Mitarai’s Golem Strategy

MITARAI KIYOSHI'S GOLEM STRATEGY ANALYSIS Created by: Aquitosias INTRODUCTION The book is Murder in the Crooked House by Soji Shimada, published in Japan in 1982 and translated into English in 2019. THE STORY A diesel engine millionaire builds a house on a cliff at the northern tip of Hokkaido. The whole building leans about five degrees. The floors slope, one staircase skips an entire storey, two rooms cannot be reached from indoors, and a mirrored tower tilted at the angle of Pisa is attached to the side. One room is covered floor to ceiling in tengu masks. He collects life-size dolls and leaves them standing around. He invites a small party for Christmas. Christmas night, one guest is stabbed to death in a room bolted from the inside, with unbroken snow outside and no footprints anywhere in it. The body is left in a strange posture, both arms raised over the head and the right wrist roped to the bed. The Golem doll from the collection has been pulled apart at the joints and scattered in the yard, head missing. Half an hour after the man was already dead, someone screams outside and a face appears at a third floor window. Two nights later, in a blizzard, with four police officers asleep in the building, a second guest is stabbed in the back in a windowless basement room locked three ways from the inside with furniture piled against the door. They open it with an axe. The police pull the walls and ceilings apart and find nothing, and the man with the only visible motive …