I was born to a Japanese mother and an American father. It was my mother who instilled in me a love for books. Much to my mother’s dismay, I became a big fan of science-fiction and fantasy, two genres my mother did not care for and probably did not understand. She was also adamant in saying that comics are for kids.

Even when the graphic novel became recognized as a legitimate form of literature, my mother still believes it was only written for kids. My mother had great influence over me but I was drawn to reading graphic novels. I kept trying to tell my mother, many graphic novels are adult-oriented and are just stories with text and pictures.

I don’t read graphic novels as much as I used to but I do go back to the format when I don’t have any novels to read. At the city library, I borrowed a copy of The New Kindaichi Files : Murder in the Hotel Opera.

The original series, The Kindaichi Case Files is a Japanese mystery manga. It is about the adventures of a crime-solving high school boy named Hajime Kindaichi. Hajime is supposedly the grandson of a famous detective named Kosuke Kindaichi.

The manga was originally serialized in Weekly Shonen Magazine, one of Japan’s best-selling manga periodicals, between October 1992 and October 2017. The series was translated into English and published by Tokyopop. Unfortunately, for the English reading fans, Tokyopop only published the first seventeen volumes.

The New Kindaichi Files : Murder in the Hotel Opera is the first volume in Kodansha’s bilingual comic series. In this story, Miyuki Kase, Kindaichi’s friend since kindergarten, has talked Hajime into joining her drama club’s rehearsal camp which would be held in a hotel on a remote island.

The drama club intends to perform [The Phantom of the Opera] for a high school drama competition. Miyuki chose this location because of its splendor and the owner is letting the group use the place free of cost. One of the students thinks the hotel looks like a set on a horror film. Only three people live on the island - the owner, Kazuma Kurosawa and two hotel employees.

The owner tells the students that he bought the place ten years ago and turned it into a hotel. The hotel has a theater where the troupe will be doing their rehearsals. The theater isn’t in the best of conditions and the owner tells the kids that he plans to dismantle the theater after the holiday seasons. He reminisces, “Well, a lot has happened here. Good things…not so good things…”

As the students were looking around the hotel, one of the troupe members, a girl named Orie Hidaka, saw something that made her go pale. Later, the other students hear a scream coming from the theater. There, they find Orie lying dead on the stage, crushed by the heavy stage curtain.

Another guest who happened to be staying at the same hotel also went to see what the commotion was. The man was Homicide Detective Isamu Kenmochi. He tells those who are gathered around, “Not really my jurisdiction, this accident. It’s an old theater. The wires holding up the lights must have become frail and…”

He was interrupted by Hajime who shouts, “No. Orie Hidaka was murdered!”. The inspector has everyone gather in the main dining room. He tells the students the police cannot come to the island as the weather has taken a turn for the worse. One of the teachers asks the detective if he suspects one of them. She tells them they were all in the same room when they heard Orie scream.

It was then that the owner remembered there was one other guest staying at the hotel that weekend. A rather odd man at that too. After Orie’s death, one student dies after another…and all their deaths are similar to how characters in the play, “The Phantom of the Opera” die.

Can Hajime Kindaichi solve this mystery? Does the blood of his grandfather really run through his veins? He needs to use his powers of observation and deduction to stop this series of murders!

The Kindaichi Case Files are popular not only as a manga series but an anime series as well. If you enjoy books by Agatha Christie or Ellery Queen and dramas such as “Murder, She Wrote”, then you will not be disappointed in this series and as it is a bilingual series, it can also help Japanese students learning English or English-speaking students learning Japanese.