The Unreachable Past: Q.E.D, vol. 9 by Motohiro Katou

I ended my twofer review of Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. volumes 7 and 8 with the promise to do another paired review of volumes 9 and 10, but had not counted on volume 10 comprising, entirely, of a novel-length story – making it better suited for a single review. So I decided to discuss volumes 9 and 10 separately.

The 9th volume is another textbook example of what makes Q.E.D so different from other anime-and manga detective series with two stories in which the motives take precedent of the puzzles. These puzzles are perfectly fine with a locked room problem in the second story reminiscent of the impossibly walled-in body from volume 5, but what drove the culprits to create these puzzles is the key to solving them. And the distant, out-of-reach past is the theme tying these stories together.

"The Rules of the Game" revolves around  "a world-class billionaire," Jonas Solomon, who's the chairman of the Solomon Foundation with the power to destabilize the economies of nations "by just flicking his fingers," but the focus here is on his annual private game he hosts behind closed doors – inviting only the smartest people to participate. A huge money prize is awarded to the winner, but the losers have to enter into a conspiracy of silence. They have to keep the secret of the game until death and "even stating an opinion or inquiring about it is forbidden." One of the participants broke the rule with devastating consequences to his company.

Roy Hills, an MIT graduate, build a successful venture enterprise, but needed more money to operate the company and decided to participate in Solomon's private game.

Solomon declared him to be one of the losers. A judgment Hills could not except, because he was convinced he had the correct answer and began asking the other contestants for their answers, but found "an unexpected truth" of the game. And then Solomon began to extract his revenge on him. So he made his escape to Japan where he came across a familiar face, Sou Touma!

Touma graduated at the age of 15 from MIT, but wanted to experience life as an ordinary, Japanese high school student and moved back home. They were in the same class at MIT and Hills tells Touma that, if he want to know more, to enter the game, but Touma tears up the paper – refusing to take part in a potentially dangerous game. Kana Mizuhara disagrees. She ensures her friend receives an invitation in the mail. They soon find themselves as guests at a remote and imposing mansion with geniuses from China and Italy, but the puzzle they have to solve, and the hidden-hidden object puzzle, are not the motor of the plot. The motor is why Solomon created the unusual and even harsh rules of the game, what his dead wife has to do with it and his stubborn personality. And the answers to these questions yield answers to the material puzzles.

One more thing you have to know, to understand "The Rules of the Game," is that it's set during Christmas and can be read as a detective story retelling of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843) with Touma playing the Ghosts of Christmas to Solomon's Ebenezer Scrooge. The result is an unconventional, character-driven take on the good, old-fashioned seasonal detective story and the kind of unusual story I've now come to expect from this series.

The second story, entitled "The Frozen Hammer," is another story with a puzzle-within-puzzle, but the motivation of the culprit and the nearly unreachable past provide the keys to the unlocking the truth of these puzzles.

The story begins when part of a dried up, mummified arm with a wristwatch dropped from an iron pipe underneath the Kachidoki Bridge on a passing boat and caused a huge sensation, because the rest of the body is found inside the pipe – in the part of the bridge that raises and lowers. And it's "blocked with steel" at both ends! So, in order to extract the body, the bridge has to be raised which "hasn't been done for 30 years." You have to keep in mind that the story is set in either late 2000 or early 2001, which is important when the police learns that the wristwatch on the corpse was made in 1975! That means that the corpse was placed inside the pipe after the bridge was last opened, but how did the murderer managed to do that? The bridge had to be raised just to get the body out and there's no way it could have been placed there when it was closed. But this is not the only impossibility of the plot.

A piece of paper is found on the corpse with a map of rivers and bridges. Touma recognizes it as a centuries old mathematical problem, Seven Bridges of Königsberg, which poses the question whether it's possible "to cross each bridge only once in a single trip" – a similar problem on the Sumida River area map from 50 years ago. But these puzzles are only means to an end. The raising of the bridge drew quite a crowd and Touma is recognized by an old man, Kishizaki, who attended a lecture given by the boy wonder at Princeton University, which prompted him to invite Touma and Mizuhara to his home. Where he shows them pictures, maps and confesses it was him who placed the body inside the bridge, but challenges the "know-it-all kid" to prove whether that's true or not.

A splendid and original premise for a locked room problem, confined to an iron pipe sealed inside a closed bridge, which is given a good solution that was wonderfully foreshadowed in the way the police tried to extract the body. Touma even provided a solution for the bridge-puzzles, but they're only of secondary importance. A tool to tell the story of the old man and his tragic backstory. A backstory that explains why the body had to be hidden inside the bridge and why Touma decided to keep the truth from the authorities. What I loved most about this story is that the culprit actually succeeded in bringing a brief, but tangible, glimpse of the past back into present! But, as one late panel shows, it came at a cost!

So, all in all, this was an excellent volume with two well done, unusually character-driven puzzle stories and can't understand why this series is not enjoying more popularity among mystery readers from anime/manga corner of the genre. Highly recommended!

My current plan for future Q.E.D. reviews is doing volume 10 as a single review and another twofer review for volumes 11 and 12, because the last story from volume 12 is directly linked to the story from volume 10. I'll probably return to The Kindaichi Case Files before, or after, my review of volume 10. Maybe it's time to give 37 Year Old Kindaichi Case Files a try to see what that series is all about. So stay tuned!