“So. What d’you think your last words will be?”

Twenty-three-year-old Haru is having a rotten year. She finally found a job, and the company went under. Her mother deserted the family, and her father hanged himself – and left it to Haru to cut down the body. Two of her only three friends just died in riots, and the third committed suicide. And . . . oh yes – Asteroid 2021-NQ2 is on a collision course with the Earth. First impact will occur in Japan, just south of Haru’s hometown actually, in two months. Doesn’t really matter where it lands, though: one way or another, the whole planet is doomed.

What’s a girl to do? Well, in Murder at the End of the World by Akane Araki, translated by Jesse Kirkwood, Haru does the most sensible thing she can think of: she takes driving lessons. It’s about time a girl her age learned to get behind the wheel; besides, there’s somewhere special that she needs to drive to. But her plans change when she and her driving instructor discover a dead body in the trunk of the driving school car. Now they’re off to catch a serial killer.

The next big thing in Japanese mystery fiction is the genre hybrid. Think of the combination of murder and zombies in Imamura Masahiro’s Death Among the Undead, murder and time travel in Yasuhiko Nishizawa’s The Man Who Died Seven Times,  locked room murder and survival thriller in Haruo Yuki’s The Ark. I have come up with my own name for this literary phenomenon: kureiji honkaku, or cuckoo honkaku.

Let’s face it: the prospect of the world coming to an end is pretty bleak. Maybe that’s why, in the wake of the announcement of the impending comet, 150 million people killed each other amidst all the riots and looting. Most of Japan’s citizenry has migrated to other countries in order to avoid being squashed by the initial impact; the rest are either making impossible plans for survival, hanging themselves in trees (known as “dying wild”), or are simply trying to live out the rest of their days without starving or freezing to death. 

On the day Haru and Isagawa meet at the local driving school to test Haru’s ability to drive on the highway (it’s a good day for it because traffic’s light!), they discover the corpse of a female attorney in the car. She has been brutally tortured and then stabbed, and Isagawa, who turns out to be a retired police detective, flips into professional mode and offers Haru a chance to assist her in solving the case. And so, whether to find justice for the victims or to simply find something to do, Haru becomes Isagawa’s reluctant Watson. The game – the final game – is afoot!

So here’s the thing: I don’t know how many women are writing honkaku mysteries these days. Akane Araki may be the only one I’m aware of, and at 28, she is certainly one of the youngest. This is her first novel, and it won the 2022 Edogawa Rampo Prize. She does a fine job of blending the two genres: the murder investigation is clearly informed by the dire circumstances the two women face. Most of the police stations have closed, power is dependent on generators, the internet is down, and phone reception is scarce. Worst of all for Haru, most everyone is gone, including the few people with whom she was intimate. 

As a result, the girl needs to create a relationship with Isagawa, despite the fact that the woman seems oddly intense and possessed of a few secrets. That’s okay: Haru has secrets of her own. But the case is intriguing: once they come in contact with a policeman, a former colleague of Isagawa’s, the pair learn that two more similar murders have recently occurred. As Haru and Isagawa try to find connections between the three deaths, their team starts to grow: they meet a pair of brothers and a little girl, and it seems that everyone is holding onto a secret or two. They also come across hidden pockets of civilization, some hopeful, others terrifying. 

In a form of detective fiction where characterization is usually almost nil, the people we meet here are refreshingly complex. And you can’t help but feel for them: there’s no miracle in the works to stop the comet in its tracks, and the survival plans that trickle from the background – an Elon Musk-like plan by the rich to escape in a rocket to the International space station, a belief that hiding in underground bunkers in Korea will offer enough protection – all of them seem like hopeless pipe dreams. 

There’s something admirable about our two heroines and several of the other citizens that we meet who have put aside their despair and the temptation to fantasize about survival or act on their worst impulses, as others are doing, and instead try and accomplish something good in the time they have left, whether it’s to build a new family out of abandoned strangers or to bring a serial killer to justice.

That covers the apocalyptic fiction aspect of the book – but what about the mystery? Well, it is a whodunnit, as somebody that we meet turns out to be a pretty sick puppy! But it’s certainly not a fair play mystery: I count exactly one clue toward the identity of the killer. Perhaps it’s unfair that, given the world-ending background of it all, I wanted something a bit more unusual instead of certain tropes popping up that seem to fuel the plots of every Japanese and Korean teen drama on Netflix. However, if you go in without expecting too much of a puzzle and accept the murder investigation as a means of exploring something more profound, there’s plenty of excitement, some true horror, even a few laughs. And the final moments put us exactly where we ought to be – with these two women, profoundly changed, driving in a car. 

I’ve got a couple more of these cuckoo honkakus on my bookshelf, and I know there are more coming down the pike. Murder at the End of the World may not be great shakes as a detective story, but it’s a gripping human drama with a nice mystery element that manages to mix the bleakest of situations with a comforting sense of hope.