Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
In the bleak and war-ravaged Japan of 1951 several events occurred within a few days, apparently unrelated but, over the length of this short novel, all meshed by a deft and curious mix of oriental and western intrigue.
The tale opens on an icy city street where a woman is hit by a skidding truck. Dying in hospital “she” is found to be a man. There is no identification and no one comes forward to claim the body; it’s a forgettable incident not long after tens of thousands died when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Shortly prior to the road accident two people were observed burying the body of a child in the basement of an apartment block. A few days before both those events a small boy, the son of an American officer and a Japanese woman, was taken to the dentist by his mother. While she was being treated he disappeared, evidently kidnapped. There was a ransom demand, with the not unusual threat to the child’s welfare if the father contacted the police. He didn’t, but the boy was never returned. His parents divorced and, seven years later, the stricken mother came to live in Apartment ‘K’ which housed only women. All were unattached: single, divorced or widowed, professional and working, or retired. Some were reclusive, more than one was eccentric, while most guarded their privacy behind locked doors.
Everything revolves round this block of flats and its disparate community, women alike only in their nationality, but united at present by major disruption. The building is about to be moved, as a whole, all five floors and the 150 residents: shifted a few metres in order to widen a road. The jacks are in place, excavations in progress. Those residents with deeply cherished secrets, some old and dusty, but at least one current and the more dangerous for that, such women are disturbed. Plots evolve, generated by both victims and perpetrators: plots like shadow actors that touch and sheer away and weave about obstacles. There is the sudden blooming of a quasi-religious cult. The master key disappears; a priceless violin is stolen. There are revelations of passionate love and betrayal and more than one vicious mind.
The shade of Madame Butterfly flits through the dim corridors of Apartment ‘K’. There is an operatic quality to The Master Key which, far from detracting from a gritty novel, loads it with realism, capping a suggestion of Japanese noir with a horrific denouement.
Read it carefully and then read it again.
Translator: Simon Grove.
