Emblazoned across the bottom of the jacket of this book are the words, “今年こそ優勝や” (This is the year we win the pennant!). Published in the spring of 2003, who would have guessed at the time that the Hanshin Tigers would win the Central League pennant that fall, for the first time in 18 years?
Probably not the authors. Wait. AuthorS? Yes, 8 writers (plus one translator), to be exact. This anthology of mystery short stories was penned by relatively well-known writers who happen to (mostly) be Hanshin Tigers fans, too. So what did they do? They each found a unique way to include the team we all adore into their plots. Here is a quick synopsis for each one.
- In this parody (I think!) of Dante’s Purgatorio (Divine Comedy), the main character must solve the mystery of whose team’s players were being held in the balance, which players, and how they reached that conclusion.
- A discussion proving that the 1985 Tigers championship was willed into reality by the power of words.
- Written in English by Edward D. Hoch and translated into Japanese, this one sees the brother of Tigers’ ace pitcher being killed while the pitcher himself gets kidnapped and held for ransom by… whom? That’s the mystery!
- An elderly hardcore Tigers fan gets murdered in his home. The leading clue in finding the culprit is the victim’s collection of VHS tapes of Tigers games – all of which were losses…
- A three-page manga whose point I did not understand.
- Two men meet at Koshien Stadium by coincidence: One, we meet just after he jumps up after the Tigers hit a come-from-behind home run, spilling his beer on another fan (and her Tigers bag, which was signed by then-manager Senichi Hoshino). The other, a down-on-his-luck middle aged man who has a fetish for young girls and is working part-time as a beer boy at the stadium. As they talk in true Osaka comedian style, they unravel a mystery they did not even know existed.
- The last one is the most interesting of them all. A Tigers freak, whose tacky yellow house was built in a rich neighborhood in the shape of the Tigers’ HT cap logo, is mysteriously found dead (beheaded) in his yard. Who did it, what was the motive, and why did they take the head but leave the body behind?
I’m not going to lie to you. I had troubles reading this one. Not because of the book itself or its quality. Rather, I had never read a single mystery novel in Japanese before. Having read baseball-related literature almost exclusively until now, there were hundreds of words and phrases that I did not understand. It really did not matter, though. I was thoroughly entertained from start to finish. Each story was riveting and had me nodding my head in approval when the plot twisted for the last time towards the end.
While I cannot recommend this book to people who are uninterested in the Tigers and mysteries, I can say that if you are a fan of both genres, and have just enough torakichi in you to try to pick up context (and historical) clues from a book written in 2002 (while the team was still pretty brutal), then find this one and give it a shot!