Switch Back begins with Moe and Saikawa driving to Moe’s family villa nestled in the mountains. As they’re driving, Moe tells Saikawa about a murder case that happened in the villa next to her family’s. The bulk of the book consists of an extended flashback, with a few brief cuts to Moe and Saikawa in the present.
Despite the framing, the story isn’t told from Moe’s perspective, but the perspective of a man named Sasaki. Who is absolutely awful. A large part of my disdain for this book stems from the fact that Sasaki is a misogynistic jerk. And, to be honest, the way the book treats Sasaki makes me think Mori might be too.
Anyway, Sasaki is attending a party at the country house of fashion designer Reiji Hashitzume, dragged there by his fiancée, Mariko, whom he hates. (Not explicitly, but it’s pretty clear.) Sasaki can’t stand the constant, vapid prittle-prattle from the woman, and so goes for a walk in the surrounding mountains. There he encounters—and immediately falls in love with—a stunningly beautiful young woman who introduces herself as Nishinosono.
The girl explains how her family owns the neighboring house, but she left in anger after her aunt tried to secretly set her up with someone, and is now trying to get to the base of the mountain. Sasaki agrees to drive her to the train station so they head back to the Hashitzume manor, although it starts to heavily rain on the way back. It turns out to be a typhoon, so they instead plan to have Nishinosono spend the night and go to the train station in the morning.
Of course, one night is all that’s needed for the protagonist curse to take effect. Hashitzume’s manor has three floors. Most of the guest rooms are on the second floor, and the third floor solely consists of a home theater, divided into a viewing area and a projector room. Nishinosono wakes up Sasaki in the middle of the night, saying she heard a scream from the room above her. They go to investigate the theater, but find both the theater and projector room locked from the inside. After spending some time in the kitchen (and discovering that basically the entire house is still awake), they get concerned again, and resolve to break into the rooms—discovering a corpse in each.
Obviously, the typhoon has taken down the telephone and blocked the road, meaning they’re trapped in the mansion… except they’re able to contact the police with a short-wave radio, and the police are able to send a small contingent in the morning. So it initially feels like it’s going to be an “isolated manor” story, but ultimately isn’t.
Nishinosono naturally gets intrigued by the case, and Sasaki is intrigued in Nishinosono’s panties, so the two snoop around. Well, Sasaki sexually assaults Nishinosono so she gets mad at him and goes off on her own, but then she gets over it and they investigate together. (In Sasaki’s defense, how could he possibly resist? Nishinosono is Not Like Other Girls and can actually discuss scientific concepts!!)
I should probably mention that Sasaki is in his 40s. Not that being younger would excuse his sexual transgressions, but the age gap just makes it that much worse.
As I said earlier, the mystery plot is bare. It’s clever and elegant, but there are no incidents after the initial deaths, so the denouement is literally only a few paragraphs, despite the decent length of the book as a whole. Most of the investigation proceeds by someone developing a theory based on information we didn’t know, and then having that theory disproven based on information we didn’t know. And only a portion of the book is devoted to the investigation, with the rest based on character development, which is basically pointless other than for the “romance.” Of all the mystery novels I’ve read that I felt would have benefitted from being a short story, I think Switch Back would benefit the most.
And the worst part is, Sasaki essentially wins! Despite being a misogynistic idiot, he’s vindicated and rewarded! Obviously having a character that’s a jerk doesn’t condone that character’s actions, even if that character is the protagonist… but when that character succeeds and is never called out, it does start to feel like the author unironically supported them.
The Japanese title is a bit hard to translate since it’s a sentence fragment that doesn’t transpose well into English, but if I took a stab it would be something like “not anymore.” But neither title particularly connects to the story anyway.
There’s a sliver of good in Switch Back, but it’s not worth all the muck you need to trudge through. Mori needs to get over himself and the crushes he has on all of his characters. Read a summary, or just outright skip (which you can safely do). Switch Back isn’t the first (or even second) time an awful protagonist has ruined a story for me, and it unfortunately likely won’t be the last.
(My least favorite S&M books are two, four, and eight… so I guess I’m just an opponent of exponents.)
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