Silent Parade (2018) by Keigo Higashino

So, lately, I've been taking down some of the modern traditionalists from the big pile and the accumulation of newer titles left me spoiled for choice, but randomly picking Michael Slade's Crucified (2008) and Micki Browning's Beached (2018) certainly provided very different, stark contrasts of the classic detective story in a modern-day setting – which made me want to pick something very different from those two next. I had the likes of Paul Doherty, Martin Edwards, D.L. Marshall and Bill Pronzini to pick and choose from. But then noticed a name I had not given much thought over the years.

Keigo Higashino is an award-winning, international bestselling Japanese mystery writer who stood at the cradle of the current translation wave. A wave that began with the 2011 translation of Higashino's most famous novel, Yogisha X no kenshin (The Devotion of Suspect X, 2005), which won some prestigious awards in Japan and was translated into numerous languages. That success was followed by translations of Akui (Malice, 1996) and one of the boldest impossible crime novels published this century, Seijo no kyusai (Salvation of a Saint, 2008). I remember being amused with the publisher trying to present a shin honkaku writer to a Western audience by brandishing such labels as "A Novel" or "The Japanese Stieg Larsson" on their front covers, before settling on "A Mystery" or "A Detective Galileo Novel."

Just around 2015, the translation wave slowly began to pick up momentum as Locked Room International, Pushkin Vertigo and a few smaller publishers joined the fray with an ever-increasing variety of classic and modern (shin) honkaku mystery novels and short stories – ranging from Keikichi Osaka and Seishi Yokomizo to Soji Shimada and Masahiro Imamura. That was about the time I lost track of Higashino. So why not return to the Detective Galileo series during the most bountiful year for translations of Japanese mysteries. 

Chinmoku no parēdo (Silent Parade, 2018) is the fifth book to feature professor of physics, Manabu Yukawa, who earned the nickname "Detective Galileo" as an occasional consultant to his friend from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, Detective Chief Inspector Kusanagi. This case has roots going back nearly twenty years and concentrates on a small, family-run restaurant in the Kikuno shopping district. The Namiki-ya restaurant is run by Yutaro and Machiko Namiki together with their two daughters, Saori and Naoki. Everything looked bright for the Namiki family. The restaurant enjoyed a small, loyal core of regular customers "who are more like family friends" and particular Saori had all the reason to look forward to the future. Saori was embarking on a career as a professional singer under the tutelage of music impresario Naoki Niikura and his wife, Rumi. She also had a boyfriend, Tomoya Takagaki, but, one day, she simply disappeared without a trace.

Three years later, two bodies were recovered from the burned-out ruins of a so-called trash house, "a house so overflowing with junk that it becomes a local landmark and eyesore," in a small town in Shizuoka prefecture – one body is identified as "the old woman who had lived alone in the filthy house." She died of natural causes six years ago. The second body had "a caved-in skull" and a DNA test identifies it as having belonged to the aspiring singer. But why had the murderer disposed of her body all the way out in Shizuoka?

While the trail is three years old and apparently stone cold, the police quickly zeroes in on a suspect. Namely the stepson of the old woman, Kanichi Hasunuma, who twenty-three years previously got away with a pretty nasty and gruesome murder. A 12-year-old girl, Yuna Motohashi, went missing one day and her body would not be found until four years later. A hiker deep in the mountains to the West of Tokyo comes across bones that had been dismembered, chopped and buried, but evidence suggests the body had been burned first. At the time, Kusanagi was a young, promising detective recently assigned to the Homicide Division and the evidence of the burned bones brought Hasunuma into the picture. Kusanagi assumed "the sheer volume of circumstantial evidence" he had accumulated would secure a conviction, but Hasunuma "just kept his mouth shut" and escaped with a not guilty verdict. Now he pulled that trick a second time by pleading ignorance ("I can't remember"), denial ("I don't recall") or simply refuses to answer the questions ("No. I have nothing to say"). This guy is the wet dream model client of every criminal defense lawyer and the prosecutor thought the case to weak to indict him. So, once again, despite the best efforts from the police, Hasunuma appears to have gotten away with murder.

Kusanagi airs his grievances and frustration over how the case has run aground to his friend, Manabu Yukawa, because he remained silent. And, when he talked, it was to deny or evade. Ever since this chat, Yukawa began to visit Namiki-ya and became one of the regulars. All the while, a dark conspiracy is taking shape around him to get some sort of justice.

The Kikuno shopping district only claim to fame is the autumn festival and the Kikuno Story Parade, which has become a popular event with cosplayers from all over the country taking part in it. This year, the day of the parade ends with the news that Hasunuma has been found dead. Hasunuma lived in a hut and his body was found in the tiny storeroom inside it without a mark of violence on his body. I've read cover blurbs ("...stopwatch timing, locked-room murder") and reviews ("...killed in a sealed room") suggesting a good, time-honored impossible crime, but that's not the case. Yukawa uses the locked room-trick from a well-known John Dickson Carr as the foundation for a series of hypothesis how death could have been introduced into the storeroom that was locked from the outside. The chapters in which he goes over all the possible ways it could have been done is a highlight of the story, if you care about such things, which does not make for a classically-styled locked room mystery, but actually stands closer to Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode – a how-was-it-done complete with "fortuitous, ironclad alibis." The mysterious method behind Hasunuma's death and the problem posed by the circumstances somewhat recalled the central puzzle from Crofts' The End of Andrew Harrison (1938). Beside the how of the murder, Yukawa has to contend with the people closest to Saori possessing almost flawless alibis. Something the professor is "not able to ascribe all that to coincidence." Yukawa also impresses on the police the importance of finding "the hinge between the old case and the current case."

However, while the plot has all the technical and scientific know-all of John Rhode and a croft of alibis, Keigo Higashino is essentially writes altruistic, character-driven and motivated detective fiction. Now my memory of the The Devotion of Suspect X and Salvation of a Saint is a little hazy, but Silent Parade seems to be in a very similar mode of storytelling and plotting. The people in Higashino's stories tend to enter into pacts and conspire to commit murder or dispose of bodies out of love, loyalty and simply to protect or avenge people they care about. You can call them noble motives, but they can exert a heavy toll on people when tragedy strikes. And provide a powerful motive to do things most people under ordinary circumstance would never do. The how-was-it-done hook and quasi-inverted nature of the plot with a twist, or double-twist, you know is coming is like stacking scaffolds with trapdoors. So you get strong, character-driven, but technically clever and satisfying, plots giving the impression of stacking scaffolds with trapdoors on top each other to drop the final, twist revelation through. 

Silent Parade follows this pattern of the altruistic conspiracy told in a semi-inverted way, which tells the readers just enough to keep them guessing, but, while an excellent, well-crafted mystery in its own right, it does not quite measure to its two predecessors – lacking their oomph or cheek. The Devotion of Suspect X had a final twist as brilliant as any of the genre classics from yesteryear demonstrating that modern forensics is no excuse for bad, uninspired plotting, but characterization and human emotions running through the story likely made most readers root for the conspirators. Salvation of a Saint has the kind of cheek rarely seen in Western detective stories, which Higashino pulled off with some first-class characterization and a maddening amount of (ROT13) pnyz, raqhevat cngvrapr. You can find some of the latter in Silent Parade, but not to the same, memorable effect. I suppose you can partially put that down to the character of Hasunuma being comically, unnecessarily evil and brilliant at the same time ("...sounds like he's got a pretty high IQ"). I think it would have worked better had he been a bit denser and lucked his way out of trouble. While the ending has its twists and turns, it's never quite as good or memorable as the setup and previous novels promised.

That's really nitpicking. I wish the average Western crime novel had the plot competence, character depth and overall quality of Silent Parade. An excellent, intimately-crafted detective story of character that only suffers from a slight case of little brother syndrome when compared to its older, admittedly more successful siblings. Nothing that should detract from a solid piece of detective fiction. And it finally brought Higashino back to my attention. So I'll move Manatsu no hōteishiki (A Midsummer's Equation, 2011) higher up the pile and go after a copy of Kirin no tsubasa (A Death in Tokyo, 2011).

I'll probably pick another modern one next, before mixing it up again with some obscure stuff and Golden Age reprints.