The Moai Island Puzzle by Alice ArisugawaMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
"The Moai Island Puzzle" (Japanese title: Koto pazuru, lit. "Solitary Island Puzzle") is one of the detective novels written in the late 1980s by a number of (at that time!) young authors who specialized in writing traditional puzzle mysteries. Alice Arisugawa and the other writers had been nurtured at "mystery clubs" at Kyoto University and Doshisha University (also in Kyoto) and were dubbed Shin Honkaku or "New Orthodox" writers (for ideological reasons, some critics in Japan wrongly think that "puzzle mysteries" are the only authentic form of the detective story, which is rather a tunnel vision). Other writers of this "group" include for example Yukito Ayatsuji, Taku Ashibe, Kaoru Kitamura, Reito Nikaido, Rintaro Norizuki and Takemaru Abiko. The older and established writer Soji Shimada, who in the early 1980s had published a number of puzzle mysteries, served as their mentor, and publishers as Kodansha and Sogensha jumped on the bandwagon to promote this commercially as a new trend.
As I have indicated in my review of Soji Shimada's Murder in the Crooked House, puzzle mysteries can be rather problematical, not only from a literary point of view, but also when considering what constitutes a good and entertaining book: due to the focus on only the puzzle, the characters tend to be flat and uninteresting; the book is filled with endless discussions; there is no psychology or motivation; and the (too ingenious) "solution" to the closed room puzzle is usually unrealistic and unconvincing.
How does this novel fare? It is set on a solitary island, visited by three university students who join a larger group of people for the holidays. The students belong to a mystery club and intend to hunt for a treasure that the puzzle-freak grandfather of one of them supposedly has hidden on the island. Clues are apparently the miniature copies of "moai statues" dotting the landscape (the monolithic statues originally found on Easter Island and elsewhere in Polynesia). Then a double murder in a closed-room happens...
One of the students, Jiro Egami, functions as the detective, and his Watson is Alice Arisugawa, a copy of the author (just as Ellery Queen plays the main role in the Queen novels; only here the writer serves not as main detective, but his helper). Please note that this is a male (the author too, whose real name is Masahide Uehara - he apparently selected his strange pseudonym out of love for that other famous puzzle story, "Alice in Wonderland"). The third student is Maria Arima, whose family owns the island, and she is true to her (anagramatic) name female.
The writing is light and wholly focused on the two puzzles - for example, there is no characterization and the relations between the three students are not at all developed. And isn't a treasure hunt rather childish? While reading, increasingly the feeling took hold of me that this was a book for children or juveniles - for example like the "Famous Five" series by Enid Blyton (whose first volume Five on a Treasure Island indeed is about a treasure hunt!)... The author was 30 when the book was published, and has since then written a considerable number of novels and short stories. I wonder whether (or how) he has developed since then?
Two stars because I in general applaud translations from the Japanese.
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