Conundrums with Corpses: Q.E.D, vol. 5 by Motohiro Katou

I've remarked in past reviews that Motohiro Katou took a different route to other, more well-known, anime-and manga detective series when it came to the characterization of the protagonists, the type of cases they get to solve and volume structure – making Q.E.D. vastly different compared to Case Closed, Detective Academy Q and The Kindaichi Case Files. The previous volume was a perfect example of these dissimilarities with a scam story and a quasi-techno thriller, but the cases in volume 5 were unexpectedly close to the kind of stories littering the Case Closed series!

The first of two stories, "The Distorted Melody," is an inverted detective story, a la Columbo, but with a quasi-impossible problem of where the body was hidden at the time the murderer was orchestrating an unimpeachable alibi.

Hirai Reiji is a world-famous young cellist and an equally celebrated symphony orchestra had added him as their main attraction for an upcoming concert, but the President of Kouwa Industries, Okabe Kousuke, canceled their long-running sponsorship. A decision Hirai, "a slave to a great art," simply could not allow to stand. So, when Okabe visits him at his remote, cliff side cabin, Hirai strangles him and sews together an alibi by inviting a small party of high-school students, which includes Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara – only they arrived a little too early. This leaves Hirai with mere minutes at his disposal to hide the body inside a small, sparsely furnished cabin without any apparent hiding places. Somehow, he managed to do it, but how? And, no, the body wasn't stuffed inside the cello case.

Two days later, Okade's body is found at his home, crammed inside a disused, filled-in water well, but "the kids testified that there was no corpse in the house" and supporting evidence, namely a train ticket and a phone call, cemented Hirai's alibi.

Touma believes the young cellist murdered the tightfisted businessman and begins, piece by piece, to tear down both his story and carefully constructed alibi. The solution hinges on the use of the cello, a piece of classical music and cellphone feedback, but the highlight of the solution is the place where the body had been hidden. A simple and elegant solution marred only slightly by the lack of (visual) clueing, but still a clever take on the hidden object puzzle.

As an aside, this story was loaded with translator's note and had a floor plan of the cabin, which, in combination with the search for a missing, cleverly hidden object, also made the story vaguely feel like an American Golden Age detective story.

Where's the body?

 

The second and last story of this volume, entitled "The Afterimage of Light," is, story-wise, right up there with "Rokubu's Treasure" and "The Fading of Star Map," as one of the better tales so far and serves the reader a bizarre, neatly posed locked room mystery – buried in the dimly remembered past. A story that begins, or ended, when Touma and Mizuhara buy an old camera on a flea market only to discover a role of undeveloped film inside. A film with five snapshots of a doll, a storage house, three children, a mountain and a blurry picture of a man's shoulder.

So they decide to follow the clues of the camera and pictures original to Otowamura, a small mountain village, where they find the "surprisingly small," windowless storage that turned out to have a weird and sad history behind it. Once upon a time, it was simply used to store rice and farming tools, but when tuberculous reared its ugly head in the region, it was converted into a sanatorium. A lot of people died in there. However, the weirdest story to come out of the store house is that of a little girl, Kuwano Taki, who had tuberculous and was confined to the windowless store house. But, every day, the girl told her visiting mother what had happened that day outside the storage house and replicated this ability in public experiments. She was "shut up in a big box" from "where she would tell people what was outside," but this is only of two locked room puzzles the story has to offer!

Touma and Mizuhara, with the unwilling assistance of a local policeman, break open the door of the storage house, because the key had gone missing of thirty years ago and nobody appears to have entered it during that period. Curiously, while the walls are crumbling, one of then looks whiter than the other as it was plastered over in the past, but part of the wall disintegrated upon being touched – revealing a decomposed skeleton behind it. The sole, long-lost store house key had been in the pocket of the body all this time. So how was the murderer able to leave a locked door behind and who did the murderer hide in the wall? And how does this long-hidden murder linked to the photos, the now three grownup children and the story of the clairvoyant girl?

The Locked Room Mystery

A really well done detective with many moving, interlocking parts that beautifully dovetail together in the end. Once again, the clueing is not always pitch-perfect and one clue, in particular, is impossible to correctly interpret, but enough of the plot can be worked out to satisfy most armchair detectives.

I think a good chunk of readers will be able to work out the clairvoyant images of the little girl, which is a surprisingly modern take on the naturalistic impossible crime fiction that was somewhat popular during the turn of the previous century (e.g. L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace's A Master of Mysteries, 1898). The result is something pleasingly different than what you usually get in these stories about faked psychic abilities. I liked the explanation as to how the skeleton ended up behind the wall of a locked room, but worked out the trick when I read Ho-Ling Wong's double review of volume 4 and 5. I misunderstood the exact situation of the locked room, but the hint in my comment (mild spoilers) was spot on! To be honest, there's really only one way that specific locked room-trick could have been worked. I still liked it.

The strength of the story is how all these plot-threads were tied together and the fact that the statute of limitation has ran out, which means that the murderer not only gets away with killing an innocent person, but is not even confronted by Touma – reminding the reader that Q.E.D. is not like the other manga detective series. Even when it tries to be!

So, all in all, this is easily my favorite volume up to this point in the series and, while not entirely spotless, I found the stories to be excellent with some original ideas and tricks. Definitely recommended!