Mathematical Goodbye / 笑わない数学者


Mathematical Goodbye is a strange book. It’s different from the previous books in the S&M series (standing for the protagonists’ names, Saikawa and Moe, and nothing else). The main trick is exceedingly obvious from the start, quite similar to another book I’ve panned on this blog (link purposefully withheld), and there aren’t any secondary tricks to salvage it. Basically, this is the type of book I’d normally consider a waste of time… and yet I liked it a lot.

I’ll admit I didn’t quite get there on my own. Normally after I read a book, I wait until I’ve written at least the first draft of my review before looking at others’ opinions. But after reading that ending, I had to see if it was me or the book, and… seeing how other people interpreted the book swayed me. Can you really call a book “good” if you need other people to tell you how to like it? I’m still going to say yes.

Enough pontificating, what is Mathematical Goodbye actually about? To start off with, it’s another “eccentric rich old guy has a crazy mansion in a remote location and promises his fortune to the person who can solve a riddle” story. I could make a jab at using such a tropey premise, but who am I kidding, it’s used so much because it’s just that great.

Famous and hermetic mathematician Shouzou Tennouji is having his annual family reunion Christmas party. One of his grandsons is Moe’s classmates so he invites her and she brings Saikawa along as a plus-one. Tennouji’s mansion has a large statue outside; many years ago he made the statue disappear for one night, and promised his inheritance to anyone who could figure out how he did it. As a special treat he reenacts the disappearance for Moe, but when the statue reappears, it does so with a corpse.

(As a side note, I saved this review for my second December review because it occurs at a Christmas party. Of course, it now occurs to me that Mystery Arena, which literally takes place on New Year's Eve, may have been a better choice. Oh well...)

Anyway, the trick here is incredibly obvious. There are a few secondary details that might require some thought, but the main idea is so telegraphed you can probably guess it before the body even drops. So you solve the murder before it even occurs… and then what? What’s left in a murder mystery once the murder mystery has been handled?

I love theme. Flavor, aesthetic, whatever you want to call it. Killing someone is fine and all, but killing a bunch of people while managing to maintain a pattern is great. (Feel free to quote that, by the way.) That’s why I love Kindaichi Case Files, because that’s basically all it does. I think I like Mathematical Goodbye so much because it also focuses on a theme, and which is applied to the entire book, not just the murders.

Specifically, the theme of Mathematical Goodbye is inversion. It starts with Tennouji’s mansion: the courtyard is plain concrete, the outer hallway is filled with plants, and then the core is a planetarium. While the ordinary order from “outside” to “inside” would be “space, nature, building,” in this mansion the order from outside to inside is “building (concrete), nature (plants), space (planetarium).”

The theme continues with the murder, which is essentially a reversed locked room: typically a body is found locked in a room, but this time the corpse is discovered locked outside of the mansion. The body is by the statue outside, and every door and window in the mansion is locked from the inside. (Japanese murder mysteries just love their fire hazards, don’t they?) ...The mystery can essentially be reduced to a standard locked room because the windows lock from the inside without a key and each window is in a locked room, but the scenario is still thematic in form.

While the above two points are the main ways this theme shows up in the direct plot of the book, the "inversion" theme also applies to the book as a whole. There are a few famous “anti-mysteries,” but I’d call Mathematical Goodbye a “reverse mystery.” (Not to be confused with an inverted mystery, however.) Typically the reader is left in the dark while the detective solves the case on their own, and the detective may even get extra information, such as by noticing certain details or performing off-screen actions that the reader isn’t aware of. Then, at the end, the detective shares what they know and the reader is brought up to speed. But here the reader can catch onto the trick early—the fact that you know this is a murder mystery and need to find a trick certainly helps—while Saikawa remains in the dark despite how simple the case seems to be.

The structure of the novel is reversed. In a typical detective story, we start off with a question (or several), and then receive the answer at the end. But here we can see the answer from the start, and then at the end the book presents an entirely new mystery that it never actually answers. (Plus, continuing the theme from the previous paragraph, for this mystery we are given clues Saikawa doesn’t have.) So, contrary to typical structure, we start with an answer and end with a question.

Everything is reversed! I adore devotion to a theme, so how can I not appreciate immersing the story so deeply here? While the murder mystery is simple, that just strengthens the notion that the problem presented at the end of the book, rather than the murder, is the “true” mystery of the book. While I usually crave closure, I was okay with the fact that this mystery wasn’t resolved because Mori does give us clues towards it, and it is not an open-ended question, with a manageable number of possible answers.

There are a few more reasons Mathematical Goodbye feels a bit different from the previous S&M books. One of those is the setting. The first two books each focused on a set of co-workers at their lab, while Mathematical Goodbye focuses on a family in their home, which obviously is going to have a very different dynamic.

In the previous book, Doctors in Isolated Room, I described the characterization as almost sterile, with most suspects reduced to a mere dossier. While the character writing in Mathematical Goodbye isn’t phenomenal, the characters are certainly more developed than in Doctors in Isolated Room, and while the individual characters aren’t particularly great, there’s a lot more to their relationships and interpersonal dynamics. Family murder mystery means family tree, and filling out the branches as the book advances feels like legitimate progress even when it isn’t directly connected to the mystery.

This goes for Saikawa and Moe themselves as well. Maybe it’s just my memory, or maybe it’s because my Japanese skills have improved, or maybe it’s because the mystery felt obvious from the start so I could devote more attention to the character writing, but Saikawa and Moe felt much more interesting and developed in this book, with an actual relationship and dynamic. Their relationship also shows signs of changing in this book. Usually the relationship between the leads in a serialized mystery series doesn’t change (until ratings start to lag), so we’ll see what happens here. Mystery series also tend to occur in a “generic” time period, but each S&M book is clearly delineated in time based on the month and Moe’s year in college, so I’m interested in whether Mori keeps this explicit progression through the entire series (and how he'll deal with Moe's inevitable graduation).

Mathematical Goodbye also belongs to the short but non-zero list of mystery novels that do something more interesting with their title than The ???????? Murder Case. I want to elaborate on the title of the book a bit, because the English title isn’t just a direct translation of the Japanese title. (As I explained in my previous review, I used “Mathematical Goodbye” as the English title because that's what's on the cover.) The English title given to the book is “Mathematical Goodbye,” but the Japanese title directly translates to “The Mathematician Doesn’t Laugh.” (For completeness, the direct translation of the Japanese title of Doctors in Isolated Room is “Doctors and the Cold Locked Room.”) I do find it fun for the S&M books to have two titles like this. The chapter (sub-)titles in this novel are also something else. My favorite is “‘Humans think they’re so great but they can barely even swim,’ scoffed the walrus.”

Even with the obvious trick, the devotion of the entire book, and not just the murder plot, to the theme of inversion won me over. If you only look at the pure mystery plot it’s nothing special, but Mathematical Goodbye uniquely gives you the opportunity to play detective to the book’s characters.

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