Man in the Box

My previous experience of a Masahiro Imamura work was with the experimental and entertaining Death Among the Undead, which broke new ground with its inspired-but-flawed use of zombies in a closed-circle situation. With an overarching thread of bioterrorism, I had expected things to escalate even further in the series, deploying more bombastic, hybrid-mystery elements.

Colour me surprised, then, because the second entry in the series, Magan no Hako no Satsujin (2019; translated as Death Within the Evil Eye, 2022), delivers a traditionally plotted, classically styled murder mystery, with just a pinch of the supernatural. No zombies, no bioterrorism plot points in the events as they transpire in real time.

Death Within the Evil Eye starts with a sense of déjà vu—Yuzuru Hamura making an idle deduction on the food a girl is about to order at the university cafeteria. It's very identical to the Sherlock Holmes-skit-like beginning of Death Among the Undead; however, due to the events of the first novel, this time, Hamura has no one to share his deductions with. The absence of Kyōsuke Akechi is felt throughout the novel, lending poignancy to the narrative and influencing the character dynamics of our protagonists in a major way.

Into this gap steps Hiruko Kenzaki, from the same university as Hamura, with her own quirks—a notorious oversleeper, and an exceptionally competent detective when it comes to real-life cases but utterly incompetent when it comes to identifying narrative trickery in fictional works. She also has a tendency to naturally attract freakish incidents. The two members of the reborn Mystery Society initially discuss strategies to hunt down the Madarame Organisation, the perpetrator behind the events of the first novel, through some potential leads—including one where a letter prophesising the Lake Sabea bioterrorist attack had been sent to a monthly magazine. However, Kenzaki decides to go at it alone, having already employed a private sleuth to investigate the Madarame Organisation's past activities and locations where it was active. In one of the finer bits of the novel, Hamura picks up changes in Kenzaki's attitude and demeanour, and decides to put the Tanuma Detective Agency on her tail. And thus it is that the duo find themselves on a journey to explore a former lair of the organisation. Their destination? Magan district in I county of W district.

Hereafter, the novel follows a pattern that may be familiar to readers of the Kindaichi series. A journey to a remote village in the mountains, with mysterious co-passengers (who happen to be students) headed to the same destination. To reach said destination, our main cast meets more curious folks—a professor and his son, a biker, a journalist, a woman visiting a grave in the village—all of whom then trek by foot to The Box of the Evil Eye—a two-storeyed building with no windows that was once used by the Madarame Organisation as a research facility to experiment with precognition and prophetic abilities. The purpose of the trip? To meet Sakimi, the prophetess whose prophecies have all turned out to be true for half a century.

And soon, a bridge burns down—isolating the whole cast. Then, the prophetess states that four people—two men and two women—will die. Yes, a major portion of the novel does indeed recreate the atmosphere and elements of multiple stories in Seimaru Amagi's Kindaichi and Detective School Q series.

Imamura does well to vary the nature of incidents that claim lives and distort minds: earthquake and landslide, animal attack, poisoning, and shooting. The cast, including two clairvoyants, reacts to the crises in a more diverse manner, even though they are already trapped in the clutches of the prophecy, than seen in Death Among the Undead. All this leads to multiple layered situations—and there's a definite improvement in establishing the closed-circle, locked-geography situations, the susceptibility of the characters to the supernatural, and creating the alignment between these situations and the rationale behind the characters' responses to these situations, when compared to the previous work. Having said that, the work still suffers from a problem I had observed in Death Among the Undead: namely that it is too aware of its status as a mystery novel, and the characters act not naturally or in accordance with the circumstances, but according to the dictates of mystery fiction tropes. It's a glaring discrepancy that is evident even here: in section-after-section dedicated to minutely dissecting each impossible situation through conversations and exposition (none of which, though logically sound, really stand out for quality or effect), but rarely do we see any concerted action.

Imamura thus comes across as an ideas man, rather than a natural plotter. The core of the novel—prophecies influencing people's actions—is carried out in several permutations and combinations. However, it is the spontaneous mix of superstitiousness, opportunism, and faith combined with fear, that invariably leads to unpredictable situations. Indeed, as Kenzaki points out in her summary of the case:

"This case is clearly completely different from the sort of crimes we all know. Setting aside the matter of whether Ms. Sakimi and Toiro’s powers were real or not, it is clear that our fear of their powers—and in a way, our faith in their powers—has influenced all that has happened here.’  

     Their powers had not directly killed anybody, but people had died there, whether by a natural event, or by human hand. In one sense, it was a murder case just like any other. However, the issue was that, additionally, the existence of precognitive powers had influenced our rationale and reasoning.  

     ‘A closed circle situation, plus precognitive powers. I do not believe that the police, coming from outside, can ever truly comprehend the fear and mental pressure created by such a combination. As soon as we step outside of the Box, the curious logic which has manipulated us over the last two days will disappear, as if it had all been just an illusion. Which is why I wanted to put an end to it all, before our tiny universe is broken up.’"

It is, therefore, quite unfortunate that the rationale and reasoning of the characters is also ultimately influenced too much by mystery fiction tropes and their analysis, which exert even more influence in the critical moments than any act of prophecy or clairvoyance does. Loss of hope and mounting despair can be powerful tools for authors to utilise, but when done in an organic manner. On the other hand, when they are used simply to serve plot-based, narrative, or trope-based functions, they can come across as excessively forced, artificial, and devoid of appropriate expression of emotions—as is the case with Imamura's two novels.

It is also the reason why, in my opinion, Imamura shines best when he explores human themes rather than supernatural themes. The evolving, moe-coded, Holmes-Watson relationship and dynamic between Kenzaki and Hamura, the continued acknowledgement of Akechi's absence—these form oddly tender oases in these two novels that revel in stretching character motivations to the extreme, and continuously putting them through a grinder. Both novels, I also think, are best read in light of a common them: revenge. While it is played in a straightforward, more preordained, manner in Death Among the Undead, the circumstantial nature of things ensures that the revenge seen in Death Within the Evil Eye is anything but straightforward, even though it is dictated by the needs of an infallible prophecy. The subject of the prophecy ends up as a victim, not of a direct revenge but an indirect, perverted one—one that not only fails to reach the intended target of the original grudge, but also effectively destroys the life of the perpetrator and condemns them to a future of utter futility, trapped by the nature and demands of the very things they exploited. In fact, this is rooted in a very Japanese sensibility—and one seen all too frequently in works featuring Hajime Kindaichi and Kosuke Kindaichi.

These are some of the aspects I would ideally have liked Imamura to have explored more in Death Within the Evil Eye, rather than the incessant homages to crime fiction he keeps making throughout the novel. There seems to be a third entry in this series—but I look forward to its translation with a sense of cautious optimism, and not of unbridled enthusiasm.

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.