Wow. I do not know what to make of this book. I’m not sure if it’s satire, something that’s supposed to mess with your head, or both. There are some brilliantly off characters. Not off in that there’s something slightly wrong with them. Off in that they are just wrong. They’re thinking is unrecognizable. This isn’t just a book of anti-heroes. With an anti-hero, at least I can understand their motivations, even if I don’t like them. These characters are all train wrecks, and I couldn’t look away.

A group of six young men meet regularly for parties. Only they don’t know how to throw parties, even for themselves. They hold tournaments of rock, paper, scissors to see who will be lead singer in their monthly karaoke. Karaoke which they set up themselves on a deserted beach in the middle of the night. During a chance encounter, one of them murders a middle-aged woman he meets on the street. She’s a member of a group of middle-aged women called the Midoris, because they all share the same last name. They, in turn, take revenge by murdering one of the five youths. This begins a vicious cycle.

What makes the book is not the plot. It’s the off characters. And apparently there’s social commentary going on here, but I don’t know enough to make a lot of sense of that. For instance, when the young men head to the country to buy a guy for the next round, their dealer sagely describes their motives as pure for wanting revenge on an oba-san. This is just after a discussion between them on what kind of oba-san she is, the kind that prepares pickled daison strips, or the kind that sings fashionable pop songs (it’s the latter, they conclude). Is this commentary on how culture hates on people who sing pop songs?

The book is readable. The oddness makes it somewhat interesting. Kind of like watching a shock comedian, not because he’s funny, but because you want to see what he’s going to say next.

I struggled on what to write about this book. It’s been nearly a week and I still don’t know what I think about it. So I struggle no longer. Decided just to write out my basic response, stop trying to deconstruct, and move on to my next book (which I’m loving so far).

Title: Popular Hits of the Showa Era
Author: Ryu Murakami (村上 龍)
Translator: Ralph McCarthy
Imprint / publisher: W. W. Norton
Format: Advance Readers Copy (ARC)
Length: 193 p.
Publication date: January 2011
ISBN-13: 978-0-393-33842-3

I received a review copy for this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program in exchange for a review to be posted on LibraryThing. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I will donate $10.17 (the price of the book on Amazon.com) to the A.L.S.A.

Going beyond explication of investigation, Miyuki Miyabe’s All She Was Worth also mixed in a good amount of characterization with its crime fiction plotting. It’s a little slow in the first half, but the pacing picks up quite a bit in the second. I didn’t care much for the anti-consumerism anti-credit diatribes, even though I agree with them philosophically. I think they could have been shortened resulting in a better paced book. Miyabe’s multi-layered characters were the strong point of the book.

All She Was Worth has a different vibe than most of the crime fiction I’ve read, but not really all that different. The investigator is unfailingly polite, though he employs a few psychological tricks that give him more control than the politeness gives him haplessness. The book’s setting is Japan, primarily Tokyo. The differences in the laws and cultural norms between Japan as told by Miyabe and the U.S. really are pretty minimal. A woman is treated as part of a man’s family and working women have expectations placed on them by their employers that we don’t see here. In the context of this novel, the differences are so few that any U.S. mystery reader will feel at home.

Shunsuke Honma is the detective, injured and on leave. A relative, Jun Kurisaka, comes to him seeking Honma’s help to find his fiance who has skipped town. Shoko Sekine disappeared after the relative decided to get her a credit card. A five year old bankruptcy prevented the application from succeeding. It’s initially baffling as to why she ran, but it quickly becomes apparent that Shoko Sekine is not the original person named Shoko Sekine. The fiance has assumed someone else’s name. We have a mystery, not just where she is, but who she really is and why and how she became Shoko Sekine.

The book is constructed to comment on the debt and consumer culture. In fact, one whole chapter is a minor character’s explication of Japan’s debt and credit industry, how regular people get themselves into trouble, and how bankruptcy works. I think the early part of the book overfocused on this and was slow as a result. I’ve seen several summaries that make the motive for the crime one of consumer culture. It didn’t appear that way to me. It was a complicating factor to the investigation, as the real Shoko Sekine got herself into debt and the revelation of bankruptcy is what caused the impostor to run, and there are some cascading effects of that knowledge. Obviously I see the motive as something else, but this is a spoiler free review so I won’t say what. I’m glad consumerism wasn’t the motive, however. It made the criminal much less crass and much more real in my mind.

I can’t think of one character I didn’t like in context of the story. Some are people I would hate in real life, of course. The investigating team, initially just Honma, slowly grows as more people get sucked in: a fellow detective, a high school mate with an unrequited crush, and even Honma’s pre-teen son. I had problems tracking who was who in the ever increasingly sizable cast, but only because of their number. Even those who the reader sees only in glimpses are characters with multiple facets. One scene just after the man with the unrequited crush asserts he will join the investigation stands out. Honma has a conversation with the man’s wife, who is hurt over her husband’s still strong feelings for Shoko long after Shoko has passed out of his life. Nevertheless, she assents to him going on his quest. She barely makes an appearance and yet her character is far more than one dimensional. Even the real Shoko Sekine leaves her personality behind her, rather than just a trail of evidence of her life. The reader gets to know what she was like and what her family was like, all through revelations from people she knew.

One thing was very different than every other crime fiction novel I’ve read. Most have a short wrap-up at the end. A kind of unwinding that says what happened or didn’t happen to the criminal, possibly something that transitions the investigator on to the next book. Miyabe’s ending occurs right at the climax. Scooby-doo pulls the mask off the monster to reveal the caretaker, and we go to credits. (Obviously, this is not Scooby-doo, and no mask gets pulled off. Again, no spoilers so I pulled my example from something else.) I’m sure it’s not that unusual, but it’s very different from the stuff I’ve read and refreshing. I might get annoyed if all my mysteries ended that way.

I liked the book enough that I’ll read more from Miyabe.

Other blogged reviews:

• In Spring It Is the Dawn
• An Adventure In Reading
• Naked Sushi
• Bookphilia.com

Title: All She Was Worth (火車)
Author: Miyuke Miyabe (宮部みゆき)
Translator: Alfred Birnbaum
Cover creator: Glen Allison (photographer) / Mark R. Robinson (designer)
Imprint / publisher: Mariner Books / Houghton Mifflin
Format: Paperback
Length: 296 p.
Publication date: 1999 (originally 1992)
ISBN-10: 0-395-96658-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-395-96658-7
Subject: Japan — Fiction

Third in my reading of the top ten obscure speculative fiction works from Feminist SF, the Blog!. In this case the book is both very good, and something I didn’t like.

I’ll explain the latter first. This is not written in a style that I like. The few bits of Asian folk tales that I’ve read are generally not my bag, and The Fox Woman is a version of a Japanese folk tale. For one, Japanese nobility don’t seem to do anything in these folks tales. They write poetry. They observe rituals. Their servants shield them from the unpleasantness of the world. Second, the stories are couched in 300 layers of symbolism. I like stories that work on multiple levels, but I don’t want to have to be a scholar to get it. I felt like I would have gotten so much more from this if I had more background on that culture.

The issue of style aside, I thought the book was really well done and fairly enjoyable. To the extent I could get my head past the style that is.

Simple plot: Kaya no Yoshifuji is married to Shikujo. Kaya no Yoshifuji is a minor noble, but failed to receive a government appointment and so is going into internal exile at his country estate. Though his real reason for heading out there is less disfavor at court and more a mid-life crisis. He brings along his wife Shikujo and son Tadamaro with him. There’s a chill in the marriage, but their reticence and Japanese cultural customs prevent them from airing it out. At the estate also live a skulk of foxes. Foxes that are restless… I can’t think of the right word, but that’ll do. The daughter Kitsune wants to be more than a fox. both Yoshifuji and Shikujo fixate on the foxes living in the garden. Yoshifuji with wistfulness for fox freedom. And Shikujo because foxes represent danger.

Kitsune quickly falls in love with Yoshifuji. But she’s a fox, and he’s a human (and married! but that’s less an issue in the culture apparently). Solution! Magic! Little bit of chanting, a human skull, and the help of a few gods, and Kitsune can change herself into a human. Her entire family becomes human. And their den under the gatehouse becomes a palatial estate. Now she just has to lure Yoshifuji to her and get rid of Shikujo…

I thought the perspective of the foxes was really well done. They are not simply evil spirit tempters in this telling, though a quick aside about luring people into swamps with foxfire was amusing. They are just as ignorant of the magic they employ as humans. The have their own desires, perfectly reasonable if at odds with those of the people in whose garden they live. They aren’t a Japanese version of Loki.

And I really liked that there are ethical consequences to everyone’s actions and inaction. Every character of substance sees some growth in their moral compass as a result of the choices they make. No one gets an easy win. There’s no Hollywood ending that absolves the characters of their sins. I am not saying no one is absolved or not, you’ll need to read it to find out. But the story avoids paint-by-numbers ethics such as having Kitsune be the neighbor woman who consoles Yoshifuji after Shikujo’s tragic death and then becomes his lover, letting everyone be morally right. (That’s an example; again, I’m not saying anyone does or does not die.) Everyone faces the consequences of their own choices.

A good book, but I’ll probably not read more novels by the author set in medieval Japan. But it was interesting and well written enough for me to pick up (eventually, my pile of unread books scares me) her stories if they are in a style that fits me better.

Title: The Fox Woman
Author: Kij Johnson
Cover creator: Susan Seddon-Boulet (artist) / Nicole Stanco (design)
Series: Heian trilogy; 1
Imprint / publisher: Tor
Format: Paperback
Length: 382 p.
Publication date: 2000
ISBN-10: 0-312-87559-2
Subject: Foxes — Japan — Folklore — Fiction
Subject: Nobility — Japan — Fiction
LC classification: PS3560.O379716 F69 2000

Next weekend is the Friends of the Seattle Public Library book sale. I mention this because it’s a great place to pick up books for cheap, and books like this one can be found aplenty. I grabbed The Modern History of Japan because I knew very little about Japan. The schools I attended in Seattle covered European history to death, but little of other areas of the world.

I have no idea if this book is accurate or not, though I have little doubt it gets its basic facts correct. But I’m not sure how good it is with the context. What was the reason why Choshu joined up with other daimyo to overthrow the Shogun and place the emperor in a position of paper supremacy? I don’t know. It’s my first book on Japan and so all I have is the perspective of Beasley, and I have no recourse to original material either.

Still, I thought the book was a steal at $1, because even the basic facts of Japan’s history were unknown to me. I’d heard the term Meiji Restoration before, but I had no idea to what event it was referring. Now I know. I knew that Japan had colonized Korea, but I didn’t know when this happened. Was it immediately before World War II? Or was it something that went back as far as time? Turns out neither, but definitely closer to World War II.

Title: The modern history of Japan
Author: W. G. Beasley (William Gerald Beasley)
Publisher: Praeger Publishers
Format: Paperback
Length: xi, 352 p. (includes index)
Publication date: 1963
Subject: Japan — History
LC classification: DS881 .B4 1963