Forty-six-year-old journalist Peter Niels, who has traveled the world since his youthful marriage ended, is touring Taiwan, a country he thoroughly enjoys, when he and his photographer, Josh Pickett, have a day free from professional responsibilities. Deciding to visit the famous Taroko Gorge, they become involved in a strange disappearance. A group of ninth grade Japanese students has come to Taroko for an end-of-the year class trip, and three of the young girls disappear. Author Jacob Ritari alternates his points of view from Peter Niels to Michiko Kamakuri, one of the schoolgirls on the trip who decided not to go exploring on her own; Tohru Maruyama, the ninth grade Class Representative with whom several of the girls are “in love”; and Detective Hsien Chao, the stodgy Taiwanese policeman called in to investigate the disappearances. The chaperone of the Japanese trip, Mr. Tanaka, a physical education instructor who became their homeroom teacher, is under great pressure to find the girls and ensure a happy ending. Told in clean and simple prose, the novel emphasizes plot and the effects of the disappearances on individual characters, though there are few complexities and surprises.
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Just after author Yukio Mishima finished the final novel in his “Sea of Fertility” tetralogy on November 25, 1970, he disemboweled himself in a ritual suicide—seppuku—committed in the presence of four members of his private army. Mishima, aged forty-five, believed whole-heartedly in the strengths of the old Japanese emperors and in the strong, aristocratic culture that had evolved from the samurai. He never forgave Emperor Hirohito for denying his godliness at the end of World War II, and he despaired of the political wrong-headedness he saw on both the right and the left a generation after the war. Spring Snow, written in 1966, is the first of the four novels of what is generally regarded as his masterpiece, a series which explores the essence of life, the spiritual beliefs which make that life meaningful, the obligations of man to a wider society, the relationship of chance to free will, and the glory of dying for one’s beliefs. Despite Mishima’s awesome reputation and the notoriety he achieved as a result of his bizarre ritual suicide, his writing is not esoteric. Instead, he writes in an accessible, descriptive style which graphically conveys the culture of Japan in the days leading up to to World War I.
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From the outset of this atmospheric, often nail-biting story, the reader knows that s/he is in the hands of a mastercraftsman, a writer at the peak of her powers who is able to involve the reader in a story of escalating tension and heart-quickening suspense. After only one page, I was completely caught up in the action, holding on for dear life and “riding the dragon” as Miyabe introduced her unusual characters and their even more unusual problems. Shogo Kosaka, an investigative reporter at Arrow magazine, is driving through a typhoon late at night, nearly blinded by the rain, when he almost strikes a small, teenaged boy, huddled next to his bicycle on the side of the road. The boy, Shinji Inamura, has a flat tire and is trapped in the storm. When Shogo gives him a lift, they are almost immediately jolted out of their seats. They have hit a manhole cover which someone has removed. Seconds later, a panic-stricken father looking for his seven-year-old son, appears at the scene. His son had run out of the house looking for his cat during the typhoon, and all evidence points to the fact that the boy has now fallen into the water-filled manhole. Exciting suspense novel which reveals much about Japanese culture.
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In this heart-thumping experimental novel which bursts the bounds of the usual genre categories, British author David Peace creates an impressionistic story of a real Tokyo bank robbery and the deaths of twelve bank employees on January 26, 1948. A man representing himself as a doctor investigating a case of potentially fatal dysentery in the neighborhood appears at the Shiina-Machi branch of the Teikoku Bank just after closing time. He says he must inoculate all the employees in the bank against this disease, and decontaminate all the documents and money that an infected man may have touched. He explains how he will give each person two different medicines and demonstrates how to roll up their tongues for the first liquid so that the medicine will not hurt their teeth or gums. After one minute, he gives them all the second liquid. Two minutes later, sixteen victims, writhing in agony, have fallen unconscious, and twelve of them die, poisoned with cyanide. The physician then removes the day’s receipts and disappears. A kaleidoscopic literary style make this a unique and challenging mystery.
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When Shunsuke Ho, a Japanese detective recovering from a gunshot wound, is asked by a young relative to try to find his missing fiancee, Shoko, this “simple” request quickly evolves into much more. Honma also finds himself dealing with issues of credit card debt, bankruptcy, identify theft, and possibly multiple murders. Cleanly written and straightforward, the novel is also unusual in that Miyabe develops character more successfully than many other mystery writers. Honma is a real person who seems older than his 42 years, with real worries and real domestic problems, and we come to know him, his life with his 10-year-old son, and his hopes for the future. This mystery is a welcome change of pace, still lively and absorbing even ten years after its initial publication.
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