Shizuko Natsuki (1938–2016)

The story is set in Japan in the 1980's and much of it is from the point of view of the only non-Japanese character, Jane Prescott, a 25 year old graduate student at Japan Women's University in Tokyo. She is invited by a member of the Wada family to attend their New Year's get together at their villa near Mt. Fuji. On the night of her arrival Yohei Wada is murdered and the family springs into action to protect their youngest member who has confessed. Jane is drawn into their conspiracy and this is the part that gave me some trouble. She was very fond of Chiyo but her going along without protest seemed a little off. Once the police are involved things become even more complicated and the scheme unravels. But a careful reader will realize that something is wrong...

There are some things here reminiscent of the classic country house murder with a limited cast -- the isolated villa, family secrets, and the observant outsider who finally sees what is really going on. The police are on the whole competent investigators with one exception and the differences in procedure from your Scotland Yard police procedural were interesting.

While it seemed slow at first, once the police investigation really got going I became more interested in the story and finished the last half fairly quickly and now think it to be a bit above average.… (mere)

I found this book in a buy-six-for-a-euro bin outside of a dry cleaner in Paris. It was actually buy one book for a euro, but the person who wrote the sign made their "le" look like the number 6 so I got an even better bargain. In any case, I'm glad to have stumbled upon this little bin of surprises.

The story begins outside of Paris, in Fontainebleau, where Daigo meets a particular Fumiko in a hotel on a dark and stormy night. Entranced by this woman's profile, Daigo approaches her and they begin to talk but when the lights go out after a thunder clap, their conversation turns dark. Daigo ends up making a promise he's not sure he can keep to a woman whose face he never even saw. Then, a few months after returning to Japan, the man he wanted dead turns up murdered.

A great premise that follows Daigo as he wonders if Fumiko is the cause of this death and if he really is up to fulfilling his part of that dark secret. It was a great page turner and, although I was able to guess the twist, it was still a wonderful twist that kept me emotionally invested till the very end.

And Shizuko Natsuki -- although my French version was actually translated from the English version -- has such an ease in her writing that I really enjoyed. This is my first book by her but I also have her Hara-kiri, mon amour, purchased from the same bin.

I still don't know how to rate crime fiction as I don't read much of it but the sheer enjoyment I got out of this certainly deserves 4 stars, I would say.… (mere)

The translation skims along on a sea of cackhandedness, making occasional clumsy leaps into workmanlike, and the premise gets more implausible the more you think about it. But this has something--both as a character sketch--a man who kills not because he is a Westerner who lost his job or had other kids make fun of him and it teasened out his cracks and led to madness; not because he is a stereotypical Japanese with a debt to repay; but because he allows his Japanese debt to pay--his sense of preexisting aloneness and then obligedness to a mystery women he meets in a French chateau, a woman who just as he does, wants someone dead, this sense rises quickly into a broader feeling of connection, and that becomes his pretext--interpreting being true to his Fumiko's wishes, as he sees them, in a way that allows him to do evil and yet not feel evil. That's more complicated and twisted than the cliche narratives as up above, and this book also reminds you how crazy obsessed with the West Japan was in the 1970s, while not pulling all the exoticizing moves that it would have done had it not been a J book by and for Js.… (mere)