The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders (2002) by Takekuni Kitayama

Takekuni Kitayama is a Japanese mystery writer best known for his work on Danganronpa kirigiri, a series of light novels, but started out writing hybrid-style, shin honkaku locked room mysteries – beginning with four novels collectively known as the Castle series. Kitayama is "known as a master of impossible situations with a physical trick behind them" earning him the nickname "Kitayama of Physics."

The first novel in the Castle series, "Clock jou" satsujin jiken (The "Clock Castle" Murder Case, 2002), won the 24th Mephisto Prize and the plot, "vividly depicting the demise of the world," sounds fascinating. Blending the traditional detective story format with fantastic elements appears Kitayama's specialty. Ho-Ling Wong noted in his review of "Guillotine jou" satusjin jiken ("Guillotine Castle" Murder Case, 2005) that Kitayama's novels "seem always to be set in a somewhat different world, a world that is very alike, but quite like 'our' world." A series that sounds right up my alley. So, of course, there are known plans to translate the novels and the series joins countless other Japanese mystery titles and series remaining frustratingly out of reach.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the second title in the Castle series, Rurijou satsujin jiken (The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders, 2002), to be one of the unexpected, exotic material to come out of the first round of nominations for the new, updated "Locked Room Library" – similar to Aosaki Yugo's "Tokuma shoten" ("Knockin' On Locked," 2014) and K.O. Enigma's Bunraku Noir (2023). Respectively, an excellent fanlation and an even better self-published, shin honkaku-style mystery novel. The available edition of The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders is also a fanlation done by Mitsuda Madoy and his friend, "cosmiicnana." A very well done translation of a tricky, intricately-plotted and multiple locked room mystery that has everything from cursed daggers, reincarnating characters and a bloody galore of inexplicable decapitations! Not to mention a ton of diagrams and floor plans of the various locations and tricks.

The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders is structured like an interlinked short story collection, set across in different places and periods, involving the same set of characters, Raine and Marie.

Raine and Marie are lovers who have curse laid upon them by six, star-engraved daggers, "belonging to a certain private order in France," which have "drank the blood of countless people in different times and places" – bringing nothing but misfortune to whomever owns a dagger. Those six daggers snagged the two lovers in a never-ending cycle of death and rebirth. Every time Raine and Marie are reincarnated, they are destined to meet each other and always ending with one killing the other with one of the daggers ("wherever we run, there's another dagger waiting for us"). They have been trapped in this reincarnation cycle for centuries.

The story opens in 1989 at the library of the Foundation of Knowledge, known as the Library at the End of the World, located in the northernmost part of Japan. A young woman, Kimiyo, is approached in the reading room by a man, Kito, who tells her he has been looking for her for a long time. Kito is Raine and Kimiyo is Marie, but she has no memory of any previous life. Let alone several. Kimiyo is naturally a bit skeptical after hearing the story of the cursed daggers and the legend of the Six Headless Knights from 13th century France ("you a knight, and me a lord's daughter... continuously fleeing the curse of the daggers... it's so cheesy"). There is, however, a dagger collecting dust in the library's storage room ("we always reunite near one of cursed daggers"). And not everything about his story appears to add up.

The next part takes place in 1243, Lapis Lazuli Castle, France, during the Albigensian Crusade. Marie is the only daughter of the villainous Count Geoffroy and Raine one of the six knights assigned to watch over her. Strange things happen inside the walls of the Lapis Lazuli Castle.

Some years ago, Marie witnessed her father and mother enter a room on the fourth floor of the east tower and peeked through the gap in the door. Only her parents had vanished from the room. The next thing that happens is a cup falling over and footprints appearing in the spilled wine, "as if an invisible person was walking through the wine spilled on the floor," coming to a stop at the wall. Marie believes the footsteps belonged to her mother and she disappeared into the wall. Count Geoffroy later comes out of the empty room alone. Raine is both skeptical and suspicious about the disappearance, believing her father knows more about the disappearance, but an investigation of the tower room only gives him answer to the phantom footprints – before disappearing himself together with his comrades-in-arms. The next day, the bodies of six headless knights on the banks of Cross Spring, far west of Lapis Lazuli Castle, which takes a day to reach on horseback. Impossibly, the six knights had been seen alive half a day before at the castle. No horses were taken and nobody was seen leaving the castle. They could "only assume that their corpses had flown to Cross Spring." No, the trick here's not what you think it's.

This is merely the beginning of the galore of gruesome, seemingly impossible murders and decapitations across time as The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders has heads to spare. The next stop is one of the trenches on the French-German front during the First World War. 1916 to be precise.

 

 

In this incarnation, Raine is a young French soldier and Marie an army nurse. Raine is not spared the brutality of trench warfare as he's right in the thick of it. While fighting in the flooded, muddy trenches with shell exploding all around him, Raine keeps encountering impossibly headless soldiers. Raine sees "an enemy soldier suddenly turned into a headless corpse" right in front of his eyes with the same happening later to an allied soldier ("had he been walking through the trenches with no head?"). Later, four headless bodies are found floating inside a flooded bunker, which apparently got hit from above and blew off their heads. However, when Raine went up topside and looked down, they were gone. And it would have taken at least eight men to move the corpses. They would have needed a lot more time than a minute.

When it comes locked room murders, Kitayama saved the best for last as the story returns to Kito and Kimiyo in 1989. The Library at the End of the World is turned into a veritable house of horrors with one of the most striking, elaborately staged and layered locked room scenarios I remember coming across. I'm not going to attempt to describe the whole situation, but everything from the locked room-trick itself and the reason for creating such a scenario to the additional impossibility of a cursed dagger materialization out of thin air is brilliantly done. I'll get back to all those inexplicable crimes in a moment.

So an ambitiously-plotted detective novel, stretching across countless lifetimes, requires a rare kind of Great Detective and Kitayama has one, "Snowy" – a white-haired, white-clad genderless being who hops through time. Snowy is tasked with managing chaos, "this world has a self-correcting function, and when it gets all out of whack, it seeks to restore order," which makes them a detective comparable only to Edward D. Hoch's Simon Ark. A character who claims to be a 2000-year-old Coptic priest cursed to wander the earth forever in search of evils to exorcise. Snowy is the eccentric sleuth taken to its extreme, but perfectly suitable for a mystery like this one. Snowy appears to Raine and Marie in every time period from the Lapis Lazuli Castle in 1243 to the Library at the End of the World in 1989 to give an explanation of the numerous impossibilities and the mechanics of reincarnation.

First of all, those numerous decapitations and stabbings under seemingly impossible circumstances. Over the years, I gorged on made a study of these impossible crime extravagances and concluded that the magic number is about four. More than four and the story usually starts bumping into one of two problems.

A locked room murder or other type of impossibility always comes with the expectation the author has something to deliver on that premise. Something really original or simply good enough to be acceptable. And those expectations go up with every additional impossible crime. So if you have four impossibilities, you need at least one or two quality locked room-tricks. One really good, quality trick can be repeated under similar circumstances, while the two other can be less original and more routine in nature. A locked room mystery with five or more impossibilities are rarely capable of delivering a satisfying explanation to more than two, three of them. A. Carver's The Christmas Miracle Crimes (2023) broke with that long-standing tradition by delivering on all eight of its locked room and impossible crime situations. However, the book bumped into another problem. Successfully stringing together eight impossibilities without using overly simplistic, routine trick as filler material is to be applauded, but, even to an impossible crime addict, eight in a single novel can be a bit much to take in all at once. Your mind eventually loses track of the smaller details.

The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders has roughly the same number of impossible crimes as Carver's The Christmas Miracle Crimes, but Kitayama neatly sidestepped both pitfalls of the miracle extravagance. Firstly, the impossibilities are clearly arranged to their specific time period and location with the minor ones (e.g. the footprints in the wine) getting explained away early on the story. Secondly, the solutions are uniformly excellent. I already mentioned the multi-layered, absolutely insane locked room murder at the library, but not to be overlooked is the bonkers explanation to how the headless knights disappeared from the castle or how the soldiers wandered around the trenches without their heads. I particularly loved that solution! It probably wouldn't work as well as suggested here, but the trick is certainly original and something that would only have a shot of succeeding in the real-life horror story called trench warfare. Very fitting! So a very well managed locked room mystery novel.

However, The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders is not entirely without flaws. Kitayama crammed a lot in what is really a short novel and wished certain parts of the story had been given more room to breath and develop. Such as the 1916 case or Snowy's explanation of the mechanics of reincarnation, which gives way to another problem. Kitayama tried to play the game fairly, but the nature of the plot, complexity of the tricks and Snowy's revelations are eventually going to outpace even the most brilliant armchair detective – where it becomes nigh impossible to anticipate the final twists. Even more so, once the reincarnation mechanics begin to influence the overarching plot and characters. It becomes a ride towards the end, you simply have to go along with, but what a ride! Absolutely insane in the truest, most flattering sense of the word!

Somehow, someway, this is reportedly considered to be the weakest of Kitayama's four Castle novels. This is the weakest? This one?! When can I expect translations of the other three?

Anyway, to cut another needlessly long, rambling review short, The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders simply is shin honkaku at its gory best. Highly recommended!