三毛猫ホームズの探偵日記

This book contains 3 short stories from Akagawa’s long-running 三毛猫ホームズ mystery series. Since 1978 there have been around 40 novels and several short story collections in this series. This Tsubasa Bunko edition adds full furigana and some cute illustrations to three shorter stories from the 1980s to make them more approachable for younger (or foreign) readers. There are no notes about how these stories were chosen, but I suspect both subject matter and reading difficulty were factors. I read a sample of the first few pages of 三毛猫ホームズの推理, the first novel in this series, and the vibe is noticeably different, with a longer, more complex sentence structure, and a rich atmosphere. These short stories are simpler, and don’t get into much detail about gore or anything that would be clearly inappropriate for children.

The stories feature the series’ core characters Detective Katayama, his sister Harumi, his colleague Detective Ishidu, and tri-color cat Holmes helping with clues. Holmes is a catlike cat, not a cartoon-ish anthropomorphic talking cat like you might imagine from the cape-clad illustration on the book cover. Aside from the oddity of this cat accompanying the team wherever they go, there’s nothing particular to suggest that this is anything but an ordinary cat. But if the cat is meowing or sniffing at something, you should probably pay attention.

The stories are: 三毛猫ホームズの名演奏 (70 pages) (About a mysterious death at a symphony hall) 三毛猫ホームズの宝さがし (32 pages) (They help a man who is searching for buried treasure) 三毛猫ホームズの通勤地獄 (61 pages) (A young woman is in danger after inheriting a company)

I found it hard to get into these stories, because I was basically flung into the middle of a series without any background. There’s a character page in the front with profiles of the 4 core characters (and I read reviews of other books), but even after finishing the first story I still didn’t have a sense of them beyond their names and 1-line descriptions. The story assumes existing familiarity with those characters so it jumps right into the plot and zooms away. The length of these stories was also an awkward fit for me. They’re just long enough that the plots can develop some complexity (enough for me to make character lists for each story), but not long enough to really settle in to the story and get to know it.

There are N1 grammar points here and there. The phrasing sometimes feels a bit old-fashioned, especially with the character dialogue. Occasionally the characters speak very politely, in a way that seems vague but also like there might be a particular and significant shade of meaning that was going over my head. I had to read a few of these dialogue sentences several times, and it didn’t always help.

I think I graded this as the same difficulty as 君の名は、but upon reflection I think it might be slightly harder. And although I now really want to go read the first full novel in this series, these short stories were not as enjoyable as I had hoped.