In Imamura’s Death Within the Evil Eye (Locked Room International, Jan.), university students Yuzuru Hamura and Hiruko Kenzali must crack a seemingly impossible mystery.
Your first whodunit, Death Among the Undead, featured zombies. Here, you introduce characters who apparently can predict tragic events. What inspired you to add these elements, since they can only make it harder to devise a logical explanation for the murders in each book?
The idea of zombies came to me when I was trying to think up a new idea for a locked-room puzzle. I wanted to create a locked room not using doors and keys, and an image from a zombie movie popped to mind. Since zombies are aggressive, I decided to use “passive” prophecies for my next book.
What, besides that contrast with aggressive zombies, appealed to you about deadly prophecies?
Prophecies in mysteries always turn out to be hoaxes, so I wondered if there could be another way of developing a story using prophecies. Whether the prophecy is a hoax or not, murders are caused by human beings, so the characters need to act on the assumption that there are those who believe in the prophecies. It’s really difficult to establish a logical story while incorporating these possibly supernatural elements, and I regret it every time, but I believe that, at the end of my difficult work, there will be fun for the readers, so in spite of stomach pains, I persist.
Which plot was harder to construct and why?
This one. Death Among the Undead had continuous zombie attacks, which prevented the story from slacking, and in the section revealing the solution, I was able to unravel the puzzles in order. In Death Within the Evil Eye, multiple characters act with different intentions, and I had to carefully advance the story taking each motivation into consideration. Also, as I approached disclosing the final twist of the story, I needed to be careful about what to reveal and what not to. The solution should have been fun to write, but I was actually worried, until the end, if everything would be sorted out logically.
Why choose to mock bad choices characters make in mysteries?
In TV dramas and movies, images flow quickly, so I can let logic flaws go, but if it is a novel, where I have time to scrutinize the sentences, even a little irrationality bothers me. I sometimes cannot help wondering why a smart detective would act so clumsily, so I challenge my characters to make contrary moves in my books.
