As in my Moonlight Game review, "Alice" will refer to the character and "Arisugawa" will refer to the author.
Anyway, Alice and Egami are essentially the only two characters returning from Moonlight Game. The other club members from the previous book have other engagements for this spring break, so our main duo is instead accompanies Maria Arima, the newest club member, on a trip to her family's private island, Kashiki Island.
This isn't just a standard vacation, though. The club members have a mission: to solve the puzzle left by Maria's eccentric grandfather and to find the fortune he hid somewhere on the island before his passing. (Kinzo eat your heart out.) Unfortunately, the puzzle-solving is interrupted by the arrival of a series of corpses.
All in all, the book is... okay. There are no glaring faults, but at the same time nothing really wowed me. I think part of it could have been my expectations for the book. I thought Ho-Ling Wong skipped Moonlight Game to translate Moai Island Puzzle because Moai Island Puzzle was leaps and bounds better than Moonlight Game... but having now actually read both novels, I suspect it's more because Moonlight Game has elements that would be incredibly difficult to convert to English, while Moai Island Puzzle does not.
There are three murders in Moai Island Puzzle, but only one of them ends up having any meat on its bones, which is a bit disappointing. Of the two underdeveloped murders, one has an explanation that is both rote and overwrought, and the other is basically handwaved. I think the developed murder has enough to carry the book, but again, it just makes it "fine," not "great." There's a solid Ellery Queen-style deduction that matches but does not exceed those in Queen's "national" series, as well as a rather clever dying message (although perhaps not in the way you'd expect).
And, of course, there's the treasure hunt. Like the rest of the book, the will puzzle manages to be decent and nothing more or less. There are several steps to the puzzle, so it certainly isn't simple and shallow, and each step is (theoretically) clued in a way that is neither obvious nor overly esoteric. But none of the steps felt particularly brilliant, either. This is probably the instance of the puzzle-will I've liked least so far, since it didn't excel in any particular area (although that doesn't mean I disliked it). For instance, the will-puzzle in part two of Gambling Emperor Legend Zero, while not reasonably solvable by any stretch of the imagination, had clues that were constructed in an extraordinarily clever way. I think I liked the riddle itself from Moai Island Puzzle more than the riddle from Kindaichi Case Files' "Russian Dolls Murder Case" riddle, but the "Russian Dolls Murder Case" integrated its riddle into the murder plot much more deeply, making me prefer it more overall.
I said each step of the puzzle is "theoretically" fairly clued because one step relies on a "hand-drawn" map that is not quite precise enough for my tastes. I also found it a bit odd because the first step seemed extremely easy (it was the very first thing I thought of) and something I feel would have be relatively easy to notice (or at least confirm) if you were on Kashiki Island, so the fact that everyone just goes "yup, I have absolutely no ideas for the riddle whatsoever, sorry you're totally on your own" felt a bit weird for me. Obviously we couldn't just start off with significant progress on the puzzle, but the first step is so obvious it was a bit disorienting that the Arima family couldn't figure it out.
The last thing I want to note is that the construction of the cast is noticeably improved from Moonlight Game. As I mentioned in my Moonlight Game review, it was a bit difficult to keep track of the different characters because they were all college students belonging to different groups that had met for the first time during the book. However, the cast of Moai Island Puzzle mostly consists of the Arima family; this means they all have varying roles within the family and differ in aspects like age and occupation, and the family tree provides a simple framework for organizing and remembering the characters and their relationships.
At the end of the day I'm going to recommend Moai Island Puzzle since (at the time of writing) it's the only book available in English written by Arisugawa, one of the seminal writers of the shin-honkaku movement. It's not fantastic, but it's decent and if you're interested in mystery fiction (and Japanese mystery fiction in particular) then you should definitely read at least one Arisugawa (and, as I already said, this is your only choice in English).
I'll admit I do have a sense that I might be being a bit spoiled here. Moai Island Puzzle didn't massively impress me because I have Moonlight Game and several Ellery Queen novels to compare it against. Moai Island Puzzle strikes me as a book that I would have found much more engaging if I had read it earlier in my mystery "career," so at the end of the day I'm penalizing Moai Island Puzzle for the timing of when I chose to read it. But I suppose that's simply the curse of diving deep into any genre, and detective fiction in particular.
No comments:
Post a Comment