Snow White / スノーホワイト

Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the cleverest of them all?

Snow White is a light, cute and unique book, and now that I’ve read the second Sanzunokawa book, I think I have a much better idea of how this series operates. They are deductive novels, not murder mysteries. They involve some supernatural element, with the characters trying to achieve some goal revolving around that supernatural element.

And the series detective, Kotowari Sanzunokawa, is the villain.

Cat Food / キャットフード

Cat Food is a book about man-eating shape-shifting magic cats.

In the world of Cat Food cats can talk and have their very own laws and society, hidden just beyond our own. A very small percentage of cats are born with the ability to shape-shift and are known as “bakeneko”. So what happens when a group of unsuspecting humans visit an island full of bakeneko trying to kill them? Well, presumably nothing good for the humans...

Two Detectives and One Watson / 一つ屋根の下の探偵たち

A certain passage struck me when I was reading Moonlight Game. It was a passage near the beginning of the book, when the characters were discussing Agatha Christie's novels. It suddenly occurred to me at the time that I, an American, was reading what was essentially a Socratic dialogue penned by a Japanese man in Japanese almost half a century ago about the writings of a British woman from a century ago. And I was following it.

At this point in humanity's history we have created an unfathomable amount of literature, and we are in an age of unprecedented access to this literature. And, if Sturgeon's law is to be believed, only a small portion of that literature is good. So how do you figure out what's decent, so you don't end up spending your life reading the mountains and mountains of junk? One of the ways is to read the works that have withstood the test of time, receiving the stamp of approval from each successive generation and becoming the "classics."

I bring this up because Two Detectives and One Watson is now the most current detective novel I have read, having been written by Morikawa Tomoki in the hyper-modern year of... 2013. When reading a "classic," even if I end up thinking it wasn't very good, I still think the time spent reading it was worthwhile by sheer virtue of it being a classic. But when reading a modern book, I always have the concern that it's going to be a mediocre waste of time. So I am happy to report that today's book, Two Detectives and One Watson, is a light, fun detective novel with an interesting premise and a satisfying solution.