Lending the Key to the Locked Room, his debut novel, focuses on Ryuhei Tomura, a wannabe director. However, when the book opens, he’s realized the limits of his skill and is content to do work for a local film company in Ikagawa City. He even (kinda) has a job lined up thanks to an old college senior, Kosaku Moro. Sadly, his girlfriend, Yuki Konno, finds this too unambitious and publicly and dramatically breaks up with him. Ryuhei tells himself he’s getting over it, but soon goes on a drunken bender where he tries to fight someone (and loses badly) while yelling that he’s going to kill Yuki.
To help him get over the break-up, Moro invites Ryuhei to a movie night in Moro’s apartment, which he’s partly converted into a home theater. Ryuhei brings the B-film Massacre Manor to watch, and the two men enjoy some snacks and drinks afterwards. Moro goes to take a shower, but when he fails to return, Ryuhei goes to investigate and finds Moro lying on the bathroom floor, stabbed to death. Ryuhei faints and awakens the next day. When he checks the apartment, he finds that the door is chain locked. Then he learns that Yuki was killed the previous night, and his only alibi witness is…Moro. Needless to say, he bolts: "It was the worst thing he could have possibly done."
Desperate, Ryuhei turns to his ex-brother-in-law, Morio Ukai. Ukai is a private detective who’s agency has the motto WELCOME TROUBLE, and Ryuhei will get him into a lot of it before the book is done.
Lending leans heavily towards comedy. The book drips with funny asides and sharp dialogue. However, while I was amused and entertained, nothing really crossed the line into full-on funny for me. I don’t know how much of this was Higashigawa’s actual writing or the translation being a little dry. It was lighthearted and I found it pleasant, but rarely on the level of laughing out loud. To the book’s credit, the character’s actions rarely cross the line into cringe. Most of their actions are silly or ridiculous, but they make sense. Ukai and Ryuhei impersonating cops to interrogate witnesses is ridiculous, but it keeps the plot moving forward; there’s never a moment where the book spins its wheels while trying to be funny.
Still, it does mean the characters are a bit thin. They’re entertaining, but I never really felt any connection to them or concern for Ryuhei’s situation. I found the characters in Mead’s Death and the Conjuror to be a little more distinctive. I also wish that the comedy had been better woven into the mystery plot. There’s one part where the consequence of a comedy sequence does play a role in the mystery, but it’s a minor one. The whole thing felt a little over-explained. There was a simpler explanation than what we got that didn’t need the comedy aspect to be satisfying.
The mystery side of the book is pretty good. However, I do think that most hardcore mystery fans can figure out the broad strokes of the solution. There aren’t too many alternative options to latch on to, which the rapid pace of the book disguises. But it’s well-done and the solution fits the tone of the book well. Sadly, the best part of the solution is a giant spoiler to even mention. Rest assured that I found it very clever and almost consider it worth the price of admission.
All in all, I enjoyed this book. It’s a fun little mystery comedy; a little lightweight but still worth your time to read. I can’t say that I’m a die-hard Higashigawa fan yet, but I’m open to becoming one. Recommended.
Other Reviews: Mysteries Ahoy! (comments contain spoilers, in ROT13 mind you, for this book and The Red Right Hand), Beneath the Stains of Time, Ah Sweet Mystery, James Scott Byrnside, The Invisible Event, Stephen M. Pierce, and The Case Files of Ho-Ling.
I don't really have much to say about the book itself beyond it being a fine little mystery story, so I'd like to take this opportunity to rant about the J-Drama adaptation.
ReplyDeleteI first got into J-Mystery pretty early: the first book I got on my first e-reader was The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, and back in the 2000s, the options for translated J-Mystery consisted almost entirely of that, its sequel, an obscure early translation of The Inugami Curse under the title The Inugami Clan and containing some casual use of slurs, and Keigo Higashino. If you wanted any more than that, you had to play Ace Attorney (yay!), read the Danganronpa fan translation forums on Something Awful (boo!), or start watching j-dramas.
Now, I'm going to say at the jump that as a general rule, I'm actually not that big a fan of j-dramas. With the exception of the peak television that is Furuhata Ninzaburo, something about them just grates against me. The "ideal" performance in a Japanese TV show is wooden and formulaic to my eyes, complex characters reduced to a costume and a catchphrase repeated with the same intonation at the same time each episode. And the official j-drama adaptation of the Ikagawa City series, The Detective That I Dislike (In Japanese, it rolls off the tongue better... but not MUCH better) is especially bad about that.
The whole series was greenlit as a star vehicle for this one specific actress, so since Lending the Key doesn't feature a female MC (I haven't read the rest of the series, so I don't know if that changes ever), they had to make some ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. So now Ryuhei's cool, laid back biker girl landlord is this college-aged billionaire who's a pushy, obsessive mystery fanatic, and she uses her fortune to bribe Morio (who is now a lazy yet classy guy who prefers to take lost pet cases from rich clients) into solving the mysteries he'd otherwise ignore for being unprofitable.
And since the book was a comedy, that means we have to start getting WwWwWaCkY with it! So now every episode there's these insufferable several minute sequences where Akemi or whatever her name is comes up with her own theories about the case, but uh oh! She's got mystery fan brain poisoning, so all her "theories" are just her bolting a series of cliche mystery tropes and references to other media together pretty much at random without any attempt to actually answer any of the problems! It's Seltzer and Friedbergian. I didn't like this style of humor in The 33 Minute Detective (sorry, Ho-Ling), but something about this over-acting starlet doing it in a script that wasn't originally written to accommodate it is a hundred times worse. I couldn't finish a single episode. God, just remembering it now is getting me all worked up...
I don't really have any greater point here. Having seen half of the first episode of Watashi no Kirai no Tantei didn't color my reading of the translation when it came out. The two are such completely different works that I legitimately didn't recognize them as the same until I looked the series back up to rant at Nana about it and went "wait, there's a character named Morio Ukai!?" I just... needed to rant about how much I hate that series or I would have exploded.