That is not a mistake in the post name!
The central gimmick of The ???????? Murder Case is that the true title has been hidden, and you're supposed to deduce it from the story. Trying to deduce the title is a novel idea that... doesn't really add much to the book. While the title gimmick and actual plot were fun enough for The ???????? Murder Case to become the 50th recipient of the Mephisto Prize, I don't think it's the right book for everybody.
Our protagonist is Oki Kentarou. He's a normal, everyday civil servant, but once a year he and a group of online friends meet in real life to take a trip to the Ogasawara Islands south of Japan. They all met on a nature blog, and spend a long weekend on one of the friends' private island.
The group managed to successfully coordinate this trip a couple of times, but this year they lose equilibrium. One of the members brings his girlfriend, Kamiki Lychee, a sensual, flame-haired girl (who's more than 10 years younger than him and barely legal), even though she doesn't follow the blog. Another member purchases a cheaper bunk on the boat, even though the other years they all roomed together. The peace is irreparably shattered when two people disappear off the island, and a third is murdered shortly after.
The book is a light read, and never takes itself too seriously. Kentarou, for instance, is a murder mystery fan, so he periodically takes note of everyone's handedness and how squeaky the floor is. You know, for fun. Rather than try to sneak in information that may or may not become relevant later, Hayasaka just embraces the meta and brings it up while acknowledging that it's the kind of information that usually becomes important in mystery novels. Readers that are tired of meta or want serious literature will likely not appreciate this style. Also, Hayasaka does sneak in a lot of clues under the radar as well; he just decided to go with the obvious route for some of the more obvious clues.
The general shape of the murder relies heavily on genre tropes and cliches. There are a couple of touchy points (I'm not quite sure how one aspect of it physically functioned), but it generally works. You, the reader, start at point A, and the solution is at a well-known point B, and the reader can make the journey in nearly a single stride. But The ???????? Murder Case is not about you. Due to reasons, the characters cannot simply go from point A to point B. Instead, they need to take a detour through point C, cartwheel over point D, and then do the rumba around point E until they finally arrive at point B. The appeal of The ???????? Murder Case isn't the solution itself, but the hoops Hayasaka makes the characters jump through to reach it.
If you're looking for a groundbreaking trick or a fair-play puzzle plot, you'll probably be disappointed. The interesting part of The ???????? Murder Case isn't the solution, but the context in which it appears, and how Hayasaka employs classic tropes. The enjoyment isn't from solving the murder, but from discovering the weird situation Hayasaka has been building up over the course of the novel, and how, in a series of increasingly silly turns, it still manages to resolve itself.
However, despite the light tone, the story does not work out favorably for literally any character. Detective stories involve murder and hence tragedy, and while you can sometimes have a detective story where things work out "well" for the "good" guys, typically the cast outside of the murderer and victim isn't affected in a major or negative way. So The ???????? Murder Case is a bit unique in how the murder impacts the entire cast. While the denouement is usually the finale, here it's only the penultimate chapter. The last chapter is devoted to showing how the lives of the remaining cast members—the innocent bystanders—unravel in the aftermath of the murder. The book literally goes out of its way for its downer ending.
This is pretty weird, since I think most mystery fans don't read it for the tragedy and drama. We're prepared to have someone die, but we don't need to see everyone's lives knocked off course. We can have death and drama, but needless cruelty feels out of place. Considering The ???????? Murder Case otherwise has a kooky, lighthearted tone, the conclusion feels bizarre and tonally inconsistent.
Now that I've discussed the end of the book, let's talk about the thing that shows up at the very beginning: the title. A title is just a small tag slapped onto the beginning of a work. While a book's title might play a big role in branding and image, it doesn't affect the experience of actually reading the book that much. So trying to figure out the title ends up feeling a bit shallow. At the end of the day, the title an author picks for their work is arbitrary, so we're not doing much more than trying to replicate an arbitrary decision Hayasaka made. We're told that title is an idiom that is 8 characters long (in kanji, 13 in kana), so we don't have to make a total stab in the dark, but... so what? It's still arbitrary.
Hayasaka goes into detail on his intentions with the hidden title in both the foreword and the afterword. There were two main purposes in hiding the title: First, the mystery is very difficult, so figuring out the title can give the reader a big hint to the solution. Second, the title is the very last thing revealed in the book, and should be incredibly easy to figure out once the reader knows the solution to the murder, so even if the reader isn't able to solve the murder they should be able to get some feeling of accomplishment and self-satisfaction from solving the title. Alright, maybe the title idiom is obvious to native speakers, but what if you're a foreigner and don't know many idioms? Huh?? WHAT THEN, HAYASAKA? WHAT ABOUT US?!?
ahem
It's an interesting idea, but at the end of the day, Hayasaka wanted the title to be both a clue and a mini-mystery. And mystery novels are full of clues and mini-mysteries. So even though the title is a unique place for them, hiding the title merely provides a slightly different flavor of something already there rather than something totally new.
On top of all this, I don't even think the "solution" to the title is that great; I might have appreciated the solve-the-title idea if I had felt the answer was cleverer. One issue is that, while the idiom is technically accurate, it kind of misses the crux of the issue. (Imagine if a character broke an arm and a leg, the key clue was the broken arm, and the idiom was "break a leg.") The other issue is that the solution is merely a technical description, and the actual meaning of the idiom does not tie into the story thematically. (Imagine if the "break a leg" novel didn't have anything to do with theater.)
Finally, the idea of solving the title is perhaps not quite as innovative as it may seem on first blush. Yes, as far as I can tell, this is the first time a book has fully and explicitly hidden its title. But, while most books don't put major emphasis on the title in a meta sense, there are some books that do put some hidden meaning or secret in the title, and at the end of the day, is what The ???????? Murder Case does really that different? For instance, one of Ellery Queen's "nationality" books reveals the true meaning of its title on the last page, almost perfectly mirroring The ???????? Murder Case.
Last point, for anyone curious: the solution idiom does have an English analog, but it's slightly different in a way that would make it not directly work for The ???????? Murder Case.
Another issue is that the beginning is a bit slow, and it takes quite a while for any crimes to occur. On one hand, the book never feels like it's just pointlessly wasting your time. The first half of the book is used to set up the characters and setting. The cast has to gather at the boat terminal in Tokyo, take a 24-hour boat trip to the Ogasawara Islands, take a second boat to the private island (where we meet a few more characters), and then reach and get settled into the house on the island. The novel is just fleshing out logistics and journey to the island where the main event takes place. On the other hand, couldn't Hayasaka just have made the choice to start the book on the island?
As it turns out, there are many more clues buried in the introduction of the book than you might expect in your first read-through. While this does justify the slow build-up after the fact, it doesn't help much at the time. Also, there actually is an interlude in the beginning of the book where the criminal commits a murder. Hayasaka apparently added this chapter after finishing his initial version of the manuscript in order to liven up the slow introduction, but the trick is revealed within the chapter and this murder is otherwise disconnected from the rest of the story, so while the interlude is more exciting than the surrounding chapters, it doesn't do much to bring up energy of the first half of the novel. One interesting aspect of the interlude chapter is that the chapter title is initially hidden and revealed at the end of the chapter, so if nothing else it serves as a clever way to give the reader a practice round before they need to solve the title of the entire book.
Oh, and don't let your kids read this. There's a random, awkward, explicit sex scene in the middle of the book, so... avoid The ???????? Murder Case if you're uncomfortable with erotica. (I'm not exaggerating; the scene is legitimate, straight-up erotica. There's also some other sexual content that's a bit problematic for other reasons.)
The book was clearly written around one idea. It feels like one day Hayasaka thought to himself "What if there was a mystery where ???????? ?? ?????," and then he wrote The ???????? Murder Case just for the sake of writing a mystery where ???????? ?? ?????. (And not to create a fulfilling, fair-play detective story.) There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it creates a different tone than a traditional detective story that might disappoint readers looking for a traditional story. But if you can enjoy a slow build-up that leads to a ridiculous resolution, then The ???????? Murder Case will be a fun ride.
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