Death in the House of Rain

One of my favorite tropes of Japanese mysteries that rarely pops up in English fiction is one I affectionately call “wacky architecture.” This is when a story centers on an eccentric businessman commissioning an elaborate house with a special feature that will eventually be a vital part of the murders committed there. I suspect the popularity of this trope in Japan comes from The Decagon House Murders, which started the shin-honkaku movement, and as a result Japanese authors started to emulate it. Some examples are Soji Shimada’s Crooked House and Takemaru Abiko’s 8 Mansion, but you can also see it in stories by authors who were inspired by Japanese fiction. DWaM’s Tower of Babel is a great example, and so is the book I’m talking about today.

Death in the House of Rain is the only book by Taiwanese author Lin Szu-Yen available in English. The premise immediately caught my attention. We follow a series of incidents taking place in the House of Rain, a 3-story mansion commissioned to resemble the Chinese character for rain (雨). To my great delight, the story comes with a map, and it’s marvelous to behold. Take a look:

As you can see, there’s a lot of rooms here—and that’s only the first floor! It can be hard to keep track of where every room is, so you’ll probably be going back and forth before you get your bearings. Still, unless you have an ear for Chinese names, you’ll be going back to the front of the book to check the character list anyway.

Obviously, stories with wacky architecture aren’t totally realistic, but they’re so much fun that I don’t care. Besides, I’d rather suspend my disbelief over the setup of a mystery than its solution. Creative architecture also allows for incredible impossible crimes, both simple and complex.

If it wasn’t obvious by now, Death in the House of Rain focuses on impossible crimes. The story follows Lin Ruoping, a philosophy teacher visiting his friend Bai Renze at the House of Rain to investigate murders that happened there a year ago. At the same time, Bai’s daughter Bai Lingsha invites several of her friends to the house, who begin dying violently in locked rooms. With the group trapped by a landslide caused by a heavy rainstorm, it’s up to Lin to solve the mysteries.

Lin Szu-Yen actually translated the book himself, so a little awkwardness can be expected. However, the book is generally pleasant to read. There’s a lot of nice descriptions relating to the rain and how it bears down on the house. The characters have clear enough appearances and characteristics that it’s possible to distinguish them, even in such a large cast. The plot moves fast as the bodies stack up, so the reading through the book was a breeze. A lot of developments are truly invigorating.

The general opinion I see of the mystery’s solution is that it’s clever but unrealistic. I can buy that (though I care less about icky-squicky realism as long as a solution is physically possible). I thought the mystery was a lot of fun, and it’s awesome how one trick unites nearly every murder in the book. However, I did figure it out roughly halfway through. The floor maps are perhaps the best clues for working out the mystery, so it’s a shame they’re so fun to look at. If you can still enjoy a mystery when you know the answer, Death in the House of Rain should be fine. Granted, I didn’t see too many people who guessed the answer, so maybe I’m just on another level.

For an impossible crime, this book is great fun, but as literature…there’s some problems. First of all, the characters. I’ll admit, Lin avoids the typical impossible crime problem of every character being boring and forgettable. Instead, the characters in Death of the House of Rain are insane. Some of the things they say and think are downright disturbing. Most of the women are fine, but the men…oh Lord. I can only hope I wasn’t this much of a horny mess in high school.

Some might argue that characters being awful people isn’t a bad thing, and normally I would agree. But here’s the problem: every male character (aside from Lin and Bai) is basically the same. They’re super horny for Woman X and will do horrible things if it means getting laid. The men act as satellite characters to the women, and once the woman they’re creeping on dies, they have nothing more to contribute. They just kinda hang out in the corner until the book ends.

There’s also an odd character—and if you’ve read the book you know who I’m talking about—who seems like a cool concept but ultimately serves little purpose. I think he’s supposed to be a red herring, but anyone who reads mystery fiction knows he can’t be the culprit on virtue of him being too obvious. Once you set all that aside he’s just another horny man with no one left to be horny for.

There’s also some weird thematic shenanigans going on here. Lin can’t seem to decide what he wants to say. You could have easily used this book to make a statement about the commodification of women and toxic masculinity, but Lin leaves this theme half-developed. Instead, he has Lin Ruoping drop a philosophical speech at the end of the book on Taoism or something that comes totally out of left field. I like the idea of Lin incorporating philosophy into his work, especially since he’s actually published in philosophy journals, but these ideas should be built into the story from the beginning. Otherwise, it feels like a weird aside rather than a concrete theme.

Still, Death in the House of Rain is a lot of fun if you’re looking for a locked room mystery, especially one with a modern feel and rich atmosphere. I’d be more than happy to read more of Lin’s work, if it were available in English. Unfortunately, all we’ve got available are two short stories, one of which is lost in an Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine backissue (though I’ve read the other, and it’s both astonishingly clever and unbelievably sweet). That’s the age-old dilemma of the genre. There’s loads of great stuff that I can’t actually read!

For now, I’ll just have to look at that map and pray for new translations. Maybe some day I’ll build a House of Rain for myself?