Trick is hands-down my favorite mystery TV show, and a serious contender for my favorite piece of mystery media ever. The leads are entertaining and have great chemistry, the world of Trick is silly but enthralling, the tricks—a component so important the show is named after them!—are wonderful, and the show manages to achieve a near-perfect balance of mystery and comedy. There are some points where Trick goes out on a limb which promptly snaps, but it's Trick's willingness to take things as far as it needs to, even if it doesn't always quite work out, that makes it so great.
Of course, you've probably already noticed that this post is not about Trick, but a book called The Demon-Mask Village Murders, which is not a Trick tie-in novel or anything of the sort, but has what I can only describe as big Trick energy.
One more point of housekeeping before I start discussing the book proper: The Demon-Mask Village Murders was initially published in 1989 while Trick premiered in 2000. So even though I described The Demon-Mask Village Murders as having big Trick energy, to the extent one work influenced the other, it must have been Trick that took inspiration from The Demon-Mask Village Murders. I just want to make sure the line of credit is clear, and take a moment to thank The Demon-Mask Village Murders for being the precursor to something so amazing. (If The Demon-Mask Village Murders had no influence over Trick I'd be absolutely shocked.)
Our protagonist is Hikaru Kurohoshi, a police inspector who is horrendous at his job. The issue is Kurohoshi likes mysteries. Actually, it's probably fairer to say Kurohoshi loves mysteries, to the exclusion and detriment of everything else. As a result, he tries to overcomplicate simple incidents into impossible crimes, muddling everything and getting it all totally wrong. I love him! It was fantastic having a protagonist as excited to be in a mystery novel as I was to be reading one.
Anyway, since this is a book from the late 80s, Kurohoshi meets our deuteragonist, Nijiko Hayama, the old fashioned way: on the bus. Hayama is a writer for a travel magazine. The Demon-Mask Village is a small village that serves as a tourist spot to see houses that have traditional Japanese thatched roofs (based on the real-life Shirakawa village). They've given Hayama's publisher money to send an author to their village to write about it and generate publicity, and so Hayama was dispatched. (Hayama is just a reporter, not a novelist like the village had requested, but a bunch of country hicks aren't going to be able to notice the difference, right?)
Kurohoshi isn't going to the Demon-Mask Village; his destination is a nearby city, which is hosting a sake festival. Since the Demon-Mask Village is too small for public transportation, Hayama's plan is to go to that same city, and have someone from the Demon-Mask Village find her (using a demon mask as an identifier) and take her to the village.
Unfortunately, Hayama leaves her mask and itinerary on the bus. Kurohoshi finds them, and, realizing that the person from the Demon-Mask Village won't be able to identify Hayama if she doesn't have the mask, tries to find her to return the mask. He is unable to locate her, however, so he figures he might as well enjoy the festival... whereupon he runs into Hayama, who is now completely wasted.
Kurohoshi has found Hayama, so all is well and he can just sit back and relax, right? Not quite. When the person from the Demon-Mask Village arrives, Hayama has passed out from the booze. Plus, since Kurohoshi is (still) carrying the mask, the villager thinks Kurohoshi is Hayama. Kurohoshi decides that Hayama is in no condition to be left alone, so he will pretend to be Hayama (saying that Hayama is his niece) until they get to the village, at which point he'll explain the situation. Of course, Kurohoshi knows nothing about Hayama since he just met her a bit earlier (and hasn't even properly spoken to her), so all he knows about her is what he can gleam from the comments the villager makes regarding "Hayama-sensei."
So the villager thinks Kurohoshi is Hayama, Kurohoshi thinks Hayama is some big-name author, and Hayama doesn't know anything because she's passed out drunk. We're off to a great start, don't you think?
As you might guess from this set-up, The Demon-Mask Village Murders has a healthy dose comedy mixed in (although that shouldn't come as a surprise for those who have seen Trick and understand what "big Trick energy" entails). Theres situational comedy, sexual innuendo, slapstick... Pretty much everything low-brow. And I love it! The investigation is often the driest part of a mystery novel, and comedy is a great way to infuse it with entertainment value.
I also want to take a moment to distinguish The Demon-Mask Village Murders from The 8 Mansion Murders, since that also had slapstick comedy, yet I didn't like it at all. The difference is that in The 8 Mansion Murders the "humorous" situations result from the protagonist's callous disregard for anyone else's welfare resulting in serious scenarios that can cause massive injuries, while The Demon-Mask Village Murders involves much tamer situations caused by mere misfortune. I didn't laugh at the The 8 Mansion Murders because I was too busy being horrified by the protagonist's obnoxiousness, but that issue wasn't present in The Demon-Mask Village Murders at all.
With wacky hijinks galore and lots of strange happenings, The Demon-Mask Village Murders is a pretty easy read. Like many Trick episodes, it feels less like a straight-up murder case and more like a series of mysterious events (specifically, people and entire buildings disappearing into thin air), one of which just happens to be a murder.
The tricks are... good enough. They're basically at the same level as Trick: sometimes they're clever, sometimes they're not, but they're never bad enough to ruin an episode. The main trick in The Demon-Mask Village Murders is simple but neat; it's the auxiliary tricks where things get dicey. (Heck, there's one of them that I still don't understand.) But I'm more than happy to trade that tiny bit of quality in the mysteries for the comedy and atmosphere.
That being said, there is one particular element of the solution that I'm a bit unhappy about, even giving The Demon-Mask Village Murders that extra leeway. The solution has several layers to it and, while everything makes sense when looking at deepest layer, some of the surface layers have problems. Maybe you can view these "issues" as "clues," and I understand that crafting layered plots like this is difficult, but I still much prefer when multi-layered solutions like this are self-contained within each layer.
On the flip side, the deepest layer employs a certain trope that typically feels like an underwhelming cheap trick but here felt substantive and earned. So there's that!
Also, since this book was first published in 1989, there are certain bits about it that are... outdated. Specifically, there's an LGBT slant that's so bizarre that I legitimately don't know how to feel about it. Fortunately, the book makes it easy to write that plot point off. Additionally, from here in 2021 the ultimate root of everything feels laughably quaint. But the humor survives, and that's the important bit.
One last bit of trivia: The Demon-Mask Village Murders was originally published under the title "The Demon Comes and Toots His Own Horn," as an obvious reference to Seishi Yokomizo's The Devil Comes and Plays His Flute.
Anyway, this book is great. It's got humor, it's got mystery, it's got deuteragonists with great chemistry, it's got hijinks, and it's got a bunch of other good stuff. Anyone who likes Trick will undoubtedly love The Demon-Mask Village Murders as well.
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