A most improbable murder - on Keigo Higashino's creepy new mystery

[Did this for the Hindu Literary Review]

Keigo Higashino's thriller Yōgisha X no Kenshin - which became an international publishing sensation as The Devotion of Suspect X when it was translated from Japanese into English two years ago - was a most unusual kind of murder mystery; strictly speaking, not a murder mystery at all, since the killing, committed in self-defence, occurred within the first 30 pages, with the reader made privy to everything that led up to it (only at the end did one realise that a small but vital piece of information had been withheld). The suspense came from the way the narrative moved between the police investigation and the murderer’s attempts at alibi-creation, and the final twist – involving the nature of the cover-up – was ingenious. But the book’s lingering quality – its ability to stay under a reader’s skin long after its secrets had been disclosed – hinged on its portrayal of two people who match wits: one a brilliant physicist-sleuth named Yukawa (also known as Detective Galileo) and the other a criminal with almost unfathomable, monk-like reserves of personal dedication and forbearance.

Now another Higashino novel is out in translation, as Salvation of a Saint, and it has all the qualities that made the first book so gripping. As in The Devotion of Suspect X, the suspense lies not so much in the murderer’s identity (though in this case there is some second-guessing on that front too) but in how the crime was pulled off – and the solution is just as jaw-dropping.

These are the facts of the case: a man named Yoshitaka lies dead in his house, a spilt cup of poisoned coffee by his side. Yoshitaka was not, we learn, particularly sensitive in his treatment of women (Higashino does seem to derive literary pleasure from turning unpleasant men into murder victims!), and there are basically two suspects: his wife Ayane and his lover Hiromi. Once again, the reader is allowed to be a step ahead of the investigating detectives – we know Hiromi is not guilty because most of the early events, leading up to the discovery of the body, have been presented through her shocked perspective. Also, within the first few pages, we have been told that Ayane at least intended to kill her husband and had the means to do so. The rub is, she was hundreds of miles away, visiting her parents, when the coffee was made and consumed. As the detectives try to postulate scenarios where she might have pre-planned the killing before she left, they come up against a wall – and eventually the sardonic Yukawa is brought in to weigh the options.

What he discovers – and I feel I can write this without giving away any spoilers – is something very close to the perfect crime, with a solution that is simultaneously very simple and dangerously outlandish. When it is revealed, your gut response might be to snort “Impossible” (which is basically what the detectives listening to Yukawa do). I even felt a little cheated at first, as if the author had blindsided me by stepping outside the permissible limits of the genre. But further reflection shifted my view of what was possible and what wasn’t; I began to see the peculiar internal logic of the denouement in light of the personalities and the lifestyles involved, and the crime no longer appeared so unfeasible.

Of course, a 370-page book has to be more than its climactic disclosure, and Salvation of a Saint is tense and well-paced. It does contain at least one over-familiar trope of the police procedural or noir – a detective becoming attracted to an apparently vulnerable woman, perhaps compromising his own integrity in the process – though this isn’t stretched to the point of derivativeness. The actual writing has some of the functional woodenness that you find in most commercial fiction of this sort – too many references to a character’s eyes “widening in surprise”, for example, or hands gripping a phone tightly when unexpected news is received – but these are genre tics, easy enough to ignore up to a point. (Besides, as has often been observed, Japanese writing translated into English can seem a little stilted and over-formal, especially when the reader is from a culture that doesn’t understand why a detective might remove his shoes outside a house before going in to question a murder suspect.)

This book is about a crime born of very deep passion, but with no sudden bursts of action, no explicit violence or dramatic confrontations, it is unnerving in ways that more conventional thrillers are not. And despite the fact that the setting is a homogenous modern city and the characters are in some ways indistinguishable from upper-middle-class people living anywhere on the planet, there is something distinctly Japanese about it, something of the deceptive placidity of the filmmaker Ozu or the novelist Ishiguro. One senses a neat and ordered contemporary world with mystical rumblings beneath its surface, like the Sheep Man in Haruki Murakami’s novels, hidden in a forgotten corner of a glass-and-steel skyscraper, or a videotape being employed by supernatural forces in Koji Suzuki’s Ring series. Higashino’s book is set in a world of tidy kitchens with coffee-makers and bottled mineral water, of dating parties and urbane dinner-time banter, but underlying it all is something much more primal. The image I was left with at the end was the indelible one of a spider watching quietly, attentively over her web.

[A short post about The Devotion of Suspect X is here]