The Tragedy of 1 / 一の悲劇

I assume most people reading this blog know who Ellery Queen is, but for who don’t, he (actually the joint pseudonym for two cousins) is one of the most influential writers from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. He was famous for novels resolved by a chain of deductions from physical clues, used to narrow down the suspect list to one candidate. While there aren’t many authors writing mystery stories with that style of plotting in English nowadays, there are plenty of Japanese writers who have adopted the style, including Alice Arisugawa and Yuugo Aosaki (who was marketed as “Queen of the Heisei period” with quite unfortunate timing since Japan’s emperor passed shortly thereafter, ending the Heisei period).

But another author who writes in the Queensian school is Rintarou Norizuki (which, like Ellery Queen, is both the author’s pen name and the name of his fictional detective), author of The Tragedy of 1, which is clearly a reference to Queen’s Drury Lane series. To be honest, I’m not sure why I read this book. As you may have noticed from my blog, I usually play a series or read an author’s work in order unless there’s a particular reason to start with a different work. The Tragedy of 1 is not Norizuki’s first novel, and I can’t remember what (if anything) prompted me to buy it... but I suppose it’s a decent choice to read “1”st.

(Following the same convention as my Alice Arisugawa reviews, Norizuki will refer to the author and Rintarou to the character.)

Little Hope

Four college students and their professor are involved in a bus crash on a field trip, dumping them outside the small town of Little Hope in the middle of the night. Thankfully there are no serious injuries, but things become strange when a mysterious fog prevents them from heading away from town. With no other options, they venture into Little Hope—where they see mysterious visions of the past and are chased by monsters. As a result, the group must investigate their strange connection to the town while staying alive long enough to find help.

Process of Elimination / 探偵撲滅

Process of Elimination is another Danganronpa wannabe from Nippon Ichi Software, following in the footsteps of Exile Election. Process of Elimination and Exile Election feel like together they form one Danganronpa: Exile Election focuses on a death game and trials, while Process of Elimination has quirky gimmick-based characters and murder mysteries. However, despite my flippant first sentence, I liked Process of Elimination a lot. It’s certainly lacking in certain respects, including providing comprehensive fair-play mysteries, but is so earnest in presenting a story about detectives that I can’t help by enjoy it.

Man of Medan

The elevator pitch for Man of Medan (and The Dark Pictures Anthology) as a whole is that it’s a horror B-movie you can play. If you’ve played Until Dawn or The Quarry, you should already have a pretty good idea of what Man of Medan is like (they’re all made by the same company, Supermassive), although Man of Medan is a bit shorter and more focused on co-op. Man of Medan isn’t an amazing game, but does what it sets out to do, and beggars can’t be choosers within the realm of branching co-op horror narrative adventure games.

Man of Medan begins with four friends who have chartered a small boat for a vacation going diving in the South Pacific. However, things quickly go south (Pacific) when the group is attacked by pirates, and then brought to a ghost ship known as the Ourang Medan that allegedly houses “Manchurian Gold.” The group must contend with both the pirates and something far more sinister if they wish to escape the ship with their lives… (As a side note, “Ourang Medan” roughly translates to “Man of Medan,” so the title doesn’t refer to an actual person.)

The Wonder

Anna O’Donnell hasn’t eaten since her eleventh birthday four months ago.

Or at least, that’s what she and her family claim. 

As word of the girl spreads, some people believe Anna has received a divine blessing, while others claim the O’Donnells are just lying fraudsters. In order to settle the matter once and for all, a few community members decide to hire a neutral outside observer to watch Anna for two weeks and see if she actually eats or not. Thus Elizabeth “Lib” Wright, a Nightingale-trained nurse, travels from England to Anna’s small Irish hamlet. 

Is Anna’s fast a hoax? Or if she truly a wonder? 

Those Who Sneer Like the Mountain Fiend / 山魔の如き嗤うもの

Another Genya Toujou book, another series of bizarre murders in a remote village that are entangled with the local folklore. Those Who Sneer Like the Mountain Fiend is mainly set in the village of Kumado, but the impetus begins in the nearby village of Hado. Nobuyoshi Gouki is the youngest son of the Gouki family, a prominent clan in Hado. While Nobuyoshi’s father and brothers are outdoorsy and outgoing, Nobuyoshi is subdued and introspective. Naturally, he does not have a particularly happy upbringing. He leaves Hado to go to college in Tokyo and doesn’t look back. The Gouki family has a coming-of-age rite where each family member must visit three shrines in the holy mountains neighboring the village, but Nobuyoshi uses his studies as an excuse to put off the rite.

Eventually, however, once Nobuyoshi has graduated and gotten a job as a teacher, his grandmother persuades him to undergo the rite. While Nobuyoshi was always the black sheep of the family, he sees this as a way to potentially earn acceptance. Even if Nobuyoshi isn’t as physically active or familiar with the mountains as his brothers, the rite is essentially a day hike through a single-path trail, so it’s not a huge undertaking. 

Obviously, it doesn’t go as planned. (But, miraculously, it doesn’t end in murder!)

Who's the Shadow? / シャドウ

Who’s the Shadow? is about Ousuke Gamo, a boy whose luck would give the Baudelaires’ a run for its money. First his mom dies, and then his best friend’s mom dies, and then his best friend gets hit by a car. And that’s just the start of the book.

The Devotion of Suspect X / 容疑者Xの献身

I had The Devotion of Suspect X on my bookshelf for a while. It was famous and supposed to be really good, so I eagerly bought it. Then I realized it was technically third in the “Detective Galileo” series, so I bought and read Detective Galileo. And any interest I had in reading Suspect X dissipated. I hadn’t abandoned it completely—it was famous, after all—but I had no active desire to read it anymore. I figured I’d get around to it eventually… and eventually has finally come.

Fortunately, The Devotion of Suspect X is much, much better than the Detective Galileo stories, structured as an actual mystery novel and not a series of cheap science fair experiments. I didn’t love it, but I did enjoy it.

The Maid

The Maid needs to clean up its act. Ostensibly it’s a cozy mystery, but in reality it’s more like a contrived, saccharine story about an autistic woman overcoming adversity to find happiness.

It Walks By Night

It Walks By Night is the debut novel of John Dickson Carr, and much better than the other one. It features one of Carr’s recurring detectives, Henri Bencolin of the French police, and, naturally, a locked room murder. As a first novel, it seems emblematic—clever and bold, but a bit underdeveloped.

It Walks By Night / 夜歩く

It Walks By Night is an awful book that no one should read. This isn’t going to be a roast, because it’s not that kind of awful, but I think the tone of this review has been set. It Walks By Night takes place almost immediately before The Village of Eight Graves and features a fantastic atmosphere involving sleepwalking, a supremely dysfunctional family, and a cursed sword, but wastes it all.

Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane

Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane is, as you might surmise from the title, an Ace Attorney-inspired murder mystery video game. (Games in that sub-genre are never particularly subtle about their inspiration.) The main feature that differentiates Tyrion Cuthbert is the fact that it takes place in a fantasy world with magic. Well, I suppose technically Ace Attorney has already done that, but unlike that game, where the use of magic itself was the crime, here we’re solving crimes that just happen to take place in a world with magic.

Triangle Strategy / トライアングルストラテジー

Normally I’m not a fan of strategy RPGs, but the stars aligned for me and Triangle Strategy. I played the demo when it first came out, and it piqued my interest. It seemed to have more JRPG trappings than Fire Emblem, and the lack of permadeath eliminated the main source of stress I had when I tried Fire Emblem. This year I was in the whim for a Switch RPG that required some thinking but could also be easily picked up and put down, so on a semi-whim I bought Triangle Strategy, and now, over 100 hours later, here I am.