In all my previous reviews of short stories, I’ve either reviewed a collection by one author or a single short story. The latter can be handled as a regular review, and the former tends to have some sort of through-line of plot or style, and so can still be reviewed as a singular work. But this is the first time I’m reviewing a short story collection by different authors. While there is a general theme of “Great Detectives,” there’s no further commonality tying together the stories into a whole. So I don’t have much to do besides write a quick paragraph or two on each story.
The collection opens with “I Hate Wednesdays and Fridays” by my beloved Yutaka Maya. (Yeah I’ve only read one book by him, but it was a really good book.) It was fine. It does what I like about Maya: take established facts to their logical extremes, regardless of how absurd the resulting conclusion is. It’s just that the story feels a bit rushed and underdeveloped. It’s apparently a spoof on The Black Death Mansion Murder Case, which is the only one of the Three Great Occult Mysteries I’ve yet to read, so all the references just went over my head.
I also found it a bit funny because the protagonist is Ayu Mercator’s mystery novelist friend. Mercator was featured in Wings in the Dark, alongside detective Kisarazu, but the narrator in that book was Kisarazu’s mystery novelist friend. While a great detective with a writer assistant is a common trope in detective fiction, I find it amusing how Yutaka has two pairs of them, and that they are explicitly in the same “world.”
Anyway, “I Hate Wednesdays and Fridays” was just fine, but little did I know at the time it was going to be the highlight of the collection….
The second story is Masaya Yamaguchi’s “I'm Afraid of Poisoned Manjus,” which is a spoof on the rakugo story “I'm Afraid of Manjus.” While any Ace Attorney fan will already know this, rakugo is a form of traditional comedic Japanese storytelling. Anyway, this is probably my least favorite story of the collection, for being an utter thematic failure without even presenting a decent mystery.
“I'm Afraid of Poisoned Manjus” can essentially be divided into three parts. The first part is basically a straight retelling of the traditional “I'm Afraid of Manjus” story. The second part takes place forty years later, and serves as the main “mystery.” The third part is a quick denouement (or perhaps it’s more appropriate to call it the punchline).
As I said, the story is a thematic failure. There’s absolutely nothing tying together the first and second parts, other than the fact that they each involve manju. The protagonist changes his name during the intervening forty years (and is the only returning character), which makes the parts feel especially disconnected. While “I'm Afraid of Manjus” is about using cleverness to get what you want (and perhaps taking it a bit too far), the second part has nothing to do with that and the “mystery” is little more than a basic logic puzzle.
The denouement then feels like a baka-mys since it is based on a literal punchline. What annoys me about the resolution is that the punchline is just one part of the solution, and everything else is pulled out of nowhere. It would be one thing if the pun was one part of an otherwise clued solution, but what we get instead is a pun followed by exposition from nowhere.
Then we have Takemaru Abiko’s “Project: Sherlock” about a man who creates a mystery-solving AI. It’s not a bad story, but it isn’t a mystery story either. It could be an interesting set-up to a larger story, but it feels like just that: set-up.
I know it isn’t, but in my head I like to pretend it’s an official tie-in story to Crimesight.
At the midpoint of the book comes Alice Arisugawa’s “The Night the Captain Perished.” While I’ve enjoyed Arisugawa’s novels that I’ve read, this story missed the mark. It features Hideo Himura, the detective of the “Writer Alice” series, which is Arisugawa’s most prolific series despite the fact I have not read any of those books yet.
“The Night the Captain Perished” is a standard three-suspect whodunnit, but the answer felt silly to me. This is also the longest story in the collection by far, but I didn’t think there was any particular payoff from that added length. On top of that, the story tries to go for the most generic and predictable stinger at the end, but it can’t even do that correctly. The ending relies on (strained) wordplay, but it’s based on an English word that doesn’t appear to actually exist. So there was a typo or it’s based on a made-up word, and either way feels sloppy.
The fifth story is Rintarou Norizuki’s “The Switched Suicide Notes”. The premise of the mystery was interesting, but I felt it was hampered by the fact it was a short story. This is the first work by Norizuki that I’ve read, and I had heard that he writes in the school of Queen, but… he certainly didn’t do so here. There weren’t any evidence-based logic chains, it was just Norizuki (the character) making baseless conjecture after hearing the premise.
The premise of the story is that two bodies are found in separate locations and each has a suicide note, but each corpse has the other’s note. It’s presented as a case troubling Norizuki’s dad (so there’s strong Queen vibes there, at least), so the dad gives some information, Norizuki theorizes a bit, the dad gives some more information refuting that theory, rinse and repeat. Eventually the dad gives a full, in-depth explanation of the situation and police’s knowledge, but I wish the story had just gone out with that. I can understand how Norizuki (the author) wanted an ebb-and-flow between exposition and theory, but it felt artificial and tedious here.
The cast is small, but the story is more about the how and why than the who. Still, I think the plot would have been more impressive if drawn out into a larger story with legitimate clues and investigation, rather than needing to pull teeth to get the facts and then jumping to the answer.
The penultimate story is Shougo Utano’s “The Dream of the Prodigy.” When war breaks out, the surviving students of a school for geniuses evacuate into an impenetrable bunker under the school. Each student is an expert in a certain field: for instance, one is a polyglot, and another is a botanist. And then a corpse turns up….
Yeah, it’s basically Danganronpa.
It’s an interesting setup for a murder mystery… except it turns out this story isn’t a murder mystery. Which is disappointing, but the “let-down” in the story is soft, so I’m not particularly upset. This story also reminds me of another story in the collection, but I don’t want to say which one, since it’s tied to the “reveal.”
The final story is from the man himself, Yukito Ayatsuji, and is called “Tentative Title: The Locked Room of the Nue.” Yet again, it’s not a mystery. It’s a story about him, Norizuki, and Abiko, who were all college classmates and part of the Kyoto University Mystery Club. Quick background: at the mystery club, members write short whodunnit stories and then at meetings present their mysteries to the other members to solve. The story opens with the three authors at a marketing event to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the shin-honkaku movement, and then they hang out at Ayatsuji’s house (with his wife, who was also part of the mystery club) where they try to remember details of an amazing mystery story that was once presented at the club but that they each can only vaguely remember. So I suppose it is technically a “mystery,” but it’s not detective fiction.
Still, it’s a cute little story about the background of these authors, and some of the other authors in the collection also get mentioned. It’s completely different from everything else in the collection, but that’s probably what makes it the perfect capstone.
Also. I now want Ayatsuji to write a gay romance novel about aspiring mystery authors. (If you’ve read the story, you’ll understand.) I know that’s a weird and awkward thing to say, given that the story is based on real people (and features Ayatsuji’s wife), but… Ayatsuji has shown he has the talent, and the heart wants what the heart wants.
too bad it's not available in english
ReplyDeleteYup. Doesn't seem like the kind of collection that would be translated, but... you never know.
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