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.
Tsuneo Asai lives a quiet ordered life as a minor functionary in the Ministry of Agriculture and has a seemingly equally conventional marriage. Then while he is away from Tokyo on a business trip his wife Elko, a shy woman who rarely left the house apart from to go to haiku classes dies suddenly of a heart attack.
When he visits the boutique where she went to get help in her last moments, Tsuneo is perplexed as to why his wife would have been in one of the seedier parts of town. As he digs into the circumstances of her death he begins to suspect that Elko was living a double life, something that puts his own ordered existence increasingly under threat.
This is a clever and unsettling book that works cold fingers of unease under the expectations of its readers. Like the work of Agatha Christie, to whom Matsumoto has been referred to as a Japanese equivalent, it works on several levels.
It is a grippingly effective thriller portraying the sweaty unease of a man with limited imagination making discoveries that imperil his narrow view of the world and his place in it. In the last quarter this trips over into the barely contained paranoia of such a personality given the sudden task of keeping a terrible secret.
The novel can also be read as a commentary on Japanese society in the early seventies and the collision between old fashioned proprieties and the pressures of modernity. Tsuneo Asai with his rigidity and barely contained fears about losing control embodies these crammed into the suit and tie of a salary man.
Reading this brilliant novel is rather like watching a classic film noir, you know fate has it in for the straight arrow protagonist from the start, but still keep watching until the final frame.
Editor’s Notes:
[1] Translated into English by Louise Heal Kawai
[2] This novel should not be confused with the 2018 American post-apocalyptic horror film directed by John Krasinski that shares the same title, but little else.
