How do you achieve the perfect crime? Thanks to certain recent works that plausibly brand themselves with the deductive label, this question has become an appetizing gimmick. However, 42 years ago, Shoji Shimada devised the perfect crime ruse in his debut novel, which was about to be submitted for the 26th Edogawa Basho Prize.
The story is set against the backdrop of an astrological serial murder 40 years ago that is as bizarre as it gets. After a heavy snowfall, the painter Heikichi Umezawa was found dead in his locked studio, and his handwritten notes were found at the scene of his death, recording his horrific plan to be possessed by a demon and to use parts of each of his six daughters' bodies to create the perfect female Ascendant. Immediately afterward, his eldest daughter, who had long been married, was humiliated and died at home, and finally all six of his daughters disappeared and their bodies were found one after another all over the country. Their bodies were later found all over the country, each with a part of their bodies cut off!
The murderer has devised a grand and magnificent ruse across time and space to cleverly hide himself from view. Its greatest success is the use of handwritten notes to wrap the details of the crime in another layer and make it fascinating. So much so that when I read it, I completely jumped into the trap and just went into the horoscopes, the bodies, the locations and the astrology. The other thing is that many of the key clues don't even have to be hidden by the killer, so much so that there are many blind spots.
However, there are still many details in the book that allow us to discover the clues to the real culprit. One of the most important of these, in my opinion, is the information in Bunjiro Takekoshi's manuscript that it was a beautifully made-up woman who seduced him at the time, yet in the second investigation of the case the dead man was clearly not wearing any make-up. I was able to pinpoint the murderer on my first reading with the various body parts required for Asode in Umezawa's cell phone, but the greatest appeal of the book is the subterfuge, and it's hard to add to the shock I felt when the subterfuge was revealed to me. Every work of deduction has a whimsical riddle, but not many riddles bring shocks, and "Astrology" even when the murderer is already known, I was still shocked by the grandeur and splendor of the riddle. The beauty of Shoji Shimada's debut novel in the narrative skills of what is slightly green, many characterization rely on the reader's brain (in my opinion, in addition to reasoning, this book conveys the humanistic feelings is also very moving, but the author did not write too much ink, so most of me in the brain hh), so it's not easy to read. Especially in the handwriting of the various metal constellations easy to make people give up reading. But this book shows the satisfaction of the mystery itself, which in my opinion is the true beauty of the trickster genre.
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Posted on 2022.08.01