I guess I have a problem with the "new
honkaku" writers coming out of Japan. I've always enjoyed the traditional Japanese mystery writers like Shoji Shimada when quite by chance decades ago I stumbled across
The Tokyo Zodiac Murders. After reading that book I sought out all his books translated in English. Then when I serendipitously found a copy of
The Inugami Clan by Seishi Yokomizo (long before Pushkin Vertigo translated/published his books) my interest was renewed. And yet when I sampled some of the more recent Japanese writers I was always bothered by the emphasis on puzzles and the utter lack of real characters. One in particular was so poorly written with flimsy characters (
The Moai Island Puzzle) I couldn't finish it and gave up after only three chapters. Like many of the mystery novels by French mystery writers (Jean Toussaint-Samat and Noël Vindry in particular) and I grew to dislike plots where characters were puppets in service of contrived incidents that all served the overarching puzzle structure. I enjoy the puzzle aspect of traditional Western mystery novels as anyone who reads my reviews knows, but I don't want the book and story to exist solely for the puzzles. Which of course brings me to today's book...
Strange Pictures is a new book by Uketsu, a mysterious YouTube figure who writes gimmicky mysteries online and insists on dressing in an all black costume and wearing a weird mask like a villain tiptoeing out of a French silent movie. The gimmick in Uketsu's mystery stories is the use of puzzles in the form of ambiguous or encoded drawings and sketches. Strange Pictures is divided into four stories that focus on nine different drawings. Ultimately, the stories are interconnected through the characters and their actions. The premise is certainly promising and tempting enough that I succumbed to the hype. But I was mostly underwhelmed.
The book opens with a foreword that sets the reader up for all that will follow. Tomiko Hagio, a "teaching psychologist", presents a simple child's drawing (see above) to her university students and proceeds to explain the hidden meaning in the picture. It all smacks of the kind of ersatz psychology I despised in the early Gladys Mitchell mystery novels in which Mrs. Bradley pontificates on the psychology of the characters based on the most flimsy of "evidence" drawn from behavior or speech. I'll spare you Dr. Hagio's explanation of the bird in the tree and the pointy ends of the spear like branches in the tree. But this is the sort of "solution" the reader will have to devise if he is to match wits with the "drawing detectives" in the various stories.
The first artistic puzzle related to a woman giving birth to her first child is actually rather ingenious because it relies on genuine out-of-the-box thinking in dealing with two dimensional drawings. I'll only add that those of you who live in the digital world and spend many more hours online than I do will probably catch on sooner than I did. One thing you mustn't do with this book is page through before you read. The solutions to these picture puzzles are blatantly illustrated. A few surprises were ruined when I lost my place, forgetting to put my bookmark in where I left off, then quickly flipped through the book looking for the correct page. In paging through the book I saw flashes of several altered pictures. Caveat lector!
The cleverest part of this book was the way Uketsu connects the various stories. This was really the only reason I kept reading. Eventually one character emerges from the background (originally an "invisible" role), becomes a supporting character, and then is oddly cast as the primary antagonist of the piece. The multi-layering of three seemingly separate stories and how the link up is ingeniously done and there are a handful of surprises that I truly enjoyed. But...
The further the story delves into the interconnection Uketsu begins to slather on shocking developments that escalate from melodrama to histrionics to absurdity. I can admire noir plots with their amoral characters and base motives, but these new writers don't seem to understand what works in noir is an understanding of human nature and not evil for evil's sake, or an abundance of cruelty and over-the-top gruesome violence to shock and repulse. At times I felt the evil characters were so absurd it became laughable. For instance, in the final section a man blackmails a woman into having sex with him all because he wants to traumatize the woman's child and humiliate her simultaneously. He arranges one night of sex so that the child wakes up unexpectedly and witnesses the horrible rape. Ugh!
The central story "The Art Teacher's Final Drawing" deals with an unsolved murder dating back to 1992. An art teacher who went camping in the mountains is found stabbed and beaten to death. Three years later a young reporter discusses the case with an editor who wrote the initial newspaper stories on the murder. The young reporter decides to recreate the murder victim's trip while focusing on a strange sketch found on the victim. It's a primitively drawn landscape (at right), one the art teacher enjoyed drawing repeatedly on his many trips to the same mountain. The reason for the sketch and how it was drawn seems clever and it's related to the horribly gruesome method of murder, described in a perverse plot twist and surprise reveal of the teacher's killer. But I found it all hard to swallow no matter how much the characters explain themselves and try to justify their unreal and absurd actions. The bizarre murder method in "The Art Teacher's Final Drawing" exists solely for the drawing to exist. In the end the whole book is constructed so that all the behaviors and puzzles can live neatly within one another like those
matryoshka dolls.
I grew impatient with Uketsu's insistence on having characters engage in inner monologues where they tell us exactly what they are feeling and justify all their unbelievable actions (including multiple murder on the part of the primary antagonist). Too much "I'm feeling like this" and "I want this" and "I will kill him because I want this" kind of monologues written in simplistic declarative sentences. In fact the entire book is rather simply written. I don't blame the translator Jim Rion. He did an admirable job of translating one of the Yokomizo books for Pushkin's Vertigo imprint (
The Devil's Flute Murder) and I wish he had done more of them rather than Bryan Karetnyk. Also Rion did an excellent job with
Kthulhu Reich (2019) by Asamatsu Ken, a short story collection written in homage to Lovecraftian horror. Rion captured the flavor of English language pulp magazine writing style in translating those stories. I know he has a talent at translating. It must be that the original Japanese is far from complex.
Strange Pictures at times reads like the work of a teenager with its lack of sophisticated understanding of human nature and the contrived machinations of puppet characters who commit amoral acts and engage in cruel violence.
Another Uketsu creation called Strange Houses is due out in the summer, early June according to the Harper Via website. And it's much shorter at only 144 pages. But even being less than half the length of Strange Pictures I may wait to take it out of the library this time.
