Night of the Living Dead

The tendency of Japanese mystery authors to fixate on apocalyptic, end-of-the-times themes has much to do with the country's own tryst with bloody conflicts, internecine strife and wars going back decades and centuries. This is visible in the settings and politics of works by prolific wartime authors such as Seishi Yokomizo (taking on the theme of the disfigured individual and society crippled by the Second World War in multiple novels) and Akimitsu Takagi (portraying the seedy underworld in the midst of bombed-out ruins in The Tattoo Murder Case). Images of the war continue to loom large in the works of authors writing a few decades later such as Natsuhiko Kyogoku (with a number of characters in the Kyōgokudō series suffering from post-war PTSD), and in manga series such as The Kindaichi Case Files and Detective School Q (both of which have stories with wartime biological experimentation in their backgrounds). And, if one includes historical crime fiction in the equation, the net has to be cast much wider, travelling further back in time — Honobu Yonezawa's The Samurai and the Prisoner takes place against the backdrop of the siege of the Arioka Castle (1578–1579), while the events of the Boshin Civil War (1868–1869) and the Meiji Restoration play an important role in Fūtarō Yamada's The Meiji Guillotine Murders.

When Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no Satsujin (translated as Death Among the Undead, Locked Room International, 2021) first came out in 2017, it was widely hailed as a much-needed shot in the arm for the shin honkaku sub-genre. As Soji Shimada points out in his insightful introduction to the book's translation, the genre had been showing tendencies similar to the preceding 'social school of mystery fiction'—namely that the sub-genre was restricting and limiting itself too much by sticking religiously to a select few 'golden rules', as a result of which originality was being stifled. Indeed, if one simply glances, at the surface level, the elements the novel introduces and the genres it blends, Shimada's observation is warranted. Yet, as has happened with so many works in the past, Death Among the Undead is also driven by bloody violence, albeit in a modern avatar—a bioterrorist attack.

Imamura clearly loves popular Japanese mystery tropes—a university setting, mystery clubs and an incredibly young cast. In fact, the opening stretches resemble, in essence, Yukito Ayatsuji's groundbreaking novel, The Decagon House Murders. The wry, self-deprecating humour ("It was up for debate whether his 'deductions' could be considered logical, but I did agree that humans do not act as predictably as they do in books.") punctuating sections (such as the one where Shinkō University's Mystery Society members Kyōsuke Akechi and Yuzuru Hamura make idle deductions on the food a girl may order at the cafeteria, or the one where Akechi strikes a 'deal' with real-life detective Hiruko Kenzaki to enter the Film Club's summer trip) makes for easy reading in the early going. All the ingredients indicate a classic, closed-circle setup: the Film Club receiving a threatening letter on who the next 'sacrifice' will be, and all the members of the Film Club going ahead with the trip and gathering at the Villa Violet close to Lake Sabea, with Akechi, Hamura and Kenzaki as the 'invited' guests.

It is here that another thread in the form of a bioterrorist attack at the Sabea Rock Festival nearby collides with this closed-circle setup with the force of a freight train, and transforms the section into a scene straight out of George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Even though the members could hear ambulance sirens since the afternoon and observe an unusual glow from the festival area, it is only during the evening-time Trial of Courage held between the Club members that things are thrown into disarray. By this time, there have been significant casualties, but it is during the main cast's encounter with wandering zombies that the novel acquires a personal touch. Both the Club members as well as Yuzura lose their friends to the horde of zombies wildly stumbling about. They are also forced to retreat into the confines of the Villa Violet, while closing, shuttering up all points of entry and egress, and barricading themselves. The book then purports to unfold as a zombie survival narrative. Or, does it?

The use of zombies to double down on the closed-circle and enforced isolationist aspects of the novel, besides positioning them as potential instruments and perpetrators of murders most foul, can indeed be considered to be revolutionary in textual or literary terms. However, in my view, Death Among the Dead can best be enjoyed as a cinematic experience*. Much of it has to do with how the novel transpires henceforth. First, Imamura carefully outlines the extent of the zombies' capabilities, laying out what they can and cannot do:

"[...] these zombies appeared to have badly-developed motor skills. Their speed of movement on the steps was much slower than on level ground, and they had trouble staying balanced. Any zombie that did somehow manage to make their way up found the barricades in their way, got their feet wrapped up in the sheets and tripped backwards, taking the zombies behind with them in their fall. The process kept repeating itself. [...]"

Despite all the precautions taken based on the collective observations of the gathered people, the following morning, one of the members is found dead in a closed room in a gross manner (with his face gnawed off), slowly transforming into a zombie before the witness' eyes. The victim is 'killed' a second time, before the observers find a note with the words 'let's eat'. This sets off a second wave of revised speculations and discourse on zombies, their abilities, and the process of zombiefication, with conversations on locked room mysteries and their applicability (in the current scenario) thrown in between. Some of the discourse has a surprising philosophical depth (which is, unfortunately, never really followed up on), despite being peppered with pop-cultural references to cult hits in the zombie fiction genre, such as Resident Evil and Shaun of the Dead:

"Zombies are not simply grotesque, horrifying monsters anymore. They are beings that can be used to cast a light on so many themes: the sin of man, economic class differences, the strong and the weak, or the tragedy of how friends and family can turn into enemies in the blink of an eye. Zombies are projections of our own egos and minds."

However, no amount of philosophising, theorising and notes-taking help the survivors prevent two other murders—one on the second night and the other on the morning of the third day. In the second case, the corpse is found with its head smashed to bits in a closed elevator stuck on the second floor of the building, while the third case involved the poisoning of a character in the room he had holed himself up in. In the meantime, the threat of the gathering multitudes of zombies breaking through the barriers put in place has increased exponentially.

So, these three incidents, featuring the involvement of zombies to varying degrees, form the crux of the narrative. The incidents are all explained in a rational manner—and to answer the question I had posed earlier, it is ironic to note that the way the novel unfolds after the introduction of the zombies makes it a celebration of logical and deductive reasoning, with the survival of characters against a zombie outbreak being presented as a consequential byproduct. In particular, I prefer the explanation of the first incident, which has a tragic and pathetic aspect to it, and merges the mystery and horror aspects very well.

Perhaps, it all unfolds a bit too logically and rationally for a reader invested in the setting of the work. The biggest failure here, in my opinion, is that Imamura sorely undersells the psychological impact of the zombie attack on the characters. The fact that they all display too much of a 'calmer heads should prevail, let's wait for help to arrive' attitude, accompanied by an almost placid acceptance of the situation, beggars belief and feels excessively unnatural, artificial and forced by the dictates of the author's plotting preferences and the need to conform to a particular brand of mystery fiction. There's no unpredictability or instinctiveness in the reactions of the characters holed up in Villa Violet in the face of a zombie invasion. Instead, even though the book had previously poked fun at the predictability of characters in fictional works, it all feels too premeditated, predictable and well-rehearsed, like a movie script. What's disappointing is that the zombies are almost peripheral in the central sections of the book, only serving as tools to advance the plot, and the sense of threat emanating from their presence is often severely underplayed. Paradoxically, therefore, the introduction of the zombie element that promised to add a new dimension to the dynamics of the shin honkaku sub-genre ends up restricting the narrative potential by imposing the dictates of a classically-constructed shin honkaku story on to the characters and their reactions that do not seem to be appropriate to the circumstances they face (except for the portion after the denouement leading to the rescue of the remaining characters). What's extremely lacking is a consistent level of panic and nervous/manic energy seen in, say, Frederic Brown's Night of the Jabberwock.

It begs the question: is the inspired use of zombies really essential to Imamura's debut work? Given the larger genre-wide implications it has wrought, the answer is a resounding yes. But, seen in the context of Death Among the Undead specifically, one cannot help but argue that Imamura fails to do justice to or explore the enormous potential of the zombies that he introduces in his fictional universe. Akechi indeed has the final say when he remarks, "... Things don't always go right."

*Thankfully, a 2019 movie version of Death Among the Undead, titled Murder at Shijinso, can be found online. In all respects, it is fairly faithful to the events in the book, but the use of dramatic tropes, some creative liberties and a stylised treatment focusing more on the action and survival elements, makes for a more entertaining, spectacle-filled view that could help one gloss over the identity-based issues one encounters when reading the book.