Brilliant, Witty, and Playful: The Tokyo Zodiac Murders

"Playful" isn't a word you usually connect to murder mysteries, except maybe in a sadistic, Jigsaw-kinda way, but for this book, I really mean it. Soji Shimada pops in twice to tell you to sit down and solve the mystery before you go on, and the solution is so clever and out there that you might never get it!

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is a classic Japanese murder mystery from 1981. I read it in grad school maybe 15 years ago, and it's been hard to get a copy affordably until recently, since the book had such limited printings in English. Fortunately, a recent printing makes this book accessible at a relatively low price, which was just the opportunity I was waiting for.

The book follows two amateur detectives, Kazumi Ishioka (the PoV character) and Kiyoshi Mitarai (his brilliant but eccentric friend) as they try to solve a forty-plus year old cold case.

In 1936, an artist was found dead in his studio on a winter morning. His murder is a classic closed-room mystery, but what's even weirder is what they found in his room: a bizarre "will and testament" that details his plans to kill a bunch of his daughters and nieces in order to create, through astrology and alchemy, the perfect woman.

Thank goodness someone got him before he could put his plans into action, right?

Wrong. Soon after, his daughters and nieces all die, including one extra female relative of his, all under suspicious circumstances. Their bodies are found over the course of the next year, and all of these cases go unsolved for over forty years, when our heroes get their hands on some new information and a time limit to save a family from public humiliation.

This book has a quick pace, partly from its organization (mostly) as dialogue. Having two detectives offers many opportunities for witty banter and personality development while dealing with what could otherwise be boring exposition.

Shimada surrounds you with a fog of plausibly important facts and asks you (yes, you, the reader) to solve the case. It's fun and the ending is so clever that even after I remembered the "trick" from reading it fifteen years ago, it still took me a while to remember who the culprit was, and why they did what they did.

This translation has some weird stylistic choices: it uses American date conventions (month-day-year) but mentions a car's "tyres." It drops periods and apostrophes from common abbreviations mostly (like "Mr" and "Jr"), but then it drops two "p.m."s in one paragraph! Very strange.

But aside from these minor quibbles, this book was almost as fun the second time as it was the first.

If you like mysteries, and especially if you like trying to solve mysteries, you absolutely must check this book out.

For a few more spoilers and a little more plot detail, check out the Spoiler Section of the embedded video as usual, starting at 17:20.

Grab a copy here.