Tokyo’s a big city that has a long and fantastic tradition of crime writing, so this Crime and the City is a little longer than normal. No apologies for that. If you haven’t read any Japanese crime writing you really should start now. And, a caveat—given the space allotted to Crime and the City there is no way I’m going to get to mention every great Tokyo crime writer or crime book set in the city so please accept this humble column as a slice (or perhaps a slash, as it’s crime we’re talking about) of Japan’s criminal literary output.
Among the modern Japanese canon are several classics that feature crimes. Primary among these is the 1922 short story “In a Grove” by Ryonosuke Akutagawa, better known now, and in a somewhat adapted form, as the 1950 Akira Kurosawa movie Rashomon. Akutagawa was a leading Japanese modernist who sought to fuse ideas from contemporary European and Japanese literature with elements of traditional Japanese storytelling. In crafting Rashomon, which tells the story of a murder as seen by different witnesses from different angles, Akutagawa was himself inspired by Ambrose Bierce’s 1907 gothic horror story The Moonlit Road. Akutagawa remains one of Japan’s best loved and most read authors with a major literary prize named after him. David Peace, a British writer of crime and other books, recently published Patient X (2018), a novel in twelve stories retelling incidents from Akutagawa’s life and work. Akutagawa died by taking an overdose of barbital in 1927 at just 35.
One other older book worth mentioning is Yasunari Kawabata’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1930). Kawabata was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1968, the first Japanese person to receive such a distinction. The Asakusa district in Tokyo was once the city’s pleasure gardens, fun fair and where all manner of sin, debauchery, delinquency and the city’s criminal underworld was to be found. The novel, which uses many modernist kinetic techniques, is essentially a long wander through Tokyo’s 1920s criminal and outcast milieu in the company of its denizens.
Though Akutagawa and Kawabata were literary modernists, more traditional crime writing was also occurring. We’ll take just one Golden Age crime writer from Japan—Seishi Yokomizi. There’s a number of good reasons to focus on Yokomizi. Firstly, he was the best-known Japanese crime writer of the interwar period and continued to be prolific after World War Two, too. Secondly, he very much sought to imitate the style of western Golden Age crime writers and constantly name drops Christie, as well as earlier writers such as Poe. Third, he developed the idea of both the dogged detective in Japanese crime fiction as well as the gifted amateur and Holmes-style consulting detective. And lastly, Yokomizi is now accessible in English thanks to Pushkin Press’s publication of two of his best-known novels in Japan—The Honjin Murders (1946, though set in the 1930s) and The Inugami Clan (1950). Both are good solid Golden Age mysteries—locked rooms, clever detectives—though in traditional Japanese settings.
Moving along, Tokyo born Masako Togawa deserves a mention. Togawa was a chanson singer, nightclub entrepreneur, TV celebrity and feminist activist primarily in the 1960s and 1970s. She also wrote four crime novels, the best of which is The Master Key (1962) set in an apartment building reserved for single Japanese working women due to be demolished and about to reveal its secrets.
In the 1980s Soji Shimada became a major force in Japanese crime writing with the Detective Mitarai Series and the Detective Yoshiki series. Shimada was one of a group of writers, including Yukito Ayatsuji, Rintaro Norizuki and Shogo Utano. However, Shimada is now the most accessible in English. 1981’s The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (Shimada is a keen astrologist) is perhaps the best place to start—the novel has various sections and readers are invited to try and solve the murders on the understanding that the characters know no more than the reader. Shimada’s Murder in the Crooked House (1982) is a locked room mystery, again a throw back to the Golden Age. Locked room mysteries have been enduringly popular in Japan.
It seems to me that most contemporary Tokyo crime writing (at least post-bubble—say, from the mid-1990s) doesn’t do much to promote the Japanese capital. It tends to be set in anonymous commuter suburbs of bored housewives and overworked Sararīman (Salarymen) who spend most of their time in the office or on trains (and, so popular fiction usually has it, in hostess clubs). Quiet streets, strip-lit convenience stores, small neighborhood bars and restaurants. where secrets—particularly family secrets, debts and bankruptcies, are scrupulously hidden from view; affairs conducted in secrecy. Violence is rare; the cops unassuming. This of course reflects the conflicting images of close community and urban alienation in Tokyo—everyone’s living cheek by jowl, but nobody really knows anything. Tokyo is vast, but not exactly hectic, and not really exuberant. In fact it’s hard to identify what it is exactly that makes Tokyo so compelling a destination. It’s not so obviously futuristic these days—the eternal Bladerunner comparisons are now more commonly made of Seoul, Beijing or Shanghai. Nor so advanced technologically these days (in fact it’s often a strangely cash based low-tech society). The days of the economic bubble are long gone, but you get little sense of any real hard-scrabble recession. Yet, as so much Japanese crime writing reveals, there are tensions and fraught emotions below the seemingly calm surface of Tokyo, and the underbelly is closer than you might think at first glance.
If I had to name one post-bubble crime novel that best symbolizes this anonymity and drab urban landscape of Japan it would be Natsuo Kirino’s Out (1997), a gritty mystery that follows the lives of four women who work the graveyard shift at a Japanese bento factory. A young mother among them finally cracks and strangles her philandering, gambling husband. She then confesses her crime to her closest colleague who agrees to help and ropes in the other co-workers to dismember and dispose of the body. It’s a book that has stuck in my mind for many years since I read it—the bleak anonymous landscapes and hand-to-mouth existence of working-class Tokyo. Kirino’s Real World (2008) is equally bleak. In a suburb on the outskirts of Tokyo, four teenage girls drift through a hot smoggy August. Then one of the girl’s next-door neighbors is found brutally murdered. They suspect a local misfit.
Natsuo Kirino is the alias of Kanazawa-born Mariko Hashioka, a contemporary novelist who’s become one of the biggest breakthrough talents in the country’s female-driven detective fiction genre. And so much of the very best of Japanese crime writing is from female authors. In fact so many we’ll never fit them all in here. But Kanae Minato deserves a mention for Penance (2017). A young girl is murdered; her friends were witnesses but can truly identify the killer; the dead girl’s mother swears revenge on them all. Kanae Minato’s earlier novel Confession (2014) follows Yuko Moriguchi, whose four year-old daughter dies in the middle school where Yuko teaches. Everyone thinks it was a tragic accident. But Yuko’s daughter was killed by two of the school’s students.
For those who prefer policiers then primary now would be Hideo Yokoyama and the doorstopper of an international smash hit, Six Four (2012), which has won a bunch of awards and sold over a million copies worldwide. The action takes place over five days in January 1989 as the parents of a seven-year-old Tokyo schoolgirl sat and listened to the demands of their daughter’s kidnapper. They would never learn his identity. They would never see their daughter again. Then, fourteen years later the press officer attached to the police department in question finds an anomaly in the case that opens it wide open again. Hideo Yokoyama’s tales of life inside the Tokyo police force have prove massively popular globally. He’s followed up Six Four with Seventeen (2018), which sees a reporter return to an air disaster story and (once again for those who like procedurals) a collection of short stories, Prefecture D (2019), set in 1998, concerning the various characters at one Tokyo police station.
If you’re in Tokyo it’s worth spending some time perusing the shelves of @wonder bookstore in the Jimbocho district—a series of streets and alleys containing around three hundred bookstores. @wonder specializes in crime, both local writers and crime novels from around the world in Japanese translation. And here’s a few Tokyo-set samples from their shelves from foreign authors:
- Sujata Massey’s Rei Shimura series was a big hit of the 1990s with a Japanese-American reporter solving crime and often in Tokyo. The Salaryman’s Wife (1997), the first in the series finds Rei teaching English in Tokyo and finding corpses in the snow. The series continues though another ten books.
- Barry Eisler’s A Clean Kill in Tokyo (2003) is the first in his John Rain series, a half American, half Japanese assassin. All the books in the series are full on action.
- Nicolas Obregon’s Blue Light Yokohama (2017) sees a family of four murdered in their own home. The first detective to try and solve the case kills himself by jumping off Tokyo’s Rainbow Bridge. Now Inspector Iwata and his partner must find the murderer. Iwata returns in Sins as Scarlet (2018)—living in LA but unable to forget Tokyo. Obregon has also written Unknown Male (2019), about an anonymous serial killer on the loose in Tokyo.
- Barry Lancet has written several Tokyo set novels. I’ll mention A Clean Kill in Tokyo (2014) because I picked it off the shelves of @wonder. The novel features John Rain, a half American, half Japanese assassin.
- Matthew Legare is a Japanese history buff whose Inspector Kenji Aizawa series is set in and around World War Two. In Shadows of Tokyo (2018), the policeman receives an anonymous call about the imminent assassination of a leading statesman. The secret informant is Reiko Watanabe, geisha mistress to the plot’s mastermind. Smoke Over Tokyo (2018) is the second in the series with Police Inspector Aizawa going undercover into the world of the Okamura Gang.
- James Buckler’s Last Stop Tokyo (2017) is about Tokyo as the perfect escape, somewhere nobody will ever find you. Well, maybe…
Tokyo has been the subject of plenty of true crime too. Murder on the Bluff (2012) is a reinvestigation of the Carew poisoning case of Edith Carew, sentenced to death in 1897 for poisoning her husband while they lived in Yokohama. More recent is the case of a British women, Lucie Blackman, a former air steward turned ‘hostess’ in the notorious Roppongi district of Tokyo. In 2000 she went missing and was later found murdered and dismembered. Veteran London Times foreign correspondent in Tokyo Richard Lloyd Parry followed the case from the start and recalls it in People Who Eat Darkness (2012). Tokyo’s police were, some argued, simply not experienced enough to hunt a murderer in a country with one of the lowest murder rates globally. The Blackman family constantly pushed for answers and eventually, after a decade, the killer was caught. And, while not entirely non-fiction the aforementioned David Peace’s Year Zero trilogy takes real life crimes in the aftermath of World |War Two and the American occupation of Japan as the launch pad for the three uber-noir novels—Tokyo Year Zero (2008), Occupied City (2009) and Tokyo Redux (2020)
So many books; so little space! I’ll finish with a sensational new novel from Riku Onda—The Aosawa Murders (2020). The Aosawas, owners of a prominent local hospital, host a large birthday party. The occasion turns into tragedy when 17 people die from cyanide in their drinks. The only surviving links to what might have happened are a cryptic verse that could be the killer’s, and the physician’s bewitching blind daughter, Hisako, the only person spared injury. The police are convinced that Hisako had a role in the crime, as are many in the town. It’s a novel that reads like a true crime; it’s multi-voiced in a way that recalls the Rashomon, yet The Aosawa Murders is firmly rooted in contemporary Japanese society, with what the author herself has called, its pervasive envy and ever so polite hypocrisy.
We’ve only scratched the surface of Tokyo and Japanese crime though hopefully these choices offer a way into what is one of the world’s great crime writing cities.
