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Mahjong Murder CaseAuthor: Unno Juza
| Original Title | 麻雀殺人事件 |
|---|---|
| Author | 海野 十三 |
| Genre | Detective & Mystery |
| Author Type | Male Author |
| Summary | On a sweltering Tokyo night, Detective Houmura Souroku’s carefree mahjong game spirals into humiliation when a murder unfolds unnoticed beneath his nose. Amid Shinjuku’s neon-lit mahjong parlor, four players—a brash athlete, a cunning professor, a delicate socialite, and a brooding student—gather for their weekly match. Tensions simmer beneath casual banter: rivalries over money, unspoken affections, and veiled resentments. Yet Houmura, distracted by rare leisure, dismisses oddities—a spilled teacup, a pricked thumb, sudden illnesses—as trivial. Only when Matsuyama, the athlete, collapses dead from a toxin does the detective’s oversight crystallize into horror. The killer weaponized mahjong itself: poison hidden in tile engravings, a rigged rivet delivering the fatal dose. As Houmura scrambles to untangle alibis, he confronts a web of deceit where love and ambition blur motives. Each suspect—guarded Midori, aloof Hoshio, enigmatic Sonobe—harbors secrets sharper than the needles in their game. But reconstructing the crime reveals a chilling truth: the murderer exploited not just tiles and thumbs, but the detective’s own complacency. |
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