Lonely Hunter

I seem to have read a small pile of books since my last post without getting round to writing a review. So I'll try and write them up quickly. One or two of them are quite interesting; but this one, while perfectly readable, didn't make much of an impression.

The book, 淋しい狩人 (sabishii karyuudou, Lonely Hunter, 1993) by MIYABE Miyuki (宮部 みゆき) is a collection of six short stories involving a little second hand book shop in Tokyo, its owner Iwa-san and his grandson Minoru (稔) who helps him out at weekends. The title sounds to an English speaker like a reference to Carson McCullers' book The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, but the similarity seems to be coincidence. There is at any rate no explicit reference. I might miss subtler allusions, since I've never actually read Carson McCullers.

Iwa-san is managing the bookshop as a favour to a deceased friend, who had wanted the shop to continue after him, but found no-one to take it on. Iwa-san is already retired and has no previous experience in the book trade or special interest in books, but his sharp wits and instinct for business keep the shop running well enough. The stories follow mysteries involving books or the shop's customers. Some are comedies, involving only minor crimes, others more serious, including the pursuit of a serial killer in the title story. At the same time we follow developments in the relationship between Iwa-san and his grandson over the course of the stories.

The emphasis on the shop and the two main characters is constant, but their role in the mysteries are often different. A few stories have Iwa-san as the detective in a classic mystery format, in others he is only a bystander in a story unfolding without his help. In 六月は名ばかりの月 ("June is a month in name only") a young woman whom Iwa-san and Minoru had helped protect from a stalker one night seeks their help in identifying him; and this leads to a murder mystery which Iwa-san solves. In 黙って逝った ("He left without saying anything") a young man suspects that he is destined to a life of getting by, like his dull salaryman father had led. But after his father's death he finds an oddity in his belongings, a bookcase full of copies of the same book, the memoirs of a volunteer crossing guard. Curious he starts to investigate, and finds that the crossing guard had been killed by a hit and run driver. In 詫びない年月 (I'm not quite sure how this title translates, "An age without apologies"?) reports of a ghost in a nearby house are followed by the discovery of a bomb shelter from the second world war with the long dead bodies of a mother and child in it. In うそつき喇叭 ("The lying trumpet") Iwa-san catches a pickpocket, a young boy trying to steal a book called The Lying Trumpet. Iwa-san notices that someone has been physically abusing him. Did the story, an ugly parable of supporters of the military regime who reinvent their past after Japan's defeat, perhaps have some particular interest for him? In 歪んだ鏡 ("Twisted Mirror") a woman finds an abandoned book on the train, and becomes curious about the previous owner, whose business card is left as a bookmark inside. Finally in 淋しい狩人 ("Lonely Hunter") Iwa-san is helping the daughter of a mystery writer, who disappeared years ago, to dispose of his library, as the family have finally come to accept his death. But someone seems to be carrying out the murders in the writer's last book, an unfinished and posthumously published serial killer story.

Most of the stories have some interest, at least in the set up, but the resolution was not always very compelling.

The Policeman's Child

刑事の子 (keiji no ko, The Policeman's Child, 1990) is a mystery by MIYABE Miyuki (宮部 みゆき). It was first published under the title 東京殺人暮色 (Toukyou satsujin boshoku, Tokyo murder dusk colours), then republished in 1994 as 東京下町殺人暮色(Toukyou shitamachi satsujin boshoku, Downtown Tokyo murder dusk colours) and finally in 2011 under the current title. The first two titles, I suspect, reflect the major role of an artist in the story, and shitamachi, downtown, is the central part of Tokyo near the main river and harbour, traditionally a less wealthy and (as the inhabitants see it) more neighbourly area, a place in which people take an interest in what their neighbours are up to more than other parts of the city. The final title reflects the two main characters, detective YAGIZAWA Michio 八木沢道雄 and his teenage son Jun　順, who are living together after Michio and his wife divorced in a new home in the shitamachi area.

The narrative of the story switches between the two. On the one hand we follow Jun and his best friend from school as they investigate rumours circulating in the area about women who visit a famous artist's home never being seen again, on the other we see Michio and other murder squad detectives working on a case with the dismembered body of a young woman. It's a little hard to get the measure of the book. The Jun parts read a little like a juvenile detective story at first; but the murder investigation is more hard boiled, concerned with a series of gruesome crimes. The two strands come together when an anonymous accusation of the artist is sent to the Yagizawa house in the same handwriting as a series of taunting letters sent to the police telling them where they could find the next dead body.

The artist suspect clearly has mysteries of his own, in his attitude to the defining moment of his life, his survival of the firebombing of Tokyo, and in his current artistic choices. The mystery when it is resolved proves to have a complex plot, but I didn't find it very satisfying; and an element of social didacticism also hurt the story for me.

Stepfather Step

The books by MIYABE Miyuki that I've discussed here have been nearer to crime novels than to the traditional idea of a mystery. ステップファーザー・ステップ (steppufāzā steppu, Stepfather Step, 1993) is a set of lighthearted traditional puzzle mystery stories, with the same characters. These are the narrator, a professional thief, and two middle school children, identical twins Satoru and Tadashi, who pick him up after he falls off a roof. The twins have been abandoned by their parents, who have each separately run off with a new partner, and are trying to get by alone rather than letting the state take them into its care. The money however is running out and they think that the thief can help them make some more. Gradually over the course of several stories, the thief comes to be a kind of replacement parent for the children. The book was made into a television series in 2012.

The actual mysteries use clues and tricks like those of golden age detective stories, but still fairly loosely plotted, with more emphasis on parts of the story incidental to the puzzle. The mysteries generally involve serious crimes, such as attempted murder and kidnapping, but occasionally the stories turn on a non-criminal mystery. The setting reflects modern everyday life, but the humorous approach is treated as a licence to include much that is unrealistic or deliberately absurd. The book was an easy, light read, but the mixture of humour and sentiment didn't always work for me. It felt like there was some sort of emotional satisfaction that readers were meant to get from the book that passed me by.



 

The Reason

I need a new label for this. Most of the crime fiction I write about here can be categorised as detective stories. My own preference is fairly strongly for the more puzzle oriented books; but I don't expect that everything that I read should have Ellery Queen style formal proof of the culprit. 理由 (riyuu, The Reason, 1998) by MIYABE Miyuki (宮部 みゆき), which won the Naoki Prize (one of Japan's major prizes for popular literature), is not really written as a mystery. There are things we don't know at the start of the story that we learn as it goes on; but the narrative does not invite us to try and puzzle too much about what is going on. I've tagged this post as "crime novel". Of course most detective stories are crime novels too; but I'll reserve the label for posts about books which can't be read as mysteries.

I mentioned Miyabe's interesting approach to narration when I wrote about The Long Long Murder (長い長い殺人). The Reason is not so unusual; but it still shows an interest in how to tell a story. The crime that the book describes is the violent death of four people in an apartment high up in a luxury block of flats. It soon becomes clear that the victims are not the owners that the building's administration have on their books; and the police realise that they have no idea who has died or why. The story's narrator presents most of the book as if reporting a now solved actual crime, with the limited viewpoint that that entails. The narrator is not very present in the narrative, but gives a tapestry of second hand accounts of the various witnesses and incidentally involved characters. Occasionally we get a little more involved with a description of an interview with a major character. And then, in contrast to this documentary style, we also get a few chapters which are narrated (as if by an omniscient narrator) from the viewpoint of one or another character. These sections are more conventionally novelistic, though the reader might suppose that they too came from a non fiction writer, choosing to write in a more novelistic way. The documentary style majority of the book also implies a readership slightly different from the real readership. Living in the world in which the crime was a major media event, they presumably know more than we do about what happened. For us the crime is a mystery. Finding out exactly what happened and why is not so much a matter of investigating, as waiting for the narrator to get to that part of the account.

You'll often read descriptions of the history of Japanese detective fiction which implies a sort of war between puzzle detective stories and social detective stories, with MATSUMOTO Seichou driving out the puzzles in the fifties and sixties, until the "new orthodox" detective story brought back the puzzle under the leadership of AYATSUJI Yukito (綾辻 行人) in 1987. I haven't read enough to say this is complete nonsense; but I feel confident that it's fairly misleading. Matsumoto wrote so many books that he almost counts as a school in his own right; but those I've read, while clearly concerned with describing the way the world is now, also have a strong puzzle element. And what was the rest of the "social school"? "Society" is not the central interest of almost any of the other writers from the seventies and eighties that I have read, even if the puzzle was not central either. Traditional themes like the impossible crime have always been popular enough in Japan that it is no surprise when one meets such a trick in almost any crime novel. That said, The Reason lives up to the stereotype of the "social school", as far as a book can.

Towards the beginning, it looks like the theme of the book is going to be "real estate in the post bubble economy". Many of the early chapters and middle chapters are concerned with the dubious finance and not quite legal practices in the buying and selling of property in Japan's depressed economy. Gradually it becomes clear that this is part of a larger focus. As we meet with different groups of people concerned in the case, we realise that the theme is not so much "real estate" as "making a home"; most people who buy a house or flat, do so to raise a family. We meet various families and hear their stories. Some are getting along well , others are just managing to hold together, or breaking apart. And we also see people who have left their families for various reasons.

In the end the book seems to favour a particular view on the way society is going. It does so only through opinions expressed by the characters; but the narrator does not offer a divergent opinion either in their own voice or from another character. It's a view that I look at with some scepticism, as I feel it forgets that the world that young people are growing up in is changed by circumstances over which they had no choices. Some things are possible for them that were not possible for their parents. Other things that were easy for their parents are harder for them (here I am thinking particularly of their financial situation). This is obviously true in Europe. I know that Japan has not changed as much; but I think the same trends are there.

The book is one of the longer ones that I have read, over 670 pages. That would be a little shorter in a typical western paperback format (Japanese paperback pages are small, but densely printed); but it would still be a long book. If that doesn't discourage you, and if your interest in crime fiction goes beyond mysteries or suspense, then it is certainly worth trying. Despite the length, it had no trouble in holding my interest.

The Long, Long Murder

MIYABE Miyuki (宮部 みゆき, born 1960) is a very successful crime and fantasy writer in Japan, and several of her books have been translated into English. The book I've been reading, 長い長い殺人 (nagai nagai satsujin, The Long, Long Murder, 1992), is a crime novel, to some extent a mystery, but one in which suspense is more important than any puzzle element. We have a fairly clear idea who the bad guys are early on. Only parts of the motives and methods are unclear, and whether they will succeed in their plan, or the police in their pursuit of them.

I often end a review with any reservations I have about a book; but that perhaps leaves a more negative aftertaste than it should. So this time I'll try putting them at the beginning. The final revelations of what, why, how and who are not especially well prepared. The solution is one that I accepted grudgingly, and I felt that, if anything, it made the villains less interesting. That said, this is a very interesting and unusual book. It's really a pity that there isn't an English translation.

 What makes the book so unusual is its narrators. There's a different narrator for each chapter, each following a different character involved in the case: policeman, witness, private detective and so on. You're probably thinking that that's not that unusual, you've definitely read books like that. But the narrators here are not the characters themselves, but their wallets. The wallets are allowed to observe and narrate the events that they are present at as though endowed with intelligence and the ability to hear and see (as long as they're not in someone's pocket). It's a very old fashioned conceit, something you'd associate more with eighteenth or nineteenth century fiction. The only examples I can think of are a children's book, Anna Sewell's Black Beauty (1877), and, definitely not a children's book, Diderot's Les Bijoux indiscrets (1748); but there was evidently a big fashion for this kind of fiction in the eighteenth century. I wouldn't necessarily want to see it become a fashion again, but an experiment like this is very welcome.

The wallets all have slightly different characters. Generally they show some similarities to their owners: their language can be male or female, young or old. They regard their owners with sympathy and concern. They are often a little more cautious and a little more respectful of traditional morality, looking on with helpless dismay at the missteps of their owners. I thought early in the book that there might be a thematic reason for choosing wallets, along the lines of the scene in a George V. Higgins book, where a character explains, whenever you want to know why people did something stupid, the real answer is always "We did it for the money". This might apply to the first chapter, where a debt laden policeman is tempted with a bribe, and a hit and run killing looks like a wife's attempt to kill her husband for the insurance money; but money is not at the heart of the book. The wallets are used in various ways, sometimes merely witnesses, sometimes directly involved in the plot (through the actions of others, of course). If there's a reason why wallets are chosen rather than other inanimate objects (watches, for instance, or socks), it might be that they are just more particularly closely tied to a person's identity.

The plot starts the hit and run death of a man, whose widow seems to have carefully provided herself with an alibi for the night in question. We then switch to various characters who come in contact with the widow, including a boy whose aunt has become engaged to a young businessman. The fiancé easily wins over the rest of the family, but the boy somehow cannot trust him. The distrust seems justified, since on her marriage the aunt is persuaded to take out life insurance for a large sum. The apparent villains seem quite reckless and confident of their ability to get what they want, whatever suspicion may fall on them. By the end of the book there are a large number of victims. This too seems a little old fashioned: characters threatened by a cruel enemy against whom they are quite helpless are something you might expect to find in a nineteenth century sensation novel. The classic puzzle detective story generally has to do without really ruthless evil; and perhaps it is missing something. Certainly the book's suspense is far greater than any puzzle detective story I can remember.