The following post contains major spoilers for Bye Bye Angel: The Larousse Murder Case by Kiyoshi Kasai
Novels and essays are very different things. And the danger with any book that tries to be both is that it will amount to little more than a strawman. When analysis is not tied down to reality as it actually appears in the world, and instead takes place in an imagined reality that accords perfectly with the author’s viewpoint, it becomes frighteningly difficult to render the world in anything more than caricature.
Bye Bye Angel: The Larousse Murder Case (1979) is Kiyoshi Kasai’s attempt to novelise and dramatise the soul of the United Red Army incident: one of the most horrific instances of political terrorism in Japanese history. Kasai’s story is fictional, and in fact set on the other side of the globe from Japan. Nonetheless, the echo of real history resonates throughout. On the one hand, its fictionality gives it a distance from the actual phenomenon, and therefore weakens its essayistic value. But the best among the novels who find themselves in this predicament don’t run from the challenge, they embrace it. They use the fictional form of the novel to bring the underside of the phenomenon to light in a manner that is simply not possible in the messy texture of reality. Bye Bye Angel at its best is that kind of novel—but not always.
The basic story of Bye Bye Angel goes like this: Our narrator, Nadia Mogart, is the Watson to a Holmes known as Kakeru Yabuki. Kakeru is a ‘phenomenological’ detective, who solves crimes by understanding the structure of the appearance of things. They are together caught up in the beheading case of Odette Larousse, a Parisian bourgeois woman surrounded by those with motives to do her in. Nonetheless, Kakeru insists that the secret to the case doesn’t lie in the usual concerns of a detective, and can instead only be reached by approaching the fact of her beheading phenomenologically.
The most visible problems with Bye Bye Angel are the kinds of growing pains of a young author that we’ve discussed plenty of times on this blog before. The hardest decisions in life are never between good options and bad options, but always between two good options or two bad options. So it is with the construction of a novel: the most wide-reaching weaknesses of a merely good novel come about as an accumulation of the many solid elements that are, nonetheless, missed opportunities to instead be great.
In the case of Bye Bye Angel, the biggest misstep of this kind is the general conception of the first of its two locked-room puzzles. It is far from dull; many other mystery novels have survived on ingredients that are less baked than what is on offer here. Nonetheless, it has a certain conservatism and caution to its construction. This is not a place where one can find a very distinctive style of puzzle or preference for certain kinds of tricks. Nothing is taken to any extreme. Kasai instead offers a collection of small, fastidious clues—and especially social clues of the Christie-esque variety. Some of the boundaries of the mystery novel are only held to as a formalistic convention: for example, the closed circle is not exactly closed, with mysterious extra characters lurking around Paris in the background of the story. On the whole, the novel is so fussily realistic, especially in the first locked-room, that it ends up precisely lacking the dramatic flair and prescribed conventions that make a mystery novel different from the other, more naturalistic, strands of modern literature.
One can definitely sense Kasai’s indulgence in exactly those other traditions here—especially Dostoevsky and Balzac. And this is the interesting distinguishing feature of Bye Bye Angel: Kasai clearly wants to write both Dostoevsky-esque ideological novels and also very plotty murder mystery novels. Therefore, he seems to have combined them together. When it works, it works quite well. But at its worst, it can be a finicky effort.
It is no secret that the worst stretch of the novel is a series of police interviews that take place around one-third of the way into the story. These interviews are meant to establish all of the necessary details for such a particular locked-room puzzle: alibis, motives, connections between characters, clues in characters’ recollections. But the very novelistic adherence to a certain vision of realism and quiet drama in fact exposes the relative weakness of much of the cast, as well as the most tediously expositional facets of a murder mystery plot. Yet, in the second half of the novel, once a second locked-room is presented—one which is far more willing to take necessary narrative risks over its predecessor—the whole configuration comes together into a rather enjoyable reading experience.
As a puzzler, Bye Bye Angel ends up finding an interesting little niche for itself. Its style of clueing and its structure are both fairly classical. Nonetheless, once it finds its footing, the better characters in the story manage to push it in a fresh dramatic direction. The narrator, Nadia, is a particular strength of the novel. Her basic features are well-worn conventions for a Watson in this kind of story: the headstrong daughter of the police superintendent who reads too many mystery novels. But through her romance with Antoine, one of the culprits, we as the audience are simultaneously thrown right into the heart of the drama whilst being kept at that typical Watsonian distance from the truth. This kind of direct involvement in the story is much more contemporary than Bye Bye Angel’s older inspirations, but it is to the benefit of its own tone and its stakes. Even if it were merely on account of that balance—of being both a very classical mystery and a mystery with a contemporary sensibility—there would be enough to recommend Bye Bye Angel.
The ambition of Bye Bye Angel is, of course, not just to write a good mystery novel. As mentioned earlier, its foremost goal is to be a Dostoevsky-esque ideological novel about the United Red Army incident. And it is in line with this criterion where the novel reaches its greatest heights. However, it is not as though the Christie-esque and Dostoevsky-esque sides of the novel are so strictly bifurcated. As it happens, one of the major ideological motifs of the novel directly takes the form of a discussion about deductive methodologies.
Nadia, as a hardcore mystery novel fan, approaches the world with the positivist vision of rationality. For her, the world cannot just be ‘given’ as it is, it must also be assimilated within a logical structure where every element has a functional purpose within the whole. Her father, (René) Mogart, instead argues for the pragmatist viewpoint, where truth is simply the best, most obvious guess in a world governed by constraints on knowledge. In contradistinction to both of these, Kakeru offers a phenomenological viewpoint—which lines up roughly with Kasai’s own ontological grounding. Kakeru of course critiques Nadia on the grounds of her lack of realism and the susceptibility of her method to infinite malleability. But more interestingly for the overall purposes of the novel, his critique of logic is also an ideological one.
For phenomenologists, an added danger of the apparent rationality of ideological systems is the compulsive power of logic itself: “The tyranny of logicality begins with the mind’s submission to logic as a never-ending process, on which man relies in order to engender his thoughts. By this submission, he surrenders his inner freedom as he surrenders his freedom of movement when he bows down to an outward tyranny.” (The Origins of Totalitarianism) Kakeru extends this phenomenological critique to the formalism of the mystery novel. It makes for something of an implicit critique of the late Queen problem, even as that had yet to be formulated at this time; while an infinite variety of truths can be logically justified, only one world appears, and must be understood in the common experience of this appearance. Hence, Sartre’s famous claim that any useful philosophical system must be able to explain something as mundane and given as a coffee shop.
The full situation of Bye Bye Angel cannot be understood without the context that, along with this novelistic critique of the United Red Army incident, Kiyoshi Kasai also wrote a non-fiction philosophical critique of the same subject titled The Phenomenology of Terrorism: An Introduction to the Critique of Ideas. I wrote a detailed (much more than the current short book review) assessment of that book here. However, beyond such details, it is important to note the existence of this text just for the mere fact that, in Bye Bye Angel, Kasai is trying to artistically express concepts that also have a far more rigorous form. And therefore, it is hard to articulate the degree to which the novel is filled with double-meanings and allusions to the whole tradition of left-phenomenological critiques of Marxism made throughout the middle of the 20th century—Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Arendt—and which Kasai participated in.
The climactic confrontation with Mathilde in particular has a great deal of direct correspondence to Kasai’s wider polemic against Marxism and against the totalitarian dangers of ideological thought; Mathilde is a clear analogue for the leader of the United Red Army, Tsuneo Mori. A frequent critique of the United Red Army, as well as the new left in general, relates to the outsized influence of existentialism and nihilism over and above the nominal Marxism of the movement. In this sense, Mathilde and her La Morte Rouge are a scandalous depiction of the United Red Army: the La Morte Rouge are not Marxists in any serious sense, and are simple nihilist accelerations. Nonetheless, both the United Red Army and the La Morte Rouge believe in agitating for a “world revolutionary war” without a mass proletarian movement, and share the same fundamental critique of the established revolutionary movements of the left.
This depiction is on its face a kind of strawman of the United Red Army—as if a failed party of this kind needs to be strawmanned. But Kasai is undertaking something a little more clever than this sounds. In The Phenomenology of Terrorism, Kasai systematically critiques the Hegelian dialectic and attaches Marxism to the cult-like nihilism of the United Red Army and its ilk. And in Bye Bye Angel, Kasai repeats the critique in the other direction when Kakeru labels the La Morte Rouge as essentially Marxist, saying to Mathilde that she “didn’t think of with anything new; all you did was finish the theory of Marx, the bearded Jewish man.” That is, the point of both texts together is to identify the essential nihilism of accelerationist revolutionary movements.
In at least a dramatic sense, Mathilde can come across as a moustache-twirling villain, with her total contempt for the mere concept of life. However, the narrative effectiveness of her La Morte Rouge comes down to the fact that she ensnares the far more sympathetic Antoine and Gilbert in her scheme. Antoine continuously cites trendy left-existentialists such as Sartre and Camus to justify his radical politics, whereas Gilbert expresses a kind of humanist Marxism. They both believe they are fighting for a coherent vision of justice that has no relationship to the bare accelerationism of Mathilde, but they are nonetheless caught up in her cult-like charisma. This is clearly based on the complicity of a great number of seemingly conventional-if-radical communist revolutionaries in the atrocities of the United Red Army incident, quite apart from the eccentricity of Mori himself.
On the whole, Bye Bye Angel is a strange novel in the sense that it is an accompaniment to a systematic non-fiction work. It stands on its own well enough, but it also doesn’t fit cleanly into the notion of the modern novel as a self-contained work of art. It is almost a kind of adaptation of a non-fiction work, but in a way that deviates from that base work on the basis of becoming an account of strictly fictional events. It is an interesting experiment—one which doesn’t always work. But in distinction to the many works that merely try to carry out “philosophical dialogue,” Bye Bye Angel definitely offers real meat on the bones. I think with a little more polish and a more interesting mystery, these core characters and this style of story could reach some truly exceptional heights. Kiyoshi Kasai’s first attempt to write a Dostoevsky mystery novel comes shockingly close to hitting the mark.
