Anyway, Nobody Can Pass Judgment on Me is the third entry in the Lychee Kamiki series, and my favorite so far. One day Lychee, our high schooler prostitute detective heroine, receives a package with a maid outfit and a letter from a man named Touzou Sakai requesting to hire Lychee as a live-in maid for the first week of May. Lychee has never heard of him before, but an internet search reveals that he and his brother run a massive machinery business—in other words, he’s filthy rich. It’s an odd request and Lychee isn’t sure whether she’s actually being hired as a maid or if that’s just a cover to take in an escort, but Lychee can’t resist the allure of cold, hard cash. So she goes to the Sakai estate and is hired as a maid—but it’s clear from her interactions with Touzou that he didn’t actually send the letter. The letter had Touzou’s personal seal, so it must have come from someone in the house. Lychee resolves to get to the bottom of this strange situation—but the next morning one of Touzou’s sons is discovered murdered in his room.
But that’s only half of the story. Lychee’s viewpoint alternates with Kouhei Toda, a high school student from Saitama prefecture. He essentially becomes depressed after a traumatic experience, and finds himself spending weekends aimlessly sitting in a park (while telling his parents he’s hitting the books). One day, a beautiful woman clearly being followed by an older man slips Kouhei an SOS note. Kouhei helps the woman escape, and the two become involved—which leads to legal trouble for Kouhei. (I’m being purposefully vague here, since I think this part of the book will be more fun if you don’t know what it’s about going in.)
The plot is a delightful puzzler. It’s not perfect, but the flaws are neutrals rather than negatives. It would be great if the fact that the two storylines tie together at the end was a big twist, but it’s not, since obviously they wouldn’t be included if they weren’t related. (I will say that the beautiful woman Kouhei encounters is related to Touzou.) On the topic of big twists, in most mysteries the grand revelation at the end serves to neatly resolve all the apparent inconsistencies that built up over the course of the story. But the big twist of this book just makes the crime seem more impossible, which I thought was great plotting. Unfortunately, the issue is resolved almost immediately—I would have liked it if the twist had been allowed to hang in the air a bit—but I loved how the “big trick” was just a stepping stone and not the destination.
The beginning deals with some pretty heavy topics and has sex scenes that are more explicit than the previous books in the series. (Fortunately the sex scenes are confined to the first act.) That being said, sex feels more deeply woven into the plot of Nobody Can Pass Judgment on Me than the other books, which I appreciate. In the other stories it felt like you could remove the sex (with a bit of tweaking) and maintain the core of the story and tricks, but I don’t think there’s any way you could maintain Nobody Can Pass Judgment on Me without sex. Yabusaka has made erotica his shtick, and I like that he’s actually leveraging it rather than merely tacking it on out of obligation.
I also enjoyed the way Rainbow Toothbrushes was tied in. Without going into spoilers, Rainbow Toothbrushes had an odd ending where it was unclear what was real and what was not. Yabusaka resolved that issue in Nobody Can Pass Judgment on Me by having the end of Rainbow Toothbrushes be a dream… which now that I’ve actually typed out sounds lame, but really works here. The issue with the “it was all a dream” trope is that it cheaply and lazily invalidates events and stakes we, the audience, were invested in since we thought they were real (within the world of the work). But the ending of Rainbow Toothbrushes is clearly not fully “real” within the world of Lychee Kamiki—so turning it into a dream imparts meaning onto events that we otherwise thought were irrelevant.
There’s also a fair amount of involvement with the Japanese legal system in the book (there’s a reason “judgment” is in the title), and while Yabusaka doesn’t sound like a lawyer, he does sound like he did his research, which I appreciate.
While not perfect, Nobody Can Pass Judgment on Me is a tightly-plotted story that knows how to push all the right buttons. It’s an easy recommendation if you’ve read previous Lychee Kamiki stories, or if you like puzzle plots (and don’t mind hard erotica).
And one last point, in rot-13 and only for people who have read the book. (Seriously, don’t look if you haven’t read the book—not only will it spoil you, but it probably won’t make any sense either.) V nz qrsvavgryl va gur pnzc gung guvaxf Zvfnxv ebgngrq gur ybjre cebcryyre. Vs fur ebgngrq gur hccre cebcryyre gurer jnf n evfx gung Gbhmbh (be fbzrbar ryfr) jbhyq abgvpr uvf ebbz jnf va gur jebat ybpngvba jura ur jbxr hc. Fb gb ryvzvangr gung evfx, vg unq gb unir orra gur ybjre cebcryyre gung jnf ebgngrq. Bs pbhefr, gurl pna ab ybatre trg Gbhmbh’f grfgvzbal gb pbasvez jurgure ur abgvprq gur cbfvgvba bs uvf orqebbz jura ur jbxr hc gung zbeavat, fb V fhccbfr gung cbvag vf zbbg (naq yvxr gur snpg gung gur cybg vf noyr gb jvgufgnaq guvf “ubyr”).
No comments:
Post a Comment