Under the Midnight Sun by Keigo Higashino

First published in Japan in 1999; published in translation by Minotaur Books on November 8, 2016

Under the Midnight Sun begins in the early 1970s and covers a span of two decades. It jumps forward in increments, each early chapter beginning a few years after the last one ends. Some chapters feature relationship drama while others focus on crime or shady business dealings. Each early chapter reads like a separate story, although they intertwine. The relationship of some characters to others only becomes clear as the novel enters its second half. Characters come and go, but two characters, Ryo Kirihara and Yukiho Karasawa, bind the others together.

Ryo is ten when the novel begins. His father, a pawnshop owner, is stabbed to death. Detective Sasagaki develops suspects — Ryo’s mother might or might not be having an affair with a pawnshop employee — but the cops cannot find enough evidence to make an arrest. They aren’t even sure they know the motive for the murder, although Ryo’s father had withdrawn a large amount of cash shortly before he was killed.

The story resumes four years later. After her impoverished mother died, Yukiho was adopted into a middle-class life. She seems to be a sweet, gentle, and friendly, a perfect example of Japanese femininity. Her delicate beauty attracts the attention of undesirable admirers, and eventually of men who have some family wealth. She is thte novel’s most intriguing character.

Another plotline involves bored housewives who pay to hook up for sexual adventures with high school boys. One of the boys is Tomohiko Sonomura, who eventually regards Ryo as his best friend. Still another plot thread involves Yukiho’s friend, a girl named Eriko, who transforms from a duckling to a sexy swan with the help (and money) of Kazunari Shinozuka. Eriko and Kazumari later return to the story at different times and in different ways.

Parts of the story amount to a police procedural as Sasagaki methodically pursues leads, conducts surveillance, interviews witnesses, and develops suspects in the murder of Ryo’s father. Parts of the story touch on organized crime as the yakuza take an interest in criminal schemes that some of the novel’s characters perpetrate. Some of the story features dark domestic drama as characters pay a heavy price for caring about — or betraying — other characters.

Keigo Higashino’s non-criminal characters tend to be introspective. Most of them are relatively dissatisfied with life. Readers who feel a need to identify with or like a main character might be unhappy with Under the Midnight Sun, as there are few characters a reader might care to know. I don’t view that as a flaw in a plot-centered crime novel, given that the darkly realistic characters have at least a modest amount of depth.

The plot takes time to develop, but interest never wanes thanks to the mini-dramas that shape each chapter on the way to laying out the larger story. Fans of fast action might be bored by Under the Midnight Sun, as the intricate story includes no shootouts or fistfights. Killings and assaults generally occur offstage. Fans of a good mystery should enjoy it. Much of the ending is foreshadowed, but the final pages hold some surprises.

It’s always interesting to read a Japanese crime novel, if only to take note of cultural differences in the story’s background. Udon (noodle) shops, funeral rituals, and tatami mats are among the details that establish the story’s setting. The background, the carefully constructed plot, and the mysterious nature of the key characters makes Under the Midnight Sun an excellent example of Japanese crime fiction.

RECOMMENDED

The Gun by Fuminori Nakamura

First published in Japan in 2003; published in translation by Soho Crime on January 5, 2016

Fuminori Nakamura’s crime novels are built on psychological suspense rather than action, but they move at a brisk pace, thanks to a writing style that wastes no words. The Gun, Nakamura’s first novel, doesn’t have the depth of The Thief. It nevertheless creates a reasonable amount of dramatic tension as the reader wonders about the fate of the central character.

Walking along a street on a rainy night, Nishikawa feels a deep sense of satisfaction, even elation, when he discovers a gun near a dead man’s body. The gun gives him a sense of fulfillment; he knows he cannot part with it. When he picks up a girl and has sex with her, he realizes the next day that she did not compare to the pleasure he receives from handling the gun.

Soon, just knowing that he has the gun is not enough. Nishikawa begins to carry it around, savoring the tension he feels. Of course, he has fantasies about shooting the gun and, of course, those fantasies become darker. Nishikawa is consumed and controlled by the gun. Decisions are made by the demanding gun, not by Nishikawa.

Nishikawa is emotionally stunted, a characteristic Nakamura develops through Nishikawa’s distracted relationships with women. Nishikawa lives inside his head but seems incapable of understanding his feelings and motivations. He has a problem with impulse control, while the impulses he manages to resist turn into obsessions and plans. Nishikawa’s half-hearted attempts to analyze his urges provide no insights that might help him to control them.

Whether and how Nishikawa will use the gun are the questions that keep the pages turning. The speed with which the story moves is due in part to its focus on Nishikawa. Other characters make brief appearances, but we learn little about them. Instead, we learn much about Nishikawa’s life and how that life changes as the result of a chance encounter with a gun.

The abrupt ending comes as something of a surprise despite its inevitability. While The Gun lacks the richness of The Thief, its noir sensibility showcases Nakamura’s ability to delve into tormented minds.

RECOMMENDED

Death by Water by Kenzaburo Oe

Published in Japan in 2009; published in translation by Grove Atlantic on October 6, 2015

Most of Death by Water is comprised of conversations among artistic intellectuals. Reading it is like pulling a sled up a snow-covered hill, exalting at reaching the top, enjoying the speedy ride down the other side, wandering for a while, and then trudging up the next hill. There are times when the novel is fun and times when it is rewarding, but most of it is tough sledding.

At the novel’s center is the novelist Kogito Choko, the alter ego of Kenzaburo Oe, but Choko is the least intellectual (or perhaps the least chatty) of the characters. His sister and other admirers spend most of their time dissecting Choko’s work or, more often, his life. My impression was that the characters love hearing themselves talk, even when they don’t have much to say -- which I suppose makes the characters realistic, if not particularly interesting.

The novel begins with Choko’s preparation to write the story of his father’s drowning. Since Choko cannot rely on his own memory, which he has either suppressed or is unable to distinguish from his dreams, he needs access to a red leather trunk that, he believes, contains the story of his father’s life. His mother has instructed Choko’s sister Asa to give Choko the trunk ten years after his mother’s death. His mother lives to the age of 95, making Choko a senior citizen before he can claim the trunk. Returning to his childhood home to do so, he consents to being interviewed by The Caveman Group, an acting troupe that wants to incorporate the interviews into stage adaptations of Choko’s work. That setup enables many of the conversations with Choko that drive the novel.

The core of the story is promising. Choko plans to write about his father through the prism of the “Death by Water” section of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” As Choko discusses his past and his writing with members of The Caveman Group, we learn about Choko as both a person and an artist. We also learn about the process of making art from the perspective of a craftsman who uses art to reflect himself.

The best segments of Death by Water involve Choko’s attempt to understand his recurring dream about his father’s disappearance in a small boat. According to Asa, Choko’s dim memories of his father and of the flood in which he drowned have been conflated with Choko’s childhood fantasies, which include an imaginary friend named Kogii who is young Choko’s exact duplicate. Choko also wants to view his father as brave and heroic, although he portrayed his father in quite a different way in one of his novels. Choko is unprepared for the reality of his father’s political extremism -- a reality from which Choko’s mother wanted to shelter him. Unfortunately, anticipation of learning the truth about Choko’s father’s death builds and then wanes as the story gets sidetracked by endless conversations concerning the details of Choko’s life, including his inability to make a connection with his developmentally disabled son.

I had difficulty developing the same keen interest in Choko's life that the characters have. No incident in Choko's life and no sentence in his writing seems too trivial to dissect at length. I also had difficulty caring about the acting troupe’s artistic achievements, which mainly consist of having audience members throw stuffed dogs at actors who are performing dramatic readings of Choko’s work.

Key themes in Death by Water include folklore and myth in world and Japanese history, the nationalist movement in post-World War II Japan, the relationship between aging and attachment to (or detachment from) an era, and whether an aging writer (or any other artist) whose best works are thought to be behind him might still be capable of producing something memorable. Rebirth might be the most important theme, as explored through the discussions of folklore and of Japan and as applied to the life of Choko. At least to me, those themes are more intellectually interesting than emotionally engaging.

The novel might be more meaningful to someone with greater interest in Japan’s uneven transition from “traditional/imperial” to “modern/democratic.” It may be more enjoyable to someone who has more patience than I possess. It is a serious novel, to be sure, but I found it to be more self-important than elevating. If Oe wonders why Japanese readers are turning to modern writers instead of, well, to novels like this one, perhaps it is because they do not want to undertake all the uphill climbs that Oe, despite his sincerity and perceptive analysis of modern Japan, forces them to endure.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Last Winter, We Parted by Fuminori Nakamura

Published in Japan in 2013; published in translation by Soho Press on October 21, 2014

The crime novels of Fuminori Nakamura explore the psychology of the criminal mind while making the point that the criminal mind is difficult to distinguish from the noncriminal mind. Guilt is often a fluid and ambiguous concept, easily shared and spread, not always understood by those who refuse to look beyond the superficial.

Yudai Kiharazaka, a photographer, has been sentenced to death for the murders of two women who were incinerated in separate fires. The narrator of Last Winter, We Parted has been commissioned to write a book about the murderer. Some people the narrator interviews speculate that Kiharazaka burned the women so that he could photograph them in flames, thus replaying a version of the climactic scene in a classic Japanese short story called "Hell Screen."

The narrator begins his project after becoming fixated on a photograph Kiharazaka took of black butterflies obscuring a figure that might be a woman. He is also drawn to Kiharazaka's obsession with lifelike silicon dolls that are patterned on real women, an obsession shared by a group known as K2.

Some chapters of Last Winter, We Parted consist of Kiharazaka's letters to the narrator and to his sister. Some chapters relate the narrator's interviews with people who knew Kihirazaka, each adding insight to his life while prompting the reader to question what really happened. Some chapters follow the narrator's introspective life as he decides what to do about Yukie, his girlfriend. The narrator becomes uncomfortably involved with both Kiharazaka and his sister while coming to understand their true nature ... and his own.

Last Winter, We Parted is a short but complex novel. The truth about the two deaths is surprising and complicity is found in unexpected places. This is the kind of novel that needs to be read in its entirety before all of the parts can be understood and integrated. Some chapters require reinterpretation by the story's end, while the ending gives the reader a new understanding of the entire book, including the dedication. The novel's brevity and tight construction make all of that possible without placing an undue burden on the reader.

Last Winter, We Parted also considers the relationship of art to the living and the dead, as well as the reality that the art of fiction can inspire. This is a work of philosophy and psychology as much as it is a crime novel, yet the mystery that unfolds is riveting. Near the end, a character asks "Just what does it all mean? This world we live in." Nukamura provides no answer, but he offers the reader fruitful opportunities to think about the question.

RECOMMENDED

Evil and the Mask by Fuminori Nakamura

First published in Japan in 2010; published in translation by Soho Crime on June 11, 2013

"It wasn't revenge. I simply wanted to set him on fire. Air, that was the word that came to mind. I felt as little emotion as air." Fumihiro wants to destroy evil, but does the killer of evil become the thing he kills? That question lies at the heart of Evil and the Mask, the second novel by Fuminori Nakamura (after The Thief) to be translated into English.

Evil and the Mask opens with a fascinating premise. It is a tradition for men in a certain family, after attaining the age of sixty, to sire a child who will become a cancer in the world, tasked with spreading misery. The men do this to punish the world for continuing to exist after they perish. In an attention-grabbing first chapter, Shozo Kuki explains the tradition to his youngest son, Fumihiro. Shozo tells Fumihiro he will experience hell when he turns fourteen. Hell will somehow involve Kaori, an orphaned girl Shozo adopted, and to whom Fumihiro becomes attached.

The novel jumps between the formative events of Fumihiro's childhood and the present, more than a dozen years later. The adult Fumihiro has changed his face to match that of Koichi Shintani, a dead man whose identity Fumihiro purchased on the black market. The plot springs forward along three twisted paths. One involves Shintani's past and the baggage that comes with it. Another brings Fumihiro (with Shintani's face) into Kaori's life again, but in a very different role. The third introduces a cultish group of pseudo-terrorists who use absurdity to undermine culture.

Like The Thief, Evil and the Mask is a novel of psychological suspense. The story's strength involves Fumihiro's struggle to shed one identity and to adopt another, to reinvent himself -- an impossible task, perhaps. It's easy to change a face and a name, not so easy to change your inner self, to abandon memories. Unlike The Thief, however, Evil and the Mask is so determinedly a novel of psychology that some characters indulge in lengthy analytical speeches -- about beauty, death, morality, anarchy, entropy, familial love, the motivations for violence and war, the nature of evil -- that too often seem forced.

Still, the character of Fumihiro is impressively constructed. The reader feels the crushing weight of his oppressive past, his struggle to feel something. His coffee has no flavor, he doesn't notice the cold. He is little more than an animated corpse. He has forsaken the happiness he experienced while he and Kaori were still innocent -- a happiness that the adult Fumihiro regards as "some kind of mistake" that "soon vanished into the distance." He still longs for Kaori but fears that another character's prediction will come true, that he will destroy the one thing in the world that remains precious to him if he gets close to her. Can Fumihiro shed the despondency that consumes him only by embracing madness? Whether his future is to be determined by destiny or choice, the novel's dramatic tension comes from the uncertainty of the path that Fumihiro's life will follow.

Evil and the Mask is a meditation on change and choice, on killing and on what it means to be alive. Apart from its philosophical implications, the story is intriguing. The plot threads weave together convincingly, although the storyline involving Shintani's past doesn't quite reach its potential. The ending (like The Thief, inconclusive, permitting the reader to imagine what might happen next) is satisfying.

RECOMMENDED