《被诅咒的木乃伊》 / The Cursed Mummy

[[TheCursedMummy|《被诅咒的木乃伊》]] is the [[ShimadaSoji|岛田庄司]] Holmes pastiche discussed in 144. 被诅咒的木乃伊：福尔摩斯会和老舍联手探案吗？. The episode notes an older Chinese title, 《夏目漱石伦敦杀人事件》, which makes the book’s core game explicit: [[NatsumeSoseki|夏目漱石]] is placed in London with [[SherlockHolmes|福尔摩斯]] and [[JohnWatson|华生]] to help solve a bizarre mummy case.

The plot begins with Soseki’s alienation in London and a haunted-room disturbance, then moves into a wealthy widow’s missing-brother case. A man claiming to be Kingsley brings Oriental objects, warns of a curse, and later appears to die in a sealed room as a dried mummy. Holmes eventually reconstructs the fraud: the real Kingsley had already died, an impostor used the dead body and Japanese armor to fake the transformation, and a staged fire let the impostor escape notice.

The episode’s reading value is structural. The case uses [[HonkakuMystery|本格推理]] materials such as a locked room, corpse substitution, clues, false writing, and motive, but the source emphasizes [[DualManuscriptNarration|双手稿叙事]] and [[OrientalistMysteryMisdirection|东方主义谜题误导]] as the book’s more distinctive pleasures. Soseki’s manuscript makes Holmes comic and unstable; Watson’s manuscript retells the same moments in a classical detective mode.

Connections

• [[ShimadaSoji|岛田庄司]] - author.
• [[SherlockHolmes|福尔摩斯]], [[JohnWatson|华生]], and [[NatsumeSoseki|夏目漱石]] - central cross-textual figures.
• [[HolmesPasticheTradition|福尔摩斯同人传统]] - literary tradition the book belongs to.
• [[DualManuscriptNarration|双手稿叙事]] - two-account structure.
• [[OrientalistMysteryMisdirection|东方主义谜题误导]] - fake curse and mixed Oriental props.
• [[HonkakuMystery|本格推理]], Observation Before Inference, and Interpretation And Overinterpretation - reasoning frames.