Tomoe’s father is a rich politician, and while Tomoe is in Tokyo for school the rest of her family lives in an isolated villa (uh oh). The day Tomoe meets with Moe, two armed kidnappers appear at Tomoe’s family’s home and abduct the family, taking them to the family’s summer house a few hours away. Tomoe returns to an empty house that night. The next morning, just as Tomoe realizes her family still hasn’t returned, a third armed kidnappers breaks into the house and holds Tomoe hostage. They eventually drive to the summer house as well—but when Tomoe arrives, it turns out two of the kidnappers have been shot to death. The third kidnapper immediately flees, leaving Tomoe and her family.
The kidnappers’ deaths seem straightforward at first glance: they were each shot once, and each is holding the other’s murder weapon. But the initial investigation immediately shows that things are not as simple as they appear. The biggest issue is the fact that the corpses were moved after their death. But by whom? And if there was someone who “moved” the bodies, could that person have “created” the bodies as well? Tomoe’s family testifies that they heard two gunshots hours before Tomoe arrived. But that doesn’t seem to leave any suspects. Tomoe’s family remained together inside the summer house the entire time, while Tomoe and the third kidnapper were at the main house several hours away. (Tomoe’s father talked to Tomoe on the main house’s landline that morning, proving she and the other kidnapper really were there, in case there was any doubt.)
The police suspect that there was a fourth kidnapper who stayed out of sight of Tomoe’s family, killed the first two kidnappers, arranged their bodies to make it look like they killed each other, then planned to ambush the third kidnapper when he arrived with Tomoe, but the third kidnapper fled before that could happen. Which does seem to line up with the physical clues, but doesn’t feel quite “right.”
Tomoe and her family need to deal with the trauma and aftermath of being kidnapped, while Moe is busy solving the murder in Illusion (it’s much flashier and more glamorous), but eventually Moe learns of Tomoe’s case and starts sniffing around that as well.
If this wasn’t complicated enough, Tomoe’s older brother is a blind poet who seems to disappear during the kidnapping, so the question of what happened to him gets thrown into the mix as well. (He wasn’t kidnapped—but when the family returns to the house, he isn’t there.) Normally a person disappearing wouldn’t be a huge mystery, but the brother is blind, meaning he couldn’t escape on his own. Plus his bedroom door was always locked. From the outside.
One of the more interesting aspects of this book is its relationship with Illusion. As I already said, Illusion and Summer take place simultaneously, but Mori goes even further. While I didn’t mention in it my review, Illusion only has odd-numbered chapters. Summer begins on chapter two and only has even-numbered chapters. In other words, the alternate chapters from the two books form one cohesive timeline (even though, outside of Tomoe’s appearance in chapter one of Illusion, there are no explicit references or clues for one book in the other). While it doesn’t change the substance of the books or the plots, it’s a fun little experiment that structurally sets these books apart. (Also, every chapter name in Illusion begins with “奇” and every chapter name in Summer begins with “偶”—in Japanese, 奇数 is “odd numbers” and 偶数 is “even numbers.”)
By the way, if you remember my Illusion review, I mentioned how the final chapter was really long, and said I’d touch upon why that was later. And then never did—in that review. Because I’m doing it now! It’s because of this structure with Summer. Each pair of consecutive chapters of Illusion needs to have a chapter of Summer between it. Which meant that if the climax was split into multiple chapters, there would need to be time and action related to Summer inserted into the middle of it. It wouldn’t disrupt the reading experience (since you wouldn’t need to read the Summer chapter), but would require integrating that into the plot—which I understand Mori didn’t want to do, and instead just went with an extra-long chapter.
The S&M series feels like it has a fair amount of character fluff, which I don’t care for, and it feels especially prominent here. The vast majority of clues are presented in the initial investigation, and after that it’s mostly character writing and descriptions of the police being stumped. I suspect this is also due to the structure with Illusion; given the structure, all the space between the Illusion chapters needs to be filled with something, after all. In Illusion the only time I felt book was affected by the alternating structure was the final chapter, but Summer really felt held back by the requirement that it keep pace with Illusion.
The older brother really ends up feeling like a big, weird waste of time. And normally that wouldn’t be notable, except it also introduces a heaping portion of misogyny. If you’re going to add red herrings, can you at least not go out of your way to make them incredibly offensive?
There’s a part of the main trick that feels unfair and contrived, that could have easily been tweaked to be fair. And yet the answer is cheeky in a way where I just can’t help but chuckle. I like the idea, I just wish the execution was a bit better, but I can’t really bring myself to be mad over it.
I also really liked the denouement. I know that in pretty much every review for this series I complain that Mori seems incredibly enamored with his own characters and wastes a bunch of time on pointless character scenes, but it’s the character scenes that set the ground to make the denouement work. So I guess he can get a pass, at least this one time.
Replaceable Summer is another solid entry in the S&M series. There are a lot of individual elements I didn't enjoy, but I just can't bring myself to dislike the book as a whole. I’m not putting it up there with the best, but it’s not a stinker. The most interesting part about it is probably the intertwined structure with Illusion. Which, in a certain sense, is only a surface-level convolution since both books still function and can be read independently. I understand why Mori wanted each book to be able to stand on its own—it would have been neat to tie them into each other more deeply, but I suppose at a certain point you’d run into the question of whether splitting your story into two separate books is actually adding anything (other than convolution and annoyance). But it’s neat to see Mori continue to experiment even as he gets deep into this series.
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