Hmmm... I feel obliged to say again that the book isn't currently available in English - its last (or only?) translation is OOP ( the movie from 1988, which is apparently terrific, is also alas unavailable), so I'm not trying to tease.

Now that I've finished it (the second half was a real page-turner, I took two weeks to plow through the first half and half a day for the remaining 400 pages), I can see quite well how it's been highly influential to later Japanese fantasy/sf/detective literature, and what I know of that is probably just the tip of the iceberg, really. I can think of many attempts to build mysteries in the vein of this novel or using some of its mix of conspiracy, fringe science, games using real people, changing perspectives, multi-layered mystery across many eras, ancient cursed magical objects, weird manga-like villains, supernatural elements and creatures straight out of the kwaidan tradition (yokai, for instance.. there's even the suggestion - laughed at - that a "god of death" may be behind the murderer at some point), tragic romance, Edo era martial arts/swords action and so on, in japanese literature, in manga and anime.

I must have given the wrong impression, as it's really nothing like Moby Dick or Ulysses. It's certainly nowhere as "weird" as Ulysses (it's not a surrealist novel, it merely borrows a few tricks from them). On the whole, it's far more an early example of the sophisticated and literary thrillers with a good dose of supernatural in the vein that modern (and hugely popular) authors like Zafon writes. If released today, with the proper word-of-mouth/reviews, it might stand a chance of being a best-seller, I think (though its first half might turn off a lot of modern readers). Properly adapted, with a lot of the exposition cut, it would also make an awesome seinen manga (that would appeal to readers who loved talkative psychological mysteries à la Death Note, though with none of the "spy" aspects).


It's certainly literary and original, and the use of many styles and of "multi-media" devices to carry the story (it's got essays, journals, letters, newspaper articles and clippings, transcripts of radio interviews and even the shot by shot scripts to documentary movies quite reminescent of those in Lost, at least in the way they're used in the story) must have been fairly avant-garde back in 1935 (which probably explains why it's not before 1962 it became a hugely popular novel). It also plunders and pastiches many literary styles (some but not all of them Japanese - like Nô plays but also samurai action novels, supernatural folk tales, and even ancient chinese epics - it's also inspired a lot by Poe and Conan Doyle and early 20th century anglo-american pop literature). It's claustrophobic and unsettling a bit like Kafka, but it's clearly a mystery/thriller story.

While the "real time" action is minimalist: over 800 pages, the main character wakes up with amnesia, is bathed and gets an haircut, is shown another insane patient (a girl, who acts like a courtier from a 1000 years ago and who thinks the patient is her lover, and her dead sister's husband) then brought to an office packed with weird objects from crime weapons, devices to pickled brains where he reads several documents then has a 300 page verbal duel with either of the two doctors (W. is a forensic expert, and M. is a psychiatrist and theorician of psychology who was has committed suicide a month before the novel starts... until he shows up in the middle, telling the other doctor has lied about the date of his suicide, that's it's for today not a month ago), runs off in the street then returns to the office where the novel ends, it's all an excuse to reveal layer by layer and with countless plot twists and changes of perspective a mystery that's hardly "static" or boring. The first half of the novel probably was more absorbing originally but now it is a bit "dated". From the perspective of a modern reader, Yumeno has overdone the exposition on psychology (he grounded his fictional theories on Freud and Jung, whose concepts were still little known in 1935 Japan, so he needed to do that. He doesn't do that as much with the theory of evolution, biology or genetics, as they were more familiar to his readers). So the first half gets a bit repetitive and tedious as a result (the author meant it to get hypnotic, though - so in part it's all intended and still works), but once he starts to peel the onion of the mystery itself (which connects together the situation of the patient suffering from amnesia, two recent and weird murders involving a boy who may or may not be the patient with amnesia while one of the two victims rather suspiciously seems to be the very much alive girl in the asylum he's just seen, events set in rural Japan 20 years earlier, others set at various times during the Edo era, with manga-like boss villains and heroic fighting monks, mysterious ancient objects and locations (cursed scrolls, supernatural stuff) - and all the way to a gruesome story set im the Heian era and in ancient China a 1000 years ago - and soon enough you can no longer tell if the two doctors are telling the truth or only part of it or even if it's all just a cruel game of their invention, if they're using the boy and girl in some cruel experiment or trying to help, if they're friends of each other or actually arch-enemies trying to bring down the other or win the game etc.), it gets really great and has tons of ingredients that have huge mass appeal nowadays (that you find in many mangas for sure, but not only that. The mystery is built very much on a canvas and with ingredients that modern audiences love. The success of series like Lost attest to that.)

They call it a masterpiece of crime fiction, and after finishing it I tend to agree. It's also extremely clever. More or less it's a tale in which the protagonists, maybe all of them, have been driven mad with the mysteries at the core of it, and at the end you kind of realize the writer is the "criminal brain" and as a reader you're pretty much in the same position as the protagonists and thus a victim too. The real genius bit of it is that he manages to accomplish that without leaving the mysteries in the book unsolved. Rather, he's piled up solutions after solutions, and like the protagonist you're left at the end with choosing what you think is the right one. The title, by the way, is a kind of Japanese equivalent to "Abracadabra".



Again, I don't think this one is currently published in English (but it's fairly recently completed in Japanese, two volumes to go in French - and it's a big seinen manga award-winning success, so it should probably get picked up for publication in English sooner than later). The Japanese title is Tsumi to Batsu, but probably because qualms at using the original title when it's such a loose adaptation, the French publisher chose to call it Syndrome 1866 instead and put "based on Doistoyevsky's Crime and Punishment" underneath.

As far as tranposition goes, it's done in a wholly different style than Ganketsou. It transposes the basic plot and the moral debates of Dostoyevsky to a modern and fairly realistic Tokyô setting, and with real social conditions/problems (college girl prostitution, for instance, a plague currently in Japan. Exacting social pressure on the young that bring many to just give up etc.). The starting point is basically the same: a young talented college drop-out and loner, who's turned his appartment into a dump by neglect and that he barely leaves anymore, totally disgusted with the system and society, debates within himself whether it's justifiable morally to murder people who harm others and that society would be better without and who seem to escape justice, and decides to put his theory/ideas to the test by planning the murder of a college girl who's forcing classmates in vulnerable situations to prostitute themselves and who's treating them abjectly. It's implied the pimp is embroiled with yakuzas. That's as far as I've gone into it for now (one out of 10 volumes), but I guess it will loosely continue to follow the original novel as it already introduced the mother and sister-about-to-marry characters - and no doubt the detective character will show up later too, for instance. The Sonya character is probably introduced already too. The conflicted vigilante theme is hardly original in manga, though this series seems to explore it from a more realistic/adult perspective than, say, Death Note or Maoh (though these are two of the mangas I like a lot).