View of Tokyo Roppongi Hills downtown from Mori Tower
Before last week I had never had any desire to travel to Tokyo. Too crowded, too big. Too much. The city itself holds over
thirteen million people, and the metro area exceeds thirty-six million. New York City only has eight and a half million in population. If you combine the five boroughs of New York City with the Los Angeles Metro Area and the Chicago Metro Area, you only get thirty-one million people.
But somehow, Keigo Higashino manages to make it feel like a small town. Perhaps that is because his work focuses, not just on a mystery, but on the relationships that the people in his tales have with each other.
Born in Osaka, the writer started out as an engineer, and in 1985, at age 27, he was awarded the Edogawa Rampo Award for the finest unpublished novel by a new writer, for his work, Hōkago (After School). The prize allowed him to quit his day job and write full time. He has gone on to collect multiple nominations and awards for his work in Japan and abroad.
There have been sixteen movies made from his novels, and as many TV movies or drama series. He now stands as one of the most popular best-selling authors in a population of avid readers:
Its [Japan's] publishing industry is one of the world’s most robust, generating $22.5 billion in 2011. (In the same period, with three times the population, American publishers grossed $27 billion.) On the Tokyo subway, one often finds more commuters engrossed in novels than in smartphones
Japanese Secret Puzzle Box
Have you ever played with a
Japanese Puzzle Box? Dating back to the 1860s, these boxes can take anywhere from three to hundreds of different steps to open. To make it even harder, the steps must be taken in the proper order.
These amazing boxes first appeared towards the end of the Edo Period in Japanese history around the 1860s when carriage bearers were subsidising their wages by producing and selling marquetry items in tea shops around Hakone where they could utilise the rich and vast array of coloured woods produced by the trees in the area. The carriage bearers made these boxes so their travellers could hide valuable paperwork and money from highwaymen within them. Because they could only be opened by their owner who knew how to slide its hidden panels in a particular way these boxes were often overlooked as ornaments.
The boxes have traditionally been made by individual craftsmen, working alone and covering the completed boxes with Yosegi-Zaiku marquetry which renders them quite beautiful as well as complex.
The reasons for my suspicion that Keigo Higashino may have been fascinated by these boxes in his youth are the three novels that are below the fold.
Malice: A Mystery
by Keigo Higashino
Published by Minotaur Books
October 7th 2014
288 pages
Malice is the most recent book that has been translated into English from the original Japanese, but it was first published in September of 1996 and is number four in the series. The series features an intriguing Police Detective, Kyochiro Kaga, who was once a school teacher.
When Kaga arrives at the murder scene of famous writer Kunihiko Hidaka, he is surprised to see that Osamu Nonoguchi, with whom he used to teach at the same school, is there and was the best friend of the brutally murdered Hidaka. Nonoguchi also left his teaching position and has become a fairly successful writer of children's books.
Between Nonoguchi and Hidaka's new young wife, who both have easily verifiable alibi's, Kaga is faced with a difficult locked room murder. Hidaka was alone in the house in his locked study where he was finishing a serial installment for his publisher before he was to join his wife at the Crown Hotel where they would spend their last night in Tokyo before leaving for Vancouver. Nonoguchi was meeting with his publisher.
But the problem for Kaga is not so much who committed the murder or even how it was committed, but rather why Hidaka was murdered. In search of an answer to that question, Kaga sets off on a journey into the past on a very twisted highway. Just when you think you have figured it all out there appears a hairpin turn that makes you re-examine everything you thought you knew.
The novel switches between Nonoguchi's account of the evening that his friend and fellow author died and Kaga's notes on his investigation. As Kaga's investigation continues he begins to question the friendship that the two authors apparently shared. Were they quite as friendly as they claimed?
Convoluted, full of surprises and dead ends, the plotting of this mystery is masterful. And because it was my first Higashino novel I was totally unprepared for the maze that is the mystery and for the skill displayed in uncovering the relationship between the two men. I am sad that it is the only Detective Kaga book that has been translated into English. So far.
Fortunately, Higashino also has another detective series and I was able to find two of those novels.
The Devotion of Suspect X: A Detective Galileo Novel (Detective Galileo Series)
by Keigo Higashino
Published by Minotaur Books
February 1st 2011
298 pages
In Devotion of Suspect X, we know who the murderer is from the start. When her abusive ex-husband pays an unwelcome call on Yasuko Hanaoka and her daughter, Misako, an argument between her and her ex-husband results in his death. The noise from the unplanned murder alerts their next door neighbor, mathematics teacher, Ishigami. Ishigami develops the perfect cover-up and alibis for the woman (for whom he harbors a hidden, borderline obsessive, love) and her daughter.
When the body turns up, as all must, Detective Kusanagi catches the case. Working with a junior detective, Kishitani, he is unable to determine what is wrong with Yasuko's alibi but knows that something is off. She is the only one with a clear motive. In frustration he turns to an old college friend and physicist, Dr. Manabu Yukawa for help. As a consultant in past cases, he has earned the moniker "Detective Galileo." Turns out that he also went to school with Yasuko's neighbor, Ishigami, which sets up a wonderful battle of wits between two brilliant men. One asks the other, "Which is harder: devising an unsolvable problem, or solving that problem?"
Once again, Higashino examines relationships, real and imagined, and looks at just how far devotion will take someone in defense of its object. Also once again, the ending is not quite the one expected. Which is a good thing in a mystery.
It is easy to see why it won the prestigious Naoka Award in 2005, the year it was published in Japan, why it became the second highest selling book all year in Japan, and why the movie adaptation topped the box office for four weeks after its release and went on to become the third highest-grossing movie of the year.
Salvation of a Saint
by Keigo Higashino
Published by Minotaur Books
October 2nd 2012
330 pages
This is the second Detective Galileo novel to be translated into English. In what looks like a suicide, Yoshitaka is found dead in his living room, the arsenic-laced remains of a cup of coffee at his side. His wife of a year, Ayane, is visiting her parents in Sapporo, hundreds of miles away, trying to deal with the fact that her husband had just told her that he was seeking a divorce.
When no other arsenic was found in the up-scale apartment, the death was investigated by Detective Kusanagi who has a new assistant, Kaoru Utsumi. Upon her return to Tokyo, the new widow enchants Kusanagi, leaving Utsumi to worry about his objectivity. Since Yoshitaka also had a mistress, who happened to be Ayane's quilting protege, Kusanagi prefers to believe that at two months pregnant, she was the killer.
Utsumi finally consults with "Detective Galileo," Dr. Yukawa. The earlier Ishigami case put a strain on the friendship between the Doctor and the Detective, so working with him proves a challenge for Utsumi, one that she is fully capable of handling.
Though we think we know who committed the murder, and we think we know why, the how is what stumps even the physicist. Do we finally have a perfect murder?
You will find the answer just as soon as you can get that tricky little puzzle box to open.
What I notice most in novels like these, that are written by residents, is that they tend to highlight cultural norms in a way that someone else wouldn't. The birth rate is Japan is extremely low, and babies are doted on by their parents. Yoshitaka is determined to leave his wife because she has not borne him a child within the first year of their marriage. His life plan does not allow any more time to be wasted on a barren marriage. Although they both agreed to this when they wed, a year down the road, Ayane was having second thoughts.
Now Yoshitaka did not want a child to support the government's attempt to increase the national birthrate from 1.4 to over 2 births per woman in the next twenty years, but the way the couple with whom they are friends talk about their new baby, made clear the social value that is awarded to families with children. Children are important to the Japanese, and as a native, Higashino was able to show that subtly. After all, his Japanese audience already knows the culture and does not need a lecture about the issue.
This contrasts markedly with The Corpse Reader by Antonio Garrido. Published in the States in 2013, and written by a Spaniard, the outlook was too modern, almost too Christian for my taste. There was too much explaining. It may have been in the translation, but there were times when a reference or a comment was so Western that I was pulled out of the 13th Century Tsong dynasty, where the story was supposed to have been set. Although it was based on the life of an actual man, it always felt like a Western interpretation of a distant culture. Perhaps because it was.
Diana Gabaldon never lived in Scotland or existed in the 1740s, but her use of a fairly modern-day narrator allowed her to marvel at the differences in the two eras and so inform the readers without jarring them back into the 21st century. It can be done, but it is hard to do it without a gimmick of some sort.
Higashino's stories don't need any gimmicks. They reflect the culture in which they are set and even if the translation was not exactly perfect, I always felt like I was seeing the real Tokyo the way Japanese see it. Except that I saw it from my armchair, which is a far more comfortable way to experience it. No crowds, no noise. And no traffic.
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