Suspicion by Seichō Matsumoto

First published in Japan in 1982; published in translation by Random House/Modern Library on March 3, 2006

I’m a sucker for stories about a criminal defendant who is widely viewed as guilty based on strong but circumstantial evidence until a crafty defense attorney unmasks the true culprit. Suspicion departs from the usual formula by omitting the trial and adds a twist with a journalist whose self-preservation requires the defendant to be convicted.

Moichi Akitani is a reporter at the Hokuriku Daily. He is visiting a relative in a hospital when he stumbles upon Masao Harayama, a criminal defense lawyer who has a bad liver. Harayama is defending Kumako Onizuka on a charge of murdering her husband, Fukutarō Shirakawa.

As they chat about the case, the reader learns that the circumstantial evidence against Onizuka is strong. A witness reported seeing her drive a car at a high speed before it left the road and plunged into the sea. Onizuka claims that her husband was driving and hoped to kill them both, but says she escaped through the shattered windshield and swam to safety while her husband drowned. Onizuka’s credibility is damaged by evidence that she took out several large insurance policies on her husband’s life shortly before he died, not to mention her contradiction of eyewitness testimony.

Akitani wrote a series of blistering stories about Onizuka, exposing her history of greed and bad behavior with men and her ties to the yakuza. He’s sure of Onizuka’s guilt, but he worries that she will send gangsters to exact revenge against him and his family if she is acquitted.

Harayama wants to pass the case along to another lawyer because he has become too old and ill to conclude it. The court eventually appoints a civil lawyer, Takukichi Sahara, to handle the case. This pleases Akitani because he expects the inexperienced Sahara to fumble it.

The story’s hook involves a wrench and a shoe that were found in the car. Characters float theories about why the wrench wasn’t in the trunk and why only one of Shirakawa’s feet lost a shoe in the crash.

Sahara comes up with a plausible but far-fetched theory that solves the mystery. I didn’t think the theory was convincing and I’m confident that no American judge or jury would buy it, but perhaps Japanese judges are more open to unlikely theories of innocence.

The more interesting aspect of the story lies in the journalist’s fear of an acquittal. The novel sends a strong message about the danger of journalists assuming a defendant’s guilt — a sin that American journalists regularly commit. Akitani confesses that journalists are manipulated by sources from the police or a prosecutor’s office who provide (and spin) inside information. While the journalists are aware that they are being used, they report the tips from the government’s perspective for fear that if they don’t, they will lose their sources.

The story’s ending is meant to be surprising, although it is foreshadowed by earlier events and probably won’t shock most readers. The plot is less than gripping and is marred by redundant reviews of the evidence. The redundancies stretch a longish short story into a novella, which may have been their intended purpose. The reader doesn’t need internal summaries in such a short book. While Suspicion has just enough twists to merit a tepid recommendation, it lacks the clever plot and quirky characters that I have come to enjoy in Japanese mysteries.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS