Review of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John Dower (1999, Penguin)

Starting with Emperor Hirohito’s broadcast to the nation to announce Japan’s surrender, Dower’s account provides a detailed account of Japan under the American occupation post-World War Two until their departure in 1952. In particular, the account focuses on the influence of the US administration on Japanese life in the immediate post-war years and its long-term effects on politics, culture and economy, covering in particular the rejigging of the political system and the introduction of democracy, the reshaping of public governance, strong censorship of the media, communications, literature and entertainment, the black market, the hardship faced by families trying to make ends meet in a country destroyed by aerial bombing and suffering the trauma of defeat, and the war crimes trials. What emerges is a fairly balanced picture told from the perspectives of the US administration and the Japanese elite and ordinary citizens, set within the wider context of a changing world order as the Cold War emerges and the Korean War starts. In particular, there is an interesting discussion of the strategy employed by the US and Japanese officials to exonerate the emperor and maintain his position, and colonialism and imperialism in Asia and the duplicity and hypocrisy in the war crimes trials. While the book is strong on the administrative and politics aspects, it pays less attention to recovery of the economy (just one chapter to bookend the history), the plight of ordinary families, and US military bases and effects on local communities. Moreover, the context leading up to the occupation is quickly sketched and scattered in the text. This is kind of inevitable – it is already a large tome and to insert these to the same level of detail would require an additional volume. Nonetheless, it is thoroughly readable, balanced and detailed overview of the period of American occupation of Japan.

Review of Zen Attitude by Sujata Massey (1998, Harper)

Rei Shimura is a Japanese-American living in Tokyo where she has started her own antiques business, hunting down pieces to order for her clients. She’s been given a commission to find a tansu – an ornate chest of drawers – from a specific period, and has a hot tip where to find the item. However, at the store she’s panicked into a bidding war and when the piece is delivered to the apartment she shares with her Scottish boyfriend she discovers not only has she overpaid, but the piece is a fake. When she returns to the store it’s shut up shop. Shortly after the shop owner is found murdered and Rei is convinced the death is linked to tansu. She starts to nose around, her amateur investigation annoying her boyfriend and his freeloading brother, the police, her original client, and those she questions. But despite various attacks on her property and herself she keeps prodding away.

Zen Attitude is the second book in the Rei Shimura series about an antiques dealer who plays amateur detective, without necessarily meaning to. Rei drifts into the investigation more to clean up a mess and save face than to solve any crime and her style of detection is the blundering outsider-insider (a mixed race Japanese-American) amateur who pokes and prods and has misadventures while hoping some useful clues will emerge and the case gets solved. All while trying to deal with a relationship in crisis as her boyfriend’s chaotic brother moves in with them. Massey tells the tale in the first person, giving some warmth and humour to the main character. The story is reasonably engaging and it trips along in a bumbling manner from one event to the next. But as it proceeds it becomes increasingly farcical, held together by a series of plot devices – forgetfulness, coincidence, fortunate blundering – many lacking credibility (the bit with the cigarette paper was particular hollow and the lack of recrimination baffling). The result was a light-hearted, whimsical tale that had a few too many holes in it.

Review of Hiroshima Boy by Naomi Hirahara (2018, Prospect Park Books)

Mas Arai was born in the US but spent his youth in Japan and was present in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb detonated. He then returned to the US only returning briefly to meet his bride. Now 86 he returns to Hiroshima with the ashes of his best friend, Haruo, travelling to a small offshore island where his friend’s sister lives in a nursing home. Not long after he arrives the ashes are stolen from his room and he discovers the body of a teenager in a bay. He recognizes the teenager as a fellow passenger on the ferry to the island and although the police are investigating the death, Mas can’t help poking about in the case while also trying to relocate his friend’s ashes.

Hiroshima Boy is the seventh and final book in the Mas Arai series. It can be read as a standalone and I’ve not read any of the other instalments. In this outing, Mas – now aged 86 – travels to Hiroshima from California to return the ashes of his best friend. Although a US citizen, Mas spent much of his childhood, including the war years, in the city, being present when it was devastated by the atomic bomb. He’s soon playing detective after his friend’s ashes are stolen from his guest room in a nursing home and he discovers the body of a teenager. Hirahara spins a quite gentle tale that pivots around these two mysteries, with Mas making a nuisance of himself as he searches for answers, befriends locals, rescues a stray cat, and takes on rowdy kids. The tale drifts along at a pleasant cadence, with the focus being as much about Mas and his journey back to the city of his youth as the mysteries. Indeed, there’s little suspense, tension or surprise, but it’s nonetheless an enjoyable, poignant read.

Review of Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace (2007, Faber and Faber)

August, 1946. The bodies of two women are discovered in Shiba Park in Tokyo. Detective Minami is assigned to investigate the death of one of the women. Like Japan itself, Minami is suffering a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. Struggling to survive on low wages, fighting political and personal battles inside the police force, dependent for drugs and supplies from a black market boss, and haunted by his mistress and atrocities committed in China, Minami struggles to retain his sanity and make progress on the case. Suspicious of everyone and scheming his own games, he ploughs on with dogged determination to solve the murder case despite the general apathy and opposition to his cause.

Tokyo Year Zero is the first book in what was to be a trilogy of books set in post-war Japan, though only two have been published. This book is set in 1946, though it seems to shuttle back-and-forth with earlier events, though this is difficult to determine at times given the fractured nature of the storytelling. The tale follows the exploits of Detective Minami as he investigates with colleagues a series of deaths into young women – indeed, it is a fictionalized account of a real serial murderer case in which ten women were raped and killed by a former imperial soldier. The story is infused with paranoia, scheming, and in-fighting as the police try to solve the case against the backdrop of a broken society and purges of officers no longer seen politically fit to serve. Minami has his own secrets to keep hidden, secrets that are destroying his mental state. Peace tries to capture this mental pressure and breakdown through the style and structuring of the text, with staccato often poetic prose, many phrases extensively repeated, and whole passages structured so as to have shortening line length down the page. While the prose did conjure up the paranoia and mental struggle, it was often grating and hard work, and the telling lacked clarity or was ambiguous in places, though I suspect that was deliberate. The result is a repetitive, fractured, messy police procedural and downfall full of visceral imagery. It’s an interesting read, but the literary pretentions did make it a struggle at times.

Review of Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama (2016, Riverrun; 2012, Japanese)

1989, a seven-year-old girl is kidnapped. The police botch the investigation and the kidnapper retrieves the ransom money and the girl is found dead. Yoshinobu Mikami was a young detective working on the Six Four case, as was his wife. 2002, Mikami has just been transferred from the Criminal Investigations to Administrative Affairs to take up the role of Press Director. It’s a bureaucratic and political role, caught between his police colleagues and demanding journalists. To add to his woes, his home life is in turmoil, his teenage daughter having run away and his wife refusing to leave the house in case she calls. The press are making his and his team’s life hell over a case in which the police are unwilling to share information, and there is clearly a major battle going on between Administrative Affairs and Criminal Investigations, the details of which he’s not privy to. Given his career to date, Mikami has split loyalties and is determined to try and discover what is underway. Then a bomb-shell lands on his desk. The police commissioner general is going to pay the prefecture a visit and he wants to meet the Six Four family. Mikami is to arrange the visit and the press coverage. Only the father is not interested, the press want his head, and the internal battle is threatening to turn into all out war. Determined not to pick sides and for his team to survive, Mikami tries to try and find out the truth about the Six Four case and act as peace-maker.

Six Four is a police procedural tale set in Japan in 2002, with flash-backs to 1989. It’s a long read (635 pages), somewhat of a slow burner, and is more akin to a multi-part television series than a two hour movie. It has a large cast of characters and focuses a lot on the internal politics between fiefdoms inside of a prefecture, particularly the battles between the press and administrative affairs, and criminal investigations and administrative affairs. The lynch-pin to the story is Mikami, a former detective who has become the press director against his wishes, and the Six Four investigation, a fourteen year old kidnapping case that the police botched leading to the death of a seven-year-old girl. The Six Four case has resurfaced and it seems as if it’s being used for internal political leverage, with Mikami trying to get to the bottom of the conspiracy as well as battle the media. The strength of the story is portrayal of institutional politics and conflict as inflected by Japanese culture, and the stoic and embattled character of Mikami. There’s a lot of moving parts, but Hideo Yokoyama keeps it all ordered. However, it did feel overly long and drawn-out at times, especially the first 150 pages, and the plot devices around the timing of events and the denouement felt forced and unlikely. Overall, though an interesting and engaging read and if you like really detailed police procedurals with a strong dose of institutional politics you’ll probably enjoy.

Review of The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino (2012, Abacus; 2005, Japanese)

Yasuko Hanaoka is a divorced, single mother. A former nightclub hostess she now works in a local takeaway where her neighbour, a high school mathematics teacher, Ishigami buys his lunch each day. One day her former husband, Togashi, turns up looking for money and threatening continued harassment. The confrontation spirals out of control, ending with mother and daughter killing Togashi. Hearing the commotion, Ishigami offers to help get rid of the body and to plot the cover-up. All Yasuko and her daughter need to do is stick to the story Ishigami creates for them when questioned by the police. Detective Kusanagi can find no holes in Yasoko’s alibi, but there is something about the case that un-nerves him and he turns to his friend, Manabu Yukawa, a university physicist, for help. Yukawa was a friend of Ishigami at university and knows him as a mathematics genius. He’s somewhat surprised that Ishigami is a high school teacher, but knows that if he is involved in the case that it will be fiendishly difficult to solve.

Set in Tokyo, The Devotion of Suspect X is a police procedural with a difference. The reader is presented with the murder at the start of the novel. Yasuko Hanaoka and her daughter murder her abusive former husband. Their neighbour, Ishigami, who is smitten with Yusuko, hears the fight and offers to help them dispose of the body and create a cover-up. A body is subsequently found, quickly identified and the police turn up at Yashuko’s door. It appears though that she has a verifiable alibi for the time of the murder and she’s sticking to pleading ignorance. The unfolding story then revolves around the police probing the alibi and trying to trace Togashi’s last movements, with the mystery essentially being whether they’ll be able to get to the truth given Ishigami’s carefully plotted cover-up. There are two unaccounted element in Ishigami’s machinations. The first is Yashuko, who takes up with an old flame in the days following the murder. The second is Ishigami’s former university friend, Manabu Yukawa, a physicist who occasionally helps the police. Yukawa knows that Ishigami is a genius. What ensues is a battle of wits based around a mathematical philosophical question: what is harder – devising an unsolvable problem or solving that problem and knowing if it is correct? A cat and mouse game evolves, with Ishigami tweaking his plan in light of unfolding events. The police, however, remain baffled. The story and characters make for interesting reading, though the tale slows to a crawl at times with only the hook of wanting to know if they’ll be caught keeping the pages turning. The patient build-up is, however, worth it. Despite having sight of all sides in the game, the pay-off for the reader is the double-twist in the denouement, the first of which is somewhat unexpected and breath-taking, despite the fact that the book is marketed heavily on its existence. It’s relatively rare to come across a twist so clever that is not a blindsiding but makes perfect sense in relation to the rest of the plot. And the ending is just perfect. Overall, an absorbing, clever tale of clever scheming; a mostly four star read elevated by a philosophical spin and a very well executed denouement.

Review of Tokyo Station by Martin Cruz Smith (2002, Pan)

December 1941. Harry Niles is living in Tokyo and running a bar. Harry is about as Japanese as an American can get having grown up in the city and attended a local school and is fluent in the language and culture. As a child he was left to fend for himself, his missionary parents travelling the country looking for souls to save. Bullied at school, he learned to look out for himself and sought sanctuary running favours at a down-at-heel theatre and living at the fringes of the underworld. Twenty years on, Harry is still running rackets and hustling to get by. As war approaches that hustle includes openly supporting the ambitions of the Japanese for a Pacific empire in order to secure passage out of the country, while also working to undermine this ambition by feeding them misinformation designed to stop them attacking the US. It’s a dangerous game as it annoys his fellow Americans, while he’s never really trusted by his hosts. Even in love he is living with his Japanese girlfriend, while also conducting an affair with the wife of a British diplomat. But the only side Harry is on is his own. Except the evidence is somewhat to the contrary. While in China in 1937 he helped run the international protection zone in Nanking and save the lives of numerous Chinese from the holocaust being wrought, and on the eve of hostilities he’s helping the German he worked with in Nanking and his Chinese bride leave the country. As he makes his own preparations, his nemesis from Nanking, Lieutenant Ishigami has arrived in the city and he wants Harry’s head.

Tokyo Station follows the raconteur, Harry Niles, in the lead up to the attack on Pearl Harbour and his attempts to leave the country before hostilities break out, while also avoiding a revenge attack of Lieutenant Ishigami, a man he humiliated four years previously in Nanking, and two agents from the Japanese ‘thought’ police. Harry is a classic anti-hero – a selfish, charismatic, seemingly amoral schemer who skirts on the edge of the underworld, but nonetheless does try to help and nudge things for the greater good, though he usually has an angle at play even when he’s helping others. The strength of the story is the characterisation, especially Harry, his Japanese girlfriend Michiko, and Ishigami, plus the use of a smattering of real-world political and military characters, the sense of place and time, and the rich descriptions of Japanese culture and history in the inter-war period and in the lead up to hostilities with the US. Smith does an excellent job of detailing the context for the plot, which while engaging and entertaining felt very much a thriller as envisaged by a screenwriter rather than being rooted in a more grounded realism. That’s no bad thing as it makes for compelling reading, though some of it felt overly-stretched in places and the ending felt a little incomplete.

Review of Parade by Shuichi Yoshida (Harvill Secker 2014, Japanese 2002)

Two young men and two young women share an apartment in Tokyo.  Koto barely ventures out into the world, waiting by the phone for her TV star boyfriend to ring.  Ryosuke attends a private college and is having an affair with his friend’s girlfriend.  Mirai manages a shop and spends her spare time either drawing illustrations or partying all night in gay bars.  Naoki works for a film distributor, is a long distance runner, and is frequently drunk.  One day Satoru, a homeless youth, turns up and moves in.  Nobody is quite sure where he came from or what he does, but he’s soon accepted as part of their world.  As they’re lives unfold, they speculate on the strange comings and goings from the apartment next door and the attacks against women in the area.

Parade is somewhat of a curious book.  It is marketed as crime fiction, with a tagline of ‘A masterpiece in tension’, yet crime is almost incidental to the story and there is practically no tension in the story or its telling.  Instead, Parade is a literary novel about alienation and estrangement in modern society; of not quite fitting in, of lacking direction and purpose, of desiring what cannot be obtained.  While the timeline is linear, each of the chapters is told from the perspective of five people sharing an apartment, each of whom has kind of drifted into living there.  Each is told in the first person, with the character reflecting on their own life – their history and ambitions, their relationships with others – and setting out their view of the world.  In this way, a wider narrative about the interactions and friendship between the five is examined, as well as Japanese society more broadly.  It was a sombre rather than tense read, a kind of literary soap opera of urban alienation which, for the most part is a thoughtful reflection on modern life.

Review of Villain by Shuichi Yoshida (Vintage, 2010; Japanese 2007)

Yoshino Ishibashi works as an insurance sales agent, lives in a company apartment, hangs around and bitches with her friends Mako and Sari, and dates men she meets on internet sites while pretending to have a rich boyfriend, Keigo.  After a night out with her girlfriends she leaves them to head to Higashi Park telling them she is going to meet Keigo, but is really going to rendezvous with Yuichi, a quite, serious young construction worker who has travelled over the sinister Mitsuse Pass, that connects Nagasaki with Fukuoka City, to meet her.  The next morning she is found dead on the Pass having been strangled, Keigo has disappeared, and the police launch a murder investigation.  They quickly unravel Yoshino’s double life, but their search for the murderer moves more slowly. 

Villain is a thoughtful and thought-provoking read that could have easily been titled ‘Victim’, since the two roles are thoroughly entwined in Yoshida’s absorbing tale of the murder of a young insurance sales agent.  The great strength of the story is its telling, characterisation, contextualisation, atmosphere and plotting.  While keeping the temporal structure linear, Yoshida tells the tale from multiple perspectives using both third and first person voices to detail the relationships between characters and their interactions.  It’s a technique that works surprisingly well, I suspect because Yoshida’s narrative has an understated style, avoiding any melodrama, and yet captures the subtleties of emotion and human relations.  He does a particularly nice job of detailing the relationships between friends and family members and their petty jealousies, awkward moments, lonely reflections, secret fantasies and encounters.  These are nicely contextualised with respect to the social relations of Japanese society.  The result is a layered, nuanced and interesting tapestry of views that thorough unsettles and blurs any notion of villain and victim, and a compelling plot that charts the aftermath of the murder and how the case unfolds to a resolution, but never from the perspective of the police.  In this sense it’s a kind of police-less procedural.  I especially like the denouement that threw up as many questions as it answered, creating closure but leaving the reader pondering the tale.  In my view an excellent piece of literary crime fiction.

Review of Shinjuku Shark by Arimasa Osawa, translated by Andrew Clare (Vertical, 2007 [1990])

Detective Samejima is a maverick and the outcast of the Shinjuku police department. Acknowledged as a brilliant investigator, Samejima is unwilling to play by the rigid rules and institutional hierarchies to progress as a career officer. The fact that he survives at all is because he knows too much about the role of the higher echelons of the force in the death of a colleague. He is known as ‘the shark’ to the local yakuza gangsters because he refuses to play by the unofficial rules that govern how the police interact with them. Working alone, he is pursuing Kizu, the maker of customized weapons. Then policemen start to be murdered. It seems to Samejima that the two cases might be related, but not to the rest of the force. He thus has two battles on his hands – tracking down a cold-blooded killer and to persuade his colleagues of the validity of his line of investigation.

Shinjuku Shark is the first novel in the bestselling Japanese crime series and winner of the Japan Mystery Writers Association Award. Over his career Arimasa Osawa has won numerous prizes and his writing has been adapted for the big and small screen. The back of the book blurb states, “Prepare for a relentless journey of suspenseful twists and turns that will leave you breathless.” Given all the plaudits I was expecting a terrific read. Unfortunately the book did not leave me in a state of suspense or breathless. The story is relatively straightforward, Samejima is a simulacrum of every maverick cop on the planet, and the writing is mostly flat and lifeless. Clearly there is something going on here. My suspicion is that Japanese probably has a different narrative and sentence structure, as well as diction, which makes translation that captures the subtleties and sophistication of writing quite difficult. As a result, perhaps the work is not necessarily shown in its best light and it’s a passable read at best.