Bruised Memories: Q.E.D, vol. 6 by Motohiro Katou

Last month, I reviewed the 5th volume from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D., a manga detective series that ran from 1998 to 2005, which comprised of two splendidly plotted and executed stories that presented the reader with a pair of corpse-puzzles – a specialty of the Japanese detective story. A tremendously enjoyable volume that left me determined to get to the next one before another 6-12 months disappeared from the calendar.

The first story of the volume 6, entitled "Uncertain Memories," made me realize how surprisingly linear and well paced the time-line of this series actually is.

I remember the stories from volume 2 take place over the summer of 1998 and volume 3 has two stories set respectively in December and the winter of 1999. The opening story from volume 4 centers on April Fools' Day with the stories from volume 5 covering the remainder of the year until "Uncertain Memories" picks up at the dawn of the new millennium, December 29th, 1999, with a strangely fitting, character-driven slice-of-life mystery – which introduces the clumsy sister of the 16-year-old protagonist, Sou Touma. Yuu Touma has an superb hearing with an uncanny knack for catching "the rhythms of the different sounds that she hears" and "amazing at memorizing words from foreign languages," but she's prone to stumbling around. Yuu came back to Japan to celebrate the New Year with her brother.

Touma rarely talked to Kana Mizuhara about himself, or his family, and she learns something about him from his sister, which provides the story with one of the two problems centering on the brother and sister. Yuu tells Mizuhara that their parents thought they were very different children, because her dangerous, reckless behavior always required the full attention of their parents and this left Touma to his own devices. A picture emerges from her story of a kind, but lonely, distant child who didn't show any emotions.

When they were younger, Touma would bring home wounded birds and squirrels from the park to take care of them, often "until late at night," but, when the animals were nursed back to health, he immediately returned them to the park and left without turning back – an attitude he also displays towards his fellow humans. But the memory that stings Yuu the most is when her brother showed no interest when her childhood dog went missing. And didn't even help to look for the dog. Why he acted so cold and distant at the time is main question of the plot with the answer bridging the gap between the two siblings as the clock ticks away the last days of the 20th century, which helps them "to face the new world."

This story also has a sub-plot that begins when Yuu is knocked down in the street by a shoplifter, but she can't remember exactly what happened before hitting her head. Touma and Mizuhara have to retrace her steps, following a linguistic clue, in order to clear her name. A very minor side distraction to an otherwise interesting, character-building story of the type you never find in series like Case Closed or The Kindaichi Case Files.

The second story, "Secret Blue Room," brings the reader right back to the traditional detective story with an impossible crime story, but, unlike the title might suggest, the story is not a locked room mystery. This story is about the murder of a sleazy skydiver in mid-air!

Mizuhara uses a ploy to get Touma to take her skydiving, but when they arrive at the drop zone to prepare for the dive, they watch how a four-man skydive team, known as Stardust, attempt to do a formation jump when one of them plummets down to earth – seemingly saved by a device that automatically opens the chute when something goes wrong. The skydiver, Nomaki, gently crashes down to the ground and the first to check on the victim is the leader of the group, Morokawa Shizuo, who removes the parachute only to discover a knife-handle sticking out of his back!

It's cleverly acknowledge early on in the story that, because "it's impossible to stab someone mid-air," the police suspects the team leader "stabbed the victim on the ground when nobody was looking." A classic locked room-trick that can immediately be disregarded as a possible answer to the stabbing and sends the reader scurrying in a different direction, but the Morokawa Shizuo still has a rock-solid motive. Exactly a year before the murder, his girlfriend died in a strange skydiving accident and rumors have been swirling around that Nomaki had sabotaged her parachute.

So this gave me the idea that Morokawa had planted the knife in a dead, or dying, Nomaki to protect the real murderer, who had poisoned or drugged Nomaki, by giving this person an airtight alibi with a seemingly impossible, mid-air murder – directing the attention of the police to himself. However, no further details emerged that could have confirmed my little hypothesis, such as an autopsy report, which forced me to abandon it well before the end. The actual solution works with a similar, classic locked room technique as the false-solution, but applied to skydiving and has some subtly planted, visual clues hidden in the panels. Touma plays a dangerous game of bluff poker by, anonymously, calling all of the suspects and confronting the murderer under dangerous circumstances. This made for a very satisfying ending to an excellent volume.

Like I've said in a previous review, I can't quite put my finger on why I enjoy this series so much, because, as a detective series, it often walks a fine tight-rope between the kind of detective stories I normally love and despises – such as a character heavy, practically none-criminal story followed by an impossible crime story. Somehow, it works with this series and found the first story as good and fascinating as the second one. So, I don't know, maybe it's the time period in which the story is set that helps make these stories so appealing. Anyway, you can probably expect a review of volume 7 and 8 before the end of the month.