Seven university friends go in search of a mysterious underground facility in the hills and, arriving late in the evening, encounter a family of three who have become lost walking in the same isolated region. The ten of them see no choice but to stay underground until morning, only for an earthquake to trap everyone inside. A means of escape exists, but requires that one person stays behind, trapping themselves underground where they might be lucky and not starve to death: instead, they may drown in the rising water filling the building from below. And so, naturally, one of the group is murdered. But why now? And, of course, whodunnit?

2022 was clearly a year for baffling deaths happening in inescapable confinement: The Red Death Murders (2022) saw men trapped in a castle by virulent sickness outside the walls being nevertheless killed one by one, and The Ark (2022) by Haruo Yuki was published in Japan with the plot outlined above. One of these would go on to sell half a million copies and get translated internationally, so the comparisons end there, but I do love the principle of someone being murdered when death is already bearing down on a group from another angle; there’s something so wrong about it, and it can take a very clever idea to make the additional intervention seem worthwhile.

Yuki’s setup feels a little thin on plot at times — we spend an otherwise-uneventful entire day waiting for various things to dry out — but there are some very good ideas in play. The dilemma that the killer would make the perfect choice of person to stay behind and enable the others to live is well-mined, with the need to identify them paramount but also the added moral dimension of how on earth you persuade someone to remain and die for the greater good. This lends a certain tension to proceedings, with detection seeming somewhat secondary even if it would be a step closer to solving the group’s problems, which in turn brings everyone’s conduct into question.

[I]t would have taken some courage to say that we should prioritize escaping over finding the murderer. That was just what the murderer would say.

Puzzle fans who lament the absence of complications in the first murder — a simple strangling in a room, bor-ing — will be delighted when two further murders follow, both positively overflowing with curious aspects. Fortunately, amateur sleuth Shotaro Shinoda is on hand to intelligently speculate around the events, and, in a style frowned upon by the likes of Ellery Queen and S.S. van Dine, is also quite happy to largely keep our narrator Suichi Koshino up to date with his thinking. When some points of interest are raised about the second death, it’s pleasing to report that some of them are, there and then, explained away — as far as Shotaro understand them, of course — rather than elucidation being smugly and frustratingly withheld until the final chapter.

The logic applied here is very good, although — and I may have missed this — I think that (rot13 for very minor spoilers) gur fvmr bs gur cynfgvp ont va gur sbhegu puncgre could have been communicated more clearly. It’s a small point, and a testament to how much I enjoyed playing along with this, and seeing how the novel of logical inference has developed to meet the 21st century. The reasoning is tighter in some places than in others, of course, but as an exemplar of how it’s possible to overlook the obvious this is a solid piece of entertainment that makes you feel clever and delightfully dim at the same time.

Translator Jim Rion again does a great job, finding some lovely phrases — c.f. the friends entering the darkened facility “holding up their lights like a parade of fireflies in the dark”, or the Yazaki family sharing stories of their dog to allow “brief moments of escape, like pockets of air in a flooded cave”. This is a very readable book, no doubt because of its limited characterisation and functional structure, but Rion does well not to make it seem like a translation while also very much making it feel like something from another place and time. Pushkin really do have some wonderfully talented people bringing these books into English for us, and here’s hoping that they’re all kept in work for many years yet.

I wasn’t sure about this after John likened it to Ellery Queen, but as a none-too-showy example of the logician’s art it’s pleasingly brisk, rigorous enough to pass muster — the central deception seems to occur like a thunderbolt, and seems unlikely as all hell…though I’ve accepted less likely things in this genre — and has a superb ending. If the rest of Haruo Yuki’s books are this accessible and surprising, I have no doubt that I wouldn’t be alone in clamouring for a few more to be carried so attentively over the language barrier. Who knew the disaster movie/detective novel mash-up could be so entertaining? More power to Pushkin Vertigo and their superb choices. And they’re putting out a translation of Six Crimes Sans Assassin (1939) by Pierre Boileau later this year, so they’re clearly not done surprising us yet!