Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
Tokyo, 1960. A man’s battered body is found on the tracks at Kamata Station by railway workers. All the police have to identify him by is a final sighting of him alive in which he was heard to say the single word “Kameda” in a distinctive accent.
It is the starting point in a particularly puzzling case for haiku writing Senior Inspector Imanishi Eitaro. One that will take him across the country to Osaka and into the orbit of the orbit of the Nouveau Group, a collective of young artists with advanced ideas and connections in high places.
Seicho Matsumoto is one of several neglected writers of crime novels brought back to public attention by Penguin Modern Classics. First published in 1961, Inspector Imanishi Investigates is a novel good enough to justify contemporary comparisons of Matsumoto to Agatha Christie and George Simenon, and this long overdue rediscovery.
The comparison with Simenon is probably the most accurate in the way he captures the down-at-heel everyday life in Tokyo that tourists never see. In Imanishi he has created a detective who, on the surface appears to be self-effacing to the point of invisibility yet possesses a quiet determination that is more than a match for those with (allegedly) sharper brains.
The plot combines a genuinely original means of committing murder with some sharp observations of a highly traditional society undergoing rapid change. Old ideas may be starting to lose their purchase, yet still exert enough pull to prompt those with much to lose to take drastic action.
This is a skillfully plotted and powerfully written crime story that continues to engage readers more than sixty years after it was first published. Matsumoto is a writer who richly deserves rediscovery by a new audience.
Translated into the English Language by Beth Cary
