Death Among the Undead

In our ongoing quest to read Japanese mystery or detective fiction, we finally caught up to the hyped Death Among the Undead. A succcessful fusion of the zombie/horror tale with a locked room murder mystery, the novel brought back fond memories of Isaac Asimov's successful fusion of mystery and science fiction. Here, of course, the reader is given a treat of a tale involving a zombie outbreak caused by a renegade researcher who targets a summer rock festival near Lake Sabea. Things spiral quickly out of control as the two members of a university's "Mystery Society" club are trapped with a number of other students, alumni and the villa manager of a country estate near the zombie outbreak. One member of this party then decides to take advantage of the zombies besieging the building to murder a few people in the group.

Needless to say, this novel succeeds by successfully bringing in suspense from the zombies gradually breaking through the steel doors and the serial murders taking place within the barricaded part of the villa. It also helps the reader with one member of the group having an encyclopedic knowledge of zombies via a film obsession with zombie apocalypse films. Indeed, we were not expecting that academic turn which even correctly traced the zombie film genre's origins back to Haiti and White Zombie. But here it all serves the purpose of establishing the 'rules' for zombie behavior so that their actions can be used to help interpret the killings and who/what orchestrated them. Likewise, Hamura, our narrator, elucidates to the "real" student detective, Hiruko, the conventions of the locked room mystery novel in a way that it useful for readers. It may seem pedantic at first, yet it actually shows that the author was perhaps trying to show that he was respecting both mystery and horror as genre fiction.

Overall, it is done quite well with a few red-herrings that initialliy scared us, particularly since we feared that the novel was going to follow an old trope established by Agatha Christie nearly 100 years ago. Fortunately, we were pleasantly surprised by the revelation of the murderer's identity and methods. The novel also pays homage, at least from what we could tell, to The Decagon House and the history of the locked room mystery in Japan. In fact, Akechi's character was reminiscent of one of the better (and more annoying!) students in the classic Yukito Ayatsuji mystery. One only wishes that Death Among the Undead utilized the notebook found by Shigemoto more thoroughly to make the forces responsible for the bioterrorist attack causing the zombie outbreak more interesting or less peripheral. That must have been put aside for a sequel, but it struck us as strange how marginal the notebook turned out to be in this case. Even with the use of scientific jargon or words from other languages, one would think that a group of university students might have been able to get more out of the notebook...