Preface
I first picked up a work by Yusuke Kishi during my high school years.
At the time, I was getting hooked on Kadokawa Horror Bunko, and I went to a bookstore..."The Crimson Labyrinth"I picked it up and bought it because the opening was so interesting.
At the time, death game stories were hardly known, and I remember being deeply moved by its incredible tension and entertainment value.
This was around the time the movie "Battle Royale" was a hot topic.
I enjoyed "The Crimson Labyrinth," so I'm looking forward to reading the same author's work."Angel's Chirp," "Blue Flame," "The Black House"I started to get involved in things like that.
(The black house has a slightly different feel, though...)
In any case, during my high school years, my perception of "Yusuke Kishi = someone who writes interesting works" became firmly established.
In recent years, there has also been a film adaptation of a story about a psychopathic teacher."The Lesson of Evil", a sci-fi horror that was also adapted into an anime."From the New World"They continue to produce incredibly interesting works like these.
In contrast to his other works, "The Glass Hammer," which I read this time, gave me the impression that he wrote a straightforward mystery novel, and I was able to read it with a fresh perspective, which is unusual for a work by Yusuke Kishi.
Work Introduction
This work is roughly divided into two parts: Part One and Part Two.
The first part follows a fairly conventional plot.
The story revolves around a murder case involving the president of a company about to go public. The vice president, who is arrested as the culprit, asks the protagonist, lawyer Junko Aoto, to help solve the mystery of the locked-room murder.
The real detective is Kei Enomoto, the security consultant whom Aoto enlists the help of.
Enomoto's extensive knowledge of crime prevention is very informative to read, and also quite frightening.
Enomoto's real job is probably thief, and his clever personality and nonchalant demeanor exude an outlaw charm.
Junko Aoto, a lawyer, is intelligent and full of a sense of justice, but she also has a slightly naive side.
However, Enomoto sometimes gets hints from Enomoto's outlandish ideas, so I think the highlight of their relationship is that they seem incompatible but have a good connection.
The second part immediately shifts to a story told from the culprit's perspective.
The film depicts the perpetrator's life story, from his upbringing to his motives and the inspiration behind his murder method, in a documentary-like manner.
When you view the case from the culprit's perspective, you inevitably empathize with them, which makes the detectives, Aoto and Enomoto, seem rather unpleasant.
In essence, the second part is the answer section, but instead of having the detective engage in lengthy deductions, the story is told from the culprit's perspective, explaining even the smallest details.
I think it's quite interesting because you can see the incident from both perspectives in one book.
Spoiler-filled review
Overall, it was very interesting.
The tricks were original, and I learned a lot from the detailed research that went into the story, including episodes about crime prevention, stories about glass, and stories about gondolas.
In the first part, Aoto and Enomoto repeatedly try to figure out how to solve the locked-room mystery, only to fail, which gives a sense of realism that there are no brilliant detectives.
Just when a method that seemed to reveal the truth was presented at the end, it turned out to be something different, and the first half ends with the line, "I've really figured out the truth!", so I was surprised to find that it's an anti-mystery where the mystery seems so close to being solved but isn't.
I didn't know it was divided into two parts, so when the second part started, I thought it was a completely different story.
While I sympathize with the circumstances leading up to the crime, objectively speaking, he was nothing more than a criminal who planned and committed murder out of greed.
Enomoto also stated that if he hadn't killed anyone, he would have settled for splitting the diamonds.
For Enomoto, who is probably a thief himself, ordinary criminal acts may be forgivable, but murder is an act he simply cannot condone.
I felt that they clearly drew a line when it came to acts of murder.
I was particularly struck by the final line spoken by Iwakiri, the developer of Lupinus V.
When a robot created for the purpose of caregiving is used to kill people,"If robots had hearts, I think they would have cried."That's the line.
The fact that something designed with safety features from every angle to prevent harm can still be used as a tool for murder due to human malice highlights the profound sinfulness of humanity.
This latest collaboration between Aoto and Enomoto seems to be part of a series, and it looks like there will be another book in the future, so I'm thinking of reading that one too.
The works I introduced are here.
Rakuten Market: 硝子のハンマー（楽天ブックス）