This post will contain full spoilers for The Labyrinth House Murders. As well as minor discussion on The Decagon House Murders and The Mill House Murders. I must also warn the reader that, despite what they might imagine from the title, this is a very positive review of the book.
Mysteries are puzzles. They are crafted with the intent of being games that the audience must try and solve, in the same manner that the average reader is expected to be analyzing the text in order to follow its narrative. Theorycrafting is textual analysis, one that is focused on speculating on elements that are not present in the story in order to bridge the gaps present between the various fragments of the narrative given to the reader. The mystery genre is one that has textual analysis as its core focus, creating a game in which the reader must figure out the full story before the narrative shows its hand.
I mention all of this to give the needed context on why drama and romance plotlines have been historically lauded by hardcore mystery fans. What people see when a mystery dedicates too much time on interpersonal character backstories and not enough on the puzzle at hand is that the author is a phony, cashing in on their interests without understanding of what the genre's appeal is. This is something that The Decagon House Murders aknowledges within its text, with one of its opening scenes having the character of "Ellery" (an alias used by the character and other members of his club, all of which call themselves by the names of real-life golden age mystery novelists, with him being named after the famous detective/collective pseudonym of Ellery Queen) give his account of the evolution of the mystery genre, and how he wants people to leave the appeal to "realistic", romantic tendencies behind and go back to the roots of the mystery genre as a puzzle targeted at the reader. A game of gradiose manors, rows of suspects and great detectives.
The Decagon House Murders is structured like that. Its a game of pure reasoning, with rather dry descriptions and characterization for all of its characters. And numbing the reader emotionally to all of these people is exactly what the culprit reveal relies on. Everything surrounding the case is tied to the culprit's feelings and their reason for doing what they did, and the point of the novel works by omitting it up until that point in order to highlight the manner in which the culprit had been dealing with these feelings, and how the people around the culprit reacted to it. It singlehandledly justified an entire novel that, up until that point, had not been fully entertaining to me, in a manner that made me immediately understand why this novel served as the springboard for the shinhonkaku (neo-orthodox) movement of japanese mystery ficiton.
And, despite what I said, I would still recommend the live action adaptation of The Decagon House Murders over the novel itself, at least for those who are interested. You may notice that I talked at length about the culprit reveal, but not the rest of the mystery. That is not only an effort of mine to prevent any curious reader who has only read The Labyrinth House Murders from getting spoiled, but also because of my own thoughts on how, despite deeply enjoying how every aspect of the murder is recontextualized with the main twist, I still found its cluing and progression in the book itself unsatisfying. Something that I think the show massively improves on, as it uses the visual format to communicate to the audience clues in a manner much more natural than in the novel, resulting in an experience that feels both more challeging than the original work, yet also way fairer as a mystery. Not only that, but the acting and directing of the show, almost in polar opposite to what I described earlier, does a lot to bring life to each of the characters and the scenarios presented, in a way that I would imagine diminished the deliberate lack of emotionality present in the novel, but still manages to capture the incoherence of its initial setup thanks to the acting choices of all the characters involved, being performed in a manner that makes them still appear as if they were stock characters in a mystery setting, but given some kind of life by their performances. It is a fantastic 5-episode-miniseries which I recommend everyone to watch.
With all this in mind, its about time that I talk about the next installment in the series, The Mill House Murders. Put plainly, I have avoided mentioning this book until now because its a book which I have relatively little to say. An experience that I found underwhelming on all fronts when compared to its predecessor. The Mill House Murders is a story that tries to center itself around a much more emotional core compared to the original novel: The drama of two 30 year old men vouching for the affection of a 17 year old girl. One of these men being our protagonist. It is a premise that, frankly, I would be highly excited to read as a psychological thriller, but feels rather underbaked as a mystery novel.
The result of centering the mystery of the novel on the core relationship between men and their victim leads to the novel barely exploring said relationship up until the revelation of its true nature. In the last 30 or so pages of the novel, I do enjoy what Ayatsuji writes in regards to the tragedy of this scenario, but it is a tragedy that, even in retrospect, lacks the crucial scenes and moments that would make me feel for these characters as revealing those scenes would be the same as revealing the core twist of this novel. It might sound similar to The Decagon House Murders' approach to the matter, and frankly it is. This is, as I have realized, the way in which Ayatsuji has structured every book of his thus far, and which I expect he will continue to follow with the next books in the series. But Mill House Murders stands out as particularly baffling because of how little this book seems to focus on its puzzle in order to give the narrative scenes of fairly dry and uninteresting drama.
It cannot succeed at either being a puzzler, nor a narrative piece, because in its attempts to be one of them, its actively hindering the other. Ayatsuji tries to break away from the shackles of what The Decagon House Murders set up, with the idea of centering the novel around stock characters who exist to be subverted, but it does not have characters who evolve much from the definition of "stock" for it to stand out as a character study on either of its three leads. And that shows when examining how relatively simple the crimes and their explanations are in this novel, as opposed to the ones seen in The Decagon House Murders, and especially in The Labyrinth House Murders.
In fact, it is my suspicion that The Labyrinth House Murders is a novel designed with these criticisms in mind.
The Mill House Murders failed on building on The Decagon House Murders' twist by making it a story centered on emotions from the get-go. And, in my opinion, The Labyrinth House Murders is a novel that succeeds in building on The Decagon House Murders' twist in a different manner. One which I find particularly more striking.
The Labyrinth House Murders is a book that discards the notion of emotionality all together.
"We're The Sacrifice For The Beast In The Labyrinth"
This is the line spoken by the first victim of the novel in page 147 of The Labyrinth House Murders. The context of the line is that it is spoken during a dream sequence, in which Utayama Hideuki, the de-facto main character of the novel, traverses an imaginary labyrinth on the night after the first murder has occurred. The labyrinth is not that of the titular Labyrinth House, but a fusion of itself and the mythical greek labyrinth of the island of Knossos. Its design alternating between the artful decoration of the house, and the simplistic aesthetic of the original. Utayama is fleeing, as he realizes that he is being pursued by something, and upon finally arriving at the room in which the novel's first victim should be, Utayama finds all of the other characters of the novel. But they are not as themselves, they appear completely at peace with the situation they find themselves in, a stark contrast to the manner in which they argued against each other earlier in the night. This is confirmed by the words of the victim, whose half-torn head turns towards Utayama to confirm that they are, indeed, sacrifices to the beast roaming the labyrinth. The beast being, of course, the iconic Minotaur. Half-man half-bull, with an axe in hand, who in one fell swing, tears the body of Utayama in half.
24 hours have passed since I finished the book, and this remains one of the most striking sequences of the novel to me. In huge part because it is a sequence that, otherwise, goes by completely unexamined. There is no point in examining a sequence like this. It is a dream sequence, in what is explicitly a fair-play mystery novel, where the content of dreams will not influence reality. The narrative purpose of this dream sequence is to serve as a look into Utayama's own subconscious view of events, to give him a sense of interiority as we see his biggest fears personified.
And yet, this sequence is odd, because its not a dream told from Utayama's perspective. No part of this book is told from Utayama's perspective. And I don't mean that this book is written in third person, I mean that, once you have reached the final page of the book, it becomes clear that nothing you have read in The Labyrinth House Murders, the novel-within-a-novell, can be taken as reflecting the perspective of any other character than that of its author.
Shishiya Kadomi, better known as Shimada Kiyoshi.
Shimada Kiyoshi at this point has been firmly established as the great detective of the House Murders novels. A title which the characters lampshade within the book itself. The "great detective" is the recurring character in a series of mystery novels whose purpose is to act as the unbiased investigator who is given the purpose of bringing the truth behind the case to light. Usually in the form of a denounment sequence at the end of the book in which every mystery is explained in a neat and tidy manner. This is the archetypical form of the great detective, as seen with characters such as Sherlock Holmes, Philo Vance or Kosuke Kindaichi. They are characters defined by their mechanical purpose of acting as the voice of truth within the novel, and who do not have any other significant attatchment to the case that would prevent them from playing their role as the one responsible for exposing the culprit. So much so, that the archetype of "the Watson" exists within stories so that the mystery can be followed from the perspective of a character who is not the great detective, in turn allowing the audience greater room for ambiguity in the nature of the truth across the story's length, as you are not allowed full view of the detective's perspective on the case until the very end.
And, because of that, The Labyrinth House Murders makes the choice to play with readers' expectations on the nature of the great detective by centering our perspective on Shimada Kiyoshi for the entirety of the novel. As it is revealed by the end of the novel, Shimada, as one of the survivors of the murders, realized that another of the survivors had been the true killer, framing the master of the house as the culprit behind the deaths of his four disciples. Of course, the master of the house, their partner in crime, has also been murdered, so there shouldn't be anyone living who would be able to testify against them. And for that reason, Shimada Kiyoshi decides to write the novel under a penname, as he knows that openly accusing the culprit will not have any real sway within public life. Instead, by writing the entire novel in such a manner that the culprit's true crime is implied, those who read the novel will grow suspicious of the true killer, and as such the truth will eventually come to light.
With this twist, every single rule that binds the great detective as a character in a narrative has been broken. The great detective has given an impersonal account of events, utilizing of another character's perspective to hide his own knowledge, in which he goes out of his way to reframe the true events that occurred in such a manner that the culprit is someone other than the person whom he had previously deduced to be the mastermind. In terms of mystery writing, it is the lowest blow that a detective could possibly go for, short of outright framing the culprit for the crime in order to fit their deduction. And its a fantastic twist in regards to recontextualizing the entire experience of the novel. Because in the same way that The Decagon House Murders' becomes the story of that novel's culprit, The Labyrinth House Murders ceases to be the story of anyone other than Shimada, and the way in which he calculated his own plan to bring the culprit to justice.
There is no character within the novel whose depiction we can fully trust while keeping in mind that they are being depicted under the subjective lens of another characters' perspective. This is, in fact, the main manner in which Shimada creates suspicion, as during the whole novel, he avoids referring to the culprit's gender at any point. Simply calling her "the critic" in places where he pronouns would normally be used.
There is a purpose to this narrative trick, as the very first murder scene needed to have blood scattered over the rug thanks to the murder coinciding with the culprit's menstruation, resulting in the culprit leaving blood of her own period that had been expunged from her body thanks to stress (a twist that, admittedly, I will go out and say is not technically impossible, but relies on very extreme biological circunstances which the book does not necessarily fit. Something that is made more apparent in how the culprit's shock upon comitting the crime is directly correlated to the culprit's status as a woman). Shimada intentionally frames the novel in such a manner that the culprit's gender is put into question, so that the readers of the novel may, in turn, begin to suspect her as the culprit, something which I did from the moment I realized the story had been avoiding using any pronouns to refer to the character in question. Its a necessary step of deduction, but in execution, its framed as if you fell into the exact line of logic that the novel's mastermind wanted you to follow. In much the same way that the culprit engineers a fake mystery with the goal of framing the master of the house as the true killer.
However, this brings me to another point. In my discussion of The Mill House Murders, I talked at length on how the novel fails in giving the characters the necessary emotional depth to make the narrative work. So how come I praise its successor for removing the emotional depth that its characters have?
Simple, The Labyrinth House Murders centers its tragedy on the idea that none of these people are allowed to have depth.
From the moment we are introduced to the master of the house during the novel's prologue, he is characterized as someone who openly admits to wanting to commit a real-life murder in order to live out his dreams that were raised by his love for mystery fiction. He is an author who cannot bring himself to write another masterpiece as not only does he fear that he may die of the pulmonar cancer consuming his body, but he finds it a difficult endeavor to surpass the masterpiece which he wrote years before, For a Magnificent Downfall. His character is defined entirely by his status as an author of the mystery genre, one who can no longer fulfill his purpose, and that becomes a recurring pattern with the rest of the characters in the novel.
All four of the victims are disciples of the master of the house whose personalities exists in the stock archetypes that were defined since The Decagon House Murders, and the novel actively denies giving them any more depth than that. There is a sequence in which all of the characters offhandledly list the motives they all have to pursue the monetary inheritance of the master of the house, a setup that is often used in mystery novels to dwell deeper into the backstory of each of the suspects, but the novel intentionally creates this set up so that it is never followed up on. Because who they are does not matter as much as their writing style does, and what the ways in which their unique writing styles, highlighted by the narration, are used in framing each of the stories that they write. Stories all following unique stylistic bearings that fit what others associate with their writing, but that turn out to all be written by the same person. Four pieces of fake evidence planted by the culprit in order to make it appear as if all the victims are killed according to the stories they had been writing, as if they had any kind of agency in their deaths.
Not only do none of the characters tied to mystery fiction have agency, but all attempts to exert their agency or individuality are openly punished by the narrative. The culprit can enter the rooms of any of the guests by travelling through the secret passages hidden in the mirrors, as a metpahorical representation of how the characters' own identities are hollow enough that a hidden passage can be drawn connecting all of them as belonging to the same person. Even the previously mentioned, extremely dubious reveal of the culprit's period blood being left at the scene of the crime, is something that ties into this theme directly. As the thing that reveals the culprit's identity is not anything tied to their role as a critic and lover of detective fiction, but a reminder of their personal character trait of not only being a woman, but being a mother. There are two other women in the cast of The Labyrinth House Murders. The pregnant doctor Utayama Keiko, and the elderly caretaker Kadomatsu Fumie. Keiko proves to be a crucial character in determining many of the facts surroundingthe case, and Fumie, despite being dismissed by the cast for most of the novel as a senile, partially deaf hag, is the one who discovers the final secret passage which leads directly to the master of the house's true bedroom.
One is a woman in the process of carrying a child and is seen as incredibly useful, and the other is a woman who can no longer bear children and is seen as useless. And in the middle, stands Samejima Tomoo, The Critic. She has a child, an intellectually challenged nine year old whose father has abandoned him, and she is motivated by taking care of this child first and foremost, but the only way in which she can do that is by setting up the plan so that the inheritance of the master of the house can be directed towards him, as he is the master's illegitimate son. Samejima can be of use and importance to the people she needs to in her life, but she cannot be that as a literary critic. A profession that is completely worthless outside of the realm of mystery fiction. And, likewise, being an adult woman, a single mother who is not currently raising children, will be nothing but a hinderance when it comes to acting within the realm of great detective fiction.
A friend of mine, the user known online as "Life", once wrote a short story for a monthly event in a certain discord server called "The Great Detective Dead". In that story, he writes the following passage during its introduction:
No matter what inspired me to write it, after all, this is nothing more than a murder mystery, a piece of entertainment that allows the reader to escape the boredom of daily life. Of course, that is perfectly fine. No, in fact, that is precisely what this book should be.
This is something that, despite being the novel's afterword, is shown to the reader before we are even given the chance to read the novel itself. The novel's own remark on its own disposability as a piece of fiction within the genre is, itself, disrespected. "Shishiya Kadomi"'s reader, Shimada Tsutomu, the character whom the novel attempts to trick us into believing is the Shimada we had been following for the previous novels, is the one to disregard the statements of the character of the case. The great detective's mirror punishes even the great detective for attempting to exert individuality outside of his narrative role, and this is something done within the very start of the novel as a tonesetter, one that highlights the core theme of the novel without the reader even realising it.
And that brings me to the scene I initially centered this review around. The dream sequence, which Shimada did not observe, yet attempts to depict within the novel anyways. Something that he could have easily neglected to mention, but he felt the need to put within his story. What reason did he have to include this piece of the narrative?
Well, it is my belief that this dream serves as characterization for the novel's only true character. The one whom the novel spends the most time in characterizing, exploring, and reflecting on. The character this novel is named after.
The Labyrinth House itself.
No character is described in as detailed a manner as The Labyrinth House. This book is a masterclass in setting and its importance in mystery fiction, as it manages to create what is by far the best location that Ayatsuji has depicted in any of his novels thus far. A house located entirely underground, which can only be navigated through a gigantic labyrinth connecting all of its rooms, all illuminated by the ceiling composed of glass pyramids that always depict the sky of the outside world: Permanently out of reach, imprisoning all who live in the house under the bronze bars that hold the glass together. It is a labyrinth filled with masks marking every corner, depicting the faces of every possible real or mythological creature, always displaying the most recognizeable features of these well known beasts, regardless of wether or not they are fictional constructs. As the dream suggests, it is a plce where the mythological labyrinth bleeds into the modern-day construct its modelled after. Where the only method of escape relies on the understanding of stories of old created for the purposes of entertainment. It is the masterpiece fit for the greatest mystery novelist of them all. The ultimate setting for the ultimate mystery. And it is the house that all of these people will die in.
Who is the minotaur that kills all of these people, who punishes them for trying to break away from their role as characters in this mystery? In my opinion, the minotaur is the House itself. Not just the physical house, but the very concept of "The [X] House Murders" as a series.
It is not a shock that all of these people were murdered and all that remains is the most stock version of their archetype. The same thing had already happened in The Mill House Murders.
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