Mitsuda Madoy's Mystery Translations

  Lunatic Retriever exploded onto the scene as the winner of the 2024 Mysteries! Newcomer Award, a work written by a grad student good enough to impress a panel of established pros. Set on campus at Teito University on the day of a partial solar eclipse, Lunatic Retriever sees four college students - cool genius Nozomu Kubo, energetic gyaru Runa Ohashi, lovable jock Yuto Hirano, and laid back but future wary narrator Keisuke Noguchi - investigating the death of Haruka Yoshida, a fellow student who's as famous for being a published author as she is for being a frigid sociopath. Found in a taped room full of CO2 sandwiched between two tent poles, it seems like a clear case of suicide, but of course it can't be that simple. What they uncover is not only a brilliant locked room solution, but the life lesson of a story that's also About Something. The critics will never stop treating those like either-or options, no matter how many times authors pull it off... Download the boo...

Nozomu's eyelids twitched. “...Why do you think I'm the culprit?”   “I thought you were suspicious from the start. I guess you could call it a gyaru's intuition?” she said. I had no idea if she was being serious or not. “Didn't you notice the strange thing he said? When Keisuke testified about the weird placement of the pipes on the body, you objected, saying 'm aybe it blended in with the color of her clothes'. When I heard that, I thought it was strange. Because the ropes attached to those pipes are white, but Yoshida was wearing a black sweater in the cafeteria this morning. There's no way those colors could have blended together. That just wouldn't be possible.”   That was right, I'd completely forgotten. Just as Ohashi said, Yoshida had been dressed in black that morning. “Wait, but when I saw her at the scene, she was wearing a pure white dress. So it was hard to see the ropes.”   “Yeah, I thought that was probably the case when I saw...

“Honestly, Keisuke, your idea was pretty good. An audacious psychological trick, simple and clear physical tricks, and a motive, all apparently cleverly explained by clues you collected. But weren't you a bit too conscious of the 'collecting clues' part? Today was the day of a super rare event, a solar eclipse. The testimony that Yoshida burned some papers was something you finally obtained after a lot of effort. Therefore, those clues must have been necessary to solve the case – you were controlled by that logic, even though it made no sense. It's the sort of trap that only people who only do smarty pants things like studying and solving mysteries would fall for.”  Ohashi's frank observation was completely accurate. Without question, my theory had been constructed by working backwards from the assumption that those two pieces of information would be important to the case somehow. But... “What's wrong with that? You still haven't proven my theory is wrong.” ...

“Eh, me!?”   When I said her name, she pointed at her own face in confusion. I didn't want to believe such an innocent girl could have killed someone. But I couldn't help but share the theory I'd come up with. “That's a bit too much for a joke, Keisuke.” Unable to bare my gaze, Ohashi looked away.   “What do you mean, Keisuke?” Yuto grabbed my shoulder and spoke in a low voice. It was clear he wasn't joking.   “Keisuke, explain yourself.”   Nozomu spoke quietly. I gave a modest nod and began to speak. “Based on what we've discussed already, it's clear someone moved the tent pipes after Yoshida collapsed. That person must be the murderer, who used one of the pipes to climb to the skylight. They let go of the pipe after opening the skylight and climbing onto the roof, causing it to fall onto Yoshida's body. So far, so good.” “Yeah. The problem is how they managed to escape without being seen by any passersby.”   “Exactly, there were almost no o...

“Noguchi, can I ask you something? There's a few things about this blueprint I want to confirm...” Takakura, who was two years my senior, slid over in his office chair and piled a load of documents on my desk. “What is it?” I asked as I turned around, answering his questions one by one. It'd been two years since I joined the company. It was a mid-sized housing manufacturer. Job hunting turned out to be as difficult as I'd feared, and I wasn't able to get a job offer from my first choice of employer. But now that I'd settled in, I think I made the right choice in choosing to work here. The other employees are nice, the boss is nice, and above all, the work I do every day is rewarding. “...So I'd appreciate it if you could adjust things in that direction.”  “Got it. You've already done a perfect job, Noguchi,” Takakura said playfully, flashing his white teeth. “That's right, you drew that cartoon introducing the department in the company newsletter, right?...

First, we went to the manager's office, near the dorm's entrance. Mr. Tanaka, the man in charge of the dorms at Teito University, was a tall, slim man with a gentle and friendly personality. His speech was laid back and his dress was casual, but his unkempt hair was streaked with gray, so it was unclear just how old he was. “You've been put through the wringer, haven't you?” As soon as Mr. Tanaka saw us, he blurted out words of deep fatigue. The police must have just finished with him.   “Um, did Yoshida really commit suicide?” Yuto asked bluntly. Mr. Tanaka looked down with a pained expression and lowered his voice, prefacing his story with a “You didn't hear this from me...”   “Yeah... Sad, but it looks that way. Yoshida's fingerprints were on the tape, and the circumstances seem clear enough: suicide by burning charcoal. They haven't found a note yet, but it sounds like there was evidence that she was going through it.”   “What do you mean?”   “...

The police sirens sounded exactly like they had when I'd ignored them as someone else's problem a thousand times before, but these ones were intimately related to me. The dead woman was Haruka Yoshida, who lived in the same dorm as me, and I was one of the first people to find her. But even when I reminded myself of all that, a sense of unreality continued to form and reform in my mind. Sensing danger, we fled the dorm and immediately called the police. The police and ambulance personnel who burst into the storeroom confirmed that Yoshida was dead. We desperately explained how we had come to find her, and obtained some information from the police who questioned us. Her cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning, and the estimated time of death was around 12:00. In other words, by the time we'd visited the storeroom before leaving, she was already long dead. To be precise, the room where we found her wasn't a locked room. The area around the meeting room was one ...

There was a hill with a great view in the park by the dorm. By the time we arrived, the locals had already gathered there, faces shining with anticipation. We also spotted some other dorm residents. On TV that morning, a newscaster had been hyping the event up, saying “This is a once in a decade opportunity to observe a solar eclipse under perfect viewing conditions,” and just as he'd said, the weather was perfectly clear, not a cloud to be seen. Yuto, holding up a sunshade, cheered “It's already starting!”, while Nozomu, next to him, munched on snacks. “It's about 30 minutes until the eclipse reaches its peak.” “That's right,” I nodded. “Oh, that's right, Yuto. Do you want to finish that story? The one about how your brother got dumped by Yoshida. Actually, we just saw Yoshida back at the cafeteria.”   “There's nothing else to tell. He still seems pretty depressed.”   Yuto removed his sunshade and gave us a bitter smile. The romance between Yuto's y...

“I've already got this in the bag. Ready to lose?”   It all happened in a matter of seconds. Nozomu Kubo, smile on his face, loudly clacked the piece down on the board, making me grab my head as I realized my rook had been captured, when Runa Ohashi suddenly crashed into the table with enough force to flip the shogi board. “Hey, have either of you seen my report?”   Asking in a voice so high-pitched it hurt to listen to, Ohashi looked pleadingly at us. Her blonde hair, usually curled, was a mess, and her large eyes, framed by false lashes, twitched with anxiety. “I haven't. Don't scare us like that, will you?” Nozomu said, still looking stunned as he picked shogi pieces off of the floor. “Did you lose it again?” “This one was handwritten, so it's super bad! I might have to repeat the year! I don't know if I forgot it in the cafeteria yesterday or if I dropped it somewhere on campus.”   “Well, it isn't lying around in here.”   I, Keisuke Noguchi, look...