Category Archives: Japan

Review: THE THIEF by Fuminori Nakamura

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I don’t think I’d have noticed let alone read this book if it hadn’t appeared on the list of titles eligible for this year’s International Dagger Award for translated crime fiction published in the UK and that would have been my loss. It’s a great reminder of why I follow this particular award more closely than any other; I am prompted to read more widely in terms of geography and style than I otherwise would do.*

THE THIEF is an odd book, not really fitting neatly into any of the crime genre’s boxes though it is, I suppose, closest to noir even though there is a bit too much overt metaphysical symbolism for it to fully conform to the necessary tropes . It recounts a short period in the life of a Japanese pickpocket who describes his daily ‘work’ (identifying victims and the various ruses used to steal their stuff) and how he gets caught up with a gang who coerce him into crimes he would not have chosen to commit. He also, somewhat reluctantly, befriends a young boy who he one day notices shoplifting with his mother and prevents the pair from being caught by a store detective.

There are several reasons why I should not have liked THE THIEF but in an almost ornery way my brain decided to be transfixed by it. Despite me. I am sure the fact that it is a teeny tiny book amongst a landslide of doorstop-sized tomes didn’t hurt.

I know I sound like an uncaring, middle class, cow but I’m not really fond of books told from the career criminal’s point of view. In most cases I’m not sympathetic to them, regardless of the real or imagined traumas that led them to their lives of crime, and I’m rarely swayed or intrigued by their angst or their revelling in the misery they inflict. So a story told by a pickpocket should not, on past experience, have engaged me at all but it did. It may have something to do with the fact that the eponymous thief (named only once as Nishimura) doesn’t delve deeply into the morality of his actions (aside from a claim to only steal from rich people) and certainly doesn’t spend time justifying himself. He is what he is and rather dispassionately tells his story which I somehow found more acceptable than the books which give lengthy reasons for a person becoming a life-long criminal. They always seem to boil down to “it’s not my fault I turned out this way” at which point I usually mumble “cry me a river” under my breath (I warned you I’d sound like a cow).

There is also, at least on the surface, is not a lot going on here in that rather than a major story arc the book concerns itself with an almost random slice of Nishimura’s life which is another reason I ought not to have been engrossed in the book as that kind of thing often irks me. But with THE THIEF almost immediately I did want to know what troubles would befall the narrator (there was never even a glimmer that his life would bring something other than troubles). Somehow his detachment and reserve made me hang on for the few tiny morsels that would provide insight into the man, his personal history and his ultimate fate.

Some of THE THIEF borders on the surreal, the female characters are prostitutes or dead (downtrodden women are a feature of all the Japanese crime fiction I have read) and the ending is as ambiguous as it gets which are all more reasons why I would normally not enjoy a book. And yet I listened to the whole thing in a single sitting almost without noticing the time passing. There are some things that don’t really work (I don’t care how downtrodden she is I didn’t for a moment ‘buy’ the character of the boy’s mother who at a point I won’t detail for fear of spoiling utters the line “what good are kids anyway” which did cause my eyes to roll) but overall I am glad to have read the book and would recommend to those prepared for something a little different.

*I see now that a delay in this book’s UK publication date has ruled it out of contention for this year’s award but I’m still glad to have read it (and can now I say I’ve started reading titles eligible for next year’s award).

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THE THIEF has been reviewed at International Noir Fiction, Mrs Wordopolis Reads and The Crime Segments

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My rating 3.5/5
Translators Satoko Izumo and Stephen Coates
Narrator Charlie Thurston
Publisher AudioGO [This edition 2012, original work 2009]
ASIN B007EJIBOC
Length 4 hours 1 minute
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series standalone
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Review: The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

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I’m counting this as my first book on the Asian leg of the 2011 Global Reading Challenge.

Yasuko Hanaoka is a single mother whose ex-husband, Togashi, still bothers her for money and engages in other nasty harassment. One evening he comes to her apartment, gets threatening and ends up strangled at the hands of his ex and her teenage daughter, Misato. Ishigami is a maths teacher/genius and Yasuko’s neighbour. He visits the lunch-box shop at which she works every day just so he can buy lunch from his pretty neighbour. When he hears noises in her apartment he deduces what has gone on there and offers to help dispose of the body and cover up the crime. The rest of the book is then billed as a battle of wits between Ishigami and the police who are aided by their very own genius, physicist Dr. Manabu Yukawa nicknamed Professor Galileo, who happens to be an old college mate of both the lead detective on the case, Kusanagi, and our genius maths teacher Ishigami (though the latter two have never met prior to this case).

This book has won Japan’s Naoki Prize for Best Novel and is highly rated at both Amazon and Good Reads. I can’t for the life of me see why any of those things is true but there’s nothing new there, I am often out of step on such matters. As always, I’ll tell you why I didn’t think much of the book and you can make up your own minds.

For a start the plot does not really take us anywhere new or interesting. My one sentence summary of the premise for the book is “ugly man does stupid thing because he is in lust with unattainable beautiful woman” (and yes that is slightly more bitter and twisted than what the book presents but only a smidgen). The only suspenseful element of the entire thing was the question of whether or not the police would uncover the truth, except it wasn’t really that suspenseful because the ‘investigation’ wasn’t remotely credible to me. Readers are lulled into accepting the immediate and singular focus on Yasuko Hanaoka as a suspect because we know she is guilty, but the police had no idea that was true and their decision to only ever investigate the woman Togashi divorced five years ago would have been laughable if it had been depicted in a more traditional procedural. In a nod to this notion one of the detectives makes a comment along the lines of ‘he had no friends’ which, I suppose, is supposed to reassure the reader that all other avenues of inquiry were exhausted. Even the investigation into Yasuko was highly improbable, consisting of repeated re-interviewing and endless following people connected to Yasuko for no reason at all and acting upon a lot of baseless assumptions.

The cover-up devised by Ishigami could have been intriguing but it dragged on too long. For me it started to get vaguely tense in chapter 16. Of 19 chapters. Irrespective of the pace I never quite bought into the supposedly brilliant machinations being put into play by Ishigami because I never really felt the author was playing fair with me as a reader so I was actively looking for things he might have hidden. In the end I’d argue that Higashino broke one of the cardinal rules of mystery writing by ensuring that the resolution relied on a piece of information that we, as readers, were never given.

The characters in the book were even less interesting than the plot, though probably more credible. I simply found them stereotypical, flat and unlikable. The portrayal of Ishigami’s life as barren due to him being an ugly, misunderstood genius whose daily battle with bored teenagers and dreams of missed opportunities which could all have been made palatable by the affections of a beautiful woman was tiresomely derivative. Yasuko’s insipid acceptance of life as something that happens to you was cringe-inducing and dull. Other people decided everything for her, from when to give up working as a club hostess to whether or not to conceal the murder she has just committed. She didn’t even really make a conscious decision to kill Togashi and even her final act was prompted by someone else’s actions rather than her own beliefs or strength of character. So this all leads me back to the plot. One of the reasons I didn’t find the ‘will they get away with it’ scenario terribly suspenseful was that I simply didn’t care.

Both the translation (by Alexander O Smith) and narration (by David Pittu) were more positive aspects of the book for me. The dialogue in the book does sometimes have an awkward feel which other reviewers have attributed to poor translation, but I thought that when conversations were stilted or tentative it was natural for those people in that setting and reflected the slightly formal feel of Japanese culture. The narration was superb and really the only thing that stopped me from consigning this book to the DNF pile.

Ultimately I found this book more of a gothic melodrama than anything else and I guess I’m just not romantic enough to have been sucked into its orbit. I’ll acknowledge that it did create an atmosphere of sorts but for me there was no real substance to it and I grew quickly tired of the contrivances of the plot. My personal recommendation for a thoughtful and intriguing work of Japanese crime fiction would be Shuichi Yoshida’s Villain.

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The Devotion of Suspect X has been reviewed far more favourably at lots of other places including The Black Sheep Dances and Yet Another Crime Fiction Blog.

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My rating 2/5
Translator Alexander O Smith
Narrator David Pittu
Publisher Macmillan Audio [this edition 2011, original edition 2005]
ISBN N/A (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 9 hours 2 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series possibly the first in a series but so far the only one translated into English
Source I bought it

Review: Villain by Shuichi Yoshida

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The 18th book I’ve read for the 2010 Global Reading Challenge completes the Asian leg of my virtual tour, being set in contemporary Japan. Three books to go before I will be able to officially say I am an extreme global reader.

When Yoshino Ishibashi is found murdered near the eerie Mitsue Pass in southern Japan, a road locals only take in desperation to avoid expensive tolls on the nearby freeways, Police at first suspect a college student she knew who has also disappeared. But attention is also focused on Yuichi Shimizu, a construction worker from a nearby town.

Rather than being a whodunnit, Villain is an exploration of what makes a murderer and seen in that light it is fascinating. Any focus on the investigation of Yoshino’s murder is incidental to the author’s exploration of changes in modern Japanese society and associated issues of alienation, loneliness and despair. In short chapters, some told in flashback, we meet a wide range of people from different geographical and social backgrounds who all have some connection, albeit tenuous in some instances, to Yoshino or her murderer. We start by meeting Yoshino, a not-very-good insurance saleswoman by day and amateur prostitute with a gift for fantasy by night and move on from there. We then meet her parents, devastated and almost physically immobilised by her death and what they learn about her life, the two friends who were with her on the night of her murder,  the college student and the construction worker who are both suspects in her murder, their friends and families and so on.

The person we learn most about is Yuichi, an almost allegorical character who experiences most of life’s disappointments in a very short space of time. Abandoned by his mother at a young age he is at the beck and call of his ailing grandparents and seems to have no interests other than his car and his fairly disastrous attempts at a love life (virtually all of which involve payment of some kind). In that respect he is not alone as none of the young people in the book seem capable of engaging in anything remotely like a ‘normal’ social life, what little social activity exists  is conducted out via emails and furtive visits to love hotels, though I don’t know enough about life in Japan to know if this is a realistic portrayal of life for twenty-something Japanese people or beefed up for storytelling purposes.

For the most part the writing is very good and the translation by Philip Gabriel makes it easy to forget the words originated in another language but I must admit to finding the some of the ‘hyper-realism’ a bit off-putting as it tended to take me out of the story. The most obvious example of this is the inclusion of the price of every service and product mentioned which made me feel like I should have a calculator by my side or a shopping list on the go and I’m not really sure what purpose it all served.

For its first two thirds Villain is pretty bleak but towards the end there are glimmers of hope in which an unexpected person or two displays a hint of humanity and some of the characters, though none of the younger ones, show a bit of backbone.  However the overwhelming feeling I’m left with is sadness as I think about these difficult to forget characters. If you can handle a slow-paced thoughtful novel that might leave you feeling uneasy about the state of the world then I would highly recommend Villain.

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I would also recommend that you ignore most of the publicity material about this novel, much of which is either woefully inaccurate (the blurb on my copy for example claims that one of the characters is arrested for Yoshino’s murder early on which is just not true) or gives away too many spoilers. Also the US cover has a stylized gun on the cover which couldn’t have less to do with the story if it went out of its way to be irrelevant. I can only assume that no one responsible for publicising this book has actually read it.

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My rating 4/5
Translator Philip Gabriel
Publisher Harvill Secker [2010, originally 2007]
ISBN 9781846552380
Length 295 pages
Format trade paperback
Source I bought it

Review: Out by Natsuo Kirino

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Title: Out

Author: Natsuo Kirino

Publisher: Vintage Books [originally 1997, this translation 2004]

ISBN: 978-0-099-47228-5

Length: 520 pages

Setting: Japan, present day

Genre: Psychological thriller / Noir

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My rating: 2/5

One-liner: A desolate tale of hopelessness and body parts.

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Four women work the night shift at a lunch box filling factory in Japan. Their jobs are back-breaking and dull, their husbands universally boorish and their futures look equally desolate. One of the women, Yayoi, kills her husband when she’s tipped over the edge by his abuse. The other three women are drawn, one by one, into the effort to keep Yayoi from being caught. When a local pimp and club owner is accused by the police of the brutal murder the women think they’re home free but life doesn’t work out quite so neatly.

This is one of the bleakest books I have read in a very long time. The story is monotonous as it meanders from one depressing incident to the next while the characters are uninteresting and almost completely devoid of humanity. Even if you can overcome the unending dreariness that permeates this story I’m not convinced it has much else to offer. Perhaps in her zeal to depict Japanese society in a confronting way (virtually everyone is racist, all the men are misogynists, no one seems to place much value on a human life and there’s a whole load of gore) the author forgot to tell an engaging, entertaining story. I admire people who dare to show the more insidious aspects of a culture, but if writers choose fiction (rather than non-fiction) as their medium to do that then they have to entertain as well as inform and this book did not entertain me at all.

For a start there’s very little conflict and even less suspense which are two things even an average crime novel should have in spades. We know virtually from the outset whodunit and why. The only vaguely interesting question is whether or not she will get away with it but as she’s a two dimensional caricature it doesn’t seem to matter much and I was in little doubt that whatever the facts of the ending it wouldn’t be a happy one. And if I could have ignored all of that I would still have struggled with the credibility factor. I could perhaps have bought that all the characters would be so blithely unaffected by the piling up of body parts around them but when the supposedly smartest of the women completely fails to see really obvious danger ahead and then throws herself stupidly into the dumbest of femjep scenarios I lost what remaining interest I had.

Then there are the characters who are all so detached from each other and the events going on in their lives that I as a reader was never terribly interested in what happened to any of them either. I should, for example, have been outraged when one of the women, Masako, was shown to have a past in which she was treated abominably by her employers merely because she was a woman. But I didn’t have any sense of her as a person and was more bored by the umpteenth revelation that life (for these people anyway) sucks.

Finally there’s the writing which leads to the unnecessary length. The best noir fiction is concise and memorable often for what is left unsaid but this book is excruciatingly long. It’s overly repetitive and contains a plethora of detailed descriptions of events and trains-of-thought that add nothing to the story.

In short I was underwhelmed by this novel. What could have been an interesting depiction of the treatment of women in modern Japanese society was, for me anyway, lost in the tedious, gore-filled story and dull characterisations. For me to be informed and even politically motivated by a work of fiction I need to be entertained first, as happens with the writing of Stieg Larsson, Matt Beynon Rees or a dozen other writers. This one just left me feeling guilty I had picked it for a book club read.

Other stuff

The book won Japan’s top award for crime fiction in 1997 so clearly other people think very differently about the book than I do. For a far more positive view of the book than my own check out Story Time.

Here’s a written interview with former romance novelist turned award-winning crime writer Natsuo Kirino