a day ago
Why you should read this Japanese crime writer adored by Lee Child
Tsuneo Asai, a Japanese civil servant, discovers that his late wife was having an affair. He identifies the culprit. He stalks him onto a train. They disembark at a lonely spot, and Asai confronts the man with the facts: I know who you are, I know what you did.
The lover, suspecting Asai intends blackmail, counters with a threat of his own: how about I tell your employer that you tried to extort me? 'Now that his position was threatened,' writes Seichō Matsumoto, often dubbed the Japanese Agatha Christie, 'a powerful instinct for self preservation kicked in. And that was the motive for what happened next…'
This is the pivotal scene in 1975's A Quiet Place, translated by Louise Heal Kawai and published this month by Penguin Modern Classics. Matsumoto (1909-1992) is wildly popular in his home country, the author of more than 450 works, inspiration for countless TV shows and movies. Penguin has taken a gamble on introducing him to the UK – it seems to be paying off, perhaps as an antidote to so many 'cosy' English thrillers about gay vicars and curious pensioners. Tokyo Express, released in 2023, has enjoyed a print run of 100,000 copies. Inspector Imanishi Investigates and Suspicion followed to glowing reviews. Lee Child called Imanishi 'an absolute classic… a whole new world to explore'.
Indeed, the books are packed with lean prose and twists – three in A Quiet Place alone – yet they're also educational. If you want to understand Japan, a country that is outwardly well-ordered and inwardly a cauldron of suppressed desire, Matsumoto is a disquieting place to start.
He was born on December 21 1909 in the Kokura district of Fukuoka, Kyushu, to a family of poor merchants. An autodidact, he left school without a diploma, worked as a street vendor from the age of 13, and his first job at the Asahi Shimbun newspaper was in the advertising department, later establishing himself as a journalist and editor. After a spell as a medic during the war, the post-war depression forced him to supplement his income by travelling the country selling brooms.
In 1950, he entered a short story into a magazine contest and placed third. Encouraged by friends, he pursued his craft and, in 1952, won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for his autobiographical Story of the Kokura Journal. Matsumoto switched from literary fiction to the detective genre, popularised in Japan in the 1920s by the celebrated writer Edogawa Ranpo (if you say the name quickly enough, you'll spot that it's a transliteration of Edgar Allen Poe). The motivation was likely financial: Tokyo Express, first serialised and then released as a book in 1958, sold well over a million copies. Japan, home to one of the biggest Sherlock Holmes societies in the world, loves a good mystery.
The story of a double-suicide turns out to be anything but, and Express 's style is sparse and concise, appropriate for the land of haiku, where less articulates more. The 2023 translator, Jesse Kirkwood, explains the challenges of working with such a text: 'sentence order is the complete opposite of English, and because so much is often left unsaid, often there won't be a subject in a sentence. There'll just be a verb and your job is to work out who the subject is. If it's ambiguous, do you preserve that ambiguity, or do you have to make a call and impose your view of the novel?'
Unease permeates Matsumoto. Characters lie; the reader has to infer what's really going on. Christopher Harding, historian and author of The Japanese: A History in Twenty Lives, notes that 'one of the stand-out features of Japanese crime fiction is the idea that you can't trust other people, a deeply unnerving idea in a generally high-trust society like Japan.'
Modernity turned the country upside-down, transporting a traditional culture from the countryside to the uninhibited city, where 'you might end up living next door to anyone. In one of [Ranpo's] stories, a man poisons the person living in the apartment below him by dripping poison through the ceiling while he's asleep'. In another, a kinky burglar secretes himself into the target's house by hiding in a chair.
Whereas Ranpo was concerned with 'whodunnit', Matsumoto was drawn to 'why'. He helped invent the 'social detective story', with realistic settings and psychological depth. 'Motive, that's what interests me,' he liked to say: his characters inhabit a repressive pyramid, boss at the top, servants and sex workers at the bottom. Kirkwood sees Matsumoto as the champion of the folks in between, middle-class, middle-rank investigators 'stuck in the middle of hierarchies… they're the ones putting in all these hours of work in the hope of solving a mystery'.
TV has inured Westerners to the flawed detective (nine times out of 10, an alcoholic) yet the star of Inspector Imanishi Investigates – four and half million copies sold in Japan – is refreshingly quotidian. He writes haiku. He chain smokes. He works so hard his wife never sees him (and doesn't complain). But when a body is found on the train tracks, it's Imanishi's dedication, reluctant even to pause his investigation to have a cup of tea, that leads him to the killer. He cares. And that compassion manifests as a rebellion against the bureaucracy.
Matsutomo's heroes, notes Kirkwood, always receive a call from a higher-up 'to shut down the investigation or push something under the carpet', and their refusal to fall in line 'really resonates today with Japanese readers'. Matsumoto is a bridge from the deferential past to the more liberal present.
He's also obsessed with trains, a recurring motif that can border on parody. In Tokyo Express, guilt hinges on whether a character could have been where he claimed to be, hence vast chunks of the book involve policemen recreating rail journeys with little to do but stare out the window. The 'melancholia', argues Kirkwood, goes back to Matsumoto's days as a travelling salesman; the willingness to make these trips, 'and often come up with nothing', evokes the zen-like patience of the beat cop (not a million miles from the procedurals of Ed McBain). Some nerds tried to spot inaccuracies in Matsumoto's timetables. As his career developed, he hired researchers to stay one step ahead of the fact checkers.
In 1959's Point Zero, a woman puts her husband on a train for a business trip and he returns in a coffin. Again, a conceit familiar to us in the West; the twist is the alien social context. Their marriage was not only brief but arranged – it still happens in Japan, but is much rarer now – so the widow decides to hunt the killer of a man she knew for just a few weeks.
The spur isn't love, it's spousal duty, plus obligation to the truth. Family advises the heroine to desist. Policemen are taken aback at a woman doing their job. The killer's motivation is revealed, like Asai's, to be fear of exposure. A key character previously worked as a consort, not a big deal in a society where geishas are venerated, but her fatal mistake was to sleep with Americans. Outsiders don't appreciate how traumatic the experience of defeat in war was – marked this month by the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima – let alone the humiliation of outside occupation. Post-war reconstruction was a national effort to restore face.
If the West is a culture based upon guilt, Japan is characterised more by shame. One's value is determined by the judgment of others, so Matsumoto's protagonists internalise Japan's conservative attitudes towards race, class or gender, and their crimes become the logical extension of those prejudices. Murder as social convention: A Quiet Place 's Asai doesn't want to lose his pension, so he opts to kill his wife's lover.
'It's not hard to get a sense of [the author's] political leanings,' concludes Harding. Matsumoto was a socialist who travelled to Vietnam, at the height of the war, to work for peace. Later in his career he wrote historical novels and long-form journalism exposing the shadier practices that lay behind his nation's economic recovery.
Matsumoto died of liver cancer on August 4 1992. Kirkwood describes his feelings towards the author as 'awe' for the scale of his work and depth of knowledge. Harding highlights his social conscience, balanced by a knack for leading the 'reader down the wrong path and tripping them up when they [get] there'.
One of his editors, Yomota Takashi, authored a posthumous profile of a man who resembled Imanishi in his professional single-mindedness. Staff could be called to Matsumoto's house any hour of the day to discuss plots and character: 'He'd plop himself down on the sofa, his hair bedraggled and his kimono starting to come undone… hand me his manuscript then close his eyes and light a cigarette.'
The kimono was riddled with burns, his manuscript was composed in fountain pen, and the master would delight in Takashi's reaction to his latest, fiendish pay-off. 'His smile reminded me of a child who had been caught playing a delightful prank on the grown-up world.'
The top three Matsumoto books, ranked
3. Tokyo Express
Matsumoto's first detective novel sees detectives try to make sense of a double-suicide on a beach. The choreography of what turns out to be a particular cruel murder is ingenious; the book's sense of place evokes the dark simplicity of rainy nights in a seaside woodblock. You might find the endless train journeys wearying, but the destination is worth it.
2. A Quiet Place
Here, the middle-man hero is an anti-hero, a civil servant who finds out his dead wife was cheating on him and embarks on an obsessive quest to find the other man. It's a fine example of the precision of Matsumoto's craft: how would one track down a lover, what would you do if you met him, how would you respond if he turns nasty? The murder is inevitable, but its fall-out is dizzyingly unpredictable. The final third of the book, in which the lead tries to stay ahead of discovery, feels like a murderer vs Columbo situation. Columbo is also loved in Japan.
1. Point Zero
A personal favourite, this book reads most like a contemporary Western thriller, though the characters and their motivations are wholly Japanese: an arranged marriage, a missing husband, a murder committed to maintain social status. That the hero is a woman is significant, yet the book's feminism is never openly expressed by the characters – Matsumoto ain't woke – she just gets on with it. Around her is a society scarred by the past yet trying to pretend it is happy, burying itself in consumerism and keeping up with the Joneses. Sometimes, it feels as if Japan is a nation of Hyacinth Buckets.
A Quiet Place, translated by Louise Heal Kawai is out now via Penguin
