The Tokyo Zodiac Murders by Sōji ShimadaMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
In my review of his second novel, Murder in the Crooked House, I have introduced Soji Shimada and the renewed interest he generated in Japan with his books in the genre of the puzzle detective in the style of Ellery Queen and Dickson Carr. I will not repeat here what I have written in that review about the puzzle detective in Japan (called "honkaku," about which many misunderstandings exist), but only add that in the late 1980s Shimada became the mentor of a group of young writers from Kyoto who also put the puzzle – mostly a closed room mystery – central, thus creating a trend. And that meant all spotlights were aimed at his first novel, "The Tokyo Zodiac Murders."
In that same review, I have also given my reasons for not being very fond of exclusive puzzle detectives: they may be good as puzzles (sometimes), but characterization, motivation, narrative and plausibility go out of the window.
That is also the case in “The Tokyo Zodiac Murders.” Shimada starts by forcing us to read the testament of a lunatic painter who plans to murder his six virginal daughters and nieces and cut off their body parts as head, shoulders, chest, hips, thighs, and lower legs to fashion these together into what he calls one perfect woman, Azoth. His confession is larded with astrological nonsense which makes it a rather hard read. There is a brief “ero-guro” suggestion that the man is a doll lover and once fell in love with a mannequin in a show window, but that avenue is not pursued - it could have been a more interesting story than what we have now (in fact, Ian McEwan has written such a story called "Dead as They Come" in his collection First Love, Last Rites).
The painter cannot execute his plan: on a snowy night he is murdered in his studio in what seems a perfect locked-room mystery. All the same, a month later the six young women disappear and their mutilated, cut-up bodies start appearing in various parts of Japan. On top of that, another daughter of the painter, who had been married and was excluded from the Azoth set-up as she was no virgin anymore, is murdered and raped in her house. The police suspect that the (third) wife of the painter is somehow involved in the series of crimes, but she never confesses and the murders remain unsolved.
That was in 1936. The novel takes place 40 years later when astrologist Kiyoshi Mitarai and his Watson-like sidekick Kazumi Ishioka try to solve the by now notorious mystery after receiving a new clue. Mitarai is one of the most unlikable and arrogant detectives I have ever come across. Ishioka is a blank sheet, for his character is never filled in, but he must be a masochist as he can bear to be in the company of Mitarai.
But if you expect the novel to get underway now, you will be disappointed, for we get endless pages of explanation and speculation in which the friends discuss the 40 year old murders. There is a lot of astrological hogwash again, about the latitudes and longitudes where the bodies were buried, about certain metal mines in the vicinity, and how the body parts for Azoth were determined by the stars. The only positive thing is that all this nonsense doesn’t play any role in the solution of the crime, so it doesn't matter if you skim through these sections…
When we are about halfway in the book, Mitarai and Ishioka finally do some detection work by going to Kyoto to follow-up a clue. But they come across a number of red herrings and the detection peters out. Mitarai disappears and Ishioka mainly spends his time sightseeing. Finally, when it is almost time to return to Tokyo, Mitarai by chance finds the solution in a flash of insight, but a trip to Kyoto would not have been necessary for that…
The explication of the locked room he discovers is rather unspectacular after all the noise about it - this in contrast to the solution of the main mystery of the dismembered virgins. I will only say that there is a real nice trick here which probably will make puzzle lovers enthusiastic, but which leaves us others who are mainly interested in a good story rather unsatisfied, as motivation is completely inadequate.
Shimada imitates Ellery Queen by pausing the story twice and challenging the reader, a breakdown of the “fourth wall” which is also a rather unnecessary copycat action.
I do like strong plots in detective novels, but my objection against exclusive puzzle mysteries is that such elements as narrative, characterization, motivation and everything else that makes a story interesting as a story, as literature, are either missing or too weak. When you want to solve puzzles, why not pick up a computer game or do a traditional crossword puzzle? Well, I should probably pick up Nabokov, Proust or Thomas Mann instead of a detective...
View all my reviews