While some books take a while to get into the action, Murderer vs. Maniac wastes no time. The opening scene is all about the protagonist killing someone!
...Wait, what?
Okay, okay, that's not entirely true. The opening scene is about how the protagonist prepares to kill someone in the middle of the night, but then discovers that someone else has beaten them to the punch. And jammed a kumquat into the victim's eye socket.
...Wait, what?
When the body is discovered the next day, based on the kumquat and lack of other apparent motive, the group concludes that the crime must have been committed by a pleasure-killing maniac. And while that is conjecture for the group, the book guarantees to us that one of the characters is in fact Serial Killer X.
Murderer vs. Maniac takes place in a facility for orphaned (and/or troubled) children and teenagers on an isolated island. We quickly learn about how a group of bullies tormented one of the girls into attempting suicide, and that incident is what pushed the protagonist into committing his crimes. As the title suggests, Murderer vs. Maniac is about a showdown between two killers: a serial-killing maniac whose bizarre rationale seems inscrutable to the ordinary mind, and a calculating murderer who has resolved to stain their hands with blood to enact righteous vengeance for their friend. (The first victim was the leader of the bullies.) And since our protagonist is one of the criminals, that means he needs to figure out who the other killer is without getting caught himself.
I liked this book a lot! It's on the shorter side and easy to read, but dense in clues and information it provides (at least in retrospect). Murderer vs. Maniac is by Yabusaka Hayasaka, and I already knew from The ???????? Murder Case that he's great at hiding clues in plain sight. But, while The ???????? Murder Case had a slow beginning that seemed to do little but actually laid the groundwork for many clues (as I noted in my review), Murderer vs. Maniac hits the ground running, so it feels like a noticeable improvement. Hayasaka's mysteries feel physically simple, but he's fantastic at wrapping an entire plot around one wild idea and it was refreshing getting to read a Hayasaka story without having to suffer through (not-quite-)gratuitous sex scenes.
All the characters are teenagers (or younger) and have quirks with Ace Attorney-style pun names, which certainly contributes to a light novel-ish atmosphere. (The adult caretakers need to suddenly leave the island due to an emergency, leaving only the kids, which is why the protagonist chooses to commit his murders when he does.) For instance, one kid claims to be the child of a great Italian detective and tries to act as the detective himself, while another girl is allegedly possessed by a mirror demon who can take over her body. It takes a certain buy-in to the world of the novel, but I enjoyed the eccentricities. The mirror demon girl is worked into the mystery in a particularly cool way.
If you're looking for a Serious Mystery, you might not enjoy all the shenanigans. If kids killing kids bothers you, that's another reason to pass on this book as well. (While the protagonist's first attempt is foiled, I will say that they do commit at least one murder over the course of the book.) The ending is also pretty weird; it almost feels like it's missing resolution, but I also don't think there's anything else that could have been done.
Murderer vs. Maniac is a nice little treat, if you don't mind the murderous protagonist. While the isolated-island-in-a-storm setting is trite, the protagonist committing murders while trying to solve other murders provides a refreshing avenue of tension, the characters are fun, and the mystery contains a decent chunk of unique ideas despite its compact page count. If you were interested in Yabusaka but turned off by overt eroticism of the Lychee Kamiki series, Murderer vs. Maniac is definitely worth a shot.
Out of curiosity, any word on an English translation, and are there any moments you think would get screwed over if such a translation were to occur?
ReplyDeleteI haven't heard anything, but I also don't keep close tabs on Japanese mystery translations. I suppose this probably would be more likely to be translated than a Kamiki Lychee book...
DeleteLanguage does play a pretty big role in the book. Most of the places language shows up would, in my opinion, range from reasonable to very hard to naturally port to English (there's one sequence that seems incredibly difficult, but that I think could be done handily with one small tweak), but there is one point that I think is basically impossible, because it literally doesn't exist in English. You could maybe try to get close, but the issue is that the closest English analog would be a "usually" while in Japanese it's an "always", and it's the fact that it's an "always" that makes it important. So I think this would be a tricky book to translate.