myself didn't find myself bored with it. Sure, the crime scene focused investigations and the subsequent discussions about why each locked room exists can be a bit slow, but they are always on topic, and never feel dragging, at least, not if you're used to these Queen-esque novels. And because it's quite lengthy, it manages to do quite some interesting things like also addressing the aforementioned Later Queen Period problems, or even fleshing out a backstory for the whole Yabusaka family that eventually becomes relevant to the case and more. For if this book had not been so long, it certainly wouldn't have been able to give as much attention too to the locked room mysteries themselves. For they are presented in full detail, and where for example a book like Misshitsu Ougon Jidai no Satsujin  - Yuki no Yakata to Muttsu no Trick or The Murder in the Golden Age of Locked Rooms - The House of Snow and the Six Tricks may have had six locked room murders, things were really hasty in general, basically just throwing the locked room situation on the table immediately followed by the solution. The extra page count of Misshitsu Kingdom is definitely used well to flesh out most of the important aspects of the book (though some characters seem to have little page-time), so both the mechanical aspects behind the locked room as well as the whydunnit behind it are satisfying reads.

By the way, the book is book-ended by two parts where an older Mikikaze happens to meet one of the characters again, and they mention how the whole crime was like a Showa-era crime. Which is one of the reasons why I mentioned the book felt, at least in terms of appearance, a lot like a Nikaidou Ranko novel, because those books are also inspired by Edogawa Rampo-esque novels, with fiends with names like Golden Mask, the Black Lizard and the Fiend with Twenty Faces who do battle against a young detective. Only those novels were seldom as intricately plotted as Misshitsu Kingdom!

And that's why Misshitsu Kingdom will probably end up on my list of favorites of the year. It manages to mix a lot of elements in a surprisingly good manner and while not every aspect of the story is perfect as a mystery novel, I can't help but admire how well Tsukatou managed to have a book so much about mysterious locked room mysteries and other impossible crimes work so well with a very Queenian set-up and execution. I haven't read that many Tsukatou novels, but I have a feeling this will be the one I will always be thinking of whenever I read one again.

Original Japanese title(s): 柄刀一『密室キングダム』