Rainbow Toothbrushes: Refractions of Lychee Kamiki / 虹の歯ブラシ 上木らいち発散

Returning from The ???????? Murder Case, Rainbow Toothbrushes features high-school prostitute Lychee Kamiki as she screws and deduces her way through an assortment of lewd cases. In The ???????? Murder Case, Kamiki functioned almost like a side character (until she started having sex with everyone and solving the case), but in this short story collection both Kamiki and the lecherous subject matter are presented front and center.

Overall, I liked the collection. The name comes from the seven toothbrushes Kamiki has in her apartment, each in a different color of the rainbow, albeit in reverse from violet to red. The first five toothbrushes are reserved for Kamiki’s five “regular” clients (who each have a designated day of the week that they visit), the red toothbrush is Kamiki’s, and the orange toothbrush is… Well, you’ll need to read the book to find that out. We analogously have seven stories, each of which relates to a color (in reverse rainbow order) and the corresponding "regular." (Well, most of them do. The Yellow chapter’s connection is arbitrary and tenuous at best.) …I’ll admit I completely fell for the Blue story. But that just put me on guard, and made me see through the Green story immediately.

You’ve probably already figured out that this book has sex. In fact, every story does! And it’s not just tasteful, obscure descriptions: Lychee Kamiki gets down and dirty. But, just like Playboy magazine, it’s not about the sex, but the plot and articles! R-Right? After all, the sex scenes are essential to the mysteries! (Are you buying this?) While it’s true that the sex scenes are necessary for the plot as written, it doesn’t feel like it would be too difficult to rearrange them into family friendly stories with the same trick. In other words, the sex is an unnecessary gimmick to add shock value to the stories.

Going by the previous paragraph, you might think I disliked the inclusion of sex scenes, but… I didn’t actually mind them. For one, I had already read The ???????? Murder Case, so I knew what I was getting into. If I cared about the sex, I would have just dropped the series. Plus, while the sex scenes are explicit, they aren’t indulgent. They’re there not to titillate or function as erotica, but to serve the function needed for the mystery plot, so that Hayasaka can follow through on his joke of a prostitute detective. (Although if you do enjoy those parts of the Lychee Kamiki stories, more power to you.)

Before, when reading The ???????? Murder Case, I got the feeling that Kamiki was a bit of a Mary Sue. She’s smart, rich, beautiful, stylish, excellent at reading people, and manages to sexually dominate every situation she encounters. In this Rainbow Toothbrushes we learn she’s never gotten sick despite never using protection. I can’t name a single flaw. Which is normally something that would make a book difficult to enjoy, but fortunately the Rainbow Toothbrushes stories aren’t about Kamiki as a person or a character. She’s a vehicle to provide sex and deductions. She’s a concept. I think Hayasaka understands this, and that’s why she was almost a side character in The ???????? Murder Case, and why most of the Rainbow Toothbrushes stories follow some other character rather than Kamiki herself. Kamiki is always in a position of power, and as long as the books understand this and don’t try to pretend otherwise, I don’t mind. Of course, Rainbow Toothbrushes also provides a fair amount of information on Kamiki and her background.

In fact, that’s what I think makes Rainbow Toothbrushes work. For most of the book it feels like a collection of short stories that are decent but not mind-blowing (although perhaps may blow something else). But then the last chapter ties everything together (or perhaps I should refracts out), with a focus on what Lychee Kamiki actually is (or isn’t). While this twist is not the craziest thing I’ve seen, it’s a fun and unique meta-mystery that takes advantage of the format of the short story collection. I just wish the twist had a bit more meat to it. Also, the final chapter is structured in a way where it needs to go through each “reveal” twice—which is an issue because a reveal is only a reveal the first time. But the chapter does succeed at arranging the discrete colors of the previous stories into a rainbow that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Most Japanese books also have an afterword written by another author, and the author in this case was the perfect choice.

Vulgarity is probably not the defining trait I would have chosen for my mystery novel series, but I am not Yabusaka Hayasaka. Rainbow Toothbrushes is a fitting follow-up to The ???????? Murder Case, providing more sex-based mysteries. In fact, I'd probably rate the two almost equally, and say the tricks are about the same level across the two books. I like the big reveal in The ???????? Murder Case more than the one in Rainbow Toothbrushes, but the core “guess the title” gimmick of The ???????? Murder Case fell flat for me while I thought Rainbow Toothbrushes did well at taking advantage of its structure. Rainbow Toothbrushes has more sex, though, so I suppose that's the deciding factor. (I'm just not sure which way that decides it.)