Source: Kamaitachi no Yoru Official Complete Guide, page 4-9
Kamaitachi no Yoru: Takemaru Abiko Long Interview
Kamaitachi no Yoru, a monumental work released in 1994, proved that games, which had up until then been viewed as being for children, were a form of entertainment that could also be appreciated by adults. Takemaru Abiko, the man who wrote the game's story and breathed new life into the gaming industry, spoke to us freely about what led to Kamaitachi no Yoru, and what has come since. What is the truth that he can only reveal now that eight years have passed since its completion...!?
―How do you feel about the difficulty and enjoyment of handling a mystery story within a video game?
Abiko: There are adventure games with titles like The XX Murder Case or whatever, right? I'd played those sorts of mystery games prior to working on the scenario for Kamaitachi no Yoru. A mystery plot seems like a good fit for that kind of game, where you have puzzles, and as you solve them you progress. However, as you'll understand if you actually play them, an actual mystery and a mystery-style adventure game are enjoyable in different ways. With a game, the fun is in overcoming each of the obstacles and puzzles before you, whereas with a mystery story, it's in the deduction at the end, when all of the mysteries are solved and you're told how it actually went down. In an adventure game, you can generally always end up choosing the right answer so long as you just brute force it and try every option, so I didn't view it as having that enjoyment of the deduction aspect. So, when I ended up being put in charge of a mystery game myself, I decided that I wanted to have the player do as much deduction as possible, and I wanted to bring out the fun in the act of deduction itself.
―Was there any particular audience you were attempting to target with the game?
Abiko: In general, I imagined that they would mostly be young people. In particular, I wanted it to make people who play games often but don't really read much pick up a book... I actually received a fan letter from someone who said that they read one of my books after playing the game, through which they discovered Yukito Ayatsuji and other writers, and have been reading shin honkaku mysteries ever since, so I think to some degree I might have succeeded at that goal.
Secrets of the Mysterious Pension
―I hear that you went to a pension to scout out the location during development. Did getting to see a pension first-hand cause you to change anything you'd written?
Abiko: No, I didn't really have to change much at all. After all, the scenario itself was more or less finished by that point. Pretty much the only thing I wrote after going there was the Mysterious Pension Chapter. Not that it has much to do with the real pension (laughs).
―Definitely (laughs).
Abiko: I came up with the Mysterious Pension Chapter at around the time when the finishing touches were being put on the game, and I'd been called in by Chunsoft to assist with debugging. Given the timing at which I came up with such an idea, I was pretty timid when I said to one of the development team while they were working, "I'd like to do an RPG..." But they just immediately responded with something like, "Sure." (laughs)
―It was decided on quite casually? (laughs)
Abiko: Yes. I'm pretty sure I remember asking them to make the dungeon using wire-frame line drawings and make it feel like an early Wizardry game.
―This process of creating episodes that have nothing to do with the main story or creating variations within the story using branching points is something that would be unthinkable in a novel.
Abiko: The idea of branching points isn't even in my mind when I'm writing a novel, so the method is obviously different. With the game, I've not only got to come up with the branches, but also write the story that continues on after each branch myself. That means that if I write a joke option then I have to write a joke story to go with it, and things just expand from there. Basically, if I did everything I wanted to do, it'd never get finished (laughs).
The Final "Mystery"
―Roughly how many people that you know have beaten the game?
Abiko: Quite a lot of the people I know have played it, but there's that "trick" at the end, right? Apparently, that bit was tricky, but I think it was also maybe the best received part as well. I had someone close to me who couldn't get there, and I kept saying you haven't finished it yet, though and dropping hints little by little. A while later, they called me going, "I figured it out!"
―That puzzle was definitely the hardest.
Abiko: I guess it's the sort of thing you wouldn't even notice unless you knew it was there, though. I have a friend called Mika Kawachi who's a manga artist, and she managed to see it without knowing anything about it at all and said it was kind of creepy. I wish everyone would notice it like she did, but maybe it was a bit too difficult after all. I actually heard from someone recently who said they finally found it after eight years (laughs). They said they were playing the PlayStation version but still didn't know what it was, so I was like, well, actually...
―Apparently, that question is the most commonly asked one by people who call Chunsoft to ask for information (laughs). I've heard that the idea for it was yours...?
Abiko: I thought it would be boring if people were able to read every scenario just by making choices, so I wanted to add in a scenario you could only see if you did something special. I asked someone from the team about it, and they told me that with the SFC version, switching it off and resetting were different things, and we could use "reset" as a command. We had to use a different method for the PlayStation version, though (laughs). I had to rewrite a little bit of the scenario to make it work.
Towards a New Game
―Kamaitachi no Yoru 2 is coming out soon. What was your first impression when you saw what they were working on?
Abiko: My first impression was, "Wow, I can't believe it's come so far." I actually hadn't heard anything from them for about six months since the scenarios were more or less finished, so the other two who were writing them with me [Hirofumi Tanaka and Osamu Makino] said to me, "Huh, I guess they must've shelved it." (laughs) As I was saying, "Nah, I doubt it," they contacted me saying that they'd gone out scouting locations. They showed me pictures of all sorts of places, and told me that this time they'd be using a combination of real and CG images. I thought, wow, that must have been so much work. Some more time passed after that, and then they showed me something that was close to finished with all sorts of silhouettes and effects and stuff on top of that. I'd been thinking they'd probably be using basically the same graphics as the last time, but then I ended up getting worried about whether it was okay for them to put so much money into it (laughs).
Takemaru Abiko's Origins
―From hereon out, I'd like to step away from Kamaitachi no Yoru a bit and ask about your own roots. First of all, what is the earliest memory you have?
Abiko: I was born in 1962, so I'm not entirely sure whether or not I saw it in real time, but there was an episode of the TV show Ultra Q [aired in 1966] called "Mammoth Flower". I remember it being so scary that I hid in the closet and watched it through the gap. The episode with the Kemur was scary, too. It was about a man who stepped on a puddle and got sucked into it and sent to the future, but because I was a kid I couldn't really follow the story too well, so what stayed with me was the idea that if you stepped in a puddle you'd vanish. I used to splash through puddles in my wellies when it rained, but after that I was so scared of them that I went out of my way to avoid them. In the mind of a kid, even if you know it's all made up, it's still scary.
What Made You Decide to Become an Author
―When did you first decide you wanted to become a writer?
Abiko: When I was in middle school, I wanted to write novels and have them read by lots of people, but it wasn't enough to put food on the table. At the time, I felt like as long as I was able to keep releasing books as I worked non-writing jobs, that was enough for me.
―When did you start writing original stories?
Abiko: The first time I was able to start writing things to completion was after I joined the mystery society at Kyoto University. I got my start writing things like articles for the club bulletin and short mystery stories for "whodunnit" events.
My Favourites
―Out of all of the mystery novels you've read, what would you say are your top three?
Abiko: If we're talking best, I'd say a novel by John Dickson Carr called The Hollow Man, but for top three, I think I'd also add Mirror, Mirror on the Wall by Stanley Ellin and How Like an Angel by Margaret Millar. I won't explain in too much detail, but I found them all very thrilling.
―Are there any authors you look up to?
Abiko: It was reading the works of a man called Paul Gallico that first made me want to write novels, even though he actually wrote heartwarming stories rather than mystery ones. I guess he's less of a goal and more of an ideal for me. I want to be like Paul Gallico.
Discussing Your Own Works
―Out of your own works, which was the biggest struggle?
Abiko: My struggles increase year by year (laughs). The toughest one recently was a novel called Shiro no Machi. It's the sequel to a book called Fushoku no Machi, which was planned to conclude within five months with 100 pages per month published in a magazine, but I was only able to write 50 pages at the start. I said I'd write extra next time, but again ended up only writing 50 pages the following month, too. Ultimately, it ended up being 50 pages a month, and was serialised across around 12 issues. Not only that, but when those first 50 pages were published, I hadn't decided what would happen next yet. I knew how I wanted it to start, but had no idea about anything that came after. But it wouldn't be long before the next deadline was looming, so each time it was like walking a tightrope. I somehow managed to make it to the end despite how tough of an experience it was, and even I thought it was totally absurd, so I left the finished manuscript alone and didn't reread it or anything. After about a year had passed, though, I was asked to fix it up so it could be published as a standalone book, and when I read back through it I found that it actually wasn't bad, but pretty great, in fact (laughs). In the end, I only made some minor changes, and it was published more or less as-is. I don't ever want to go through that again, though, so I've decided to stop doing that and think things through properly before I start writing from now on (laughs).
―Which of your works do you find to be the most memorable?
Abiko: That would be Diprotodontia Macropus. It was based on a 120-page novella I wrote back when I was in university, which I then rewrote into a full-length novel. I'd been wanting to rewrite it for ages, and it doesn't use any of the original text, but the story itself is almost exactly the same. There are several other old stories I'm sitting on, and if they make it out into the world then maybe they'll make for even more memorable books.
Regarding New Works
―Why is it that you're always challenging yourself to work in new genres, not just with books, but also games and online "e-novels"?
Abiko: I want to do things that no one else is doing, whether that's with novels or with games. These are things that I can do specifically because I don't think anyone else has done them yet. I'm not interested in things that seem like they'd make a lot of money, or things I know will be a hit.
―Do you want to challenge yourself to anything else new this year?
Abiko: If anything, I've been neglecting novels for too long, so I've got to get a book out (laughs). There are different things I want to try my hand at, but ultimately, in this world, it all comes down to releasing books. This year, first of all, I've got a new novella being published by Shodensha Bunko. As well as that, I'm collaborating on an anthology for Kamaitachi no Yoru 2 with Tanaka and Makino. There's also a novel I have to get done that was actually supposed to have been out ages ago, plus another novel this year, and possibly also a new magazine serialisation beginning at the end of the year. Things are pretty crazy.
―I get the feeling I'll be seeing your name all over the place this year.
Abiko: It's more like I didn't get enough done last year (laughs). I have to work harder this year to make sure that doesn't happen again. I am a little relieved that Kamaitachi no Yoru 2 looks like it's about to actually come out soon, though (laughs).