“You’re guilty of the crime of being you, and so, too, shall that be your punishment.”
– Jun Aikawa, the World’s Strongest Contractor

When I reviewed the first volume of the Zaregoto series, I was somewhat at a loss as to what to actually write about, as I’m not really a mystery fan. It’s clear that Nisio Isin himself started his writing career far more fascinated with mysteries for their own sake than he ended up – though shows like Monogatari are technically constructed around mysteries, they always ultimately reveal themselves to be about human psychology, instead. Who did what to who is never the actual point; it’s what drove a given story’s players to that point which is interesting, and “solutions” generally hinge not on figuring out who’s guilty, but on whether the guilty party can learn to embrace whatever truth they’re hiding from themselves.

Strangulation feels far more indebted to Isin’s recent style than Decapitation, simultaneously reflecting both the author he would become and the jaded, almost assuredly self-loathing person he was at twenty. Having just dropped out of college and only months before published his first novel, I have to imagine Isin was struggling mightily with justifying his own existence during the writing of Strangulation. All of that bleeds directly onto this volume’s pages, as they tell of a murder mystery that also reflects directly on our hero Ikkun. The story of Strangulation is the story of Ikkun’s psychology, and Ikkun’s psychology is a harrowing thing – ultimately, this book serves as a punishing dive into self-hatred and existential despair.

The actual plot of Strangulation centers on Ikkun’s relationship with a classmate named Mikoko, who drags him to the birthday party of her own friend, Tomoe. There Ikkun meets Muimi and Akiharu, celebrates awkwardly with the four friends, and carries the drunken Mikoko home. The next day Ikkun opens his door to two detectives, and learns Tomoe has been strangled to death. From there, Ikkun’s relationship with this fractured social group spirals into violent madness, as he befriends a serial killer and grapples with the darkness inside himself.

The actual mechanics of Tomoe’s death, and the deaths to follow, only consume a small portion of Strangulation’s running time. The far greater portion is taken up by all of Strangulation’s main actors struggling against their own personalities, from the gloomy Tomoe’s desire to be reborn as the chipper Mikoko onwards. Ikkun is profoundly disinterested in what might motivate someone to kill, but utterly obsessed with finding a motive to live – a justification for his own isolated, unproductive existence. Over the course of these pages, Strangulation’s characters alternately seek to rationalize their own existence, find external validation for being the people they are, or escape existence altogether. Ultimately, different members of the cast both fail and succeed in attempts at all three.

The original source of Ikkun’s self-loathing is never made clear; he consistently gestures towards something horrible that happened during his time in America, but never breaks down and actually reveals his thoughts. Instead, his sense of emptiness, unbelonging, and societal uselessness are framed as a more universal condition, something I consistently struggled with dividing between Ikkun’s imposing narration and Isin’s youthful worldview. Ikkun himself refers to his condition as a “mortal wound” – a scar separating him from “normal” humanity, which left him staggering through a half-life of apathy and merely simulating human behavior. But Ikkun is the last person you’d want to consult on Ikkun; he vacillates constantly between feigned apathy, obvious self-loathing, and genuine hurt, and takes great pride in making sure he expresses no consistent personal truth.

Both Ikkun’s emotional void and his incredibly untrustworthy nature play naturally with the mechanics of this story’s murder mystery. Claiming to feel and actually be nothing, Ikkun is perfectly comfortable lying for no reason to either himself or others, or presenting an incorrect version of himself and past events. He’s both a deeply unreliable narrator and a deeply unhappy person, and it can often be difficult to tell where his personal self-loathing ends and his intentional self-abnegation for the sake of the case begins. He hates himself for being a ghost, but is never above using that fact to his advantage.

Ikkun’s not alone, though. Though he regularly claims he’s inhuman or “defective,” he finds mirrors for his own nature all throughout this narrative, for better or for worse. Granted, striking up a casual friendship with an utterly unrepentant serial killer might not qualify as healthy growth, but Ikkun is ultimately far from unusual. He’s young and smart and antisocial and unhappy, and those qualities always fit together pretty well.

Strangulation is full of young, smart, and unhappy people, people who may not all be unhappy in the same way Ikkun is, but who certainly all possess their own inner void and desire for a better self. Ikkun describes himself as broken beyond repair, and Tomoe agrees, reflecting on how she doesn’t think she has the emotional capacity to make an honest connection with anyone. In spite of this very conversation disproving her point, Ikkun envies Tomoe for her supposed ability to maintain the “ideal distance” – close enough to others as to avoid suspicion, but not so close as to be genuinely vulnerable or honest. And for her part, Tomoe envies Mikoko for her energy and easy way with friendships, hoping to one day be reborn as someone like Mikoko. But of course, Mikoko is broken in her own way, as we all are, collectively forming a continuous ring of emotional voids that we forever seek to fill with the happiness or understanding of the world that seems to come so easily to others.

In spite of his own protests to the contrary, Ikkun’s hunger to fill that void and reach that “true humanity” is clear in his constant self-analyzing and rationalizing. Unfortunately, Ikkun’s relative distance from others is also his greatest deductive tool, and his skill at turning himself into a faceless nobody works as well on himself as on others. The actual murder mystery of Strangulation isn’t really the point – the more central mystery is Ikkun himself, and how much he’s both aware of his own nature and willing to share with the audience. Does Ikkun truly feel nothing, or does saying he feels nothing strike him as the only way to survive? Does he hide from true feelings by pursuing these “nonsensical” mysteries, or are they the only way he can truly express himself?

Ikkun’s response to this question would likely be a dismissive “that’s nonsense.” “Nonsense” is his catchphrase, superpower, and perpetual rationalization, the term he raises in defense any time he gets too close to personal revelation or self-growth. When the world starts to make any sort of sense, he labels it nonsense. When his own feelings are clearly guiding his actions, he labels them nonsense. And when the case he’s working on tethers his feelings too closely to the feelings of others, threatening an actual human connection, he dismisses it as nonsense and hides away, content to remain his broken self.

Ikkun’s protests aren’t terribly convincing, though. Although he may claim indifference, his diligent work on this volume’s case utterly undercuts that pose. Ikkun spends this whole volume despairing over whether he genuinely deserves to live, but all the while, he takes active steps to both solve a murder case and even enforce his own view of justice on the world. Ikkun might not be able to act in the interest of Ikkun, but he can certainly act in the interest of the Nonsense User. The void of self that plagues him is both his greatest weapon and his greatest comfort, a tell that reveals there really are things he believes and loves.

So what does that leave us with? In the end, the mystery is always Ikkun – how much he’s concealing, how much he’s misunderstanding, how much he’s deliberately ignoring to maintain his “broken” status. He claims he doesn’t deserve to live, and yet seeks desperately for his emotional mirror. He claims he cares about nothing, and yet works tirelessly to impress his terribly skewed but undeniably heartfelt morality on the world. He claims he can’t be love or be loved, and yet it’s his dedication to others and their fondness for him that keeps him alive. He says all of this is nonsense, and maybe that’s what he has to believe right now. Until he can find a happier selfhood, let nonsense be his sword, let nonsense be his shield. As his genuinely wise neighbor Miiko urges, “One day you’ll understand. Stay alive until then.”

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