Rintaro
Norizuki is a Japanese mystery writer, a founding member of the
shin honkaku (neo-orthodox) movement, who began, like so many
writers in this movement, as a member of the Kyoto University Mystery
Club – before officially debuting with Mippei
kyoshitsu (The Locked Classroom, 1988). One of many
Japanese detective novels I would like to see translated in the
future.
The Exploits of Rintaro Norizuki |
Norizuki is the current
President of the Honkaku
Mystery Writers Club of Japan and has won several awards for his
short stories and novels, which are heavily inspired and indebted to
Ellery
Queen.
The protagonist in most of
his novels and short stories is his mystery writing namesake, Rintaro
Norizuki, who forms a father-and-son detective team with his dad,
Chief-Inspector Norizuki. However, this is only a superficial
resemblance. Norizuki has garnered a reputation as a purveyor of
extremely logical puzzles that can only be solved by logical
reasoning. So no wonder our very own Ho-Ling
Wong is quite a fan of the series.
Unfortunately, as of this
writing, only two of his short stories have been translated into
English in the past fifteen years. The most recent translation was
the brilliant "Midori no tobira wa kiken" ("The Lure of the
Green Door," 1991), published in English in the November, 2014,
issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and collected in The
Realm of the Impossible (2017), which presented the reader
with a brand-new solution to the locked room problem – making it
the crown jewel of that anthology. Back in 2000s, "Toshi densetsu
pazuru" ("An Urban Legend Puzzle," 2001) was translated and
published in the January, 2004, issue of EQMM. The story was
very well received and was later included in two anthologies,
Passport to Crime (2007) and The Mammoth Book of
International Crime (2009).
Somehow, "An Urban
Legend Puzzle" has always managed to elude me, but finally decided
to track down the story in order to relieve my insatiable hunger for
more shin honkaku detective stories.
"An Urban Legend Puzzle"
has a plot-structure I can't help but associate with G.K.
Chesterton's "The Dagger with Wings," collected in The
Incredulity of Father Brown (1926), in which the plot is
slowly unfolded and dissected during a conversation between two
characters. In this instance, Chief-Inspector Norizuki tells his son
about a homicide case he has under investigation.
A second-year student in
the Sciences Department at M-University, Matsunaga Toshiki, was
stabbed to death with an ice pick in a one-room apartment in
Matsubara, Setagaya Ward – shortly after a drinking party with
other university students broke up. One of the students, Hirotani
Aki, forgot her cell phone and returned to the apartment, but she
found the door unlocked and the apartment was pitch-black. Aki
assumed Toshiki had gone to bed and forgot to lock the door. So she
didn't want to wake him up and searched around the apartment in the
dark for her phone, before leaving quietly.
On the following morning,
a delivery man found the body of the student lying in "a pool of
blood on the floor of the 8-tatami-mat-sized room" and a
disturbing message was left in blood on the wall: "Aren't you
glad you didn't turn on the light?" Rintaro Norizuki
recognizes the phrase from "a popular urban legend" and
together they go over who of the students benefited, or were
disadvantaged, from embellishing the murder with the urban legend
motif. This makes for an interesting and original backdrop. They also
test the alibis of the students and go over every possible scenario,
which results in various false solutions getting smashed to pieces.
And this is a very satisfactory approach to fans of detective stories
that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.
"An Urban Legend Puzzle"
is a cleverly contrived, extremely logical story with a solution
hinging breaking apart "a solid alibi," but the story is
so logical and fair that an observant or long-time mystery reader can
easily put the whole thing together – which is the only flaw in
this otherwise great story. So not in the same league as the locked
room classic "The Lure of the Green Door," but still an excellent
specimen of the pure puzzle-plot detective story and the shin
honkaku movement. I hope more of Rintaro Norizuki gets translated
in the future.
On a final, somewhat
related note: I've noticed for a long time that schools, universities
and student characters are staples of shin honkaku, but
Ho-Ling mentioned in his review of The Locked Classroom (linked
above) that they're mainly staples of anime, manga and light novels –
because they geared at a younger audience. However, you can still
find them in your regular shin honkaku novels. Yukito
Ayatsuji's Jakkakukan
no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987) and
Alice Arisugawa's Koto
pazuru (The Moai Island Puzzle, 1989) has characters
that are members of university mystery clubs. Katsuhiko Takahashi's
Sharaka
satsujin jiken (The Case of the Sharaka Murders, 1983)
is a scholary-cum-historical mystery with a university setting. One
of Keigo
Higashino's series-detectives is an assistant professor of
physics.
So I have begun to wonder
if this has anything to do with the influence from all those
university mystery clubs that have produced so many of shin
honkaku writers. Add the Japanese school-culture, with all its
problems and ghost stories, and you have all the material you need
for a detective story.
As possibly the biggest English-language fan of 'The Lure of the Green Door' on the planet I'm very excited to learn of this -- how the hell did it pass me by? Sure, it falls short of that masterpiece, but any Rintaro Norizuki in English is a cause for great excitement. Many thanks!
ReplyDeleteYou've also reminded me that I have a copy of Soji Shimada's 'The Executive Who Lost His Mind' kicking about, so I should get to that before too long, too.
Don't feel too bad. This story has managed to elude me for years. And even then it took me some time to finally get around to reading it.
Delete"You've also reminded me that I have a copy of Soji Shimada's 'The Executive Who Lost His Mind' kicking about, so I should get to that before too long, too."
You can expect my review of that short story (and others) in a single review in a little under two months.
Most of the Rintaro novels are quite different from the short stories. The shorts are, obviously, very similar to the Queen short stories in spirit with a focus on the puzzle, but the Rintaro novels (with the first one as an exception) are more similar to the later Queen novels, with more angsting about the role of a detective.
ReplyDeleteFrom what I have read on your blog, the plots of an angsty Rintaro tend to be better than those from Ellery Queen's Hollywood and Wrightsville days. I know that period has its fans, but I just can't see Calamity Town or Ten Days' Wonder as classics.
Delete