Illusion Acts Like Magic / 幻惑の死と使途

Illusion Acts Like Magic begins with Moe meeting her friend Tomoe Minosawa and going to a magic show. Saikawa was supposed to come as well (a date!) but backs out at the last second because Saikawa. Tomoe is Moe’s best friend from high school. For a long time Tomoe saw Moe as an academic rival, while Moe… had no idea Tomoe existed. But once Tomoe confronted Moe they became fast friends. Anyway, Tomoe doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of the book. At the magic show Moe receives an ad for an upcoming magic show at a local park, and that’s where the plot of the book really begins.

The show at the park is a disappearing act performed by Shougen Arisato, a famous veteran stage magician. He goes inside a box, which is moved onto on a floating wooden platform on a lake in the park. A detonation blows the box into the water, where it is recovered by a team of divers. Nevertheless, Shougen emerges from the box, completely unharmed! (Other than the knife in his chest.) 

Magic is an inherently enthralling subject for a murder mystery. Magic tricks are basically mini-mysteries themselves, and having a murder during a trick automatically casts doubt on what exactly happened, allows for all sorts of wondrous scenarios, and provides a vehicle for ridiculous physical set-ups without being contrived. For instance, here Shougen is stabbed despite the fact that nobody ever approaches him or the box, which is constantly monitored. There’s an inherent question of how the trick was performed, and how the murder could have been performed within it. 

One element of Illusion Acts Like Magic that I appreciate is the fact that, perhaps more than any other magician-themed mystery I’ve read, the crimes feel like they were set up and carried out like a magic trick. I don’t want to get too specific, but there’s a difference between just stabbing a guy in the middle of a magic trick, and using misdirection, props, and artifice. Especially compared to another magician mystery I recently read, where magic was essentially used as a black box for the magician to perform any sort of sleight-of-hand. Also, since Shougen was the victim and (supposedly) the only one who knew how the trick at the lake worked, there was no contrived “a magician never reveals their secrets… even in a murder investigation” shtick. 

There’s a fair amount of fluffy character writing in this book (I feel like I’m starting to sound like a broken record), but also enough meat on the bones of the mystery that I didn’t feel like the character scenes were intrusive. Mori continues to be enamored with relationships between young females and older males in mentorship roles, but what else is new…. The way Moe gets into danger (it’s Moe, you know there’s a 50/50 shot of that happening in any given book) is particularly egregious this book. Also, this might be a bit of an odd nitpick, but the final chapter was really long. It definitely feels like it could’ve been broken up into two or three chapters—but I understand why Mori couldn’t (and will explain later). 

The solution initially seemed incredibly contrived, but after the initial explanation it’s recontextualized in a way that made it much easier for me to swallow. Plus, as I described earlier, thinking of it as a magic trick made it much more palatable. Also, even though Saikawa has been the one to solve and explain the crime in every book up until now, Moe has always been desperate to solve the crimes her own, and Illusion presents a nice evolution of that dynamic.

I think the only part left is the title, since Mori likes to put little jokes in there and I don’t want you to miss it. The meaning of the English title of the book is pretty straightforward. The Japanese title, “Genwaku no Shi to Shito,” means “The Death and Use of Illusion,” which… honestly, I don’t really get. I maybe kinda get it, but I’m not entirely sure. I think it’s mostly just for the “shi-to shito” wordplay, so overall I’m not a huge fan of this title. (I suspect Who Inside was probably the high point of the series in terms of titles.) 

Illusion Acts Like Magic is a fun book with a fun set-up and fun mysteries. Mori continues to be obsessed and enamored with his own characters for reasons that are beyond me, but the plot is strong enough to carry to day and serves as a great example of a magic show mystery.