The title of The 8 Mansion Murders is way too generous; there's no way I'd rate it anywhere close to an eight. It's not particularly clever or inspired, but seems to think it's some sort of epoch-defining masterpiece.
The book opens with a murder in the Hachisuka family mansion, which is shaped like a giant number "8," as depicted on the cover*. Fortunately, the murder is witnessed, which makes the case pretty simple. From the "bottom" of the mansion (when looking from above), the witnesses see an assailant in the "top" part of the mansion shoot the victim in the "middle" row of the house. Easy, right?
The murder takes place at night so the witnesses can't see the identity of the murderer, but they do know which room the shot came from: the bedroom of the son of the Hachisuka family's live-in maid and butler, Yuusaku. However, he claims that he slept the entire night, with his door and window locked from the inside. It'd be bizarre for him to commit the murder in such a brazen way—but if it was someone else, how did they get in and out of his bedroom?
(*: For those curious: The "hachi" in "Hachisuka" actually uses the kanji for bee. But a building shaped like a bee proved too complicated, so the Hachisuka family head settled for a building shaped like an 8, which is also pronounced "hachi" in Japanese, even though that isn't the actual kanji used in their name.)
Enter police detective Kyouzou Hayami, here to...
Y'know what? I'm just gonna come out with it. Kyouzou is a disgusting creep. Typically I don't care too much about detectives one way or another, but Kyouzou's extreme obnoxiousness made me actively dislike him. I feel like his antics were supposed to be comedic, but they just made him look like a jerk, especially since they actually injure people. The only reason he investigates the case seriously is because he gets the hots for the Hachisuka family's daughter who believes in Yuusaku's innocence.
Maybe I wouldn't have minded Kyouzou so much if the mystery had been juicy enough to distract me from his awfulness, but it wasn't. The trick in the first murder is painfully obvious; the basic idea will probably spring in your mind from the start. And it's weird, because this murder stumps the cast while the second murder is solved almost immediately! The second murder has a few pieces that need to be stitched together, which makes it a bit more interesting, but I'm not sure how physically plausible it is, plus I feel like the state in which the crime scene was discovered contradicts the solution.
There is a twist to the solution that is the sort I typically like... but it didn't do anything for me here. I think there are two reasons for it. The first is that it pulled off the entire twist in one segment, but to really shine this sort of twist needs to be spread out over at least two. Splitting this plot point into two parts gives us time to accept the first half, which is what makes the second half impactful. When it's all done immediately, we don't have a chance to get any sort of emotional attachment. The other reason is that I feel like the culprit should have tried to take advantage of this trick more. Seriously, they go through a bunch of effort to set it up, but it seems like they were going to just shrug and walk away if it failed.
This book just goes around grabbing a bunch of plot points it doesn't earn. The culprit just spontaneously confesses to everything as soon as they're accused. Kyouzou is truly fortunate in this respect, since he ends up with no proof. A culprit confessing as soon as they're accused despite the lack of any hard evidence is a classic stereotype of detective fiction, but in my experience, it doesn't actually happen that often—there usually is some proof, even if it's not ironclad—but The 8 Mansion Murders conforms to the stereotype as close as possible. The motive is ridiculously stupid, and the way the culprit is identified (or rather, the way a certain character is excluded from suspicion) might be the single most stupid reasoning I have seen in a detective novel. The book is too enamored with its brilliant(ly obvious) trick to bother coming up with any sort of compelling conclusion to its story.
Kyouzou's younger sister Ichio was awesome. The rest of the cast was mediocre (although thankfully not horrible like Kyouzou himself), but Ichio was great. Let's make her the protagonist instead.
If you're really hungering for a classic-styled Japanese whodunnit I guess you could read The 8 Mansion Murders, but there are so many more worthy books you could read instead. If The 8 Mansion Murders has a saving grace, it's that it's short so it won't take too much of your time.
No comments:
Post a Comment