Death Within the Evil Eye (2019) by Masahiro Imamura

Two years ago, Locked Room International published an eagerly anticipated translation of Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017), an amazing hybrid mystery, which injected an otherwise normal, down-to-earth closed circle murder mystery with zombies – straddling the traditional detective story with the survival horror genre. Unleashing a horde of zombies inside a detective story sounds like a cheap gimmick, but the story, to quote Soji Shimada's introduction, "simultaneously maintains the necessary rigour of the locked room mystery by making the zombies bound by strict rules." So the presence of the undead stumbling around, what would have been, an ordinary shin honkaku mystery changes the entire equation and opened the door to a whole new realm of possibilities. The tricky thing to do, of course, is ensuring that the inclusion of one does not come at the cost of the other and vice versa. Imamura moved across that slippery tight-rope without slipping and falling down. And that makes Death Among the Undead a masterpiece of the genre in my book!

So ended my review hoping that a translation of the sequel, Magan no hako no satsujin (Death Within the Evil Eye, 2019), would materialize before too long. I didn't really expect that translation to appear before 2023, but John Pugmire managed to release it right at the tail-end of 2022.

Just one thing that needs to be mentioned is that this series has to be read in order for numerous reasons. Firstly, Death Among the Undead not only introduces the two main characters, but also the ongoing storyline linking all the individual cases together. Secondly, the first and second are tonally entirely different stories. If the first novel is a shock to the system, the second one is the calm after the storm with a puzzling problem that's more ethereal in nature than living zombies. 

Death Within the Evil Eye, translated by Ho-Ling Wong, opens several months after "the unbelievable bioterrorism attack at Lake Sabea" and Yuzuru Hamura, 1st year economics student and now President of the Mystery Society, has returned to Shinkō – trying to pick up the pieces and coming to turn with the events of the past summer. Hiruko Kenzaki, 2nd year literature student and the only other member of the Mystery Society, has been trying to figure out the cause behind the zombie outbreak and the trail leads to an organization that conducted research on the paranormal. She finally has gotten her hands on a potential clue. A magazine dedicated to the occult, Monthly Atlantis, received a prophetic letter correctly predicting a number of tragedies going back months. One of the prophesies concerned the Lake Sabea incident ("...many of the dead will rise") as well as a very specific fire ("...many people in Osaka will run around as they go up in flames"). A second letter from the same sender to the magazine tells how, decades ago, men "purportedly from the M. Organization" appeared in a remote village in W Prefecture and offered the villagers a lot of money to built a secret research facility deep within their village to carry out experiments on people who claimed to possess supernatural powers.

Hiruko suspects the research laboratory and anonymous letter writer can both be found in the old Magan district near Yoshimi, a remote mountain village, which she wants to check out. Hamura insists on going along to be her Watson. When they arrive, the villagers have temporarily abandoned the place and one of the few people they find is Lady Sakimi. Lady Sakimi was one the test subjects and the only one from the project who stayed behind, despite her powers of prophecy being proven to be legitimate, and had now "lived for over half a century in this haunting region" feared "by the villagers of Yoshimi as a prophet." She "predicted countless disasters and incidents around the world," which is why her latest prophesy emptied out the village. Lady Sakimi announced that "on the final two days of November, two men and two women shall perish in Magan." So there were only a few people around when Hiruko and Hamura arrived.

There are two high school students, Marie Toiro and Shinobu Kukizawa, who traveled on the same bus as Hiruko and Hamura. Toiro appears to be a clairvoyant who carries around a sketchbook in which she draws accurate sketches of "the imminent future." Usually something disastrous involving someone getting hurt or dying. Yasuko Hattori moved from the village to Magan to take care of Lady Sakimi and titular Box of Evil. A two-story, box-like building without windows where once the experiments and tests into the paranormal were performed. Akiko Tokino is a former resident of Yoshimi and returned to the area to visit a grave. Takashi Ōji was touring the countryside on his motor cycle when he ran out of fuel and hoped to find some petrol in the village. Iwao Shishida is Sociology professor with a "perpetually angry face" who had car trouble and is now stuck there with his young son, Jun. Lastly, there's a writer of Monthly Atlantis, Raita Usui, who seems very pleased with the developing story. And then the bridge burns down.

So this group find themselves trapped between a river, a high rock wall with a water fall coming down from it and an inescapable prophecy, until help can arrive and that's likely not going to happen until the first of December – a situation hardly improved by Toiro furiously drawing sketches of the near future. What follows are deadly landslides, attempted as well as accidental poisonings and outright murder!

Ho-Ling Wong said in his 2019 review that the murders "happened under seemingly impossible circumstances," but while there's a quasi-howdunit element to some of the incidents, the only ties to the impossible crime is the minor no-footprints sidetrack in the fourth chapter. If anyone had the wrong impression, the prophesies do not have a natural and rational explanation. Toiro and Lady Sakimi's powers of precognition are not clever, elaborately-staged impossibilities that turned out to have a perfectly rational explanation, but genuine abilities to foresee the future. So those very real abilities, predictions and the nigh impossibility to escape those visions of things to come. When you bound such a prophesy to a location and trap people within that place, you get a practically unique situation that could not have arisen under any other circumstances. Hiruko observes that the murder arising from this unique set of circumstances would appear "incomprehensible to the police coming from the outside," which is why the primary problem is "is not the question of howdunnit, but whydunnit." However, it's not just the presence of two characters with the power to see into the future that makes Death Within the Evil Eye and this series incomparable to anything else out there.

I mentioned in my review of Death Among the Undead that Hiruko is presented as a flesh-and-blood incarnation of the murder-magnet trope, which sounds fun (see John Sladek's Black Aura, 1974), but there are some dark, grim consequences to her "innate ability to attract bizarre incidents" – like getting shunned by her own family. When she has a teary conversation with Toiro about their unfortunate abilities, Hiruko says "if curses do really exist in this world, then I am the one who is cursed. I can't begin to count the number of people who have perished around me." Imamura tried to show what would realistically happen if things such a bio-engineered zombies, prophets who run circles around Nostradamus and murder-magnets who not only naturally attracts "freakish incidents," but possess the ability to resolve them. So the connection between the two protagonists is not your typical Holmes-Watson relation like in other detective stories, which is something Hamura finds out for himself. It makes you wonder if this second wave of shin honkaki writers will end up somehow finding a way to harmonize the traditionalists movements spawned by Seishi Yokomizo with the social school of Seicho Matsumoto in a most fantastic way.

I glossed over the majority of the plot-technical details, but not because the plot plays second fiddle to the characters and outre elements. There's an abundance of plot, “the matter of alibis and motives is important,” which also poses such intriguing question why some scattered flowers in front of Lady Saki bedroom door, why a clock had unnecessarily been smashed to pieces and who was spear-wielding, white clad figure who disappeared down a flight of stairs. And lead the pursuers to another horrible discovery. I also liked how the closed circle situation was scrutinized, "there is no situation less suitable for a murder than a closed circle," which begs the question why the culprit was willing to kill under these dangerous, high-risk circumstances. But they mostly happen after the halfway mark. And don't want to give away too much.

Suffice to say, Imamura created another strange, but stable, mixture of fantasy and realism, "a closed circle situation, plus precognitive powers," which unlocked previously closed doors to new possibilities to tell and play out the traditional, fair play detective story – since this story could not have happened without real precognitive powers. Just like the first novel, it provided the murderer with an original motivation to carry out the murders and the ending definitely had a haunting touch of Final Destination. Even then, there a final chapter playing up the detective part of the story and that one is also made possible due to the predictions being a reality. And it all worked! Death Within the Evil Eye is a very different from Death Among the Undead with the emphasis being on the mental anguish caused by an unwielding future rather than the physical challenge posed by keeping out of biting distance of a zombie horde. So the pacing of the story is notably slower, but what it builds towards is magnificent. The way in which he brought the grounded detective story and the supernatural together almost makes writing and plotting hybrid mysteries look easy. I don't know what more to say except that Imamura is inching closer, and closer, to becoming a personal favorite.

So I'll end this review hoping that a translation of the third novel is in the works, because Kyoujintei no satsujin (The Murder in the House of Maleficence, 2021) sounds completely insane. I called Death Among the Undead a shock to system and Death Within the Evil Eye the calm after the storm, but The Murder in the House of Maleficence strikes me as having come to terms with the new reality and comes out guns blazing.