Reviews and Comments

This book, had its author not been marketed as "The Japanese Stieg Larsson," would've been... Well, it would've been okay, and I would've left it with some of the same complaints. But I felt them more strongly because what I'd been primed for was met in the worst of ways possible, in a way that wasn't at all in line with the point of Stieg Larsson's original trilogy.

There are too few books that deal with abused women, especially abused women who actually succeed despite everything. There are too few books that even engage with the concept of killing your local rapist (or abuser) and what that can possibly mean. There are too few books that engage with the internal struggle of someone who has done that to save themselves (especially in a situation where it wasn't intentional) and actually engaged with what it meant.

This book isn't that, but based on the summary and the use of the name 'Stieg Larsson'... And then based on the opening... That was the book I that I expected.

That was not what I got.

Without spoiling it for others, I hate the ending. I hate the solution, I hate how 'Detective Galileo' (a physicist) is used, I hate the friendship between him and the actual detective, and I hate the message that it sends without doing any of the fucking work for what it delivers. There were so many elements that could've been interestingly used and still supported the characters who had suffered the abuse of the victim. Higashino did none of that, and I just...

He is not The Japanese Stieg Larsson. I don't want anyone to be Stieg Larsson of anywhere, but if that were a mantle that could be passed on? Higashino could not take it because the point of his book did not at all engage with the true forms of abuse that his characters endured and felt like they would endure.

On his writing technique, the man struggles to know how to transition between sections or chapters without telling what this chapter or the next will be about. It's like he has one trick, and he's not quite sure how to lead in to something else.

In terms of the history, he makes a lot of assumptions that no one is qualified to make and that even the data we do have cannot possibly support. We cannot know precisely how violent people were in times where we have no documentation of violence; we can only make assumptions based on what artifacts remain, and it's silly to assume that the handfuls of skeletal remains can tell us precisely how violent a society was. This way of deciding how violent the world was is much in the same vein as when archaeologists categorise unknown objects as "religious relics," even when it's not. (This is something that may have largely gone out of vogue, but we still live with its ghost until it's been totally rectified.)

He also focuses entirely on the positions of Hobbes and Rousseau for his initial "history of violence," and I suspect there were more perspectives on violence than those presented by either man. In fact, I'd be there were lots of people of other classes and demographics whose views were systematically erased at the time and after who could've provided more interesting thoughts than either of these two men who have been used as the template for how to deal with violence or what violence is or how violence can be mitigated, blahblahblah.

Oh, and he also hasn't defined what is violence and what isn't violence, according to him. But I suppose a lot of the constant and daily violence that many of us endure... doesn't count. The constant stress of "what ifs" that many of us have to think about or are faced with, the refusal of care providers to provide the care we seek, the perpetual stress placed upon us by others through varying forms of coercion to exist in certain ways... None of that is considered violence because it doesn't immediately result in us being stabbed or clearly murdered.

On his writing technique, the man struggles to know how to transition between sections or chapters without telling what this chapter or the next will be about. It's like he has one trick, and he's not quite sure how to lead in to something else.

In terms of the history, he makes a lot of assumptions that no one is qualified to make and that even the data we do have cannot possibly support. We cannot know precisely how violent people were in times where we have no documentation of violence; we can only make assumptions based on what artifacts remain, and it's silly to assume that the handfuls of skeletal remains can tell us precisely how violent a society was. This way of deciding how violent the world was is much in the same vein as when archaeologists categorise unknown objects as "religious relics," even when it's not. (This is something that may have largely gone out of vogue, but we still live with its ghost until it's been totally rectified.)

He also focuses entirely on the positions of Hobbes and Rousseau for his initial "history of violence," and I suspect there were more perspectives on violence than those presented by either man. In fact, I'd be there were lots of people of other classes and demographics whose views were systematically erased at the time and after who could've provided more interesting thoughts than either of these two men who have been used as the template for how to deal with violence or what violence is or how violence can be mitigated, blahblahblah.

Oh, and he also hasn't defined what is violence and what isn't violence, according to him. But I suppose a lot of the constant and daily violence that many of us endure... doesn't count. The constant stress of "what ifs" that many of us have to think about or are faced with, the refusal of care providers to provide the care we seek, the perpetual stress placed upon us by others through varying forms of coercion to exist in certain ways... None of that is considered violence because it doesn't immediately result in us being stabbed or clearly murdered.

On writing technique, his only ability to transition between sections and chapters is to tell you what the chapter is supposed to be about, even if he's already told you what the chapter is about.

A lot of what he views as historic data related to violence is... Not actually data and relies upon a lot of assumptions that we cannot and should not (and honestly are not qualified in the here and now) to make. Hobbes and Rousseau are not the only people to make determinations on what violence is, and I'm sure there were people who were entirely unlike them in their own time and sharing the same continent who would've said as much. But what else can you do when you systematically ensure that the history you look at doesn't involve any other sorts of people or that they appear to never have existed in the first place.

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'.