"Following the terminology of alchemy, I shall call her Azoth, which means "from A to Z" - the ultimate creation, the universal life force. She fulfils my dreams completely."
It's been a decade since I finished this weird murder mystery-fantasy visual novel series called Umineko no Naku Koro ni, also known as Umineko When They Cry. That particular story began with a prologue about an elderly man, the head of the the Ushiromiya family Kinzo Ushiromiya, sitting in a dim and grossly sweet liquor-smelling room with his doctor, talking about his family and that massive fortune of his. Kinzo didn't have long to live, but he was still managing, surpisingly enough to his doctor. Although he lived in a mansion on the Rokkenjima island he himself had bought along with other members of the Ushiromiya family, he never really wanted to go out of his large room. He didn't care to see anyone except the family servants who'd served him for decades.
Throughout his life Kinzo had somehow managed to build a kingdom out of nothing, and thus had lived a fulfilling life, accomplishing everything he ever could... except for one thing. You see, Kinzo had a deep regret and sorrow for not being able to meet a certain female character more than he'd wanted. That woman was the Golden Witch Beatrice whom had corrupted this poor old man's mind. Beatrice was known as a fictitious character on the Rokkenjima island, used by some of the adults as a horror story to scare the younger Ushiromiya family members who lived on the island from running to the forest as they could hurt themselves or even disappear to the large ocean waves if they accidentally fall of a cliff. Beatrice was so real to Kinzo that he even had a large painting made of her - a young woman with "a beautiful blonde hair and didn't look Japanese at all."
Beatrice had mesmerized Kinzo so badly that he'd started to believe that she was more important to him than anything else in the world. It quickly became clear that in his later years he'd also gone a bit crazy, as he was ready to give up everything to see Beatrice again just one more time before his death. All of his fortune, and the lives of his children and grandchildren would be given as 'sacrifice' just for him to meet this mysterious woman one more time.
Now, on 21st of April 2021 is when I'd finally finished the legendary Tokyo Zodiac Murders (1981) by Soji Shimada. This has to be one of the most popular Japanese detective fiction (also known as Honkaku) novels of all time, and maybe even for a good reason. There's been some talk about this Japanese story in particular being the cause of kicking off this new orthodox (Shin Honkaku) era of golden age-styled detective fiction. And even though I have both positives and negatives to talk about the story, I can definitely see the impact the story has had on modern detective fiction from series like Kindaichi to Umineko and even the new Ron Kamonohashi detective manga series. Even series like Subete ga F ni Naru: The Perfect Insider and Kubikiri Cycle seem to be inspired by it one way or the other.
It has quite a bit of that classic feel to it that one could expect as well. Once you finish reading this post I believe that you, too, will understand what I'm talking about.
The book opens up with a foreword from the 'writer', Kazumi Ishioka (one of the two main characters), claiming that the Tokyo Zodiac Murders of 1936 is one of the most peculiar and elusive mysteries in history of crime. It is a case that evaded sleuths all over the world for over forty years due to the answer to the puzzle being so unimaginable. When I first read the foreword I immediately liked how this first page ended, as the writer invites the reader of this book to solve the crimes with the same clues the writer also had in their hands when they managed to solve it in 1979, in other words we are spoiled on the foreword that our main characters solved this allegedly surprisingly hard-to-solve cold case. The way how Soji Shimada (real life author) had inserted Kazumi Ishioka (the fictitious author and main character of the story) to create this book where Kazumi attempts to solve the case is slightly reminiscent to the Ellery Queen stories. Though I noticed that the book has many references to other detective fiction franchises (especially Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle), they interestingly enough never mentioned Queen.
Year 1936 - The Umezawa Family Massacre
The actual story begins in prologue with a narrated letter named Last Will and Testament from 1936 written by an older introverted man, Heikichi Umezawa, who was an artist that enjoyed spending his days sitting in his room alone while drawing paintings. The text claims that it's not meant to be read by anyone else, but there exists a possibility that someone might get their hands on it. The letter reads a bit different when re-reading the book.
The letter starts a bit uncomfortably with Heikichi mentioning about being possessed by a demon, and about being enamored about the idea of a perfect woman who consists of all body parts empowered by astrological concepts. The letter talks about astrology, alchemy, geograpy, and the Umezawa family, including Heikichi's first wife Tae, his second wife Masako, his brother Yoshio, his daughters Yukiko, Tomoko, Tokiko, Kazue, and nieces Nobyo and Reiko. The Umezawa family lived a comfortable life in a large mansion while Heikichi in his later years had isolated himself into his art studio next to the main mansion.
Heikichi had been thinking about meeting this perfect woman, so much so that he even made up his mind that he could give his own life to do so. There was but one problem, though: no one can actually be perfect because we are born with only one part assigned to us as our astrological identity. A perfect woman would need to be a virgin soul born under and empowered by six different and specific astrological signs.
There are six major body parts in a human body: the legs, the thighs, the hips, the abdomen, the chest and the head. Each part of the body is governed, empowered and protected by their own 'planets' that exist in our solar system. For example those born under Libra (ie. people born on September 23rd through October 22nd) are governed by Venus and find their strength in their hips, those born under Sagittarius are governed by Jupiter and find their strength in their thighs, and so on.
One day Heikichi realized something. Something crazy... no, actually more like something absolutely deranged. You see, Heikichi realized that he already had the six women needed to create the perfect being. His own daughters and nieces, all six of them governed by all six different types of zodiacial signs. Once Heikichi realized this he wrote: "I chuckled to myself at life's so-called "coincidences", grateful for my knowledge of astrology. My knees grew weak as my fantasies assumed a reality."
Thus started the planning to create the perfect woman - a woman called Azoth that Heikichi believed to be the magnum opus and a supreme lifeform. He would cut out the corresponding bodyparts from his six daughters and nieces and combine them together. The bodies of the girls would be taken to different places that are used to mine different types of metals, and buried under different depths on different longitudes and latitudes in Japan.
As a final note Heikichi mentions that once Azoth has been finished, he will place her in the 'centre of 13' which he claims is the true centre of Japan. The hunt for Azoth is on as the gruesome murders begin!
Year 1979 - The Investigation of Kiyoshi Mitarai and Kazumi Ishioka
The story then skips over 40 years to the present time that our investigative story is going to be told in. Freelance journalist and fan of Western detective fiction Kazumi Ishioka had just finished reading Heikichi Umezawa's note about creating the most beautiful Frankenstein's monster to an astrologist and the main brain of the duo Kiyoshi Mitarai (a name which literally translates to Clean Toilet...). Their relationship and backstory isn't that fleshed out, but they're kind of a cute and quirky pair of best friends. Kiyoshi is the all too cocky and all too smart one of the two while Kazumi is the diligent one with a lot of optimism towards the future. Their roles are basically acknowledged as Kiyoshi being the Sherlock while Kazumi is the Watson, even if Kazumi wants to show his friend otherwise. Furthermore, our duo works almost exactly like the main duo of Ron Kamonohashi: Deranged Detective (2020) manga series. It's clear that at the very least Ron Kamonohashi is meant to be the author Akira Amano's version of Kiyoshi Mitarai: they're both almost identical in their personalities, they are bored and slouch around when depressed, or get that glimmer in their eyes when things are starting to fall into place, and they both say random things and want to go to random places to refresh etc.
Enough about references in other series, now let's get back to the actual novel. After the timeskip happens we get to learn a weird collection of events that happened since the letter was written. These events have perplexed the world for over forty years.
It was after a night with a heavy snow when one of the daughters of Heikichi Umezawa had gone to give food to their isolated father in his own shack in the morning. But things had clearly gone off-script for the man as he was inside, dead. The daughter, Tokiko, got rest of the Umezawa family women who lived in the mansion to the art studio. Now here's the setting:
Death of Heikichi Umezawa
In 1936, Heikichi was found dead, killed with a blunt weapon hit to the back of the head after taking sleeping pills. The windows and door were locked, but outside, on the heavy snow, there were footprints left behind by man's shoes going back and forth outside the studio as if someone had been nervously looking at the crime scene, as well as the shoeprints of an unidentified woman, assumed to be a mystery model that Heikichi was drawing. His painting of the woman was almost finished, but the most identifying feature, the face was undone. The room was locked from inside and most of the major suspects have iron-proof alibis. A true locked room mystery.
Seven Corpses
After Heikichi's death however, things quickly "go brrr" as the eldest daughter Kazue Umezawa is found dead in her home, beaten to the back of the head with a blunt object while looking at the mirror, and then raped posthumously. Police visit the place and assume that the attack was done by a robber.
But then all of a sudden all six of the younger girls; Heikichi's daughters and nieces, go missing while on a trip... until body pieces start appearing one by one as people use Heikichi's note to attempt to locate the corpses in six different places around Japan. One corpse is without a head, another without an abdomen, another without a waist, one is missing her feet one her thighs. Body pieces have been sawed off brutally like in the most horrifying horror films, and even buried the way how the letter mentioned. But how did this all happen? Why is the culprit going so far as to go through and fulfil some crazy old man's wish? And what's more horrifying is that now, 'Azoth' must've successfully been created and left in the 'centre of 13' in Japan...
The murder of Heikichi Umezawa. The assault and murder of eldest daughter Kazue Umezawa, and the murder of the six other daughters and nieces of Heikichi. These three murder cases - cold cases - together collectively create the "Tokyo Zodiac Murders" that countless people from all over the world have attempted to solve for over forty years, without success. Kiyoshi and Kazumi adventure all over Japan to collect information on the case. But not with enough success of finding clues as they should have, if we're being honest. Quite a few of the places mentioned in the book are familiar from the Detective Conan franchise (ex. Osaka, Tokyo, Kyoto, Nagano, mentions of Battle of Kawanakajima, and the Kiyomizu Temple, and even that one bridge...).
1st of March, 2016, was when I created my first blog post here at Blogger. It was a review about a Finnish hard-boiled modern crime fiction novel In the Name and Blood by Ilkka Remes. Back then, after finishing the book, I noticed that the author basically lured the reader in with an intriguing first chapter while rest of the story was quite generic and uninspired. Even though I don't really look back fondly on that particular story, I did immediately understand that if the first chapter - the kick off of the story - is strong, the story has much higher chance of standing through the test of time. This story also had one of the really crazy starts that can pull readers in. As an overall piece of fiction I'm not going to be as harsh on The Tokyo Zodiac Murders but I do believe that the beginning set up such intrigue from reading the crazy note, that the author perhaps got a bit lucky with how the story blew up in popularity. The quirky main duo compiled with an intriguing beginning, the tense expectations about getting to learn the whereabouts of Azoth, and a crazy answer to the murder trick are easily the most notable redeeming factors that this story has.
1. Narration. There's a common complaint towards fictional series these days that goes like this: "Show, don't tell." This story in particular isn't even meant to 'show' basically anything as all the backstory, clues and hints seem to be given in narration through reading or characters talking about the past. There are three main pieces of 'letters' that reveal, in narration, the beginning, middle and end of this case. I personally didn't find this to be that big of a problem as the story would've been too long had it been 'shown' all the way through, but I know many have a problem with series that are only about telling stuff.
2. Useless exposition and too many red herrings. After finishing the book I was kind of disappointed by these aspects of the story the most. There's so much about geographical places in Japan and history lessons and learning the names, connections and backgrounds of the characters in info-dump narrations, and yet it all ended up being straight-up filler with no point in the story.
I think the fact that in Detective Conan there's never really been a filler chapter (and rarely even filler pages) that I was expecting more from the huge chunks of information we'd been given through numerous info-dumps. I can imagine some readers writing all of this information down on a notebook to try to figure out the Tokyo Zodiac Murder Case, only to realize in the end that they literally would have done a much better job by not wasting so much time and effort thinking about it in the end. Not very rewarding to the reader, is it?
However, there are also good parts about this aspect of the story as the writer wants to give the reader a life lesson on how we can look at all the superficial details all we want, but we should never forget about the basics, the core of the subject. Everything else can truly be meaningless, and distracting from the truth. Focusing on all the individual leaves on a tree can be a waste of time -- and it was. I think the author definitely should have trimmed some of the information if they weren't willing to use them as real substance to move the story forward.
3. Pointless adventuring.
The story offers us a big multi-part serial murder case that's been unsolved for 40 years. However the story ends up being very limited and I wasn't really feeling the adventure. There are chapters with out main duo just running around couple of cities in Japan trying to
meet people, failing, going back to their friend's house to sleep and
try to meet the same people again the next day - sometimes with bad
success. Other than that they talk about longitudes and latitudes that end up meaning nothing in the end.
4. Zero fleshing out of the large cast of characters. There are dozens of names introduced in this story, and most likely only couple of them will stay in the future Kiyoshi Mitarai books. Yet, none of the cast is truly fleshed out properly. There's bunch of history lessons on their backgrounds in info-dumps, yes, but after finishing the book it's hard to call any of them truly proper characters. I think if they'd put more effort into the culprit's character it might've come off better, even if more readers would have figured the case out faster that way. I think I personally liked the writing style of the characters more than the characters themselves. I liked how Kazumi introduces himself by his full name in narration to the reader - for some reason that made me feel cozy.
I wouldn't complain about the cast being non-characters if some of the other aspects of the story I've been criticizing had been handled more to my tastes.
About the truth behind the Azoth murders, the locked room murder was kind of lackluster perhaps, but I didn't really even bother thinking about it, as it was still built-up properly with many theories and red herrings about what happened inside the locked room. As for the rest of the case, I'm not sure about how I did it but my intuition immediately knew who the culprit was without any solid proof and didn't take long for me to just be "ok, it's that person" for 100% certainty out of all the other characters. Naturally I had a good hunch on the main trick - although I must say I overthought it and the true answer is genius in its simplicity, but surrounded by too many unrealistic factors that led up to the case staying unsolved for all those years.
I will move on to either Crooked House next, or read a bit of Seishi Yokomizo.
I wonder if there's anything left unsaid about this one...
