I am sure this is not where anyone wanted this post to start, but let’s talk about utility optimisation functions. Don’t worry, I will promise you all right now that this post will contain no math.
Economists are highly concerned with math relating to trade-offs. In particular, a holy grail for economists is finding situations where pareto improvements can be made. A pareto improvement refers to any gain that can be made by one party that is not made at the expense of another party. In reality, it is mostly a theoretical concept. In a world of scarcity, whenever someone gains something, it could have gone to someone else, making it “at their expense” in the abstract.
This is why economists are generally more focused on finding what are called Kaldor–Hicks improvements. Kaldor–Hicks improvements refer to situations where there is a gain that one party can make at the expense of another, but that party’s gains lack some kind of loss or inefficiency compared to other allocations of a given resource. In such a situation, it means a kind of “pseudo-pareto” improvement can be made by letting the more efficient party benefit from the resource, and then forcing them to compensate the other party with the extra gains they made from the deal.
Don’t worry if that was a bit confusing, it is easier to understand by way of an analogy. Let’s say that you had two people who each had high capacity batteries that you wanted to charge as much as possible before going on some long trip. Now let’s say that you had one hour to charge the batteries at a power socket before going on this trip, and that one hour was not enough time to completely charge either battery. However, battery A has an older charging mechanism, and charges slowly, whereas battery B has a fast charge system that charges much faster. Economists would point out the importance of Kaldor–Hicks logic in such a situation: The best thing one could do is spend the complete one hour charging the fast-charging battery B, and then give some of its charge to battery A in compensation during the trip.
This is all to say that when dealing with trade-offs, the most reasonable thing one can do to start with is to focus on the areas where gains can be made most efficiently. This allows you to minimise the potency of the scarcity of your resources, so that you can then move on to more fair and complex trade-off arrangements afterwards.
Storytelling is as much an exercise in problem solving and pragmatism as it is a demonstration of creativity and ingenuity. Beyond just getting good ideas onto a page, the mark of storytelling mastery is being able to arrange a narrative in such a way that its ideas are packed in efficiently and communicated clearly. This is why much of the struggle in writing a standout novel is not just writing it, but the extensive process of rewriting and editing it so that it is the best that it can possibly be. I think not nearly enough attention is paid to this reality within critical spaces. Often, fulfilling the desires of certain audience members would come at great expense, and so it is the correct decision to craft a story that would leave them disappointed.
It is for this reason that I have always seen a massive gulf between two different kinds of criticism: The first is the kind that is directed at a story’s trade-offs, which deals almost entirely in the realm of subjective differences in priorities between audience members. This is in contrast to criticism that focuses on a more pure kind of ineptitude; cases where there’s no good reason why a particular idea or plot point was executed in the way it was, such that it could be unambiguously improved by some change without any cost to any other part of the piece. Put another way, critics too much often confuse pareto improvement (cost-free improvement) with Kaldor–Hicks improvement (improvements that come by economising on the cost of trade-offs).
While much of this confusion goes one way, with critics confusing their own preferences in regards to trade-offs with being “the right way”, or as being some kind of cost-free improvement, it sometimes goes the other way instead. Sometimes we forget that there’s so many different ways for a story to excel, and it is natural for a creator in a particular genre to have a laser focus on the parts that are most important for their particular kind of story. Since no one is perfect, we’ve come to accept these small imperfections as par for the course even among good storytellers. Even if it would be an unambiguous improvement to the end product, we are happy to forgive the fact that not every story with even a slightly fantastical premise will have fully worked out setting and worldbuilding elements. Sometimes the focus of such stories is more on romance, or comedy, or some other goal where the worldbuilding takes a backseat in the author’s mind.
However, even though there are good reasons to forgive such oversights, we should not lose sight of the fact that correcting them would be pareto type improvements, rather than merely a case of fiddling around with subjective trade-offs. In most cases, there’s no real harm done in the absence of such improvements. Who cares if a police procedural hasn’t worked out its science in the same detail as an expansive sci-fi epic? Well, such feelings disappear once you’ve experienced the feeling of having these minor missteps completely dealt with. Once you acclimatise to writers who can take that exceptional extra step, one can’t help but wonder how much better other stories would be if they had such considerations.
My beat here on this blog is chiefly mystery writing. To be a mystery writer is to exist in a genre where every aspect of narrative structure, logic, and credibility is inspected with a fine-tooth comb. There’s no room in mysteries for cheap twists and contrivances; every plot turn has to be earned, comprehensibly foreshadowed, and feel logical in retrospect. To do otherwise is usually to be chased off the shelves into obscurity. As a result, I have become entirely acclimatised to a very high standard of plot structure — some might say that I have gone too far. So, I almost always walk away disappointed from the big twists that have defined the mainstream of other genres.
The frustration I have is not just that these twists aren’t good enough, but that they could be made better with such ease. What they demonstrate isn’t a lack of effort, but a lack of understanding of the tools that have been refined over generations — especially in mysteries — to make twists and reveals land with the gut-shattering impact that is possible. Regardless, whenever I run into this problem, the particular sentence that will run through my mind, as of my recent read-through, will be “if Another can do it this well in a horror novel, being a sci-fi or fantasy or romance is no excuse”.
A casualty of reputation
Another is a 2009 supernatural thriller novel written by Yukito Ayatsuji — the originator of the honkaku mystery renaissance that revived classic style mysteries across Japan, starting in 1987 with Ayatsuji’s The Decagon House Murders. Another was originally published in serial format in Kadokawa Shouten’s Yasei Jidai magazine between July 2006 and May 2009, before it was collected into a single volume hardcover novel that was released in October 2009.
Another was then reprinted as a two volume paperback novel released in 2011, and again in two volumes through the Kadokawa Sneaker Bunko light novel imprint in 2012. It was additionally adapted into a manga version between 2010 and 2012, a twelve episode anime in early 2012, and a live-action film also released in 2012.
Put another way, Another is one of the rare examples of a story that has run the full gauntlet of the media mix strategy. What was originally a hardcover novel has been rereleased as a light novel, a manga, an anime, and a film. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that everyone and their mother has seen something of Another in one of its many forms, especially its smash hit anime adaptation. And while I don’t despise the anime from what I’ve seen, I would like to ask those who have only seen it to keep an open mind, because the novel is fairly different — in the sense of being better, mostly.
Another follows Kouichi Sakakibara, a 15 year old junior high student who relocates to the relatively remote town of Yomiyama for the 1998 school year, only to become embroiled in the secretive “curse” that dictates the lives of all of Yomiyama North Junior High School, class 3-3. I won’t go into a detailed summary of the plot, since there are plenty of reasons that anyone reading this should go read the novel, or at least watch the anime, on their own.
What is of particular note for the purposes of this post is that Another is a school-focused novel, distributed in part within a light novel imprint, yet written by one of the masters of the modern Japanese style (shinhonkaku) of orthodox mystery novels. It is also in equal parts a supernatural horror and school-life drama as it is a mystery. In so being, it provides the blueprint for my fundamental thesis about such stories: Even beyond the stuffy tropes of detectives and closed circle murders and such, breaking open the mystery novel toolbox and applying it elsewhere is the superior way to construct the twists and turns of stories of any genre.
The reveals that are dolled out in Another, especially in its second half, are downright fantastic. They make use of various classics of mystery fiction: Twin tricks, gender tricks, narrative tricks built on biased perspectives, alibi tricks, and so many others. And it does so without any of the normal genre restrictions of conventional detective mysteries. There are no locked-room murders to solve in Another, just the identity of the “casualty”, the cursed individual driving the horrific events of the story.
Such details are important not just because mysteries automatically have the best twists or anything, but because these techniques have been refined to take twists beyond the realm of mere surprise, instead aiming towards the higher goal of building turns into the plot that are complete and satisfying in retrospect. As previously stated, mysteries live and die by their plot mechanics, and one of the key measuring sticks for their success has been Chandler’s Laws five to seven:
- It must have enough essential simplicity to be explained easily when the time comes.
- It must baffle a reasonably intelligent reader.
- The solution must seem inevitable once revealed.
While mystery “rules” should always be taken more as guidelines, the importance of these particular rules is that they allow a mystery to leave a lasting satisfaction with the reader. They lead to a solution that is challenging to spot, but once revealed, leads the audience to believe they could have done so with only a touch more ingenuity. Mysteries that can craft this feeling demonstrate the kinds of twists that don’t merely surprise, but get under your skin and leave you thinking about them for ages to come.
To get into more concrete, spoiler-ridden details about at least one mystery: The reveal of the true role of Misaki Fujioka in the story serves as an excellent example of Another’s greatest strengths. Throughout the earlier events of the novel, Mei’s insistence that both she and Kouichi are not the casualty always rung hollow because of the lack of concrete evidence given for the assertion. Kouichi comes up with a half-baked theory regarding why he can’t be, but it is far from certain. However, when Mei finally explains her full family history, the undeniable proof of what she’s been saying is revealed to have been staring us right in the face.
The very first death of the novel, that of Misaki Fujioka, is revealed to have been a product of the curse. The incident that we the audience had assumed started in May, at Kouichi’s arrival, had actually started in April, when Kouichi had an “alibi”. It was the kind of logical deduction most becoming of a detective in a parlour room of a country manor, but it came out in the last act of this, arguably light, novel concerned with school students and supernatural curses. It utterly demonstrated the utility of the pollination of literary techniques across genres.
Of course, Another is not perfect or anything. There are good reasons that it has a relatively downer reputation — although some of this is in no small part to a series of wrongheaded changes made in its adaptation to anime. However, regardless of its flaws, Another is a fundamentally compelling case-study into the importance of mystery fiction, not just for its own sake, but for the sake of all other genres. The next time you encounter a twist in a big fantasy film or the next big network TV drama, ask yourself why this school-life horror called Another did it all so much better. If everyone starts asking themselves such questions, that’s when we’ll get stories that really blow us all away.
