Figuring In the 8 in THE 8 MANSION MURDERS (1989)

Originally posted April 22, 2024.

What better way to kick off a mystery novel blog than by reviewing a book with extensive genre references to ones I haven't discussed? Takemaru Abiko's The 8 Mansion Murders was one of the books that kicked off Japan's shin honkaku (neo-orthodox) wave of the 1980s. But unlike Yukito Ayatsuji's The Decagon House Murders, The 8 Mansion Murders is overtly comedic. I was happy to finally check out Locked Room International's release, translated by Ho-Ling Wong. (Unfortunately it no longer seems to be available as an eBook, but the physical edition is still for sale.)

We open with a prologue from the murderer's perspective, in which they praise their own cleverness in designing a brilliant murder trick that exploits the unique layout of the book's eponymous estate. The Hachisuka family home ("Hachi" is homonymous with the Japanese for "eight") is a rectangular building with an interior courtyard with an overhead walkway bisecting the garden, giving it the appearance of an 8 shape from above. A mystery reader would likely raise an eyebrow at this description, feeling that such a specific design has to figure into the murder plot somehow. The murderer, apparently, feels the same way. They do lament "framing someone innocent for the murder," but conclude that it's necessary for the "work of art" they're about to perform.

That night, Yukie Hachisuka witnesses her father being murdered while crossing the covered walkway, shot with a crossbow by a killer in the diagonally opposite window. The room belongs to the household servants' son, Yūsaku Yano, who was sleeping in the room at the time and claims that the windows and door were locked. Logically, Yūsaku is the only possible culprit, but put-upon police inspector Kyōzō Hayami suspects foul play and a frame-up job. He recruits his two detective-fiction-addled younger siblings Shinji and Ichio to see if any of the tricks from their favourite authors could explain how someone else could have pulled the murder off. The answer is "no," but that doesn't stop Shinji and Ichio from kibitzing at every turn and trying their hand at playacting the brooding amateur detective, which culminates in Shinji's sanctimonious attempt at his own "quasi-locked-room lecture":

‘Are you hard of hearing? I said that was it for Dr. Fell’s locked room lecture. But the dear doctor himself says the following: “It’s only a rough offhand outline, but I’ll let it stand.” Listen, when do you think The Hollow Man was written? In 1935! That’s more than fifty years ago. Since then, many detective writers, including Carr himself, have searched for new variations on the locked room.’

Parody mysteries are a tricky balancing act. Mysteries with elaborate mechanical tricks don't tend to be deep character pieces, which means that the humour often has to stem from direct references to famous detectives and the plots and solutions of other novels. But you can't spell out a solution without spoiling it, which means resorting to coded references which only land to readers already familiar with the other works.

There is plenty of that style of comedy on display here—Shinji even name-checks it when he bluntly states of a Clayton Rawson short story, "I don't really feel like revealing the trick to people who haven't read it." But I appreciated Abiko's skill at writing a comic novel in itself, on top of using legitimate murder tricks (one of which was unfortunately spoiled for me by an episode of Jonathan Creek). Much of the humour comes from Kyōzō's relationship woes, slapstick from his hapless sidekick Kinoshita, or the highly eccentric cast. Character details like the family patriarch who had originally intended to build the mansion in the shape of an enormous bee, or the secretary who sings children's songs at karaoke, were just as funny as the sly nods to locked-room canon. The ultimate conclusion is own sort of punchline.

The climax of the novel includes a hilarious incorrect deduction about the killer, which is almost certainly a tongue-in-cheek nod to the infamous twist ending of The Portopia Serial Murder Case, an adventure game which came out five years earlier. Portopia is considered the first visual novel, and perhaps it shouldn't surprise me that Abiko would reference it when he went on to write some genre-establishing VNs himself: Kamaitachi no Yoru (localized as Banshee's Last Cry) and 428: Shibuya Scramble, a comedic thriller-mystery that was also at the time the only VN to receive a perfect 100 rating in Famitsu magazine. The 8 Mansion Murders was not a perfect 100 in my book, but it did make me bust a gut more than once.