The Final Curtain by Keigo Higashino

Published in Japan in 2014; published in translation by ‎ Minotaur Books on December 12, 2023

In The Final Curtain, the play’s the thing. The play in question, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, was first performed in Japan in 1703. Saying that it holds the key to the mystery probably won’t spoil anything for American readers, although it might provide a clue to readers who are more familiar than I am with the history of Japanese theater. In any event, the mystery extends well beyond the play.

Keigo Higashino is the current master of Japanese mystery novels. His plots are intricate but credible. Embedded in the plot of The Final Curtain are troubled relationships between a father and daughter and between a mother and son. As is often the case, the affected children are too young to understand the difficult lives of their parents.

The novel begins with the story of Yuriko Tajima, a woman who finds a job in a small-town bar and stays there for years. She confides to the bar’s owner that she failed as a wife and mother. Perhaps she has found her niche as a waitress/hostess.

Yuriko befriends a customer named Shunichi Watabe. The nature of their relationship is a bit of a mystery to the bar’s owner. When Yuriko is found dead in her apartment, the authorities decide she had a heart attack. Her employer takes possession of her ashes. Watabe gives the bar owner the information she needs to track down Yuriko’s son, to whom the ashes rightly belong. Her son turns out to be Kyoichiro Kaga, the police detective who stars in a series of novels. The Final Curtain is the most recent, both in the original series and in translation.

Kaga isn’t much interested in the mother who walked out on him, but he is dutiful and so agrees to pick up the ashes. When he goes through his mother’s possessions, he finds a note that lists twelve Tokyo bridges, each written next to a month of the year. He doesn’t think much about it. Life moves on.

About ten years later, a woman’s body is found in a Tokyo apartment. Michiko Oshitani was strangled to death. Neither the cleaning company that employed her nor her parents know why she came to Tokyo. The apartment’s tenant, Matsuo Koshikawa, has gone missing.

Detective Shuhei Matsumiya is tasked with investigating the murder. He wonders if the murder is linked to the murder of a man who died by strangulation before his body was set on fire. The murders took place a few kilometers apart but within days of each other.

Michiko managed client relations for her employer. Matsumiya decides to interview all the businesses where Michiko had recent contacts before she traveled to Tokyo. At a retirement home, Matsumiya learns that Michiko believed she recognized an older resident as the mother of Hiromi Asai. The woman insisted that Michiko was wrong, but Hiromi lives in Tokyo, which might have given Michiko a reason to travel there.

Hiromi Asai seems to have had a tragic life. Her mother, Atsuko, felt deceived by the matchmaker who set her up with Tadao Asai. Atsuko remedied the bad marriage by walking away from her family while Hiromi was still in junior high school. As Matsumiya follows the trail of clues, he learns that Tadao jumped from a tall building, leaving Hiromi to be raised in an orphanage. Yet Hiromi Asai went on to become Hiromi Kadokura, an actress and a successful theater director in Tokyo.

When Matsumiya relates all of this to Kaga, who happens to be his cousin, he mentions a calendar on the wall of Koshikawa’s apartment. On each month, someone had written the same of a bridge. Kaga realizes the bridges and months match the note he found in his mother’s possessions.

From those roots, the mystery blossoms. It is a story of assumed identities, missing persons, and a dubious relationship between a teacher and student. Kaga is forced to confront and reconsider unpleasant memories of his childhood as he learns the truth about Michiko’s decision to leave her husband.

Kaga methodically assembles clues as he pieces together the relationship between the two strangulation victims and his mother’s possession of a list of bridges. As is customary in Japanese mysteries, the eventual solution to each puzzle makes sense. And unlike too many American crime novels, Higashino’s plot does not depend on an abundance of unlikely coincidences.

Kaga’s troubled childhood has been a collateral issue in earlier novels. This one brings the issue into focus while helping Kaga come to terms with it. Higashino always makes the drama of human existence important to the story without allowing it to overshadow the mystery. Crime novel fans who prefer the purity of a murder mystery to mindless action and shootouts might want to fill their shelves with Higashino’s novels.

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The Tatami Galaxy by Tomihiko Morimi

First published in Japan in 2008; published in translation by HarperVia on December 6, 2022

This thoroughly odd novel was apparently a hit in Japan, where it was adapted as an anime television miniseries (because Japan). I watched the trailer on YouTube and it’s, um, colorful? Anime rarely speaks to me, but different strokes.

The book was apparently followed by a “spiritual successor” and an actual sequel. The sequel also became an anime miniseries in Japan that has apparently been released in the US on Disney+ or Hulu. (I glean this information from Wikipedia so take it with a grain of salt.) The sequel (Tatami Time Machine) will be published in translation in 2023. I think I’ll give it a pass.

The novel is set in four parallel universes. It tells, at times, a somewhat interesting story. It is typical in a novel of this sort to illustrate how a life might be different if a person makes different choices. Tomihiko Morimi eschews the typical by imaging a character who makes similar mistakes and encounters similar misery in every life he lives. The story is, at times, so absurdist or surreal that it might have been inspired by Borges.

The unnamed narrator is a college student who, in each universe, is beginning his junior year, having accomplished nothing during his first two years. He is pretty much the same guy in each reality. He consistently lives in a four-and-a-half tatami room and he always has a porn collection. Ozu is always his friend and a man Ozu calls “Master” always lives above him. He always reads Jules Verne. Some passages, including his description of the regret he feels for wasting his first two years at the university, are repeated verbatim in each section.

The stories diverge in other details. In each universe, he flashes back to his first year in college, when he examined flyers for student clubs and, although they all seemed “pretty shady,” chose one he would later abandon. He makes a different choice in each universe. The first is a film club called Ablutions. In the second universe, he becomes a disciple of Master Higuchi (although for two years, the narrator is not sure what kind of disciple he was).  The third is the Mellow Softball Club. In the last universe, the narrator joins an underground organization, Lucky Cat Chinese Food, and more particularly, the Library Police, a suborganization that has taken on the life of an intelligent organization.

The narrator sees the clubs as opportunities to expand his nonexistent social contacts. The narrator has limited social skills, which might explain why he ends up making friends only with Ozu, a troublemaker who might or might not be a good companion. In the third universe, he practices conversation with Ozu’s love doll; in the fourth, a plot is afoot to kidnap the doll. In the first, the narrator calls himself the Obstructor of Romance because of his unsuccessful love life. A mysterious fellow “who dared call himself a god” is apparently trying to decide whether to play cupid with the narrator or his friend Ozu. The god is not clear that either of them are worthy of Akashi, a judgmental engineering student who (in some universes, at least) makes a “positive impression” on the narrator.

The god tells the narrator that he ties and unties the red threads of destiny each year. That’s quite a job, but the god seems to tie and untie them in nearly the same way in each universe. While the details vary, the narrator’s life always begins with hope and seems to end with a feeling of lost opportunities. In repeated universes, a fortune teller advises the narrator to seize chances. He finds it difficult to heed that advice. He knows he should ditch Ozu, who is something of an albatross, and pursue paths to happiness — perhaps Akashi — but the narrator is incapable of overcoming his social ineptness. Even moths are better at socializing than the narrator.

The last section creates a source of hope in a bleak story. The narrator finds himself in a labyrinth (hence the Borges comparison) consisting of endless four-and-a-half tatami rooms. The contents are not always identical (Ozu’s love doll appears from time to time) and some might come from one of the other realities, but the food supply (fish burgers and sponge cake) is always the same. The narrator makes infinite decisions during the 80 days he spends wandering through the rooms, creating the possibility of infinite fates, but his fate always seems to be another four-and-a-half tatami room. In the end, an escape changes the narrator’s life, but he won’t talk about that drivel because (as he observed in another reality), “There’s nothing so worthless to speak of as a love mature.”

I’m not sure what to make of The Tatami Galaxy. The novel alternates between being engaging and boring. The narrator is frustrating in his incapacity for change until he changes. The idea of living a life in alternate realities is a clever variation on the venerable time loop story, but the final journey through a labyrinth piles fantasy on top of fantasy and distracts from the story’s point, assuming Morimi had one. Maybe I need to watch the anime miniseries to make sense of it all, but lacking the motivation to do that, I’ll leave it to readers to form their own conclusions.

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Silent Parade by Keigo Higashino

Published in Japan in 2018; published in translation by Minotaur Books on December 14, 2021

American mysteries tend to feature outlandish plots or brilliant but unrealistic forensic scientists or tough guys who solve the mysteries with their fighting skills or self-aggrandizing protagonists who can’t stop reminding the reader how much they care about victims. The age of clever but plausible plots and deduction that doesn’t depend on CSI gadgetry has largely passed. Fortunately, readers who enjoy the challenge of puzzling out the solution to a complex mystery can turn to Japanese mystery writers. Whodunit and how’d-he-do-it plots are plentiful in Japan, where fictional detectives use their wits rather than their weapons or crime labs to solve mysteries.

Saori Namiki is a teenager working as a waitress in her parents’ restaurant when she begins taking voice lessons from Naoki Niikura. His wife Rumi encourages Saori to pursue a career in music. Saori sees the appeal of pursuing stardom, but she also enjoys being pursued by one of the restaurant’s customers, Tomoya Takagaki.

Saori disappears one evening without explanation. Three years later, a house burns to the ground. Saori’s body is discovered in the rubble. The body of the old woman who owns the house is also discovered, but she died years before Saori, who died soon after she disappeared.

The old woman’s son, Kanichi Hasunuma, was a customer at the Namiki restaurant who took an unwholesome interest in Saori. Hasunuma’s ties to the house and to Saori make him the prime murder suspect. Two decades earlier, Hasunuma was suspected of killing a 12-year-old girl. Despite abundant circumstantial evidence, Hasunuma resisted the cultural urge to confess, having learned from his cop father that convictions are difficult to win without the suspect’s confession. True to his father’s teachings, Hasunuma avoided a conviction and even received compensation for his detention.

The investigation of Saori’s murder is led by Detective Chief Inspector Kusanagi of the Toykyo Metropolitan Police. Kusanagi was a young detective when he worked on the first case against Hasunuma. Kusanagi hopes he can bring Hasunuma to justice this time. The novel’s true star, however, is Kusanagi’s college friend, Professor Manabu Yukawa, a/k/a Professor Galileo, a character who first appeared in The Devotion of Suspect X and has solved crimes in three other novels, including Silent Parade.

While Saori’s death is the novel’s initial focus, the fun starts with Hasunuma’s death. Was he murdered? If so, how? He appears to have died from natural causes, but Yukawa isn’t so sure. If he was killed, how did it happen? Yukawa propounds one hypothesis after another. Kusanagi dutifully sends officers to look for evidence that confirms or refutes the evolving theory. Many of the obvious suspects have an alibi involving a parade, complete with helium balloons, that the entire community attended.

Once the police settle on a likely means of Hasunuma's death, the mystery requires the killer to be identified. Revenge is the obvious motive, but Saori was beloved by her family, their friends, her lover, and pretty much the entire neighborhood. Just when it seems that the police have identified a killer, Yukawa mentions a fact that isn’t consistent with their theory and forces the investigation to reboot. By the novel’s end, everything the police (and reader) think they know is cast into doubt. The truth is out there, but like any good scientist, Yukawa knows that the truth is found by accounting for every fact rather than jumping to conclusions that are consistent with only some of the facts.

Keigo Higashino’s complex plots are among the best in modern mysteries. Nearly every character in Silent Parade, apart from Yukawa and the cops, is a potential suspect. Higashino gives each character, from Hasunuma to Saori to the various suspects, a sufficiently detailed background to explain why they behave as they do. The unfailing politeness of everyone except Hasunuma makes Silent Parade a relaxing departure from American crime fiction. Mystery fans who appreciate a challenge should appreciate Higashino's work.

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Bullet Train by Kotaro Isaka

First published in Japan in 2010; published in translation by Overlook Press on August 3, 2021

Kotaro Isaka brings a playful sensibility to crime fiction. Bullet Train follows a number of murderous characters through a complex plot, but Isaka balances the grimness of crime with the amusing oddities of human behavior.

As the title suggests, the story takes place on a train. Two passengers, Lemon and Tangerine, were hired to recover the kidnapped son of crime boss Yoshio Minegishi. Their second and third priorities were to recover the ransom money and to kill the kidnappers. They board the train with the son, having accomplished all three objectives. Unfortunately for them, little time passes before the son dies of an unknown cause. To compound their trouble, a fellow named Nanao has been hired to steal the suitcase full of ransom money. He snatches the bag, but his lifetime of bad luck makes it impossible to disembark with the bag before someone else takes it.

The novel’s other key element involves an eleven-year-old boy named Satoshi “The Prince” Oji. A personification of evil, the Prince has mastered the art of manipulating adults and other kids to do his bidding. Killing and torture are not an issue for the Prince, although he typically forces others to do his killing for him. Yuichi Kimura boards the train to kill the Prince because Kimura believes that the Prince is responsible for his six-year-old son’s fall from a building and the son’s ensuing coma. Kimura quickly becomes the Prince’s captive.

The train is largely empty as it journeys from stop to stop. Most of the passengers are killers. They are familiar with each other by reputation, including two late arrivals who had retired from the game before circumstances compel them to prove that their senior status hasn’t slowed their wits or determination.

The rising body count assures that the plot moves as quickly as the train. While the plot is fun, the novel’s characters account for much of the reading pleasure. Nanao is certain that he travels under a cloud of bad luck. Kimura has been trying to recover from alcoholism since his son’s fall and blames himself for his son’s fate, in part because Kimura’s father regards him as worthless. Lemon is obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine while Tangerine is a serious reader of fiction. The Prince asks nearly everyone he meets why it is wrong to commit murder and is never satisfied with their answers. Only the grandfather who appears near the novel’s end delivers a thoughtful answer to the question.

Who killed Minegishi’s son? Who hired Nanao to steal the bag of money and why? Can any of the adults outsmart the eleven-year-old Prince? Bullet Train eventually provides satisfactory answers to all those questions. Mystery and crime novel fans should enjoy the clever plot, but the quirky characters make Bullet Train stand apart from the self-impressed heros and cartoon villains who populate crime novels that readers in the West usually encounter.

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A Man by Keiichiro Hirano

Published in Japan in 2018; published in translation by Amazon Crossing on June 1, 2020

A Man is a story of people who have changed their identities. The prologue tells us that the author is recounting a story told in a bar by a man who identified himself as Akira Kido before confessing that the name belongs to someone else. Kido told the author that he keeps himself together “by living other people’s pain.” Kido claims to achieve honesty through lies, something that all writers of fiction should strive to accomplish.

The author tells us that Kido told a story of becoming obsessed with the life of a man, but it is Kido, “when viewed from behind as he chases this man,” who the story is about. The author sensed something in Kido that “needed to be seen.” What that might have been is left for the reader to decide.

The man with whom Kido becomes obsessed was known for part of his life as Daisuké Taniguchi. Until his accidental death, he was married to a woman named Rié. Rié had two sons with her first husband. After the younger son died, Rié’s husband divorced her. After Rié’s father died, Rié returned to her hometown with her son Yuto. She met Daisuké, who explained that his father had also died, but not until family friction was caused by Daisuké’s reluctance to be a liver transplant donor for his father. Rié and Daisuké had a girl named Hana, but Daisuké died after less than four years of marriage.

The story begins after Daisuké’s death, when Rié makes contact with Daisuké’s family for the first time. When she notifies his brother Kyoichi of Daisuké’s death, Kyoichi visits Rié and delivers the startling news that Rié’s husband was not his brother. While Kyoichi indeed had a brother named Daisuké, the man who was married to Rié is not Daisuké. Kyoichi’s brother found it better to run away from home than to live with the impossible expectations of an overbearing father. The life story Rié’s husband told her is Daisuké’s story, not his own.

Rié takes this news to her divorce attorney, who happens to be Kido. The story then follows Kido as he attempts to discover Daisuké’s true identity and the reason he concealed it from Rié. The answers he finds give closure to Rié and Yuko, as well as the opportunity to repair the difficult relationship between a mother and teenage son. In a way, ending his obsessive quest also brings Kido a sense of closure.

This is a novel about the lives of people who want to begin anew. Adopting a new identity, or trading identities, seems to be the preferred mechanism in Japan of abandoning an old life and making a new one. Kido, at least, finds multiple examples of the practice that complicate his investigation. Kido’s exploration of troubled lives brings him into contact with stories of violence and despair, but also prompts a potential reunification of a lost soul and the woman he has never forgotten.

Kido tells us of his own life and his interest in heritage, stemming from his Korean ancestry. He is a third generation Zainichi, although he only recently started to understand the discrimination that Zainichi have faced in Japanese culture. An increase in Japanese nationalism and xenophobia has unsettled Kido. Exploring other families makes Kido wonder about his own roots in Korea. It also amplifies his feeling of being isolated in the world.

The theme of loneliness pervades the novel. It is central to Kido’s life, “a bottomless, middle-aged kind of loneliness that he never could have conceived when he was younger, a loneliness that saturated him with bone-chilling sentimentality the moment he let down his guard.” Rié senses Kido’s loneliness but wonders if she is only seeing a reflection of her own “intense loneliness of middle age.” She always thought her second husband was the best man she had ever known and cannot understand why he deceived her about his very identity, leaving her with memories of a life together that no longer feel authentic.

A Man is more than a mystery novel. In addition to nationalism, the novel considers the role of the death penalty in Japanese society. One of the lives Kido explores belongs to a man who was raised by a violent father and in turn became a violent husband and parent. That man eventually murdered his employer’s family. When he was executed, the judicial system made no effort to examine the childhood that shaped him. Kido views the judiciary as covering up the mistakes of other branches of government that failed Japan and its citizens by allowing the killer to be raised in an atmosphere of violence. Kido believes that wiping out the evidence of society’s failure is destined to create an ever-growing number of citizens who will need to be executed.

Apart from its social relevance, the plot investigates questions of identity. Perhaps pretending to be someone new can transform the pretender into someone who is truly new. Adopting a different identity is an extreme way to change a life, but Keiichiro Hirano seems to suggest that unsatisfactory lives can, at least, be changed. Perhaps the person who tells the story to the author, the person who claims to be using the name Kiro, has internalized that lesson. In any event, Hirano gives the reader much to ponder while working through this intriguing mystery.

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