(Alright, so as far as the Chinese zodiac is concerned, the “water spirit” corresponds more to the dragon rather than the snake, so hopefully the previous paragraph wasn’t blasphemy. But still a funny pattern!)
The narrative of Water Spirit is split into two threads. In the first we follow Genya as he travels to a remote group of villages (where else?) located in a natural basin known as the Hami region. The villages are agricultural, relying mainly on the river flowing from a mountain lake to the west, and thus worship a water spirit known as the Mizuchi. Each village has a shrine, and the priests will perform a rite on the lake to bring or stop rainfall during times of drought and flooding, respectively. Sometimes mysterious occurrences during the rite, and so Genya has come to observe a rainfall rite, which is scheduled to occur.
The other story thread follows a young boy known as Shouichi, who starts off living with his mother and two older sisters in occupied Manchuria. When Japan surrenders and begins to withdraw, the family must flee and return to Japan. Once there, for lack of anywhere else to return to, they go to Hami region, where his mother grew up. Shouichi’s mother, as it turns out, is the estranged daughter of the head priest of the shrine in the top village of the region, as well as a tyrannical, womanizing boor. He takes a “special” interest in Shouichi’s oldest sister, so Shouichi and the other sister vow to watch over their elder sister to protect her from their grandfather. And nothing seems to happen for years, until a rite to bring rainfall is scheduled to occur…
The rite is relatively simple: the villagers prepare a casket and six barrels full of offerings to the water serpent, which are brought up to the lake. One priest takes the offerings into the lake on a boat, while on the shore a priestess performs a ceremonial dance as the other priests play accompaniment music. The priest takes the boat to the other side of the lake and dumps the offerings into an underground cavern known as the mouth of the serpent. Once all offerings have been sucked into the mouth, the rite is complete.
Naturally, the rite heralds the start of a series of bizarre murders. The boat is enclosed (with a hole in the floor to drop the barrels), but no matter how much time passes, the priest performing the rite never leaves the interior to signal the completion of the rite. When the others go to investigate, the priest been stabbed with a sacred relic of the Mizuchi. (Despite the title, none of the deaths in this book are drownings, for some reason.)
Consequently, the boat functions as a locked room. While there was another man on the boat to drive it, he remained outside the enclosure the entire time. Additionally, because the dancing priestess is on a different part of the shore from the priests playing accompaniment, together they had a full view of the lake during the period in question. On top of that, there is only one path through the mountains to the lake, which is monitored during the rite. It seems absolutely impossible for anyone to have infiltrated the boat, or even the lake area.
(Of course, there’s a pretty easy way around all this, although it’s a bit more difficult given this takes place in the aftermath of World War II. But rest assured, even the characters don’t immediately bring it up, which made me worried we’d have an Egyptian Cross problem, this answer is absolutely addressed.)
Water Spirit to me feels a lot like a second attempt at Evil Spirits. In both it takes half the book to reach the first murder, at which point bodies start rapidly dropping, and both involve alternating points of view. (Water Spirit also has a very amusing reference to Evil Spirits.)
Both Headless and Mountain Fiend wrapped their story around a single idea and pushed it as far as it could go, and while Water Spirit doesn’t quite have that same tightness, I still enjoyed it a ton. Water Spirit felt to me like Mitsuda was trying to lean more into what makes the Genya Toujou series special, since it’s the first book where the legends are folklore are real.
Well, not explicitly, but close enough. In the other books, while there would be spooky stories and usually a stinger at the end, the mystery plot never involved anything supernatural. In Water Spirit, while nothing outright supernatural happens, there are events that would require massive amounts of coincidence and contrivance for a rational explanation. For instance, Shouichi’s grandfather has a secret, spooky storehouse hidden in a bamboo grove behind the shrine. A spiritual barrier is apparently present in the grove to prevent others from finding the storehouse. And indeed, every character that enters the grove without some way to bypass the barrier ends up back where they started, rather than the other side. No something that is outright impossible, but a magic barrier is certainly a simpler explanation than multiple characters coincidentally getting lost or not in the exact same pattern we would expect if the barrier were real.
The book never draws attention to this, it’s just woven into the fabric of the narrative. It rains the entire second half of the book, soaking the story in a gloomier atmosphere once the murders start to occur, but the rain starts as soon as the rite is completed—which could be coincidence, or a sign of success.
Water Spirit also starts to dive deeper into the secondary characters surrounding Genya, which I’m not as crazy about, since I don’t care for trite recurring will-they-or-won’t-they subplots, I want weird, spooky, ritualistic murders.
As promised for the series, at the climax we receive a list of questions and several false solutions, although no lecture on mystery fiction—although I figured Mitsuda was starting to run out of topics anyway. At one point I thought the false solutions were going to go in one direction and then they went in another, and I think I would have liked my version better, but Mitsuda avoids the worst ending that would’ve gotten me very mad, so I’ll take it. I’m not sure how physically plausible the solution is, but we’re here for the experience and not complete realism, right? The book also has one particularly great “why didn’t I think of that?” logical turn, which are difficult to pull off but so impressive when they do.
While Water Spirit isn’t the strongest mystery story in the Genya Toujou series (Mitsuda set a high bar for himself), it’s still another fantastic entry, going even further than before in using the folklore and superstition as plot elements rather than decoration. Perhaps it’s just recency bias, but I also think Water Spirit has the most compelling cast so far. (Probably because it puts you in the shoes of a group of innocent kids and makes each other character a clear ally or enemy, creating a clear set of characters to root for and against. Which is cheap, but effective.) Either way, Water Spirit is another hit in a consistently great series.
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