The Moai Island Puzzle Read online

  THE MOAI ISLAND PUZZLE

  KOTŌ PAZURU

  Paul Halter books from Locked Room International:

  The Lord of Misrule (2010)

  The Fourth Door (2011)

  The Seven Wonders of Crime (2011)

  The Demon of Dartmoor (2012)

  The Seventh Hypothesis (2012)

  The Tiger’s Head (2013)

  The Crimson Fog (2013)

  (Publisher’s Weekly Top Mystery 2013 List)

  The Night of the Wolf (2013)*

  The Invisible Circle (2014)

  The Picture from the Past (2014)

  The Phantom Passage (2015)

  Death Invites You (2016)

  *Original short story collection published by Wildside Press (2006)

  Other impossible crime novels from Locked Room International:

  The Riddle of Monte Verita (Jean-Paul Torok) 2012

  The Killing Needle (Henry Cauvin) 2014

  The Derek Smith Omnibus (Derek Smith) 2014

  (Washington Post Top Fiction Books 2014)

  The House That Kills (Noel Vindry) 2015

  The Decagon House Murders (Yukito Ayatsuji) 2015

  (Publisher’s Weekly Top Mystery 2015 List)

  Hard Cheese (Ulf Durling) 2015

  Visit our website at www.mylri.com or

  www.lockedroominternational.com

  THE MOAI ISLAND PUZZLE

  Alice Arisugawa

  Translated by Ho-Ling Wong

  The Moai Island Puzzle

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  First published in Japanese in 1989 by

  Tōkyō Sogensha Co., Ltd. as Koto Pazuru

  KOTO PUZZLE

  Copyright © 1989 by Alice Arisugawa

  English translation rights arranged with Tōkyō Sogensha Co., Ltd.

  English translation copyright © by John Pugmire 2016.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  For information, contact: [email protected]

  FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Arisugawa, Alice

  [The Moai Island Puzzle English]

  Koto Pazuru/ Alice Arisugawa

  Translated from the Japanese by Ho-Ling Wong

  Dedicated to Yoshitaka Miwa

  Contents

  Introduction

  Dramatis Personae

  Prologue: Puzzler

  Chapter One: Jigsaw Pieces

  Chapter Two: Locked Room Puzzle

  Chapter Three: Bicycle Puzzle

  Chapter Four: Moai Puzzle

  Chapter Five: Suicide Puzzle

  Challenge to the Reader

  Chapter Six: Jigsaw Puzzle

  Epilogue

  Translator’s Notes

  Introduction:

  Behind The Moai Island Puzzle

  Sōji Shimada

  Alice Arisugawa’s The Moai Island Puzzle is a mystery masterpiece which was first published shortly after Yukito Ayatsuji’s The Decagon House Murders, for which I also wrote an introduction, explaining the origins and significance of honkaku (“orthodox”), the Japanese form of the Golden Age puzzle-plot.

  In my introduction to Decagon I explained that honkaku refers to a form of the detective story that is not only literature but also, to a greater or lesser extent, a game. It follows the concept of “a high degree of logical reasoning,” the key prerequisite for the most exciting form of detective fiction as proposed by S.S. Van Dine, a prominent figure of the English-language Golden Age of detective fiction during the 1920s. I explained how, after World War II, novelists like Akimitsu Takagi and Seishi Yokomizo wrote several excellent honkaku detective novels, but that the arrival in the 1950s of “the social school” of Japanese mystery fiction dried up interest in honkaku mysteries almost overnight. This school, led by Seichō Matsumoto, emphasised “natural realism” in which the motive that led to the crime and the depiction of the psychology of the criminal were the most important elements.

  The “winter of the age of honkaku” lasted until the early 1980s and ended with the publication of my own humble work The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (1981), followed by Ayatsuji’s The Decagon House Murders (1987). Because of the thirty-year hiatus, this new Japanese mystery scene was dubbed the age of shin honkaku, or “new orthodox.” One of the most important works that made the inauguration of this new age inevitable was Arisugawa’s The Moai Island Puzzle, first published in 1989.

  The term honkaku was actually coined in the mid-1920’s by Saburō Kōga, but it was Edogawa Rampo, in his essay collection Gen’eijō (The Phantom Castle), who first applied the term shin honkaku to the style of British post-Golden Age writers of the 1940s, such as Michael Innes, Margery Allingham and Nicholas Blake.

  Starting in the 1960s, Yomiuri Shimbunsha started publishing a series of mystery novels dubbed Shin honkaku suiri shōsetsu zenshū (A Complete Collection of Shin Honkaku Mystery Novels). Ironically, it was Seichō Matsumoto himself who was responsible for the supervision and commentary of the series. He used the term neo honkaku in a retrospective on the emasculation of the Japanese mystery novels after the age of the social school. But the term did not catch on, probably because the Shimbunsha collection in its ensemble was not impressive enough to spark a revival of honkaku/ shin honkaku. In fact, the term shin honkaku did not finally take hold until the 1990s.

  The age of shin honkaku is one of development of unexplored territories and, looking back now, we can identify two distinct routes from which writers could make their way to these exciting frontiers. One was to make a debut via the Kodansha Novels line of publisher Kodansha, headed by the famous editor Hideomi Uyama. I, too, was involved with this route in a consulting capacity. Mr. Uyama and I would have discussions about the quality of the works and how they were shaping up, and once publication had been decided, I would write the introductions and the marketing slogans for each of the works.

  The other route was through publisher Tokyo Sogensha. Former Sogensha company director Mr. Yasunobu Togawa, who was an editor at the time, was the focal point of this project, with honkaku mystery writer Tetsuya Ayukawa acting as consultant. This would evolve into the Tetsuya Ayukawa Award for newcomers. Every year, a talented writer is able to make his first step on the route to success thanks to this award, and Alice Arisugawa was one of those to make his debut on the honkaku mystery scene through this route.

  Yukito Ayatsuji began his writing career with The Decagon House Murders in 1987, while Alice Arisugawa began in 1988 with Gekkō Gēmu (Moonlight Game). The latter had been submitted for Kodansha’s Edogawa Rampo Award, but because it failed to pass the first round, it was published through Tokyo Sogensha.

  The Tetsuya Ayukawa Award started in 1990 and it was in the ceremony hall that Kaoru Kitamura, Taku Ashibe, Yukito Ayatsuji and Alice Arisugawa all met. Their social calls continue to this day, and Ayatsuji and Arisugawa have become close friends after working on the original scenarios for Anraku Isu Tantei (The Armchair Detective), a whodunit TV drama.

  Other well-known novelists who started with Tokyo Sogensha are Kaoru Kitamura, Taku Ashibe and Reito Nikaidō. Nikaidō, however, did the exact opposite of Arisugawa: before making his debut with Tokyo Sogensha, he moved to Kodansha.

  Among those who took the Kodansha route are Rintarō Norizuki, Shōgo Utano, Yutaka Maya, Yasuhiko Nishizawa, Natsuhiko Kyōgoku and Hiroshi Mori.
In the early days, the term shin honkaku as coined by Rampo was applied exclusively to Kodansha newcomers, but eventually it was also used for writers from Tokyo Sogensha, and had become a genre-defining term by the 1990s.

  Like just about every shin honkaku writer, Alice Arisugawa was originally a member of a university mystery club, but not the Kyoto University Mystery Club made famous by The Decagon House Murders. Arisugawa, on the other hand, came from the Mystery Club of Dōshisha University, also located in Kyōto. As to why only amateurs debuting from university mystery clubs became the founders of the extraordinary phenomenon known as the shin honkaku movement, that is an important question which holds lessons for the future. The answer might be found in the Aesopian tale I recount below.

  In the 1920s, when Edogawa Rampo imported the Edgar Allan Poe-Arthur Conan Doyle style of mystery novel which started in the West, and new Japanese writers gathered to solidify the form of this new genre, the scientific revolution which had given birth to the detective novel had not yet arrived in Japan. In the absence of scientific inspiration, Rampo turned to the grotesque haunted house attractions of the Edo period (1603-1868). To compare it to a British example: he employed a style reminiscent of the terror people experienced for the Elephant Man. Such grotesque horror does appear to some extent in Poe’s and Doyle’s works, but to nowhere near the extent of the Japanese mystery novels. Eventually, Rampo’s followers started going too far, even introducing the pornographic tendencies of Edo period entertainment fiction into their novels.

  Whereas Poe and Doyle used the shocking elements from pre-modern times as a jumping board to proclaim the intellectual victory of the scientific revolution over pre-modern times in their tales, Rampo used the pre-modern Edo period as an inspiration stressing the vulgarity of the “Edo mass culture,” which was devoid of scientific deduction. As a consequence, Japanese mystery authors were looked at with contempt by authors of pure literature at the time, purely because of the vulgarity which offended their morals. Hence the belief that mystery fiction was just lowbrow entertainment found its way into Japan’s literary world, as well as with the readers.

  It was the post-war emergence of the social school of mystery fiction pioneered by Seichō Matsumoto which saved the genre. Focusing on the motive behind the crime and the psychology of the criminal, this new school managed to improve critical reception of mystery fiction and give pride back to genre writers, while maintaining the sales numbers of the Rampo era. The superiority of the Seichō style was accepted by the literary world, changing the literary scene virtually overnight. Professional writers hastened to get on board with this new trend, and what was then being called honkaku mystery was thrust together with the Rampo style and shunned. Honkaku and the Rampo style are not the same, but at the time nobody was interested in clarifying the matter. In the period before World War II, unsuccessful honkaku writers had been in contact with Rampo, who was seen as a pioneer and a leader in the genre, and Rampo himself had written honkaku short story masterpieces in his early years, which he himself and the readers loved. So the confusion of honkaku with the Rampo style seemed natural enough, but none of this mattered because the topic had become taboo.

  These complex circumstances affected the Japanese literary world profoundly, leaving deep scars and purging honkaku writers; any professional writer associated with honkaku was quickly ostracised. So it was that in the 1990s, after the tide started to turn and the popularity of the “social school” started to fade following the publication of my own The Tokyo Zodiac Murders and Naname Yashiki no Hanzai (The Crime in the Leaning Mansion), professional writers capable of taking up the challenge of writing their own honkaku mystery stories were nowhere to be found. Thus it fell to the amateur writers from the university mystery clubs, untainted by the past, to pick up the gauntlet.

  Before describing the evolution of this movement in Japan, however, it is important to know what happened in the West to the movement known as Golden Age Detection. This genre of mystery fiction, which builds on logical reasoning, had come to a surprising end, ironically because of S.S. Van Dine’s rare talents. Declaring that the detective novel was the only form of literature that put the reader to work, he had argued that “a deduction game emphasising fair play within a limited setting” would be the story structure with the best potential to result in masterpiece mystery stories. He focused his own writing on this form, and the success of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction proved him right. But when the elements of the game are too severely limited and the building materials are all the same, only the first few builders will get all the glory and there will be an over-abundance of similar novels, which is what happened. Further contributing to the decline of the puzzle-plot novel was the emergence of Hollywood and visual entertainment—itself the result of scientific development—which allowed people to enjoy mystery fiction in a more passive manner, without putting the viewer to work.

  The Japanese university students who started writing mystery fiction were aware of what had happened in the past on the other side of the ocean. Making sure they didn’t limit themselves too much, they bravely pushed the frontiers of the format, carefully picking the most flavourful elements for their own dishes. This is the best way to explain the essence of 1990s shin honkaku writing, of which The Moai Island Puzzle is a prime example. The simple, attractive, setting is a limited stage: a lonely island where nobody from outside, not even the police, can interfere. Potential suspects are introduced one after another in a fair way, with a narration free of any falsehoods, to the young members of the Mystery Club who arrive on the scene by boat. The amateur detective is given the important duty of looking for hidden treasure, investigating several murders—including an impossible one—and finally identifying the murderer, using clues that are also available to the readers. This setting is an alluring one that should attract anyone with a love for mystery fiction. The Moai Island Puzzle is a soup made from Van Dine’s country house mystery, with a dash of pirate treasure hunt thrown in.

  Now let us turn to the author of this work himself: Alice Arisugawa. He was one of the amateur writers who made his debut as described above. He had one clearly-defined ambition when he started his writing career: he was determined to be the successor to Ellery Queen. He made that clear to everyone around him when he first started, and it is still his goal today. Yukito Ayatsuji, a member of the Ellery Queen Fan Club, got wind of Arisugawa’s declaration and read his debut novel, Gekkō Gēmu (Moonlight Game). At that time, Ayatsuji was not convinced, but after reading Arisugawa’s second work, The Moai Island Puzzle, he was won over. Thus, in order to discuss Arisugawa’s style, it is also necessary to analyse the writing style of the American giant.

  As so many scholars in both the United States and Japan have pointed out, the charm of Ellery Queen’s detective stories lies in the spirit of fair play, the beauty of the surprising, but clever clues and the intellectual and cool logical reasoning culminating in the Challenge to the Reader. The Queen cousins had no particular interest in shocking conclusions or witty writing. What they loved was intellectual excitement, such as when something seemingly innocent eventually evolves into an essential clue. Arisugawa has embraced the Queen tradition and worked on perfecting this element, which he considers the most alluring point of detective novels.

  In The Moai Island Puzzle, he has no interest in dumbfounding the reader with something shocking at the end of his meticulously constructed tale of mystery solving. A murder without any showy elements happens and, by introducing expertly placed clues, he coolly constructs a chain of logical reasoning with mathematical precision. The reader will be touched by the calm way in which the detective, Jirō Egami, using a normal, everyday style of speech, exposes the murderer. The explanation is done without any eccentric behaviour but readers will experience a serene intellectual astonishment and a silent respect for the mind of the author who was able to come up with the logic leading to the identification of the murderer. Arisugawa considers this mathematical, prope
r process of logical reasoning more important than a showy performance.

  This leads us to another aspect of an Arisugawa novel: the type of detective. Roughly speaking, there are two types of great detective in mystery novels. On the one hand there is the dramatic hero detective, and on the other there is one of the characters who just happens to be given the task of explaining the truth to the readers.

  The archetype of the hero detective is, of course, Sherlock Holmes. To my mind, almost any detective character will automatically turn into a Holmes-like hero type whenever they appear in films or TV dramas. This is because the visual medium simply doesn’t allow for a protagonist who is as expressionless as a machine, silent, lacking in vigorous action, and forever lost in thought. Detectives in TV dramas are almost all active, cracking witty jokes, talkative during investigations, and at times even acting peculiarly to attract the attention of those around them. And in the visual medium, the ability offered by the printed form to flip back several pages to check up on a piece of evidence, is severely limited. As a consequence, there is a limit to how elaborate the logical reasoning can be.

  The mystery-solver detective, who silently bears the task of solving the mystery without being extrovert and talkative, is a type whose existence is thus only possible within a bundle of printed pages. It is there where he can make best use of his typical, attractive intelligence to do cool-headedly whatever is needed to solve the mystery. The question of why is an interesting one, but for some reason you find this type of detective often in Japanese mystery novels. You will come across this type in Western mystery fiction also, for example Jacques Futrelle’s famous The Thinking Machine. However, even these reserved types turn into hero types whenever they are adapted for the screen.