as they say in the musical Gypsyyou have to have a gimmick. This is especially true for mystery novels, where writers have been trying to outdo each other with eccentric detectives ever since Hercule Poirot and his gorgeous mustache hit the screen in the 1920s. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Fiction (comics and other forms) has given us all kinds of unusual detectives over the years, and the well doesn’t seem to be running dry just yet. But when a creator like teniwoha brings us a functionally immortal private eye, you’d be forgiven for wondering how much water is left.
“Functionality” is important here. Sakuya Otsuki and his father are both private detectives with an unusual gift: they can be resurrected after being killed. But unlike traditional zombies or immortals, they are restored to full life – and are actually dead in the interim. For high school student Sakuya, the most important part is the last part, because unlike other immortal creatures in the novel, his death is truly painful. He felt it every time he was stabbed or had his throat cut; he remembered every bullet to the head or heart. What mattered to him was not the resurrection; In fact, each death brought new emotional trauma to him that he could never forget. While his father seems more than happy to continue taking on dangerous cases, Sakuya would rather live a normal, safe life.
We don’t know what compelled him to work in his father’s detective agency, but given his age, it’s entirely possible that he couldn’t refuse his father. While Otsuki-senpai takes on dangerous cases – the book ends with his work on plane hijackings – Sakuya tries to stick to cheating spouses and other similar low-risk jobs. this is him think When he ends up on a luxury ocean liner, that’s what he’s doing: investigating a cheating movie director. But of course, things don’t turn out that easy for him and he first dies and then solves the mystery of who murdered the scion of a manufacturing family.
Perhaps the best thing about this book is that it summarizes the case. While the hijacking remains unsolved, the cruise conspiracy has been fully resolved. There is a real attempt to make it a fair-player mystery, possibly to anglicize the main clue, which relies on the English letters “M” and “W”; this trick also works with the katakana characters “ma” and “wa”. (This is just a theory; however, I’m not sure which one the original used.) A minor mystery involving a lost cat is integrated into the main mystery in a meaningful way, and if Sakuya doesn’t seem like much like one of the novel’s great detectives, I think that’s intentional – he himself doesn’t entirely trust his skills, and doesn’t enjoy his job enough to care.
While Sakuya himself is a perfectly fine character – his mental health issues make sense – his supporting cast is far less engaging. His assistant of the same age, Lilithea, made the mistake of being “too weird for her own good.” While she may care about him (and he certainly cares about her), her behavior is irritatingly robotic for no reason, and her treatment of Sakuya often feels unnecessarily mean. Yuriu, a young actress involved in the Cat Case who is basically the breast of the operation, is portrayed as sleepy and maybe a little adoring of Sakuya. Both of them drag the story down in different ways, especially Lilicia. The art works better, and it balances the panels well so the pages never feel claustrophobic, despite the use of many small panels per page throughout; the grey, black and white spaces are equally well balanced. Things got a little confusing towards the end because it wasn’t clear Which We saw the Outsuki in a crunchy state, but that may have been intentional.
Mr. Detective was killed again? Not as good as it should be. Despite having a lot of solid elements, it somehow doesn’t feel as effective as it should, like it thinks it’s smarter than it actually is. It’s still a good book and I’m interested to see where it goes, but if you compare it to a suspense novel like this lost boy in london or this Kindaichi case fileit appears insufficient. This is probably more of a library read than a book I would recommend running out and buying.
