Tick... tock... tick... tock...
Attorney Shunsaku Morie is a simple man. He just wants to go to his client, do his job, and go home. Nothing fancy. But when his job involves reading the will of a wealthy, eccentric hermit in the deceased's mansion filled with a collection of antique clocks, whose family includes an assortment of odd characters (including a man covered in bandages), even Shunsaku can tell where things are headed.
The Japanese Clock Mansion Murders is a novel that both revels in and refuses to be hamstrung by classic mystery tropes. We start with father and son Jihei and Shouichi Amachi passing on in quick succession, Shouichi in a car accident rushing to his father's sickbed and Jihei on said sickbed. Family drama, car accidents, suspicious deaths. Good stuff.
But it turns out this is just a prologue, as we then jump nearly three decades into the future to the aftermath of the death of Jihei's second son, Keijirou. He also died of sickness. You can feel the way The Japanese Clock Mansion Murders plays with tropes from the very beginning, tantalizing us with all these deaths but refusing to give us an outright murder.
Anyway, Shouichi was supposed to succeed Jihei, but due to the dual tragedy everything instead went to Keijirou, who just, erm... wasted away his life. While Keijirou was the nominal head of the family's company, he left management to his older sister, using the family wealth to build up a collection of Japanese clocks but not much else. Until he died.
Enter Shunsaku Morie, who has been dispatched to read Keijirou's will to his heirs at the Amachi family mansion, which is now filled with Keijirou's clocks. Keijirou wasn't Shunsaku's client (so Shunsaku is as clueless as us regarding Amachi family history), but Keijirou requested that his will be read on a specific day(!) that his attorney could not make, so that attorney requested Shunsaku go in his stead. (Also the original attorney could smell the murders coming from a mile a way and knew that Shunsaku is good with that sort of stuff.)
Shunsaku goes to the Amachi mansion, and after getting a crash course in Japanese clocks, we finally get to the will reading. This will surely be the catalyst for the mystery, right? Perhaps in his will Keijirou will leave his entire fortune to an unexpected recipient, or reveal that it will go to the first person to solve a particular riddle? Nope, it's a standard will, splitting his assets fairly among his siblings and their children. Well, that was uneventful.
And yet, that night, a murder occurs! Not only that, but it happens in a locked room from which the culprit seems to disappear right before the witnesses burst in. A few more crimes occur, and each one similarly has some sort of bizarre, fantastic element to it. The story doesn't quite take the path you'd expect from some early plot elements, but once the crimes start occurring, they are strange and intricate affairs.
I actually really like how The Japanese Clock Mansion Murders simultaneously acknowledges and refuses to lean on traditional mystery tropes. For instance, it's centered on a will left by an eccentric patriarch, but the will is ordinary. One character's head is completely covered in bandages (allegedly because he just received plastic surgery), but the police recognize and thoroughly investigate the possibility of an imposter or double. (Compare with Ellery Queen's The Egyptian Cross Mystery, which falls apart as soon as you ask the most obvious question suggested by the crime scene.) The story takes place in the Amachi family estate, but the characters are free to enter and leave, rather than being isolated by some disaster. It feels like a conscious rejection of cliché, which in turn emphasizes the originality of the mystery and solutions.
(In the rest of the review I'm going to reveal some features of the solution that I think cross over into spoiler territory. So if that concerns you, stop reading the review here.)
As for the solutions, they're quite clever, but they lack some impact emotionally. There are three main reasons for this. First, the incidents occur largely due to a string of coincidences, rather than an intentional plan. While you have to have some allowance for coincidences in mystery novels, it still tends to be cooler when the detective gets to take down a master criminal with a genius plan. Second, the solutions are quite technical. As I discussed in my Sekimeiya review, one of the main appeals of the mystery genre is the catharsis from the resolution provided by the solution. However, when the solution is technically involved, the description of the technical pieces creates a gap between when we learn what the "trick" was and when we become satisfied that that trick actually does work and explain the crime, lessening the impact of the catharsis. And finally, we aren't told all the necessary facts about Japanese clocks needed for the answer, making the book feel a smidge unfair.
The book is called The Japanese Clock Mansion Murders, and that's what you get: a bunch of murders that all end up relying on the idiosyncrasies of Japanese clocks in one way or another. On one hand that's a bit predictable, but on the other hand I just can't bring myself to complain about the book delivering on its central promise, especially when the crimes aren't tied to the clocks on the surface. Figuring out all the ways to use the Japanese clocks in murders was interesting, even if it does get technical and involved.
So overall, I really liked this book. It played with classic tropes without ever falling for cliché, while simultaneously building interesting mysteries that revolved around a unique prop. Leaning so heavily on a technical apparatus does reduce the emotional satisfaction of the reveal a bit, but I found that a small price to pay for all the other positive qualities.
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