The Black Swan Mystery (1960) by Tetsuya Ayukawa

I pontificated in "The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime Story in the 21st Century" on how today's translation wave started when Keigo Higashino's 2011 translation of Yogisha X no kenshin (The Devotion of Suspect X, 2005) became an unexpected, international bestseller opening the door to invite future translation – which the late John Pugmire accepted in 2015. Locked Room International published the first-ever English edition of Yukito Ayatsuji's epochal Jakkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987) opening the floodgates to even more translations. And attracting other publishers to the joys of the Japanese shin honkaku mysteries.

Funnily enough, neither The Decagon House Murders nor The Devotion of Suspect X can be labeled as a locked room mystery or impossible crime, but the translation wave has been dominated by locked room novels and impossible crime stories. So the past ten years have been something of a locked room renaissance and the translation wave infused the form with some much needed fresh blood, which helped to revitalize it and even lead to a revival.

However, the locked room mystery is not the end-all of detective fiction, you don't always get that impression from reading this blog, but the impossible crime story is merely my favorite hobby horse – a hobby horse I enjoy riding into oblivion. I love and welcome good, craftily-plotted detective stories in any shape or form and wanted to see what the Japanese detective story can do outside a locked room or field of untrodden snow. This is one of the reasons why I've been so intrigued by their hybrid mysteries, tracked down Seimaru Amagi's Dennō sansō satsujin jiken (Murder On-Line, 1996) and jumped at the opportunity to sample Jun Kurachi's Hoshifuri sansou no satsujin (Murders in the Mountain Lodges Beneath the Shooting Stars, 1996). So was not dismayed at all when it became apparent Pushkin Vertigo was going to diversify their output of honkaku and shin honkaku translations.

This year, they're going to publish Yasuhiko Nishizawa's time-looping, hybrid mystery Nanakai shinda otoko (The Man Who Died Seven Times, 1995), Taku Ashibe's classically-styled whodunit Oomarike satsujin jiken (Murders in the House of Omari, 2021) and two strange novels by horror Youtuber "Uketsu." I'm not sure about Seishi Yokomizo's Kuroneko tei jiken (The Murder at the Black Cat Cafe, 1947), but it appears to be a whodunit without any impossible crimes. Don't worry. I'll be getting my Japanese impossible crime fix through Ayatsuji's Tokeikan no satsujin (The Clock Mansion Murders, 1991), MORI Hiroshi's Warawanai sugakusha (Mathematical Goodbye, 1996) and the various anime-and manga detective series. This move began last November with their publication of Tetsuya Ayukawa's Kuroi hakuchou (The Black Swan Mystery, 1960), translated by Bryan Karetnyk, whom readers will remember from the short story collection The Red Locked Room (2020).

Ayukawa's The Black Swan Mystery is best summed as a police procedural in the tradition of Seicho Matsumoto's Ten to sen (Points and Lines, 1958), but with the heart, soul and plot of the traditional, fair play detective novel – particularly Christopher Bush and Freeman Wills Crofts. Yes, the story largely hinges on the question of alibis, complete with time tables and railway schedules, but it's much more than simply retracing people's movement and breaking down alibis. It's also an excellent and absorbing police procedural/whodunit.

The investigation at the heart of The Black Swan Mystery is an involved one starting with the murder of Gosuke Nishinohata, director of Towa Textiles, whose body was found next to railway tracks near Kuki Station with a bullet in his back. Detective Inspector Sudo and Constable Seki get to take a crack at the case first and they get a lucky break as Nishinohata's body had been thrown from an overpass and landed on a train passing under the Ryodaishi Bridge. So the blood on the bridge and roof of the train gives the police an exact time and place to check everyone's alibis ("my, my, that's awfully precise, Inspector"). There are, of course, enough complications to make this everything but a routine murder investigation. This is a detective story, after all.

Firstly, the owners of the Towa Textiles Company are at "loggerheads" with the trade union who presented them with "a four-point list of demands and called a strike." One of the four demands is freedom of religious expression, because Nishinohata was a follower of the Shaman, a new sect of Shintoism, who tried to push his religion on the workers and that didn't sit well – neither with the workers nor the the Shaman. The Shaman have stranglehold on their followers, figuratively and literally, which is why they're not happy Towa Textiles is willing to give in on that specific demand. It would mean losing thousands of members at once. They employ an ex-secret serviceman, Hanpei Chita, who's job is to dissuade people from leaving the Shaman and considered to be capable of everything ("...even of killing a man"). Secondly, Nishinohata was a known philanderer coming with the usual complications and his position as director gets entangled with the personal lives of the people at the company. His private secretary, Takeshi Haibara, wants to marry the beautiful daughter of one of the directors, Atsuko, but she's in a secret relationship with the vice-chairman of the trade union, Narumi.

So enough to keep Sudo and Seki pleasantly occupied with trying to entangle this complicated knot of relationships, potential motives and those pesky, rock solid alibis, but then more bodies begin to turn up along the way – all curiously connected to the first murder. Sudo and Seki eventually hit a dead end and the top brass decides to assign the case to Inspector Onitsura to give it a second look.

Inspector Onitsura previously appeared in several short stories from The Red Locked Room, translated by Ho-Ling Wong, who described him "Ellery Queen wearing the face of Inspector French" and his short stories/novels are generally regarded as early police procedurals. But they're crammed with original tricks and EQ-style chain of logic/deduction. Tetsuya Ayukawa certainly allowed Onitsura to live up to his reputation in The Black Swan Mystery. Onitsura is as logical and methodical as French, but neither is above making the occasional mistake or overlooking a small detail. Once they got hold of something, they follow it to its logical conclusion. Whether there's a murderer waiting at the end of that specific trail or not. There's something really comfy about following Onitsura on those leisure train rides pass the small stations along the less frequent traveled lines. Or, to quote the story itself, "writer of children's stories with a fantastical mindset might have imagined that the train were a tortoise and that he were riding on its back towards the Palace of the Dragon King" ("...the inspector himself was too much of a realist to have such fairy tales in his mind"). So the first and second-half of The Black Swan Mystery already form an excellent, slightly classically-styled, police procedural published during the rise of the social school in Japanese crime fiction. The story definitely has a strong flavoring of the social school with a strike going on in the background and addressing certain issues of post-war Japan, but the overall plot and uncluttered, clear solution possesses all the ingenuity of the Golden Age detective stories of the West.

A solution that naturally turn on the question of alibis and opportunity, but those alibis don't come into play until Onitsura has identified the murderer with roughly a quarter of the story left to go, only to be stonewalled by a pair of cast-iron alibis – "unassailable from every angle." But the "very perfection" of those alibis makes him only more determined to tear them down. And tearing them down, he does! The tricks behind the two alibis honestly are something you would expect from a honkaku mystery novel rather than a police procedural with obvious ties to the Seicho Matsumoto's social school of crime fiction. Bush, Crofts and Queen could have hardly done better! That fact is also depressing as hell. Even when Japan moved away from the traditional, plot-oriented detective novels of Seishi Yokomizo and Akimitsu Takagi to make way for the social school, they continued to produce first-class detective fiction. Sure, it was often disguised as historical fiction or police procedurals, but they were still there. When the West abandoned the traditional detective stories of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, the genre descended into a dark age.

So, to cut long story short, Tetsuya Ayukawa's The Black Swan Mystery comes heartily recommended as one of those rare mysteries that fans of the classic detective story and modern crime novel can enjoy, but the former have to keep in mind it's a little different from what most have come to expect from a Japanese detective novel. A little different, but just as good.