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.

Some uninformed impressions

The next review is going to take a little while, as the book I'm currently reading is over 670 pages long. I thought I'd fill the gap with some impressions I've got of the Japanese detective story business. Then I thought "But I don't know anything about commercial publishing in Europe or America either, so this just so much uninformed chatter." But then I thought, "Look at the rest of the blog: uninformed chatter is pretty much all I do here." So here you get a few remarks about things that have struck me while reading. Perhaps if you're better informed, you could tell me what I'm misunderstanding.

The common background to most of the points below, is that Japanese writers have something of a struggle, if they want to get by as writers, enjoying a potentially large market in their own country, but (for most of them) only there. Despite its difficult writing system, Japan clearly has a high rate of literacy. Whether the 99% literacy you'll often see in reference works is based on anything solid is slightly questionable, as the last time Japan seriously investigated its own literacy seems to have been in 1948 (and it wasn't 99% then); but you can find small international surveys in which Japan really does score better than other developed countries.

1. The importance of prizes. There are a lot of prizes in the Japanese book world. My impression is that there are more of them than in England or America. Very often when you read a writer's first novel, you find it was submitted for a prize for first novelists, whether it won or not. The Edogawa Rampo Award is the most important of these in the context of detective stories. Ellery Queen is the only writer who comes to mind, who started his career like that in the west; but doubtless there are others. Still the biographies of Japanese writers almost always mention that the first work was submitted for a prize; and I can remember at least one fictional first author depicted working towards a contest deadline. Since a writer is likely to want to go full time from the first publication (see point 3 below), the prize for a first publication is probably important both for publicity and for its actual value.
2. Serial publishing. Many of the classics of Japanese crime literature (and other genres) were serialised in newspapers or magazines before being published in book form. You still sometimes see this mentioned even with recent books. The heyday of serial publication in England was the Victorian age; and almost all the classics of that time were first published in magazines like Dickens' Household Words. In the twentieth century, occasionally a magazine or a weekly paper would serialise a book; but it was always (in my lifetime, at least) an exception. The only crime fiction example I can think of in England is Kingsley Amis's The Crime of the Century, written for The Sunday Times in 1975 (and completely worthless). The background for the importance of serials in Japan is perhaps that the Japanese are huge newspaper and magazine readers. Getting a serial is another mark of success within detective stories, when a fictional writer is being described.
3. Prolific authors. There are a few writers in English famous for the conveyor belt like book production that they kept up, John Creasey and Erle Stanley Gardner, for instance. AKAGAWA Jirou (赤川 次郎) and NISHIMURA Kyoutarou (西村 京太郎) have similar productivity in Japan. Each has written more than five hundred books. But even if you forget these famously prolific writers, a large number of books seems to be almost the rule for Japanese writers. A typical publication speed in England or America might be one book a year or slightly less, with some writers managing two and only the most prolific getting near three for any length of time. Looking at a writer's first twenty years of publication, if I've counted right, SHIMADA Souji has over sixty books, ARISUGAWA Arisu has 38 (excluding a large number of edited anthologies and books with co-authors). My impression is that successful writers nearer the one a year rate are fairly rare. One reason might be that Japanese employers look for more devotion from their employees and side jobs like writing are seen as an indication that their heart is somewhere else. The consequence is that the discovery that an employee is also publishing novels can lead to dismissal (this too crops up as a consideration with one of the fictional authors in a book I read). Most professional writers in England probably make their main living with a job of some kind and write what they can in their spare time until they become sufficiently established to risk writing full time.
4. Translation. You can probably see that the label "books with an English translation" in the sidebar doesn't have many entries. It's incredibly rare for Japanese books to get a translation; and in fiction, "his books had been translated into English" is used to indicate a hugely successful writer. This is perhaps the reason why the covers of many books feature an English translation, or an alternative English title, even though the book has never been translated. The English often sounds slightly off. Sougen suiri bunko, which specialises in translations of English mysteries, generally manages competent English titles (and adds them to almost all their books).
5. Bookshops. I've mentioned this before, but finding a book in a Japanese bookshop can be difficult. Most are arranged not by genre, even in the broadest sense, but by publisher. This means that if you're looking for a particular book, you need to know the publisher in advance. The reason for this, I imagine, is the difficulty of Japanese names. Written with Chinese characters (kanji), their meaning is not always immediately evident even for Japanese readers. So the spine of a typical paperback will look something like the photo below. At the top is the name of the author in kanji (NORIZUKI Rintarou). Below that is the first letter of the family name in hiragana (the Japanese syllabic alphabet), の ("no"). Below that is a number, 75, showing the place that the book takes in this publisher's list of its books by writers whose names start with "No-". So when putting books on shelves the bookshop staff only have to read the letter-number combination to find the right place.

 That does mean, however, that if a writer wants to catch the attention of browsing readers, they need to be with a publisher already established in the kind of thing the writer is writing.

(Sorry for the formatting of this post, by the way. I can't quite get Blogger's software to put that photo where I want it.)

The Friends

夏の庭 The Friends (natsu no niwa, The Summer Garden, 1992) is the first book by YUMOTO Kazumi (湯本香樹実, born 1959), a Japanese children's writer. It was translated into English in 1996 by Cathy Hirano as The Friends (the subtitle of the Japanese original) and made into a film by SOUMAI Shinji  (相米 慎二) in 1994. The Friends won prizes for children's literature both in the original and in Hirano's translation, including the Boston Globe-Horn Book award in 1997. Hirano has also translated other books by Yumoto: The Spring Tone (2001), The Letters (2005), and The Bear and the Wildcat (2011).

The story follows three twelve year old boys over the summer holiday of their last year at junior school, KIYAMA　(木山), the narrator, YAMASHITA　(山下), and KAWABE　(川辺). The three friends have their various problems: Kiyama's mother is an alcoholic, Yamashita, who is overweight (called 'fatty' by his friends), is clumsy at sport and shows little talent at schoolwork, Kawabe, from a single parent family, is nervous and intense, given to telling lies about his missing father. Kawabe has heard from neighbours of an old man living alone, who looks like dying any time now. 

'Kiyama, you've never seen a dead body have you?'

'Er — no.'

'Same with me.'
'So what are you asking for?'  
'What I mean,' Kawabe's eyes glittered. Scary. 'What I mean is this. An old man living alone, one day he dies, what do you reckon will happen?'

'What will happen? — If he dies on his own —'
What would happen? With no friends, no family, even if he had last words to say, with no-one to hear them those words would drift through the air or the room and finally disappear, perhaps. As if he had never said anything. 'I don't want to die.' 'Bitter.' 'It hurts.' 'It was a good life.' Whatever.
'I'm talking about discovering him.'
'What?'
'When the old guy dies alone. Find him.'

'Who?'
'Us. Who else?'

This may not sound very promising. The assorted social problems and a 'big theme' (death) may suggest to you the kind of slightly earnest children's books often aimed at ten to fourteen year olds. There are a lot of fairly bad books in that style, and a few that are good, but still not much fun to read. The Friends may sometimes give the impression of striving after seriousness, but it is not dull or earnest. The narrator Kiyama has a basically optimistic outlook, and the book's character comes from his lively and humorous description of the boys' friendship with each other, and then with the old man, who, aware of their vulture like observation, comes out of his lethargy to put his house and life in order. The 'problems' of the children are not allowed to dominate the narrative, they are just a part of their lives.


To some extent I was reminded of the English writer, Jan Mark. (Perhaps Betsy Byars would be the comparison that would come to mind if I was American.) The Friends doesn't feel quite as realistic or have the wit and depth of observation of the best of Jan Mark's books; but there is the same skill at getting the reader interested in sharing the interactions of 'normal' people's lives. As with Mark's books, the reader shouldn't expect too much action, though the story is eventful enough.

I haven't read the English version; but you can perhaps get an idea of it from an article where Cathy Hirano talks about her approach to translation here. 

The Confusion of A Aiichirou

This marks a little blog milestone, as it's the hundredth post. Oddly exactly half those posts are in 2013 and half in 2014. Since I only started the blog towards the end of June 2013, my posting in this year has been unimpressive. I'll try and do a bit better next year; but I don't expect to get up to two hundred posts any time soon.

Because the way that Japanese names are converted in European languages can be a bit variable, the first time I mention a name in a post, I mostly try to make clear what part is family name and what part is given name by using the convention of putting the name in Japanese order and putting all letters of the family name in capitals, for instance YOKOMIZO Seishi (generally referred to in English as Seishi Yokomizo). It turns out that there are names where that doesn't help. So let me just say in advance that the family name of the detective in the stories I'm reviewing here is A (亜), and the given name is Aiichirou (愛一郎).

AWASAKA Tsumao (泡坂妻夫) started his career with an A Aiichirou story, one of eight published in magazine form from 1976 to 1977, that were then collected in 亜愛一郎の狼狽 (A Aiichirou no roubai, The Confusion of A Aiichirou, 1978). They are pretty well known among lovers of traditional mysteries in Japan, often compared to the Father Brown stories of G.K. Chesterton. Let me say in advance, they are not nearly as good as the Father Brown stories. I say that, just so that you can have a chance of approaching them without too high expectations; and if you can read Japanese, you should try these, as they make a thoroughly entertaining collection of unusual mysteries. (It is the first of three collections: you can read Ho-Ling's discussions of all three here.)

The hero A is a photographer, specialising in taking photographs of clouds and insects and other natural objects of little interest to most people. At first glance he makes a good impression, as he has movie star good looks and is dressed smartly and with good taste. This impression does not survive long in his company: he is nervous, clumsy and socially awkward. But then his unusual way of looking at things leads him to deductions that those around him could not imagine. This sounds a little forced, as if someone had taken the convention "unimpressive character proves to be brilliant detective" and mechanically added an extra stage "impressive looking character proves to be unimpressive, but then proves to be brilliant detective"; but A's slightly unusual way of looking at things makes a character that goes beyond the summary traits.

The stories generally follow a pattern. The narration is in the third person, but follows the viewpoint of one character. Along with the events that make up the mystery this observer at some point comes into contact with A, and as mentioned is first impressed by his looks, then astonished by his clumsiness, then amazed by his deductions. A's deductions often go so far, that he discovers a crime before we are aware that there is a mystery, or at least before we know that the mystery involves more than a "puzzle of everyday life". Examples of this are the first story, "The Flight DL2 Incident", "The Warped Apartment" and "The Black Mist". In the last, for instance, the puzzle is why someone would engineer an accident that covers a street with carbon dust. Most of the story is a farce, with the shopkeepers on the street losing their tempers with each other. Only A spots that there is something more sinister behind it. Like Ho-Ling, I doubt that a reader could legitimately make the deduction; but it is still a very satisfying mystery. Others involve impossible crimes, a man shot while alone in a balloon that was being observed for the whole period of its flight ("The Skies over Right Arm Mountain"), a village chief on a tropical island found shot dead in a hut observed by the other villagers, the only person with him being his dead wife, who holds the gun ("The God of Horobo"), a mugger found murdered in a car with no footprints leading away through the snow except those of the taxi driver who fled while the mugger was still alive ("Weasel on Road G"), a man in a golden mask shot while standing on the outstretched hand of a giant Buddhist statue with a gun too inaccurate to have a chance of hitting him ("The Golden Mask in the Palm of a Hand"). The last of these is my favourite of the impossible crimes, with ingenious ideas and a good use of A's unusual style of thinking, which often involves imagining himself in the place of others. "The Excavated Fairy Tale" belongs more to the first group, with a writer's odd insistence on retaining misspelling in a fairy tale leading to the discovery of a crime: the route in this case, unsurprisingly, is via code breaking (with an idea quite close to the last code breaking story I read). The storytelling takes a different approach here: the viewpoint character is now an acquaintance of A, and in competition to discover the secret ends up handcuffing A to keep him from getting ahead.

The style of the stories is quite interesting: they seem to be deliberately loosely constructed. You should not expect a single minded concentration on the mystery. Most are humorous, some concentrate on a narrative whose relevance to the actual mystery may prove at best tangential. This makes it easy for Awasaka to introduce his clues, of course; but reading them does not feel like the writer is wasting our time. The experience is more of an agreeable lack of focus.

Boy Science Detective: The Riddle of the Beard

[You may want to check the warning on this blog's translations.] 

Another translation: this is the third Boy Science Detective story by KOSAKAI Fuboku. Previously we had:

• Preface (and general introduction)
• 1. The Scarlet Diamond
• 2. A Fight in the Dark 

This one doesn't give away the endings to the previous stories, so you don't need to have read them to read this. The first story introduces the main character, boy genius Toshio Tsukahara and his bodyguard/assistant Ono. Toshio has a private laboratory and office a few streets away from his rich parents' house. The stories first appeared in a children's science magazine; and Toshio's investigations always involve a Dr Thorndyke style scientific element.

The puzzle in this one is quite well done, I think (although as always the culprit is fairly obvious). The story is also a spy story, and has a not very sympathetic MacGuffin in the national secret of a poison gas formula. At the time of the story, Japan had a small empire (the result of Meiji period militarism) and was a not very stable democracy, which had to struggle with the kind of militarism that would so disastrously come to dominate a few years later.

The story was first published from June to August 1925 in 子供の科学 (kodomo no kagaku, Children's Science), then collected in book form in 1926.

As always, I've put the translated story (whose Japanese original you can read online at Aozora Bunko here) after the break. Explanatory footnotes look like this[1] in the text; but you'll have to scroll to the end of the file to find them.

The Murder at Clock House

I reviewed a novel by IMAMURA Aya (今邑彩) earlier, The Murder at the Broom House (1993). The book I've just been reading, 時鐘館の殺人 (Tokeikan no satsujin, The Murder at Clock House, 1993), is a collection of short stories by the same writer. There are six short stories of varying length. The longest is the title story at ninety pages. Most of the stories are traditional detective stories (more or less), but some are suspense or horror.

The first, 'The Living Dead Murder', features the murder of a writer in his house in Karuizawa. The murderer is also known, a woman with whom he previously had an affair. She too is dead, murdered by her victim and her corpse is sitting in the house. The puzzle is that she died long before he did; and after her known time of death various witnesses had seen her leaving her Tokyo mansion and arriving at the Karuizawa house. The author had fled his attacker and locked himself in the toilet, writing a dying message "Living corpse" on the walls. In the bar "The Living Dead" two crime writers sit discussing the case, watched by the surly and sceptical 'mama' (female barkeeper). I have mixed feelings about this one. It has a lot of ingenious ideas in it, but some of them undermine each other, so that as a puzzle story it could have been far better. Still it's a very clever and playful piece of narrative.

The next, 'Black/White Reversal', takes its metaphor from the game Reversi or Othello, which various characters play in the story. Students from a film history club visit a reclusive old woman and her sister. Both had been actresses, the older one a successful movie star, who retired early after the director who worked most with her had died in a car accident. While visiting, one of the students is murdered. The central trick here is probably rather obvious; and the atmosphere comes to less than one might expect.

'The Murder Next Door' is a suspense story with a twist that you will spot about three pages in.

'That Child, Who is it?' is a ghost story of sorts, the kind of ghost story you might expect a puzzle writer to make, and quite effective (more sad than scary).

'Lover' is a short horror story, and a really horrible one, set in the world of young people living isolated lives in apartment buildings. A failed student studying for entrance exams and working part time is too lazy to put a personalised message on his answering machine. Coming home late at night, he gets a message from a  desperate woman who thinks she is talking to her lover, who evidently left her a false contact number when he left her. Since the student doesn't know who or where she is, he leaves it at that; but the calls keep coming.

The last longest story, 'The Murder at Clock House', has distinct similarities to the first story, making a kind of ring composition. Both make play with the writing of detective stories. In this case, the story is framed by Imamura's account of the editor of a magazine commissioning her to write a "spot the culprit" story for their magazine competition. In a boarding house whose clock loving owner has working clocks all keeping their own private time throught the building, a detective story writer mysteriously goes missing, leaving a note that he can't face his editor who is calling that night. The next day, a snowman is standing in the garden, roughly made, except for the lifelike arms sticking out of the snow. The framing elements are more satisfactory than the actual story to my mind, as the chains of argument in the internal story uses premises and arguments that are hard to accept.

Here and in the novel I wrote about earlier, Imamura seems reliably able to reach a certain level of skill, so the stories are always worth reading; but they also leave some disappointment - the wish to see a better use of the capacity for invention that is so clearly there.

Boy Science Detective: A Fight in the Dark

[You may want to check the warning on this blog's translations.]

Another translation from the Boy Science Detective stories by KOSAKAI Fuboku. Previously we had:

• Preface (and general introduction)
• 1. The Scarlet Diamond

 暗夜の格闘 (anya no kakutou, 'A Fight in the Dark') is the second Boy Science Detective story, featuring twelve year old Toshio Tsukahara and his bodyguard and assistant Oono (whom Toshio addresses as niisan, older brother). It was published serially from March to May 1925 in 子供の科学 (kodomo no kagaku, Children’s Science). The work is in the public domain in Japan and Europe (and probably America, but I don't know the rules there). You can read the original at Aozora Bunko, here. The story does give away the (very obvious) culprit in the previous story. So you might want to read 'The Scarlet Diamond' first, if you care about that.

Footnotes look like this[1] and you'll have to scroll down to the end of the story to find the annotation they're pointing to (or search for "footnotes").

As always, I've put the translation after the break: so click through for the actual story.