Like a Destroying Angel

"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them."

- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

From all the Japanese mystery writers who clambered over the language barrier, Keigo Higashino appears to be one of the few who actually met with success and popularity on the other side.

A translation of an award winning and somewhat controversial novel, Yogisha X no kenshin (The Devotion of Suspect X, 2005), was published in 2011, which collected favorable reactions across the board – from readers of contemporary thrillers to fans of the traditional mystery novel. A translation of Akui (Malice, 1996) came out last year and a fourth translation is scheduled for 2016, but the second release has been languishing on my to-be-read pile ever since its release in 2012.

Seijo no Kyusai (Salvation of a Saint, 2008) is the second, novel-length entry in the Detective Galileo series and has a plot that frames an impossible poisoning as an inverted mystery, which occasionally channeled the spirit of Agatha Christie. There's even an eternal triangle at the core of the plot.

Yoshitaka Mashiba has one, fiery wish: to find a wife and have children. That's why Yoshitaka’s marriage to Ayane is made under the condition that she had to be pregnant within a year or he would divorce her. After nearly a year, it becomes obvious to Yoshitaka that the deadline won't be met and began to court Hiromi Wakayama. One of Ayane's students from quilting school. 

As the saying goes, "hell has no fury like a woman scorned." Ayane puts this piece of proverbial wisdom into practice by poisoning her husband, but the reader isn't show how she managed to spike the coffee with arsenous acid (i.e. arsenic) – while being miles away and surrounded by witnesses, that is. 

The initial investigation is for Police-Detective Kusanagi and his assistant, Koaru Utsumi, who go over the crime-scene and statements with a fine toothcomb, which makes for a pleasant police procedural reminiscent of Ten to Sen (Points and Lines, 1958) by Seicho Matsomoto. 

The police investigation focused mainly on how the coffee could've been poisoned, but every attempt at separating the essential facts from the side issues showed how frustrating a simple, straightforward looking poisoning can be. It's a complex and impossibly constructed house of cards, but its construction was as fun to watch as its destruction at the hands of Detective Galileo. 

Detective Galileo is the nickname of Manabu Yukawa, assistant professor of physics, who made his scientific mind available to Kusanagi in previous investigations, but it's Utsumi contacting the physicist – convinced Ayane used a trick to cover her tracks. As Yukawa observes, "criminal tricks are different from magic tricks," because the audience of a magician never has an opportunity to examine the stage where the illusions took place. However, "with a criminal trick, investigators can pore over every detail of the crime scene until they’re satisfied." Some trace always remains. 

Yukawa provides a delightful, false solution involving a time-delayed trick to release poison in a water kettle, but some readers will have a problem with swallowing down the final explanation. 

The explanation for the poisoning is as clever as it's original. The clues that were embedded in the characterization made it feel inevitable and I would place it in the same league as Ronald Knox's "Solved by Inspection," collected in The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories (1990), but I would actually understand the people who would dismiss it on grounds of being unrealistic – because even I was there for a moment. 

However, the final chapters translated to a convincing argument for the reader to suspend their disbelief and I went along with it... willingly. 

What more can I say? Salvation of a Saint is a first-rate example of what the genre can produce when stories aren't dismissed for having something as vulgar as a plot. While Higashino's work is modern in appearance, it's the plotting that makes him closer to Western mystery writers of the past than from the present, but hey, lets not flog that horse again. Not now anyway. 

On a final note, the book slated for release next year is Manatsu no Hoteishiki (Midsummer’s Equation, 2011), but there's already a Dutch translation available. So I just might go for that edition instead of waiting for the English release in 2016 and reading it somewhere in 2019.

With Malicious Intent

"Either there was no motive at all like in those crazy kind of murders that you read about in the newspaper. Or there was a very good motive, one that makes terrific sense. And that's what keeps going around in my mind--motive."

- Lt. Columbo (Make Me a Perfect Murder, 1978)

I've noticed something inexplicable about the reviews I tagged over the years with the "Foreign Mysteries" label in that, logically, only the blog posts reviewing Dutch-language detective stories should've escaped being labeled as such, but they're categorized as foreign mysteries as well! I seem to have tagged everything that wasn't written and published in England or the United States as being from abroad. Hobby deformation, it seriously alters the mind.

Well, there's no ambiguity on whether or not the label belongs on the work of Keigo Higashino, who made his debut with a Western reading audience in 2011 with a translation of the award-winning Yogisha X no kenshin (The Devotion of Suspect X, 2005), which got a positive reception. The success was followed up with a translation of Seijo no kyusai (Salvation of a Saint, 2008) in 2012 and an English edition of Akui (Malice, 1996) was released this year.

I wanted to read Salvation of a Saint before Malice, but the synopsis of the later captured my attention: "...body is found in his office, a locked room, within his locked house, by his wife and best friend, both of whom have rock solid alibis. Or so it seems." Unfortunately, Malice is not an impossible crime story, but therefore not any less ingenious and enjoyable as it toys around with narratives and the readers' expectations – in what even the respectable looking book cover describes as "A Mystery" instead of "A Novel."

The Devotion of Suspect X and Salvation of a Saint both featured, by now, Keigo Higashino's best known series character, a professor of physics with the nickname "Detective Galileo," but Malice is from the much older Police Detective Kaga series – which began with the for now untranslated Sutsogyo (Graduation, 1986). Malice is split up in "notes" and "accounts," from Kyoichiro Kaga and Osamu Nonoguchi, regarding the violent death of a popular novelist, Kunihiko Hidaka.

Hidaka recently remarried, after being widowed, with the much younger Rie and they're about to move to Vancouver, Canada, but on the evening before their departure, while working on the conclusion of his latest story, Hidaka is murdered in his home office – rendered indefensible with a paperweight and finished off with a phone cord. The front door and door to the office were locked, however, there was an unfastened window. So, yeah, it's not a locked room mystery. Moving on: Hidaka was discovered by Rie and Nonoguichi, who was best friends with the deceased, writer of children's fiction and a former colleague of Kaga. They were briefly teachers at the same high school, before Kaga left to become a policeman and Nonoguichi began a career as a writer. The events leading up to the murder, its discovery and the meeting with Kaga were recorded by Nonoguichi, but the next chapter gives Kaga's view of the events and it puts Nonoguichi's account in a completely different light.

It's the second chapter where the fun of Malice really begins, because Kaga has grabbed the tail end of the truth, while the lion's share of it remains elusive, but, for an inverted whydunit, the story was grounded in the proper detective work of a whodunit. Essentially, Detective Kaga and Nonoguichi are locked in a cat-and-mouse game, but the narratives were meticulous picked apart by demolishing an alibi, correctly interpreting the meaning of a bright computer screen in a dark room, a single cigarette butt in the ashtray of a chain smoker and a stack of handwritten, spiral-bound manuscripts – among other such clues.

I was (somehow) reminded (perhaps by the sober policework) of a short story, entitled "The Shoe," by Chinese Golden Age mystery writer Cheng Xiaoqing, collected in Sherlock in Shanghai: Stories of Crime and Detection (2006), but with the same effect of indecisiveness on the reader as Paul Halter created in La Septième Hypothèse (The Seventh Hypothesis, 1991) by pitting two narratives against each other. What I really appreciated is how Higashino, effortlessly, can present his stories as modern crime novels with a classic bend, without compromising either, as well as exploring the new avenues offered to good plotters by modern science and technology. The Devotion of Suspect X is a particular good counter argument against the slanderous claim that contemporary police work killed the necessity for clever plots (Pfui!). What's more, I think Malice is one of a handful of whydunits I actually like. The only other I can think of is De dertien katten (The Thirteen Cats, 1963) by A.C. Baantjer. So, yes, I enjoyed Malice.

What's even more amazing is that I read a Japanese mystery novel that Ho-Ling hasn't already read in Japanese. That means we're catching up, right? 

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

"Better a good neighbor than a distant friend."

- Dutch proverb. 

As an ardent collector of detective stories, I have to confess to an appalling trait that the preponderance of books, in my collection, has to endure after the postman drops them off. I have no problem investing time and money in order to acquire a particular novel or collection of short stories, but I have to begin flipping through its pages, as soon as it has shed its cardboard package, or it will languish on the snow capped tops of my to-be-read pile for weeks, months or even years! This was also a fate suffered by Keigo Higashino's The Devotion of Suspect X (2005), which reached the shores of the English language last year and I immediately pounced on the hardcover edition, however, it took me until now to actually read it – and only after being nudged. Not to mention that the paperback release is just around the corner!

In Japan, The Devotion of Suspect X is part of an ongoing and acclaimed detective series, in which an assistant professor of physics, Manabu Yukawa, nicknamed "Detective Galileo," abets one of his old friends, Detective Kusanagi of the Tokyo Police, in his investigations. At first glance, this structure suggests a platitudinous take on the classic amateur detective, who has to solve the cases for an unimaginative policeman, but this is not entirely the case with this book – which feels more as an upgrade than as a throwback.

The story begins, as so many do, with a man and woman, Yasuko Hanaoka and Shinji Togashi, but in this tale they separated long before the readers meets them in the opening chapters. And for good reason, too! Characters like Togashi are to the modern crime novel what the tyrannical patriarch, who had a stranglehold on the purse strings of his relative and altered his will on a whim, was to the traditional whodunit. He was a bum and a drunk, who abused and leeched off his ex-wife and stepdaughter, Misato, which, needless to say, put a strain on their marriage – and eventually Yasuko and Misato left him. However, Togashi proved to be as persistent as a tick and it took some effort to shake him off their backs, but, in the end, they were able to settle down and began reshaping their lives.

Unfortunately, for them, it takes Togashi only a year to track them down and the confrontation escalades in a scuffle, in which Yasuko and Misato kill their tormentor. Still dazed and confused over what they just did, their next-door neighbor, Ishigami, a first-rate mathematician whose heart secretly beats for Yasuko, appears, like a deus ex machina, to expel their demon once and for all. He removes the body from their apartment and constructs an alibi for them. It's a clever scheme calculated to have the delusory appearance of a common place crime, but there's an unfathomable depth to it and it would have gone without a hitch where it not that Kusanagi mentioned Ishigami's name in passing to Yukawa – one of his old friends from University.

One of the most interesting part of this novel is that Yukawa and Ishigami, from the viewpoint of the inhabitants of this story, act as (im)partial observers – while it's their minds that drive the events that everyone is a part of. Yasuko and Misato function as a proxy for Ishigami, who, in turn, has to adjust his plans when Yukawa is beginning to see through them. This makes The Devotion of Suspect X a very character-driven crime novel, but one that managed to impress me from start to finish and found myself rooting for Yasuko, Misato and Ishigami! If there ever was a bunch of conniving, but endearing, murderers who deserved to get away with murder, literarily, it's them and you almost get annoyed at Yukawa's persistent deconstruction of Ishigami's plan – which felt tantamount to destroying a beautiful piece of art work.

I guess I also have to address the controversy this book whipped up back in 2006, when it swiped the Honkaku Mystery Grand Prize for best orthodox mystery novel. Some well-known mystery critics drew question marks around this decision and wondered aloud about the veracity and fairness of the clues, which, I think, is an apparent qualification to win the prize – and I have to admit that they do have a point.

This story is an inverted mystery and the issue of fair play clueing here is a bit different than in your standard whodunit. It's not about whether the reader has been furnished with all the necessary clues and hints to have a shot at solving the case themselves, but how the detective arrived at that point. This is were you bump into the only flaw I could find in this novel: Yukawa arrives at his conclusions, which he admits to at one point in the book, intuitive rather than deductively and what's more damning is that his guesses were mostly based on 20-year-old memories of Ishigami – which I found, to be completely honest, rather ridiculous.

For example, Yukawa became suspicious of Ishigami after his old school chum made a casual remark that he was losing his hair, which prompted a memory that the Ishigami he knew, from over 20 years ago, never cared about his physical appearance and began drawing conclusions from this. Well, people change, especially after two decades, and the fact that he assisted in a murder, no matter how good his intentions are, proves that he was no longer the Ishigami that Yukawa once knew – and this is were the critics have a point. On the other hand, the final twist that was uncovered in Ishigami's plan oozed with brilliance and completely took me by surprised. It was also reasonable clued.

As a whole, The Devotion of Suspect X is worthy of the praise and recognition it has received as well as being an excellent example that a capable and clever mystery writer can construct a classically-styled, multi-layered plot in a modern-day setting – which makes this a book that can be enjoyed by both detective and thriller fans.

Fellow mystery enthusiastic, Ho-Ling, has more on Keigo Higashino on his blog – including reviews of his, as of yet, untranslated novels and adaptations. I recommend you check it out.