I finally picked up Soji Shimada’s The Tokyo Zodiac Murders after seeing it recommended so often that it was hard to ignore. It is both his debut and, by his own account in the afterword, the book that left him brooding for a long time over having peaked so early. I had previously read another Shimada novel that was also widely recommended—the one I found in the library when this title was unavailable—and liked it enough to keep an eye out. This time the book was on the shelf, so I borrowed it. I have no belief in fortune-telling or astrology; if the recommendations had not been so persistent, the title alone would probably not have made me pick it up.
The opening chapter is strange and spectral. It describes a mummy-like construction assembled from parts of several people’s bodies according to a theory of the twelve zodiac signs. This object is supposed to possess immense power, enough to alter the fate of Japan. I have to admit I did not follow much of it. The chapter leans heavily on astrological lore and on calculations involving latitude and longitude, and I found myself dazed rather than intrigued. If the rest of the book had continued in that vein, I would have stopped.
The story becomes more grounded in the second chapter, when Shimada’s great detective Kiyoshi Mitarai appears and begins to lay out three linked unsolved cases that have remained open for forty years. The crimes themselves are described vividly, with plenty of detail, and then the investigation gets underway.
When I finished, my first reaction was that Mitarai had hardly done anything. He simply arrives at the truth in a flash and resolves the case. At the end, through Mitarai’s voice, the author reconstructs how the culprit carried out the three crimes. The solution is genuinely striking; I found myself admiring the ingenuity of the murderer’s method and wondering how anyone could have conceived of it.
On reflection, however, the culprit seems to leave far too many openings. Could everything really go according to plan without a single telltale trace? The police at the time must have been astonishingly careless. Another detail that strained belief was that people connected to the case were still living in the same places forty years later, making them easy to find.
Even so, the novel is a pleasure to read. I kept turning the pages because I wanted to know the answer, drawn along by each new piece of the author’s design, and when the final revelation came I had the satisfying “Oh—so that’s how it was” reaction that a good puzzle can produce.