The Glass Tower Murders comes to us courtesy of Mikito Chinen, an author I figure some people will be more likely to have heard of than my usual fare but likely not as a mystery novelist. Chinen is widely known among fans of J-Dramas for the many medical dramas he's been adapted into.
This is not one of them.
The Glass Tower Murders is a mystery fan's mystery novel. It is set in an extremely contrived mansion out in the mountains, which gets cut off from the outside world when an avalanche buries the only road home. It exclusively features murders in locked rooms. It features a non-zero number of dying messages. It features a lead victim who is a total, cartoonishly over-the-top asshole. It is extremely tropey, and extremely self-aware about how tropey it is.
Mind you, though, it does feature one unique wrinkle: the viewpoint character, the Watson of the book... is a murderer.
Not THE murderer, mind you, there is more than one. Our tragic protagonist would like nothing more than to place all the blame on their killer-in-arms, and their rival is probably thinking something similar. Who will be able to expose and frame their actually-guilty-but-not-for-the-crime-they're-being-framed-for counterpart first?
Way back in the before times, when things only mostly sucked instead of entirely sucking, I made a post on my now-nuked-and-deleted Twitter stating that, despite its definite for-fans intention, this book could be good as an introduction to modern J-mystery, as it clearly lays out its hand and dedicates a lot of page time to explaining the appeal of its own genre. Having now finished translating it for myself, I stand by my original thought. If you have any friends or relatives you want to get into murder, maybe ask them to...
Or read online below:
Day One
Day Two
Day Three
Final Day