Murder at the End of the World (2022) by Akane Araki

I previously reviewed Ross Montgomery's The Murder at World's End (2025), a classically-styled, retro-Golden Age mystery, which is set against the backdrop of the Great Comet Scare of 1910 when Halley's Comet was making its pass by the Earth – believing the planet would pass through its poisonous tail. However, the apocalypse never happened and Montgomery exploited the historical panic to stage a locked room murder inside a grand mansion that was turned into a vintage doomsday bunker. Coincidentally, just when I finished writing the review, the perfect supplement arrived in the mail.

In July, Pushkin Vertigo released Akane Araki's Konoyo no hate no satsujin (Murder at the End of the World, 2022), translated by Jesse Kirkwood, which was awarded with the Edogawa Rampo Prize ("...Japan's most prestigious award for unpublished crime writers"). That award got her manuscript published. Araki's Murder at the End of the World is a completely different story from Montgomery's The Murder at World's End.

Murder at the End of the World begins normally enough as 23-year-old Haru is taking driving lessons from her instructor, of the Dazaifu Driving School, Isagawa, but something strange is going on with the world outside – deserted roads, empty streets and everything's unnervingly quiet. Haru tells Isagawa she's now living alone with her younger brother, because their mother run away early on and their father hanged himself two days ago. And that's before they come across dozens of bodies hanging from trees in the mountain forest. Not a mass suicide, but individual people who decided "dying wild" ("...carrying out the deed in some remote natural setting") was their best option given the circumstances. It turns out humanity has only three months left.

Four months previously, the Spaceguard Foundation held a press conference to announce asteroid 2021-NQ2 (a.k.a. Telos) is going to collide with Earth on March 7 and release "a kinetic energy equal to 45 billion megatons of TNT." The asteroid is expected to land in Aso District, Kumamoto Prefecture, south of Fukuoka. A doomsday broadcast that became known "Black Wednesday" resulting in global, large-scale riots in which "150 million people perished," but Japan and the whole Asia and Oceania got the brunt of it. There was a mass exodus that turned two regions of the world into a continent-sized ghost towns as everyone tried to get as far away from the projected impact site as possible. However, it was explained it didn't matter where you are in the world when the asteroid impacts ("...over 3 billion people would die in the initial shock wave... 5 billion who survived would then starve or freeze to death"). Haru's hometown, Dazaifu, is right in Fukuoka Prefecture. So why even bother taking driving lessons when the story of humanity is about to end? Haru has her own reasons, but Haru and Isagawa stumble across a real and very disturbing mystery.

The Dazaifu Driving School has an untouched, fully fueled fleet of forty-nine training cars. So they can pick and choose which car to take for their lessons without having to worry about fuel. But when they return for their next lesson, they find the body of a woman stuffed inside the boot of one of the training cars. She has been the victim of a brutal and savage knife attack! Isagawa is an ex-detective with an overdeveloped, sometimes dangerous sense of justice and is determined the find the killer of the woman, but where do you start when everything around you has collapsed and been practically deserted? Surprisingly, they find several police stations with a skeleton staff and learn there have been other murders. But the victims of those frenzied stabbings were two male high school students. Nothing was really done to investigate the murders on account of the problems the impending end of the world has caused.

The first-half of Murder at the End of the World is superb from the pre-apocalyptic aesthetics, existential dread and looming extinction to the problems arising from trying to carry out an investigation in a collapsed, depopulated society – like finding the link between the victims. Something that would have been routine before the Black Wednesday. This also count for the murderer. Why go on a killing spree near the end of the world? Why try covering up the murder by hiding the body in the boot of the car when a body beside the road would hardly be noticed, reported or acted upon? That being said, Murder at the End of the World is not a detective novel proper dealing with cleverly hidden murderers, impossible crimes, dying messages, clues and red herrings. Murder at the End of the World is ultimately a criminal character piece/crime novel telling the story of Haru coming to terms with the inevitable and Isagawa's uncompromising desire for justice, but also the stories of the survivors and small pockets of civilization they come across. The so-called holdouts who, for one reason or another, couldn't get out of the country.

So that's perhaps why I preferred the first-half to the second-half and ending, because it was building towards a more detective-esque possible solution. I thought I had at least gotten hold of part of the correct solution, but had to abandon that possibility at the halfway mark. That's where the book became a character-driven crime novel in a doomed world that has largely gone dark. A serial killer sub-plot was even introduced fairly late into the story. Not that the story became any less readable or captivating. I was hooked and actually wanted to know how it ended for the characters, before the asteroid arrived. So even without a detective-esque plot, Araki had my full attention with Murder at the End of the World from start to finish. It's at the finish where my only problem with the story turns up.

The character-driven crime novel is not my favorite type of crime fiction, but I'm not completely allergic to them when they have something good or interesting to offer in lieu of an intricate or simply good plot. Murder at the End of the World definitely found that hook with an asteroid hurling towards Earth, but (IMO) it should at least give the murderer a strong motive to kill under these circumstances. I thought the motive behind the murder to be weak, unconvincing and cheapened the characters and the story preceding it. I would have been happy enough if the murderer turned out to be cracked and was sacrificing people to heavens as an old world remedy to the asteroid. So that left me with mixed thoughts.

I guess you can compare Murder at the End of the World to the other disaster detective Pushkin Vertigo published earlier this year. For me, Haruo Yuki's Hakobune (The Ark, 2022) is the better, more satisfying of the two novels as The Ark is a fiendishly-plotted whodunit with a series of crimes that could have only arising from that situation. Murder at the End of the World is the better written novel with a bigger impact. The Ark only impacted the characters trapped inside that underground structure, while most of society has already collapsed months before page 1 of Murder at the End of the World. Araki very effectively showed the devastating effects of Black Wednesday by exploring the nearly deserted Dazaifu and the surrounding Fukuoka region. If only the motive had been better or slightly more convincing and I would have been happy with this departure from my regular detective fiction.

Araki's Murder at the End of the World is still a very good, hard to put down read. Basically doom scrolling for crime readers. If your taste is somewhat similar to mind, I recommend to adjust your expectations. Araki's Murder at the End of the World is an entirely different kind of "disaster detective" from Yuki's The Ark. The disaster is larger in scale, nothing short of apocalyptic, but not the plot. So this is one best read and enjoyed when you go along for the ride.

Note for the curious: the next review is not going to be of Stuart Turton's The Last Murder at the End of the World (2024). I wish I had thought and planned that far ahead.