The Tokyo Zodiac Murders

I'm amazed. This book was so good I don't even have words to describe it. If you're a fan of complicated mysteries, you'll probably love this book!

Content Warning: Violence Against Women

One of my prompts for the Litsy Challenge is “Japanese Thriller” which took me some research to find one I could get my hands on. As it turns out, this isn't really a thriller, just a mystery. It was the debut novel of this author, who has now churned out over a hundred mystery novels. It only came out thirteen years ago; he must write very fast!

In The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, two friends are trying to solve a 40-year-old serial murder case in which a man, his five daughters, and his two nieces were all killed. There was a curious note left by the murdered man detailing his plans to kill the women, take parts from each of them, and make the “perfect woman” called Azoth, who was supposed to become some kind of goddess and “save Japan.” His eldest daughter was raped and murdered in a crime that, besides timing, looked unrelated to the rest. The other six were not only killed, but chopped up and dumped with parts missing, all according to the murdered man's plan. ....Except he was murdered first!

What starts the two friends on this path is one of Kiyoshi's clients bringing him a letter her father had written before he died, confessing to having consensual sex with the eldest daughter the night she was murdered, then dumping the bodies as instructed by a blackmailer who knew about the encounter. He did not kill the girls; just took care of the disposal. This is brand-new evidence to the case.

This was definitely a mystery, not a thriller, but they're largely lumped together in the lists of translated works of “Japanese Crime Fiction” so I'm counting it anyway. It was an interesting mystery; I liked that, unlike a lot of mysteries, all of the evidence is available to the reader. The characters tell the reader everything they uncover, but not the conclusions they draw. (Until the big reveal at the end, anyway.) Shimada actually put two author's notes in the novel itself; one before the characters reveal anything, saying “You have all the information you need to solve the mystery now, can you do it before the characters reveal what happened?” and one after the murderer is revealed but before the How is answered, asking “Can you figure out how and why she did it?” before the complete reveal at the end of the book. It was a little surprising, but I really liked it.

I've never been big into mysteries, so I don't see myself reading more of Shimada's work, but for a book I wouldn't normally have read, this was pretty interesting. That's what reading challenges are all about, right? Stretching out your literary comfort zones.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

OK, this was really quite a bit of good fun. According to the afterword by the publishers at the end, this style of mystery is under the subgenre called “honkaku”, which is much more interested in “pure” mysteries without any social criticism. Readers are given all the clues they need to solve the mystery before the end of the book, so there's perhaps less focus on the personalities and backstories of the characters and more emphasis on the actual puzzle.

Indeed, you really do feel like this is a logic puzzle in the form of a novel. Things are laid out for you right from the prologue itself. It's got a sort of narrative thread, but it's really just our two main characters, Kiyoshi and Kazumi, discussing with each other and therefore infodumping every little hint and detail of the puzzle to the reader. It's not exactly a crime-solving journey that the reader is invited on, it's really the author giving you the puzzle pieces and telling you to try solving it yourself.

It takes a while to get used to but I found it pretty fun. Some of the dialogue may seem a bit stilted but I chalk it to translation. I find that East Asian languages inevitably lose a lot of colour and nuance when translated to English, and it results in slightly strange-sounding dialogue sometimes which I don't really mind. Plus, this book was published 40 years ago so I'm sure a lot of the terminology, proverbs, and slang used here is already long outdated.

I didn't quite solve the murder before the last Act, but I'm slightly happy to say that I did guess it just before it was revealed in the narrative, with the final clues that Kiyoshi threw down before he went ahead with the full explanation. The solution was fairly ingenious, but I thought the backstory was more mundane than we might've expected, although I usually find that to be the case for murder stories with the most sensational premises, what with all these astrology elements and bizarre dismemberments.

I'd definitely read more of Soji Shimada's books.