“On the final two days of November, two men and two women shall perish in Magan…” — so sayeth the seer Sakimi, who has a fifty-year streak of being right about these things; thus, anyone in Magan would do well to clear out for the last two days of November. Just a shame that no-one told the nine people who have travelled to Magan at the end of November, some of them specifically to meet Sakimi, and that the message is only relayed as the sole bridge out of town goes up in flames. But, c’mon, prophecy belongs with zombies in the world of cheap and tawdry science fiction, so there’s no way that anyone is really at any risk….is there?

I felt like a dissenting voice when I merely enjoyed Masahiro Imamura’s debut Death Among the Undead (2017, tr. 2021), rather than loving it as everyone else seemed to, and his follow-up Death Within the Evil Eye (2019, tr. 2022) has attracted, if anything, even more fulsome praise…and left me, if anything, even more cold. It probably contains some clever logic — though the explanation for red flowers inexplicably left outside the scene of a poisoning is pure circular reasoning — but, for all the intelligence on display, it’s crucially painfully transparent at the worst times, and left me almost unimaginably bored at others.

When nine people find themselves at the Box of the Evil Eye — isolated location of a series of laboratory tests into precognition which have been going on for fifty years (surely contradicting, incidentally, the means by which our narrator Yuzuru Hamura and his detective/crush Hiruko Kenzaki discover the Box in the first place) — it’s only a matter of time before the resident psychic tells them someone is going to die and then, sure enough, the deaths begin. The first one is pleasingly shocking, almost a superb punchline, and begins to raise the spectre of Sakimi’s powers being genuine, despite what some of the people there gathered might choose to believe.

Having survived the events of Death Among the Undead, Yuzuru and Hiruko are perhaps well-placed to view events with equanimity, and so when another of the visitors demonstrates precognitive powers, and when the predictions she makes help save the life of someone else there, it becomes a tense stand-off to see who will die and who will survive. Well, it should become tense, but instead, to my eye, we’re met with a series of briefly diverting incidents — a shooting, a white-robed figure fleeing down a hallway, the apparent suicide of one of the visitors over a waterfall — which are, without fail, all followed up by lots of sitting around and talking. And talking. And talking.

Now, speculation is a necessary part of the detective novel, if only to allow the characters to air thoughts the reader might be having to show how wrong the reader’s suspicions are. But here there’s so little discussion about action and such a focus on motive that it palled for me incredibly quickly — at least talking about how something was done enables the reader to picture those events unfolding, and makes what is essentially just discussion feel very kinetic. But discussions about why and where are just tedious to me, and having the tropes of mystery fiction pored over time and time again stopped being playful and just became eye-rolling for how little they progressed the plot or contributed to the overall edifice.

Imamura deserves huge credit for folding the speculative edges of science fiction so fully into the novel of detection — “It wasn’t logical any more to deny the existence of something simply because it didn’t fit our current knowledge” — but there’s so much repetition of events, and lots and lots and lots of people spinning their wheels while we discuss this ad infinitum to no real purpose. There’s an edit of this which cuts out the repetition, structures things in a more compelling way, and gives a meaning to more of the hanging threads of who-was-where-when which we pick over for page after page after page, but that’s not the book we’ve been given. This is like early Ellery Queen, and fills me with as much joy as regular readers will know that comparison carries.

You likely disagree, that’s fine, but this bored me so much that I put it down for two days without reading the final chapter, and was tempted to not even return to it when I remembered that fact. And, hey, that’s evidently my loss, because everyone else seems to love this. Other honakau and shin honkaku titles from Locked Room International (and elsewhere) have delighted me, so maybe it’s just that Imamura goes about his work in a way I don’t care for. A rumoured third novel is apparently out there that we might be getting in English at some point, but — a prediction of my own — I suspect I’ll fail once again to echo the praise which will come ringing in from all corners. Crucially, though, will read it, because someone doing this much to play with the classic novel of detection deserves attention…I just wish I enjoyed his efforts more.