Sometimes you discover something isn't available in English and kick rocks in disappointment. Other times, at least if you're me, the fact that something is not available in English, and barely anyone has talked about it at all, only drives a stubborn obsession with tracking it down regardless. That was what happened with the Mario books after I read "A Smart Dummy in the Tent", the sole English-translated story from 人形はこたつで推理する (The Puppet Deduces from the Kotatsu), by Takemaru Abiko (tl. Ho-Ling Wong). The Mario series is about a ventriloquist, Yoshio Tomonaga, who solves mysteries with his puppet Mario. The trick here is that, as you might guess from the title, it’s the puppet, and not the ventriloquist, who’s the detective. (Mario is, as the series puts it, Tomonaga's "alternate personality", although "imaginary friend" might be more accurate.) This leads to comical hijinks in situations where it would not be appropriate to do a puppetry ...

"All living things in this world go to war. It doesn't matter if they're big or small. As long as life exists, we'll all keep killing each other." Two lovers reincarnate in an endless cycle across history, destined to always find one another, cursed to always kill each other with the same dagger. Not a premise you look at and think "sounds like a fair-play locked room scenario", but that's exactly what you get in The Lapis Lazuli Castle Murders , an unconventional detective novel by Takekuni Kitayama. It's the second book in his Castle series, which could be compared to Yukito Ayatsuji's Mansion series (each case is themed around a weird castle) except that as far as I'm aware, the detective doesn't carry over. Kimiyo is a young librarian suffering from terminal brain cancer. One day, the mysterious Kito comes to "the Library at the End of the World", claiming that Kimiyo was his lover in a past life, that she was once...

Originally posted January 1, 2025. “In the gloomy darkness, I revealed my accursed face.” When I read The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji, I happened to guess the killer early—what almost felt like unfairly early, as there was a good two-thirds of the book left to go. Which is not the worst problem to have; at least I got to feel very clever for figuring out this fiendish mystery based on a totally, totally unjustified guess. Nevertheless, when I got to the follow-up book, The Mill House Murders (tl. Ho-Ling Wong), I was looking forward to a cunning surprise. “There’s no way I’ll guess the culprit a third of the way through again,” I thought, and I was right. This time, I guessed it… in the prologue. Rats! Let’s rewind and talk about the plot. The Mill House Murders is set in the eponymous mansion, an eerie place nestled in the mountain woods, whose power is generated by three enormous mill wheels in the bordering river. The master of the house is Fujinum...

Originally posted May 17, 2024. Despite cutting my teeth on Detective Conan , I only started reading its influences, writers of the shin honkaku (neo-orthodox) school of crime fiction, a few years ago. At the time, I was in a jaded period where I felt like I’d seen every trick that mystery fiction had to offer, and could no longer be surprised. I was gifted Murder in the Crooked House by Sōji Shimada, thought it was okay, at least enough to seek out his previous book The Tokyo Zodiac Murders . And, well, that one surprised me—enough that I had to put the book down and rest my head in my hands. After that, I was hooked again. I made it my mission to read all of Shimada’s work published in English, which remains ‘not that much,’ and from there, some of his contemporaries. One strategy was to camp out Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine ‘s Passport to Crime department, started in 2004, which publishes works in translation for the first time. Here are some of the scattered shin ho...

Originally posted May 8, 2024.   An early footnote in The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story summarizes Edogawa Ranpo’s A Taxonomy of Mystery Tricks . One such trick is the ‘narrative trick,’ clues which are disguised through the presentation of the story. But, the game assures us, “such tricks are considered impossible in films & TV.” Anyone who’s seen Poirot ‘s awkward adaptation of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd would probably agree. But a suspicious player might well wonder if The Centennial Case , a PC/PS4/Switch game presented in live-action FMV format, will attempt to invent one. Haruka Kagami is an up-and-coming mystery novelist whose science consultant, the biologist Eiji Shijima, invites her to his family succession ceremony—apparently for research purposes, but secretly because an unidentified hundred-year-old skeleton has been found under the Shijima family’s cherry tree. To identify the skeleton Haruka and her editor Akari Yamase dig into records of strange...

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...