Am also reading more Kindaichi Shounen Jikenbo (The Case Files of the Young Kindaichi), which is a mystery manga. I’ve read the first ten or so volumes in English, but the translations started to get really slow. Anyhow, it’s fairly simple to read in Japanese, except for the discussions of the mechanics of the case (to be honest, I like mysteries more for the psychology than for the puzzles. So I read for characterization and suspense, and sometimes I kind of uh… (don’t tell anyone) skim over the details, especially if a timetable is involved, or a cipher), where I sometimes have to look up vocab. Kindaichi is especially good if you like super angst and melodrama, because in every crime, it’s an elaborate plot conceived to take REVENGE for an even earlier crime by the now-victims. And so therefore the villains always have a semi-sympathetic sob story, and like most of the time, they commit suicide or die dramatically. Well, except for the recurring villain, who is an unrepentant psychopath. Anyhow, reading Kindaichi, although because of the nature of the plot (Kindaichi goes somewhere, and then there is KILLING, or Kindaichi is called in to investigate some mysterious case, or Kindaichi goes to a fun mystery event and then it suddenly turns into KILLING) is kind of repetitive, is pretty fun.

Oh wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. So what is the crime anyway? In Tokyo, in 1936, a painter, Heikichi Umezawa, was murdered in his studio. A note was found at the crime scene, in which the painter outlined a deranged occult plan to create Azoth, the perfect woman from the body parts of the six young women, his daughters, step-daughters and nieces, who lived with him. The plans included many complex astrological calculations, geomancy, bizarre references to the alchemical correspondences of the planets and the elements, as well as attempts to link the idea of Azoth to the legend of the shamanist-empress Himiko of Yamatai. In any event, after Heikichi’s death, his eldest stepdaughter, who was divorced and lived outside of the house, and was not mentioned in the note, is raped and murdered, and more shockingly, the six young women disappear, and later their dismembered corpses, each missing the part which the note specified would be taken to summon Azoth, are found in mines corresponding to the element of the missing part. For forty years afterwards, this crime becomes an obsession, but the motives and the identity of the killer remain obscure. That is, until the daughter of a police officer brings some shocking evidence to the heroes in 1979.

 Anyway, if you really really want to know what went down, you can read the wikipedia entry, which thoroughly spoils the case. I did feel the appearance of a certain minor character was suspicious, as was the note itself and the disposition of the money. What kept me reading the book until the wee hours of the morning was the atmosphere of occult dread, the psychotic specifications of the creation of Azoth, the maddened attempts of later sleuths to calculate her birthplace. The seemingly meaningless obscenity of the crimes (although in the end a mystification:  which is what is interesting, how geniunely creepy and unnerving even the red herrings in the case are, the asides about obsessions with mannequins and dolls) is more redolent of the thriller genre than the classical fair-play mystery it structurally is.