The Man Who Died Seven Times / 七回死んだ男

After Evelyn Hardcastle died seven and a half times, dying seven times just doesn’t seem that impressive…

The protagonist of The Man Who Died Seven Times is Hisatarou Ooba (although, due to a quirk in the Japanese language, pretty much everyone calls him Kyuutarou instead). He has a special… condition. Every so often (about four times a month) he falls into a “repetition pitfall” where he experiences the same day nine times until he finally moves onto the next day for real. The “repetition pitfalls” are completely random, and Kyuutarou has no control over when they happen. In fact, he can’t realize he’s in one until the day loops the first time. Each day loops exactly from midnight to midnight, and the day fully resets each loop with nobody’s memories carrying over except Kyuutarou’s. Additionally, only the ninth, final loop carries over into the next “real” day. 

Anyway, Kyuutarou is part of a rich family embroiled in an inheritance dispute (because of course he is). Grandpa is a rich jerk (because of course he is) with three daughters. The middle daughter helped build and run the company but is a spinster, while the older daughter (Kyuutarou’s mom) and younger daughter are both in financial straits (because of course they are) and so are desperately maneuvering to make one of their kids the heir to the family fortune. 

Since Kyuutarou’s family is weird and dysfunctional, him and his cousins only visit Grandpa once per year, at New Year’s. On January 2, the last day of the visit, Kyuutarou gets caught by Grandpa and is forced to spend all day drinking with him. (Kyuutarou is a high school freshman, by the way.) When Kyuutarou wakes up “the next day” still at Grandpa’s house, he realizes he’s fallen into a repetition pitfall. He can’t stand spending the next eight days straight getting blackout drunk, so he stealthily avoids Grandpa that day… only for the family to later discover Grandpa’s dead, with his head smashed in. 

Oh no! Anyway… 

Okay, fine, there is no “anyway,” that’s the plot. While Kyuutarou is oddly indifferent to Grandpa’s death, he does resolve to find a way to avoid it, since it is technically his “fault”: in a repetition pitfall, everything will play out the same way every day so long as Kyuutarou acts the same. Kyuutarou acted differently (by avoiding Grandpa and not drinking with him), and therefore any differences from the original loop (in this case, Grandpa’s death) must (somehow) be the result of Kyuutarou’s changed actions. This also means that Kyuutarou can save Grandpa by just biting the bullet and drinking with him, but he saves that as a last resort. (Which, in fairness, might explain Kyuutarou’s muted reaction to Grandpa’s death—from the beginning it’s essentially guaranteed that Grandpa will be saved, one way or another.) 

Grandpa’s death seems rudely persistent, however. Whenever Kyuutarou falls into a repetition pitfall, the original day tends to serve as the “model” the other days follow. In the absence of outside forces, events typically to default to what happened in the original iteration of the day. Maybe the actors will change, but the “events” remain relatively consistent. Since there was no murder on the original loop, Kyuutarou thinks it should just take a small push to get the day to return to its “default” of not having Grandpa die… except, no matter what Kyuutarou does, Grandpa is murdered. 

You might think that if you know a murder is going to occur, it should be easy to figure out who did it and then stop them. And you’d be right! Kyuutarou’s family is… quite far from a group of criminal masterminds. Whenever Grandpa dies, he’s able to find the person responsible for the incident almost immediately. The issue is, if Kyuutarou then stops that person the next loop, someone else ends up causing the incident. So the book becomes a game of murder whack-a-mole, where Kyuutarou is trying to juggle an increasingly large pool of potential culprits. 

So I think that’s one of the first reasons The Man Who Died Seven Times fell flat for me. There isn’t much to “solve” since, with Kyuutarou’s knowledge, he can identify the culprit almost immediately. Instead it’s about how he’ll try to prevent the incident and how the incident will occur despite his efforts, which… is entertaining, but not the same type of entertainment as a traditional detective story. 

Nevertheless, The Man Who Died Seven Times is still structured as a detective story. There’s a big reveal at the end! Only it doesn’t change anything. The denouement occurs after the final loop, when Grandpa has been saved. (That’s not a spoiler, if Kyuutarou failed in his mission the book would’ve been called “The Man Who Died Eight Times.”) Sure, the reveal recontextualizes certain scenes and explains some seemingly-unnatural points, but the main goal in the book was saving Grandpa, and that isn’t affected at all. Imagine a locked room mystery novel where the culprit is exposed near the end because a bloody knife falls out of their pocket, and then the denouement explains their motive. Yes this is adding detail and context to the story, but it’s not adding anything to the main conflict, which has already been resolved. 

Despite its structure, The Man Who Died Seven Times is not a detective story, and maybe I could have found more enjoyment in it if I actually cared about any of the characters. Everyone in the story is either awful or underdeveloped. Grandpa in particular is a monster, which is not a great look when the whole book is about saving him. He never gets any comeuppance, and in fact the book seems to portray him sympathetically by the end. Kyuutarou only has brothers, and all his cousins are women, so there is talk of marriage between the two families, but nobody brings up the fact that they’re cousins?? For the record, Kyuutarou isn’t left out of marriage talks, even though he’s a high school freshmen and all the women in the novel are at least in their 20s. (I’ll admit I don’t know about Japan’s consent laws, but in America that’d be statutory rape.) 

It’s difficult to care about what happens to these people when they’re all just awful. They’re awful, and yet everything still gets neatly wrapped up with a little bow for them. The lack of comeuppance is unsatisfactory. Except then at the end the book hints that perhaps things aren’t as rosy as they appear, and there’s trouble on the horizon…? Which then makes me wonder what the point of Kyuutarou going through all that trouble and why I had to bother reading the book if it’s all just going to get undone at the next family gathering. In other words, The Man Who Died Seven Times simply can’t win on this point. Maybe I’m being unfair, but that’s what happens when you don’t have a single likable character. 

The prose doesn’t fare much better, since it’s repetitive and verbose. There is an entire chapter near the beginning of the book dedicated to explaining how the “repetition pitfalls” work which I thought went on a bit longer than it needed to, but fine, you get all the exposition out of the way at the beginning and then we’re good, right? No, every single time Kyuutarou interacts with someone and uses knowledge he gained from a previous loop, we get a passage describing how when Kyuutarou is in a repetition pitfall he retains his memories from loop to loop but nobody else does and in the absence of outside forces acts exactly the same each loop so Kyuutarou has this special knowledge that the other person doesn’t have and can use to his advantage. Or if Kyuutarou wonders about something somebody said or did in a previous loop the book explains how the only person who retains their memories each loop is Kyuutarou, so even though Kyuutarou wants to ask this person about what they did in a previous loop he cannot do so anymore because even though Kyuutarou maintained his memories the other person doesn’t have their memories of that event anymore because their memories are reset each loop while Kyuutarou is the only person whose memories carry over from loo—I GET IT. 

I also want to say that it irks me how Kyuutarou seems to view his Grandpa’s death as an isolated incident. If there is someone out there that wants to kill Grandpa and cause his death, will preventing his death this time do anything in the long run if the underlying motive isn’t addressed? It doesn’t become an issue, but it seems like it’d be a shame to go through all this and save Grandpa today only for the culprit to strike tomorrow. 

The Man Who Died Seven Times is competently plotted, although it’s more about just seeing what happens than trying to solve the death, and leaves plenty to be desired in the characters and the writing. It’s fine to read if you want every time loop mystery you can get, although I’d generally recommend The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle above this.