Because we’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not. Let’s not invent elaborate excuses to drag in a discussion of detective stories. Let’s candidly glory in the noblest pursuits possible to characters in a book.
The Hollow Man, by John Dickson Carr
A review of Our Broken World, volume 1 of the Sekai Series
What does it mean for a fictional world to “come alive” for the reader? If it was simply that the story is believable in the sense of “being possible in reality”, only the most dreary and mundane affairs would be fit for adaptation into fiction. By contrast, when a bookstore advertises that its latest best seller will “take you into its world”, the story is most likely to be utterly fantastical and lacking in any semblance of common sense. Even if nothing “impossible” happens, there is an implicit understanding between author and reader that it should be the kind of interesting story that would never happen in their own lives.
The idea that “reality is stranger than fiction” is the kind of half-baked cliché which should make you suspicious that most people don’t think about their words before speaking. Stranger than fiction, really? You don’t have to look very far at all to find stories about teenage girls piloting song-powered battle robots, psychedelic rhymes about having sex with demons, or children’s programmes about miniaturised people entering the human body. What kind of life are you leading if you think this is all a little too mundane to match your daily affairs?
All it means for fiction to come alive is that you aren’t so bored that you start thinking about how made up it all is. No story is “unbelievable”, it is just that some are so dull that the reader starts wasting time worrying about something as utterly trivial as whether or not it could happen in reality.
Warning: Spoilers ahead
Our Broken World is a Japanese shinhonkaku style mystery novel written by Nisio, Isin and first published in 2003. It is the utterly unbelievable story of high school student Samatoki Hitsuuchi, who pushes his physical relationship with his sister into territory of dubious legality, starts dating someone else’s childhood friend, and secretly falls in love with a completely separate third girl. Or, at least something like that. I recall some kind of murder mystery plot being important as well, but I was too distracted by the harem-like situation our protagonist found himself in… oh right, the third girl is also an amateur detective, that was the relevant point.
Samatoki and our dubiously dressed detective, herself named Kuroneko Byouinzaka, set about finding the truth behind the completely implausible circumstances of a murder of a fellow student occurring on the grounds of their high school. Realistically speaking, that is if we apply even a mustard seed of common sense, this premise is complete and utter nonsense. Students are almost never murdered on school grounds, especially not by other students. Since our story encompasses only a small handful of characters, all of them students, the only believable outcome is that the victim was murdered by a third party, one who exists completely outside of the closed circle of our story.
Our Broken World does not waste the reader’s time with such dull excuses. It is a shinhonkaku detective story, after all.
The principles of the detective’s world
Anton Chekhov’s most famous principle of storytelling states that “if in the first chapter there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.” However, if I were to offer this principle to a mystery fiction author, they might amend it like so: “if in the first chapter there is a rifle hanging on the wall, and in the second or third chapter the master of the manor is found dead, the audience will naturally begin inquiring about who it was among our cast of characters that shot him.” And finally, if I were to offer this amended principle to a shinhonkaku mystery author, they would form the following completed principle: “If the master of the manor is found dead in the second or third chapter, the writer and the audience enter an unspoken compact which states that there must be a rifle hidden somewhere in the first chapter.”
The implicit understanding between author and audience pertaining to the unreality of fiction is at the core of shinhonkaku mysteries. If we spent all of our time fiddling about explaining the logistics of how realistic it is for a rifle to appear in the first chapter, by the time the body is found in the second or third chapter, the audience will be so bored that the killer may as well be the cat for all they care. This is not to say that a mystery story fails if it has any purposes outside of developing its mystery. Instead, rather than needing to be anything that could happen in real life, so long as the mystery is sufficiently interesting, logical, and satisfying such that it is befitting of a fictional story, the audience will agree to accept it.
In fact, rather than being expunged of other purposes, Our Broken World is dripping with stylistic elements which are completely extraneous to the act of mystery solving. S.S. Van Dine’s law against literary dallying in detective fiction is flaunted with masterful intention here. Every moment of this novel is dominated by the unique flow of Samatoki’s narration: It is meticulous and unending, bordering on being in the style of stream of consciousness. Long stretches of the novel are either in the format of monologue which is unbroken by any dialogue, or dialogue which is unbroken by any monologue. There is no room for subchapters here, as each scene flows naturally from Samatoki’s last thought, with no regard to the order of time or space.
After all, this is not ultimately a story about mystery solving: Just the story of a teenage boy learning to move beyond the comfortable embrace of apathy, even if he is still very far away from becoming anything like an upstanding citizen. However, even with this being a literary work beyond matters of mere deduction and conjecture, it is still in the genre of a mystery novel. Just as Samatoki must learn that there is more meaning to life than logically solving every one of his sister’s problems algorithmically, we as the reader must learn that there is more to mystery stories than solving the case laid before us as though we are a detective following a formula.
The broken man
Rather than discussing Our Broken World as a merely abstract text, I think it would be best to discuss the structure in concrete terms. A quick glance at the table of contents would make Our Broken World seem like the most meticulously, ordinary story of crime solving in existence. Problem Part, Detective Part, Answer Part, Ending. You could not dream of a more rigorous investigation in accordance with the principles of whodunit conventions. There is not an atom of room for unfair twists, the late Queen problem, or anything else. However, the text itself defies expectations at every turn.
The clues are all assembled in the Problem Part, allowing the Detective Part to have its attempts at investigation go spectacularly off the rails. Still, in both of these sections, Our Broken World makes its philosophy on the structure of detective stories abundantly clear. Firstly, there is no pretence that our characters can solve the crime by eliminating all possibilities in accordance with the cruel complexity of reality. Instead, they operate within the constraints the audience knows must exist according to the principles of a detective story. Take, for example, the notion of a closed circle of suspects:
“With your hypothesis… The culprit is a high schooler?”
“Rather than putting it that way, you see, the only ones I can point at and say something like ‘you are the culprit!’ are high schoolers. Mm—if I can be even more blunt, Samatoki.”
“What is it?”
“I had chosen who to doubt from the start. Before Kazusawa’s death was made clear I doubted you, but that had a different meaning… I have reduced the suspects of Kazusawa’s death to six people.”
“Six people?”
“The first one is you, Samatoki Hitsuuchi; then your little sister, Yorutsuki Hitsuuchi; the head of the kendo club, Hakohiko Mukaezuki; his childhood friend, Ririsu Kotohara; the victim himself, Rokunin Kazusawa; and finally myself, Kuroneko Byouinzaka. These six.”
This crime has theoretically limitless suspects. There is no true physical closed circle or locked door complication that makes it completely unimaginable for a third party to commit this crime. And yet, Byouinzaka recognises a truth that the audience already knows. It is utterly impossible for a third party to commit this crime, because the audience would be bored by any result where the culprit was not already an established character in the story.
Byouinzaka is not shy about the reasoning behind such an unrealistic mindset, and in so doing forms the fundamental raison d’être for Our Broken World:
“This isn’t a stupid detective novel, I hope you’re not really taking yourself for an amateur detective trying to investigate the place.”
…
“What if I was, Samatoki?”
“It would be a waste of effort… this kind of thing should be left to the police, shouldn’t it? It’s not the kind of stage that we, just a pair of normal high schoolers, should stand on.”
“That’s the point.”
“Mm?”
“That point. The real cause of anxiety at being unrelated to the world. A case you are involved with being dealt with by someone else—in short, that’s the same thing as being ignored by destiny.”
Byouinzaka hits the nail on the head. If we do not accept the premise of the shinhonkaku author, that is that writer and reader can come to a shared understanding based on the fact that any story is just a contrived reality, we are limited to a meaninglessly drab sense of reality. We will come to accept that the world is simply too large for our protagonists to change. Indeed, the whole premise of an interesting story happening to begin with is a suspicious notion if we imbue our vision of the world with an excessively sensible dose of realism.
And so, in recognition of this, Byouinzaka does not give us an itemised list of clues to finish off the Detective Part. She does not challenge the audience to openly conjecture on the identity of the culprit. The majority of the Detective Part is spent dealing with unravelling the mystery of our characters, instead of alibis and fingerprints. Because none of that business needs to be said aloud. We know there was a body in the second and third chapter, so we are free to search for the rifle in the first. Instead, Samatoki’s real challenge is learning his place within the world.
As a result, there is no last minute trick here. The late Queen problem does not reappear in accordance with Byouinzaka’s foreshadowing to undo suspicions on the most likely candidates. The mystery does still have a surprising solution, but even the manner by which it is surprising is itself surprising. Even to those readers who solved the murder itself. In a spectacular finale, Byouinzaka lectures for page upon page without any room for the enter key, until she clarifies the truth of this world. The truth that even murderers care about their friends. The truth that even cynical arseholes prefer if the people around them are happy. The truth that mystery novels are more interesting if implausible things are allowed to happen so long as they make logical sense.
And the truth that even living a life that is basically a falsehood is fine so long as someone cares about you enough to put up with it. If you want to make it whole, just share your broken world with others who find it interesting.
“No matter what you do, you cannot deceive me. Even if you deceive everyone else in the world, even if you deceive the world itself… I will see through your lies. I will prioritize it over everything else and demonstrate your deceits. So you are fine, Samatoki. Your world is still completely fine, Samatoki. Your world… isn’t broken.”
Bonus thoughts
- Pointing out the late Queen problem, which rests on the subject of suspects’ motives, not having the actual problem arise, and then having the final trick be based on the analysis of motives is the kind of genre savvy trick I crave
- “In short, even if you read Edogawa Ranpo these days you won’t notice that there’s a trick. What was previously honkaku sank with that era. Originality from the past is today’s norms. The parts standing out like tricks or surprises fall off and leave a clean cliché work. They come off as simple horror novels, in a good way.” A good quote. See my Higurashi part 3 post for further discussion on genre escalation.
- Speaking of my Higurashi posts, I would be remiss not to address the fact that despite whining quite a bit about moe getting in the way of the story there, there’s quite a bit of moe here. Hopefully you will grant that such things are always a problem of subjective preferences. So, please do not blame me for enjoying it here.
- If you want further recommendations for similarly metatextually dense detective fiction, this very review you’re reading is positively bloated with references to The Hollow Man (A.K.A. The Three Coffins) by John Dickson Carr, so go read that.
