Soji Shimada

I don’t know if contemporary Japanese author Sōji Shimada is a member of the Detection Club, but he deserves to be — both because of his excellent novel and due to Shimada’s strictly maintaining the club’s promise to play fair with readers in their novels. (Founded in 1930, the Detection Club was originally all British. The great G.K. Chesterton was its first president, and it continues to this day.)

Shimada promises more than once that he gives you every clue you need to solve the show more crime, and he’s true to his word. Even so, I never guessed the culprit, and I suspect that most readers won’t. I was utterly delighted that this was the first of a series featuring slacker astrologer Kiyoshi Mitarai and his Watson, illustrator Kazumi Ishioka. It’s hard not to dislike Kiyoshi, just as it’s impossible not to love the eager beaver Kazumi; however, Kiyoshi could play Sherlock Holmes like no other. I’m so glad there are sequels. Highly recommended. show less

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An amateur detective races to solve a decades-old murder mystery in this “bloody and bizarre” Japanese crime novel with a twist hailed as “one of the most original” (Daily Mail).

Astrologer, fortune teller, and self-styled detective Kiyoshi Mitarai must solve a macabre murder mystery that has baffled Japan for 40 years—in just one week.

With the help of his freelance illustrator friend, Kiyoshi sets out to answer the questions that have haunted show more the country ever since: Who murdered the artist Umezawa, raped and killed his daughter, and then chopped up the bodies of six others to create Azoth, ‘the perfect woman’?

With maps, charts, and other illustrations, this story of magic and illusion—pieced together like a great stage tragedy—challenges the reader to unravel the mystery before the final curtain falls.

This quintessential Japanese “logic mystery”—eerie, gory, and intriguing—combines the puzzle-solving of Golden Age Western detective fiction with elements of shocking horror and dark humor.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Japanese locked-room mysteries are pretty much exemplars of the genre. Unlike Dame Agatha's versions of the genre, they include a bit more gore...this one feels like it could easily have made itself a mild body-horror story with very little authorial effort...but the focus really is on the puzzle.

That focus is evident from the epistolary outset. The entire first thirty-plus pages is a letter written in 1936. It is the statement of purpose for the rest of the book: A murderer pens is intended crimes in detail, explaining why he intends to do these...vile, violent, violating...things to women.

Now, that right there? The crimes being committed against women for a man's gratification? That will get me to Pearl-Rule a book for good and ever. In this case I did not because I felt the facts presented in this introductory letter-cum-statement-of-purpose put the reader into the mindset of knowing the murderer's sickness. As a result, there was no prurient titillation of discovering the women's bodies to learn what had been done to them. I got in my head the purpose of the story, as it shifted into forensics, into crime-solving, because I knew what the crimes were for. I had already decided how twisted and sick the crimes were.

You should know this going in: Misogyny is on full display in very deeply disturbing ways.

Kiyoshi Mitarai, our sleuth, is in the modern day of the book...early 1980s Japan...solving an unsolved cold case. He's unusual in today's world for being a New-Age practitioner of astrology, a thing that was really prominent in culture at that time. He gets interested because the daughter of the police detective who failed to solve the case, dead now after a blighted career from this case, thinks her dad's soul can rest if the failure is reversed by solving it. Her brother horns in and sets our sleuth a serious time limit of five days to complete the puzzle, or the son will blow up old dirt about Kiyoshi.

As is necessary for a locked-room puzzle to get solved, Kiyoshi has a sidekick to think out loud to, and to do some legwork that the audience doesn't need to see. We'll learn it when mystery book lover, and importantly book illustrator, Kazumi Ishioka delivers the information anyway. (Side note: There is, for each timeline, a dramatis personae...prepare to use it A LOT.) The way the story is presented is largely through these two guys sitting and talking through what they know, how they know it, where they've been, and the like. Direct action? Not a lot. Fun little grace notes of these dudes preening for each other, making friend-jokes, talking about stuff that really does have something to do with the case but does not look like it? I'll read that over a run-around drenched in gore-fest. The world is violent enough.

The story's replete with floorplans and crime-scene illustrations (courtesy of Kizumi) and the details are numerous, hard to track, well-buried meanings abound. It is a delightful time for logic-puzzle reader. It turns meta when, approaching the end, the author directly addresses the reader, asking if we've solved the puzzle yet. Okay, thought I, now I'm aware that I have all the information I need to do it. So I sat me down to think. I flipped to some illustrations. I thought some more. I came up with a perp's identity. I read the rest of the story.

I was wrong. I was sure I was right, and I did not see until it was explained to me what I had missed.
That's a reading experience I really enjoy a lot. Get you one for some #Deathtober fun and games. show less

The Crooked House, built in the north of Hokkaido, Japan, by a wealthy magnate, certainly lives up to its name. The whole house slants, floors are on a slope, and tables and chairs have to be calibrated to accommodate the incline. The house also has a leaning tower at the same angle as the one in Pisa. The owner, Kazaburo Hamamoto, has invited a group of friends and colleagues to spend Christmas with him and his daughter, Eiko. On Christmas Day, a blizzard rages. By the end of the day, show more someone turns up dead. The next day, another. Both of these are under impossible circumstances, with locked doors and impenetrable rooms. The police are at a loss. Enter Kiyoshi Mitarai, a Great Detective in the classic tradition (the eccentric, gifted amateur).

This mystery is totally bananas, and I say this with affection. The book pays homage to the classics of the Anglo-American tradition of locked-room mysteries. An automaton may remind the reader of John Dickson Carr’s The Crooked Hinge. At one point the characters name-check Edgar Allan Poe and his Mystery of Marie Roget. The book even offers up a “challenge to the reader”, stating that all the clues are present and asking if the reader can solve the case. This reader did not; I don’t generally try to solve mysteries, and I alternate between being annoyed and impressed if I somehow do it without even trying.

I found the book went on a bit too long, especially because Mitarai didn’t show up until 2/3 of the way through. And the solution stretches the bounds of credulity and requires a great deal of disbelief to be suspended—for me, anyway. But if you do like the classical “puzzle-based” locked-room mysteries, this one might be worth trying. show less

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders starts off with a “last will and testament” written by Heikichi Umezawa in 1936. In this document, he detailed his belief that he is possessed and how he came to the realization that killing six of his daughters and nieces would solve his problems. Using their zodiac signs as a guide, he’d take one body part from each young woman and construct Azoth, the perfect woman.

The story then fast forwards to about 40 years later. Kazumi, a mystery fan, is describing show more the facts of the Tokyo Zodiac Murders to his friend Kiyoshi, an astrologer and occasional detective. The six young women were, in fact, killed and mutilated in the manner described in Heikichi’s will, but Heikichi couldn’t possibly have done it: he’d been dead for several days prior to the murders. In addition to Heikichi’s murder and the Azoth murders, one of Heikichi’s other stepdaughters was also killed. No one is sure whether that murder was related to the others or not.

After Kiyoshi takes on a client with a distant but potentially embarrassing connection to the case, Kiyoshi and Kazumi end up with a one-week deadline to solve a mystery that no one else has managed to solve in 40 years. Diagrams included throughout the text invite readers to solve the mystery along with them.

If you like trying to solve mysteries before a book’s fictional detective does, you really need to give this a try. It’s an excellent puzzle, and the author even interjects a couple times in order to let readers know when enough information has been included to allow them to solve the mystery. Of course, he interjects late enough that readers have more information than they need, muddying the water a bit, but that’s part of the fun.

The first part, with Heikichi’s will, was particularly strong. Heikichi casually describing why he needed to kill his daughters and nieces was incredibly creepy. I promise, though, that that’s as creepy as the book gets. Although the description of how the murders were actually accomplished was horrifying, the book’s overall tone didn’t have much of a feeling of creepiness, horror, or even urgency to it. Yes, Kiyoshi only had a week to solve the mystery, but the only things at stake, really, were his ego and reputation. Most of the people directly affected by the Tokyo Zodiac Murders were long dead.

There were a few times when I started to lose interest as the book became a little too “two guys talking about the facts of the case,” but for the most part those facts were really interesting. I had all kinds of theories about who might have killed Heikichi and how Kazue, Heikichi’s eldest stepdaughter, was involved, and who had killed the other women. None of my theories fit all of the facts of the case, and all my theories were torpedoed after Shimada included one particular document.

Kazumi, who was basically Kiyoshi’s Watson, had some ideas of his own that sounded promising, but I was fairly certain that he’d miss the key detail that would bring everything together. By the time Kiyoshi finally announced that he’d solved the murders, both Kazumi and I were thoroughly lost. It got to the point where I felt like Shimada was practically shoving the finished puzzle under my nose and I still couldn’t solve it. It was frustrating and fun at the same time. If it hadn’t been for work and sleep, I’d probably have read the last part of the book, where everything was finally revealed, all in one go. I can confidently say that I’d never have figured everything out on my own. There were aspects that stretched my suspension of disbelief, but, even so, the solution was really good.

All in all, this was a very enjoyable mystery that kept me guessing until the final revelation. It was very deliberately structured like a puzzle that readers were invited to solve along with Kiyoshi and Kazumi, but, despite the author’s two interjections, it still didn’t feel quite as detached as a couple similar mysteries I can think of. Kiyoshi and Kazumi had some life to them and didn’t just feel like pieces on the author’s gameboard. I particularly enjoyed their conversation about Sherlock Holmes and well-known mystery authors, and Kazumi's enjoyment of various locations in Japan made me wish I could visit them myself.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) show less