The Summer of the Ubume / 姑獲鳥の夏

This book is crazy. And not in the "that was so crazy, dude!" way. In the "needs serious help and should be locked away until it's no longer a threat to itself and others" way.

I wanted to like The Summer of the Ubume. I really did. I had heard all about it. It seemed cool! The detective, Akihiko Chuuzenji (although he's commonly referred to as Kyougoku-dou, the name of his used bookshop), is a priest who doesn't believe in the supernatural. He resolves mysteries by addressing the underlying physical cause but framing it as a supernatural event and performing an exorcism for the related persons. The Summer of the Ubume in particular seemed neat. Rather than a traditional murder mystery, it's about a woman who has been pregnant twenty months, and her husband who disappeared from a locked room.

And yet... And yet...!

The mystery just isn't good at all. At least from a fair-play puzzle plot perspective. It's basically just a bunch of people being crazy, and... that's it. The characters do ridiculous, far-fetched things, or don't do things you'd expect a normal, reasonable person to do, and it all culminates into the story we're presented. The solution doesn't have a single speck of cleverness, and that's what bothers me the most. The questions are original and intriguing, but the answers have nothing worthwhile. Imagine a mystery where the victim was found on the other side of a thirty foot chasm, and the solution was just "the culprit jumped." That's what The Summer of the Ubume's solution felt like to me.

Or rather, I should say that's what the core of the solution felt like to me. In fairness to the story, while the main idea behind the explanation is trivially uninteresting, there is a lot of detail and ancillary information packed in. (The denouement is almost a quarter of the book, and it's a long book!) But the detail isn't really about the physical solution or deductions used to reach it, it's about the characters and what they did, and why the horrible things that happened to this character caused them to act this way towards that character, and how that ruined that character's life and in turn caused them to do this to this other character, and so on and so forth.

The chain of misery is painstakingly embellished, but it just didn't do much for me. It was a bunch of psychological mumbo-jumbo about people I didn't care for. You can polish a pile of junk all you want, but all you'll be left with is shiny junk.

The solution is also ridiculous from a scientific standpoint. The folklore and mythology behind the book was meticulously researched (as shown by the bibliography at the end), but the science involved quickly devolves from "I'm not sure if that's true, but... he's the author, he probably did the research" to "That's not how it works! That's not how any of this works!"

Sometimes, even if the solution isn't great, I can forgive a book if the journey there is fun enough. But Ubume's solution is horrible, and the body of the story isn't anything special. Nothing happens. We find out about the case, we question the family members, we question some people who knew the family, and then we have the denouement. And that's it.

The characters don't win the book any points either. In particular I couldn't stand the narrator, Tatsumi Sekiguchi. He's an annoying doofus. I'm half-convinced the only reason Kyougoku-dou hangs out with him is to make himself feel like a super-genius in comparison. The only reason Sekiguchi gets heated up about the case is because he has a weird thing for the pregnant woman's older sister, which wouldn't be a huge issue in itself, except for the fact that Sekiguchi is married. To his wife. Whom he completely neglects. Several times in the book he decides to just... not go home. Doesn't say anything to his wife about where he is or what he's doing, just... doesn't go home, so he can keep on investigating the case to help this other woman. And this is all before we've even gotten to the fact that he's kind of a rapist.

The other characters aren't anything special. Kyougoku-dou can be interesting, but his sophisms get tiring. I did like this approach to youkai as sociological constructs developed in response to certain events and natural phenomena. There are lectures and discussions on the origin of certain youkai, as well as various topics related to science and philosophy. Very... long... lectures.... They all tie back to the case by the end of the book, but they are massive speedbumps in the pacing of the novel, so will probably make the story an absolute bore if you don't enjoy these topics.

The supporting characters are okay, but the people involved in the case don't get much of the limelight (despite the length of the book) and aren't presented sympathetically, so I didn't particularly hold any feelings towards them. There's also one character who can magically see people's memories, and even having finished the story I'm not sure if the book is serious about that or not.

One thing I did like about the book is that it felt like a missing link between The Village of Eight Graves and Those Who Bewitch Like Evil Spirits. All three books are set in post-war Japan and make heavy use of Japanese folklore. But Ubume is the most different of the three: it takes place in Tokyo, rather than a rural Japanese village, and does not directly involve a murder case. However, these elements result in Ubume also having, in my opinion, the weakest atmosphere. The discussions of Japanese folklore are interesting, but there's no sense of supernatural suspense—we're in a metropolis, and (as I previously said) nothing creepy happens!

Of course, Ubume may not have been even trying to cultivate a sense of supernatural suspense, and I might have only been expecting it to because I unilaterally tied it to The Village of Eight Graves and Those Who Bewitch Like Evil Spirits. (The fact that Kyougoku-dou emphatically refutes any supernatural elements from the opening of the story might have been a slight clue towards this.) If there was an atmosphere the book was aiming for, I think it was "creeping madness"... but even that doesn't feel particularly strong. The characters might be eccentric, but they don't feel insane, and Sekiguchi just feels dim-witted more than anything else. The strongest piece of insanity comes from a short scene in Sekiguchi's memories, which is not nearly enough to create a threat of insanity in the present.

People like this book, but I have no idea why. While I admit the set-up is fantastically original, the solution is face-palmingly stupid, the characters aren't anything special (with the protagonist especially grating), the actual plot is dull, and the atmosphere is lacking. If you want a psychologically twisted story intertwined with Japanese folklore about messed up things happening to messed up people, then sure, give it a read. An English translation exists! But if you're looking for a thematic fair-play detective story with an original "crime" and solution, keep this one locked up.