The Third Lady (1978) by Shizuko Natsuki

At the turn of this century, Shizuko Natsuki was alongside Edogawa Rampo, Akimitsu Takagi and Seicho Matsumoto among the few Japanese mystery writers with a footprint in the Western genre composed of a dozen translated novels, collections and a scattered number of uncollected short stories – printed in publications like Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Natsuki had twelve short stories published in EQMM, two in New Mystery and a series of six standalone mystery novels. However, developments since then have shown these pre-2000s translations to have only superficially scratched the surface of the Japanese detective story.

So the translations of Natsuki's novels have been overshadowed over the years and on their way to be practically forgotten. Yes, the dodgy translations has as much to do with it as the lack of reprints and a growing offering of better, more varied translations. Robert B. Rohmer, the translator, took some liberties with the original text to make alterations intended to make them more accessible to non-Japanese readers. For example, Natuski's most well-known novel, W no higeki (The Tragedy of W, 1982), was translated in 1984 under the title Murder at Mt. Fuji with one of the central characters changed into an American exchange student, Jane Prescott. Mt. Fuji is referenced only a handful of times, but it's a famous and recognizable landmark. So it was plastered across the cover as if they were printing a travel brochure. These were obvious marketing decisions, but decisions regarded as disrespectful to the author and insulting to the audience. Gave the whole story is strong sense of authenticity.

I, and others, had a spark of hope when a reprint of Murder at Mt. Fuji was announced as forthcoming, courtesy of Hutchinson Heinemann, but it turned out to be a reprint of the Rohmer translation – not a fresh translation. Without any good, new translations on the horizon, I decided to take another look at the translated novels. Flawed as they may be, I never fully lost interest in Natsuki's detective fiction.

Natsuki was billed as the "Agatha Christie of Japan," but the six novels translated between 1984 and 1991 were clearly picked as examples of the contemporary, character-driven crime novels of the day. So more P.D. James and Ruth Rendell than Agatha Christie. While it's true Natsuki doesn't appear to have been a mystery writer who tinkered with locked doors, railway timetable or dying messages a lot, she appears to have delighted in placing her characters in utterly bizarre, impossible situations. Kokubyaku no tabiji (Innocent Journey, 1975) has a suicide pact gone wrong when one of them survives to find the other dead with a knife in his back. Kaze no tobira (Portal of the Wind, 1980) has a murder interrupting a scheduled, revolutionary head transplant surgery. In Daisan no onna (The Third Lady, 1978), Natsuki blindfolded the inverted mystery, spun it around and then let it loose.

The Third Lady begins in the village of Barbizon, on the outskirts of Paris, where Kohei Daigo has attended a conference. Daigo is an assistant professor of hygiene at J university, in Fukuoka, happily married with two daughters, but, while killing time until he can catch his flight back home, he has a chance encounter – one that ends up completely uprooting his life. In the salon of Château Chantal, Daigo meets a woman during a power failure. During this intimate blackout, Daigo and the woman calling herself Fumiko Samejima become very frank and share a chilling secret. They both wish to see someone dead and buried.

Daigo's enemy is Akishige Yoshimi, professor of health at the J university, who squashed Daigo's damning report on the Popico cookies made by the Minami Food Company. A batch of cookies had been contaminated with a cancer causing mold, which had a caused a rise in cases of child cancer. Many died and practically every parent in the poor region were left with crippling debt from hospital bills. Yoshimi was trying to punish Daigo for his opposition by trying to get him dismissed or transferred to a rural university in Alaska. The woman Samejima wants dead is Midori Nagahara, eldest daughter of the owner of the Emerald View Hotel at Lake Hakone, whom she describes as arrogant with a heart as cold as ice. Two years ago, Nagahara killed someone and got away with it because the police was unable to proof it even was murder. That undetected, unresolved murder is the reason why Samejima is determined to get some off-the-books justice ("...my heart will know no peace until she is dead").

Before the lights come back on, the woman who called herself Fumiko Samejima is gone. Daigo is left behind with a lot of questions to muse over, but, when he returns home, life appears to have resumes to relative normalcy. That's until some time later when Akishige Yoshimi is found poisoned at his home. Daigo is, of course, among Inspector Furukawa's primary suspects, but Daigo possesses a cast-iron alibi that he knows was created for him by someone who knew where and when Yoshimi was going to die. So the police turn their attention to the elusive, unidentified woman who was seen with Yoshimi and near his home at the time of the murder. But is she the woman whom he met in France under those strange circumstances? And, before too long, Daigo receives a subtle hint regarding Midori Nagahara and the Emerald View Hotel. Just like the old saying goes, one good deed deserves another, which is when the wheels really begin to come off for Daigo – who's as amateurish as murderers come. That also makes me wish there were more interactions between Inspector Furukawa and Daigo or more scenes from Inspector Furukawa's perspective. I really liked Inspector Furukawa and how he pursued Daigo with a Columbo-like tenacity ("...with that same smiling face, pretending that he had just run into Daigo by accident, the way he always did").

The Third Lady is not that kind of procedural puzzle mystery in which alibis get demolished, identities broken down and hidden connections get uncovered. What's at the center is Daigo's obsession with a woman who he has only heard and touched in a pitch dark salon somewhere near Paris. A meeting resulting in two murders, but, as the sketchy premise and book title suggests, there's a snag somewhere in this strangers-on-a-train pact. John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, reviewed The Third Lady back in 2011 and praised the final twist "poignant, sorrowful and tragically inevitable," but above all it's an incredibly cruel twist. Cruel to the point where you can almost count Daigo among the victims, but beautifully and effective executed. More importantly, there's a graceful simplicity to the devastating truth that makes the already bleak ending as dark as night. So you can see why Shizuko Natsuki received some translations during the 1980s and '90s, because she appears to be of the modern school. However, if you take everything from the premise to the bleak conclusion, The Third Lady strongly reminded me of Paul Halter's work. Only thing missing was a locked room murder or other impossible crime.

That brings us to the elephant in the room named Robert B. Rohmer. The translation is an improvement when it comes to story-ruining alterations and character inserts. I'm a bit suspicious about the first chapter taking place in France and the references to the rural university in Alaska, but only real problem with the translation that's far from the same quality as the translations we're treated to today. Nevertheless, even this less than perfect translation can't take away Natsuki penned a fresh and original take on both the inverted mystery and the strangers-on-a-train/murder-by-proxy motif with The Third Lady. So recommended to fans of both with the caveat that a better translation would likely make it even better.

By the way, if anyone from Crippen & Landru is reading this review, this probably the best time to put together a Shizuko Natsuki collection with those fourteen short stories from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and New Mystery (Divine Punishment and Other Stories of Crime & Retribution). A collection like that would be a welcome addition to the growing list of translated Japanese detective fiction. Note that most of the short stories were translated by Gavin Frew, not Rohmer.

Murder at Mt. Fuji (1982) by Shizuko Natsuki

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed my affection for the Japanese detective story and have read some twenty novels, several short story collections and countless episodes and volumes of anime-and manga detective series over the years – nearly all of them translated in the past few decades. Since 2000, the number of translations gradually changed from a slow, barely existent drip to a steady stream with Locked Room International, Pushkin Vertigo and Bento Books regularly adding new titles to the English catalog. Keigo Higashino even became an international bestseller with the translations being deemed good enough to brandish the label "a novel" on their front covers.

For today's review, I picked a much older translation that, regrettably, betrayed the Japanese detective novel wasn't held in the same regard thirty-five years ago.

Shizuko Natsuki was an incredibly productive mystery novelist, writing more than eighty novels and short stories collections, whose detective stories formed the basis for roughly forty movies and six of her novels were translated into English – published between 1984 and 1991. One of Natsuki's most well-known novels is arguably W no Higeki (The Tragedy of W, 1982), translated in '84 as Murder at Mt. Fuji, but the translator, Robert B. Rohmer, took some liberties to make the story more palatable for Western readers.

Ho-Ling Wong noted in his 2012 review that he had no idea why one of the main characters, Jane Prescott, had to be "a double outsider" (a foreign friend of the family) for the story to work, because she's changed to a Japanese women in screen adaptations. An anonymous comment pointed out that the translator had replaced the character from the original with Jane Prescott to give Western readers "an American heroine among all the exotic creatures." Regrettably, this character change is noticeable and unnatural enough to give Murder at Mt. Fuji a sense of inauthenticity. Ho-Ling blamed the title change from the Ellery Queen-inspired The Tragedy of W to the nondescript, uninspired Murder at Mt. Fuji on Orientalism and a lack of interest, or knowledge, of Golden Age detective stories, but it probably was a marketing decision to make the book standout as something different – as it introduced Natsuki to an English-reading audience. But the title certainly oversold the story's background scenery just a little bit. Mt. Fuji is referred to only a handful of times throughout the story.

Yet, in spite of these changes, Murder at Mt. Fuji treats the reader to an unusual inverted detective story that stands much closer to Anthony Berkeley than Ellery Queen. Natsuki is billed as the Agatha Christie of Japan, but her Western debut was pure Berkeley with an altruistic conspiracy and a twisted ending. Although some would probably argue the plot is an inversion of a very famous Christie novel.

Jane Prescott is an American exchange student from the University of Oregon, who specializes in modern Japanese literature at Japan Women's University, but she had to take a part-time job tutoring Chiyo Wada, in conversational English, to cover her living expenses. Chiyo is the grandniece of the family patriarch and president of Wada Pharmaceuticals, Yohei Wada. A tradition of the Wada family is to get together for the New Year's holiday at one of their villas, where the entire clan would spend a few quiet days in seclusion, but this year, Jane had to be invited to help Chiyo prepare for her graduation thesis. Jane travels to their summer villa on the shores of Lake Yamanaka, Mt. Fuji "soaring majestically" in the background, but she's warned by one of Chiyo's relatives that all the men of the Wada family have "a reputation for womanizing." A lecherous trait that "even the men who marry into the family develop." This serves as a prelude to a deadly domestic drama.

That evening, the peace is shattered by a distraught cry, "my god, Chiyo! Why did you do it? Why?" Chiyo had attempted to slash her wrists after stabbing and killing her great-uncle.

Chiyo tells them Yohei had asked her to come to his room later that night, where he tried to rape her, but she defended herself with a fruit knife and, since Chiyo is "the one person everyone loved," they decide to make "every effort to conceal her crime from the police" – voluntarily putting their necks in the noose by tampering with the evidence and concocting an incontestable alibi. Chiyo is send back to Tokyo with the excuse that she had forgotten an essential reference book while the family stage a burglary, but also make it appear as if Yohei was still alive when she left. One of their tricks involves a late-night delivery meal and a stomach pump. Japanese mystery writers really like to play with corpses, don't they? I'll never stop being amazed how easily they wring cast-iron alibis or baffling impossible crimes from a body!

So the first quarter of the story details the conspiracy, showing the reader every step they take, before the faked burglary and murder is reported to the local police, but the amateur conspirators turned out to be no match for the experienced, well-oiled police apparatus. The competent Detective Ukyo Nakazato and mediagenic Superintendent Katsubei Aiura need less than a day to gather enough evidence to prove the murder was an inside job. However, they might have had some help from someone within the Wada family. A mole who wanted to see Chiyo arrested and sabotaged the conspiracy.

On a side note, there's hole in the conspiracy nobody noticed, not the conspirators or the police, which concerns the playing-and score cards. The family wanted to make it appear that Yohei had been playing poker with them, after Chiyo left, but had the cards been dusted for fingerprints the whole scheme would have collapsed, because Yohei's prints would not have been on them.

Just as an inverted mystery novel, Murder at Mt. Fuji has something completely different and fresh to offer, but have to agree with Ho-Ling that the story feels a little light and rushed in parts. Even with the assistance of the Wada mole, the police very easily pulverized an incredibly elaborate plot and cut through the web of lies. A little too easily and a little too fast. This is what makes the story feel lighter, and lighter, with each passing chapter that followed the setup, which is unquestionable the best portion of the book, but the ending gives the reader a glimmer why Natsuki picked an EQ inspired book title – a title that makes sense when you imagine the case from the point-of-view of the police. Everything else screamed Berkeley.

The tragedy of Murder at Mt. Fuji is that it has since been overshadowed by better translations of better novels by some of the grandmasters, past and present, of the Japanese detective story and the translator tinkering with one of the characters certainly didn't do it any favors. It tainted the atmosphere of Murder at Mt. Fuji and this makes it difficult to recommend to anyone who has enjoyed the novels and short stories by Takemaru Abiko, Yukito Ayatsuji, Keikichi Osaka, Soji Shimada and Seishi Yokomizo. But if you enjoy inverted mysteries, Murder at Mt. Fuji comes highly recommended.