Reviews and Comments

My main issues include: The translator decided to use the sentence "She was a Japanese," which I'm surprised wasn't updated in newer versions but... okay. The naming conventions are inconsistent (sometimes last name-first name, other times first name-last name). There's an obvious failure of the translator to know what a child of an American would call their own mother when speaking English (even though this is a well-known difference, and it would've been true in the mid-century setting and when it was translated in the 80s), which is just a little obnoxious. But these are largely just small picks.

What I really think this book suffers from is improper marketing. Its inclusion as a 'mystery' book is correct, but I think its constant description as a 'classic mystery' and being marketed next to things that do fit 'classic mystery' does nothing to really help it. This is because a 'classic mystery' to most people who engage in mysteries is to see it in the realm of there being a detective who you follow with an obvious crime to solve as you do, and this book isn't... that.

And that's fine. But the marketing team at Pushkin Vertigo really need to understand what the book is in order to help it properly find its audience... Especially when they're marketing it to people who enjoyed reading their other translated mystery novels, which are... very different from this.

I also think this book is misunderstood by people who read it (which can stem from the improper marketing), and I'm saying this because of how many people I've seen complain of its tell-over-show quality. The way the story is told is... through telling because the events of the crime have already happened long ago in the past for the characters. You're not following the 'mystery' of the kidnapped child of seven years ago, and that kidnapped child is not really the most important part of the story. He is an important part, but he and his kidnapping are not the core of the story. They are solvable elements, but they're not the point.

The focus is on the loneliness of 'spinster' women. There's a reason it takes place in an apartment block entirely dedicated to the lives of young women (and later older women). It's about the ways in which society completely neglects and overlooks their lives, especially once they're no longer "useful" to society. It's about what loneliness, especially under a variety of circumstances, can drive people to do (even in a very negative form). It's about how we can misunderstand the people around us because, rather than engage with them directly, we're encouraged to gossip and skirt around issues. It's about the assumptions we make of other people using what little evidence we have. Hell, it's even about the grief of loss and how that can negatively impact people.

I originally complained that this book was more like creepy vignettes than a mystery novel, but that 'creepy vignette' structure had a point. It was to show the reader all of these people, everything they do in their loneliness and grief and vanity and... whatever. We're being shown who these people are and what they're driven to do and why they're driven to do it.

The mystery itself is secondary, and that's... fine.

The Kindaichi Kosuke series of books is currently one of my favourite, especially as it does a lot within the genre that typically goes undone. Something that I noticed this time around and was able to ruminate on was that a lot of the books still hold a degree of humanity for the murderer, even when they clearly don't support their behaviour. This is something that I appreciate because it really does highlight that people can and do horrible things but that they're still people (which I think actually makes them more terrifying instead of less terrifying).

I point this out because it's something that is done in the solution to the case, and it's something that I frequently find myself wanting to see more of because I think it's best that we not separate ourselves too much from these horrible people (as in, we can definitely separate ourselves ideologically, but we shouldn't be doing it on a species-wide level... something I've also noticed with real-world politics and problems).

Anyway, it's engaging as always. The translator does a wonderful job, and all of these books feel like they've been written from one person (even though they've all largely been translated by a handful of different people).

This book was actually quite surprising. It was less surprising for the solution and the mystery itself, but I wasn't expecting for a mystery novel to kind of tackle the idea of 'outsiders' and the supposed suspicious nature of people within a small town while also recognising that there are different cultures within the same country that impact how we think and behave.

Rather, I was more surprised because the handling of the issue wasn't immediately structured in a way to make all the 'small town' people inherently unlikable, unintelligent, or 'beneath' the protagonist (which is something that is annoyingly common in texts that utilise this structure). This is actually something that Yokomizo's books seem to handle well because Kindaichi never seems to hold himself above the people he's around. The locals are shown to be somewhat suspicious and cautious, friendly to a point, but with some still believing that the 'outsiders' can never really understand them or the people they've lived with.

I also really like the ways in which superstition is utilised and discussed. This was also another surprise for me because, again, I'm so used to texts that utilise superstition in a way that makes in feel disconnected from the story and the people. This made it feel really authentic to the story and like something you could actually interact with, question, and understand. It wasn't taken for granted, and it showed how even some people who weren't really superstitious could still find themselves falling into the trap of 'fate'.

This is a book that overstays its welcome, though I do feel like that's kind of the point.

Split into two parts (or 'books'), the first one is far more engaging than the second. Perhaps it's because all of the action for what transpires happens in the first book. You see the frustration and the conspiracy between the primary characters, and it finally culminates in what every other character in the book believes to be a tragic "accident."

The second part basically unravels those primary characters, both for the reader and for the characters. But this is where it feels like it overstays everything, and I stopped caring about any of what was happening. I had to force myself to finish this bit, and I felt compelled because I was already so far into the book. It was a slog.

This isn't helped because, at no point, are any of these characters really interesting people who you can like. They're all entirely unlikable, but it's unlikable in a way that a person sees a particularly rotten politician. You don't want to follow their movements, but you're compelled to because of external forces. Many of them aren't interesting, though I also feel that this is the point. These characters are incredibly shallow and perceive superficial but grand gestures as being the only way through a problem.

Probably the most interesting bit of the second 'book' is the part where the protagonist starts to believe that his actions were part of the plan all along, even when he didn't recognise it as being something that could so easily be controlled. But so many threads of interest were used in ways that were entirely underwhelming or felt completely dropped, and that was one.