Take a photo of a barcode or cover
wintermute47 's review for:
The Tokyo Zodiac Murders
by Sōji Shimada
I appreciate that this book is regarded as a seminal work in the Japanese literary mystery tradition. And I enjoyed the details of the setting: it's neat to get a sense of what Japanese life looked like in the 1930s, when the mystery begins, and in the 1970s, when the mystery was solved.
As a mystery, though...
I didn't appreciate the pair of authorial interludes, late in the book, where the reader is informed that "You really should have been able to solve the mystery now. Have you, or do you need it spelled out?" Aside from chaffing my ego, when the mystery is ultimately revealed, while it was technically something the reader could have deduced early on, there's a key piece of information about motive that's completely omitted, and one of the other key facts is deliberately obscured. Maybe I'm just not clever enough to roll with Soji Shimada, but the idea that the solution is something the reader should be able to figure out feels like a stretch.
As a mystery, though...
I didn't appreciate the pair of authorial interludes, late in the book, where the reader is informed that "You really should have been able to solve the mystery now. Have you, or do you need it spelled out?" Aside from chaffing my ego, when the mystery is ultimately revealed, while it was technically something the reader could have deduced early on, there's a key piece of information about motive that's completely omitted, and one of the other key facts is deliberately obscured. Maybe I'm just not clever enough to roll with Soji Shimada, but the idea that the solution is something the reader should be able to figure out feels like a stretch.