"The Slasher" (1990/2025) by Rintarou Norizuki

Many years ago, I read Rintarou Norizuki’s “The Lure of the Green Door,” an excellent locked room mystery. Norizuki is one of the big names in shin-honkaku, a well-known author who writes mysteries with Ellery Queenian complex logic chains. He’s also written mysteries that explore a pointed criticism of that Queen-school of writing, the “Late Queen Problem.” (Associated with Norizuki even though the originator of the term was likely Kiyoshi Kasai.) However, aside from one other short story, “An Urban Legend Puzzle,” he has remained officially untranslated. “Officially” is the key word there, since another one of his short stories has been translated by a friend of mine who was kind enough to share his translation of Norizuki’s “The Slasher,” originally published in the April 1990 issue of Kotton* and later collected in The Adventures of Norizuki Rintarou. Since Norizuki follows in the well-known Queen tradition of using the same name for author and detective, I’ll use “Norizuki” to refer to the author and “Rintaro” to the character.

In spite of the name, “The Slasher” doesn’t involve Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers on a rampage. No, this slasher does much worse than slaughter teenagers for the sake of a entertained audience. This slasher violates the sanctity and purity of library books, specifically mystery novels, cutting out the pages “up to the table of contents.” The slasher “cut very close to the spine, so only the barest traces of the page remained.” Our detective, Rintarou, has no intention of getting involved, but his attraction to the librarian (and her taunting him) moves him to action.

“The Slasher” is a solid short story. The act of tracking the slasher down doesn’t involve any great reasoning on Rintaro’s part, just some digging through the library’s records to pick up on patterns. But the motive is honestly brilliant. It’s a motive that any mystery reader can sympathize with. And the reason the slasher chose to do it this way is excellent, fairly clued and leading up to a final revelation. I’d say it’s fairer than “Green Door.” I myself came close to figuring it out, if only I’d thought a bit more about the implications of the culprit’s actions.

I must also give full credit to the translation. It reads very well and captures the humor of the original text.

I apologize for such a short review this week. Like Rintarou, I’m a procrastinator at heart. I will have something more substantial, or more unique, for next week.

*The translator wasn’t 100% sure on the title.