Why does it have to have “Mercator Ayu The Last Incident” on the cover?? I actually have a fairly rigid hierarchy for how I select the English titles for Japanese works in my blog. First, if there’s an official English translation, I use that name. Then, if an English title is presented by the book itself, I’ll use that. If someone else (read as: Ho-Ling Wong) has covered the book, I’ll use their translation of the title for consistency in the English-speaking Japanese mystery fiction blogosphere. (Well, unless I don’t really like that translation. Sorry, Ho-Ling.) Finally, if there’s absolutely nothing else, I’ll use my own translation.
So I need to title this post “Wings in the Dark: Mercator Ayu - The Last Incident” because as you can see for yourself that’s what it says on the cover. Which is stilted in English! Without that I could easily translate the Japanese title into “Wings in the Dark: the Final Case of Ayu Mercator,” which works perfectly fine. But noooo, I’m stuck with “Mercator Ayu - The Last Incident.”
To add salt to the wound, an earlier edition of Wings in the Dark apparently has “Messiah” as the English title. That would’ve been fine too! But they just had to go and change it. (As I've previously discussed, for my posts I try to use the actual cover of whatever version I experienced, so I can't just use the "Messiah" cover for this post, either. And yeah, there's still that little tiny "Messiah" on this cover, but it's clearly beaten out by the other English.)
Anyway, that’s my biggest grievance with this book.
Objectively, I won’t call Wings in the Dark a perfect book, because how could anyone make such a claim? But subjectively, this book is absolutely amazing. I love impossible crimes, I love stuffy contrived settings, I love playing with tropes and meta, I love references to mystery fiction, I love humor, I love absurdity, I love silly ideas carried to their logical extremes, I love multi-layered solutions, and Wings in the Dark provides all of these with gusto.
Despite not knowing much about Wings in the Dark going in, I could still tell from the start that something funny was afoot. The only piece of outside knowledge I had was that this is Yutaka Maya’s debut work… but that’s already a bit strange. After all, “Final Case” “Last Incident” makes it sounds like the conclusion to a series, not the very first Ayu Mercator story. But fine, I can work with this. Obviously “something” happens to Mercator, but it needs to be an event where the fact that we’re primed for “something” to happen to Mercator elevates the experience. But what could that be?
So we begin the book… and the detective is some guy named Kisarazu. Where the heck is Mercator?! I felt like I had played right into Maya's plans before I had even opened the book.
The book takes place at Souajou (Blue Raven Castle), estate of the mega-rich Imakagami family out in the middle of nowhere. Kisarazu has been summoned to the manor by the current family patriarch (our narrator is Kisarazu’s mystery novelist friend Kouzuki), but arrives too late: the patriarch has been murdered—and beheaded! Kisarazu “deduces” the location of the missing head, only to discover that that head belongs to the victim’s son, indicating he has also been murdered. The patriarch’s head and son’s body are then found inside a locked room (together with the key to said room, naturally). And these are just the first of many, many murders.
Wings in the Dark is steeped in mystery fiction. This is not a book for amateurs. By which I mean knowledge and understanding of Golden Age detective fiction, and how Wings in the Dark plays with and subverts the tropes of those stories, will deepen the experience of Wings in the Dark. One of the fun parts of a hobby is geeking out over it with other fanatics. I’ve mentioned before how cool it feels reading about characters discussing detective fiction, because it’s like a little in-joke you get to have with the author, and a signal from the author that they’re writing for fans of those types of books. Wings in the Dark is similarly a book for mystery fans. While it doesn’t signal this upfront as some other books do (such as by including a discussion of classic detective fiction by the characters), by the end it’s clear how deep into the weeds of Golden Age detective fiction Maya himself was.
But what good is a deep knowledge of detective fiction and tropes if you can’t play around with them? Fortunately, Wings in the Dark has a great sense of humor. (Or at least, my sense of humor.) I don’t think it should be a huge shock I love comedy, considering Trick and Ace Attorney are two of my favorite mystery franchises. When you dig down, the two genres are conceptually more similar than you might initially suspect. The basis for a lot of comedy is a punchline that is unexpected but follows logically from the given setup—just like mysteries are built upon unexpected solutions that follow logically from the clues presented. While mysteries aren’t inherently funny, there are plenty of mysteries that have a sitcom-esque black humor to them, especially if you completely ignore the fact that they involve people brutally dying. (And even when the case isn't particularly humorous from the side of the detective, it can get a lot sillier when viewed from the culprit’s perspective, which is literally the premise of Hannin-tachi no Jikenbo, a comedy spin-off manga of Kindaichi Case Files that retells each mystery from the point of view of the killer.)
Which is all to say that, while Wings in the Dark is a mystery (a serious mystery!) and doesn’t explicitly make jokes, I think Maya was fully aware of the absurdity of his plot when the gravity of death is scrubbed away. According to the afterword, Wings in the Dark began as a parody of The Black Death Mansion Murder Case (the only one of the "Three Great Occult Mysteries" I’ve yet to read… which again ties back to my previous point about experience in mystery fiction being helpful for this book) but morphed into a legitimate mystery—and yet I think the spirit of humor is still there, if you look at the book from that angle. Ayu Mercator himself is basically a parody of the great detective archetype. The finale to the first half of the book is a particularly great moment that functions as a dramatic and mysterious turn of events, but with the same type of plot beat you’d typically see in a sitcom.
In addition to the meta references and humorous undertones, and perhaps most importantly, the plotting in Wings in the Dark is supreme, with a brilliant(ly ridiculous) conclusion. Mysteries only exist for their solution, after all. As I’ve said before, what I seek in a mystery is wit, surprise, and catharsis, and Wings in the Dark has all. The strength of the novel is not in mechanical trickery, however—of the multitude murders that occur in the book, that first pair is the only impossible crime. And I love impossible crimes and mechanical trickery (which is why I love Kindaichi Case Files, because that’s pretty much all that series is), so the fact that I enjoyed Wings in the Dark so much without a major focus on that sort of trick should be a testament to how great it is.
Specifically, there are two parts to the plot that make it work for me. The first is the multi-layered nature of the solution. Crafting a plot in a way that causes the clues come together elegantly is hard enough, but doing so in a way that there appear to be multiple parsimonious solutions is that much more difficult, so having layered solutions is a surefire way to my heart. (The turn of logic from the penultimate to true solution is also pure genius, even if a bit reliant on specialized knowledge.) The second aspect I like is the absurdity of the solution. Anything goes in a mystery novel as long as it’s clued, and, in fact, as long as the proper cluing is established, a more outlandish or unlikely solution is often seen as a better one. But there’s still a balancing act—you can’t just pull something that seems completely impossible out of nowhere—which Wings in the Dark hits perfectly.
Having both of these elements to the novel is nice on their own, but Maya is able to expertly play them off each other: there are multiple solutions, but each successive solution gets more and more ridiculous, while still staying entirely within the logical parameters set out by the book. The plot goes off the rails while staying completely on track.
And of course, this is all complemented by the humor I’ve already discussed.
Still, there are a few parts of Wings in the Dark that nag at me in the back of my head. It feels a bit contrived how, despite body after body after body, the Imakagami clan doesn’t appear to do anything to stem the deluge of corpses. (Leave the manor for a bit, hire a night guard, stay grouped... Anything!) There is also little to no forensic evidence to speak of, with most handwaved away with a line like “There’s no way the criminal would be sloppy enough to leave their fingerprints.” After all, crimes (in detective fiction) should be solved through the power of the detective’s mind, not a “mere” rigorous search and analysis of the crime scene. Wings in the Dark does not take place in reality, but the alternate dimension (where most mystery stories are set) that closely resembles reality but for the existence of ridiculous coincidences allowing for convoluted murder plots—except this is where I want to be, so the fact that this nags at me is strange in itself. I suppose it’s just a question of verisimilitude: I want to be in the alternate mystery dimension, but I don’t want to feel like I’m there.
While the prose is often relatively straightforward, there are some dialogue conversations that feel… weird. In fact, they gave me the exact same feeling I’d often get from Carr, that there were missing lines or undertones behind the conversation that I couldn’t perceive. But according to the afterword these conversations were purposefully made wonky, and they don’t have a particularly large effect on the plot, so not a big deal in the end.
In the end, none of this bothers me that much. As I said, my biggest complaint is the English title on the cover.
Wings in the Dark is utterly fantastic. It might just be me, but I can’t write enough good things about it. As a fan of the genre, the clever, almost comedic plotting that both hinges on and subverts detective fiction was a treat. Maya masterfully plays with tropes, characters, and even the reader—I couldn’t help but smile even when the joke was on me. Wings in the Dark is a book all Golden Age fans should read.
This sounds incredibly fun. More reasons to learn Japanese?
ReplyDelete