This novel was WINNER of the 2005 Naoki Prize for Best Novel in Japan, and also WINNER of both the Edogawa Rampo Prize and the Mystery Writers of Japan Prize for Best Mystery. Mathematical genius Tetsuya Ishigami and his equally brilliant friend Manabu Yukawa, from the physics department at Imperial University in Tokyo, are at the heart of Keigo Higashino’s complex and satisfying murder mystery from Japan. From the outset the reader knows who has killed a loathsome and terrifying bully; the big question is whether or not the person will ever be caught. As Prof. Yukawa says, “The investigators have been fooled by the criminal’s camouflage. Everything they think is a clue isn’t…[it] is merely a breadcrumb set in their path to lure them astray. When an amateur attempts to conceal something, the more complex he makes his camouflage, the deeper the grave he digs for himself. But not so a genius. The genius does something far simpler, yet something no normal person would even dream of, the last thing a normal person would think of doing. And from this simplicity, immense complexity is created.” With two characters who resemble Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty in their battle of wits, the novel also contains the kind of abrupt dialogue and thin characters of Conan Doyle. Outstanding and very clever.
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In this readable, exciting, and historically enlightening novel with two separate plots, Audrey Schulman accomplishes an incredible task. She makes the individual plots totally compelling and uniquely character-driven as they shift back and forth in alternating chapters, always leaving the reader panting for more and anxious to keep reading toward a conclusion. What is most seductive about the novel is that the plots take place in two different time periods and settings—one, in the area of what is now Kenya in 1899, and the other, in Virunga National Park, on the border of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, in 2000. In the first plot a man from Bangor, Maine, responsible for building a railroad from Mombasa to Kisumu, through Amboseli, must deal with two large and bloodthirsty lions, reportedly over nine feet in length, as they lie waiting to pick off railroad workers; in the second, a young scientist with Asperger’s Syndrome is charged with finding a vine that is consumed by mountain gorillas and which dramatically reduces the incidence of both stroke and heart disease in their species. If Max, the researcher is able to obtain samples of the vine, a pharmaceutical company will, among other benefits, provide armed security to ensure the survival of the gorilla population in Virunga National Park, ad infinitum. Somehow Schulman manages to connect these two disparate plots in the conclusion, leaving the reader wholly satisfied on all levels.
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Told by Marianna, a young woman who has lost all sense of “home” as a result of the more than ten years of warfare she lived through in her homeland of Lebanon, this impressionistic psychological novel begins with her dreams of “before the war was real.” Romantic images of her mother “wander[ing] outside, smelling the ghostly jasmine in the dark, and Daddy open[ing] another old book under a lamp” overlap with images of her grandparents lighting the candles on a Christmas tree while sweet wine boils on the stove. Now the war is “real,” however. Years have passed, and the old reality she yearns for remains only in her dreams. Marianna, now eighteen, is in another place, America, her father’s birthplace, where, she believes, “nothing can be beautiful” and where she looks “inward to the night, to my dream self who had promised that this time I really had gone back home to my true life.” The warfare she experienced in Lebanon, which began in 1975-76, when she was seven, is now thousands of miles away, but she has been unable to cope with a new life in the US. Focusing almost exclusively on the four people in this family, on their friends, on those who died in the war (between 1975 and 1990), and on Lebanon itself, author Patricia Sarrafian Ward recreates the psychological damage of war.
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After an apprenticeship as a shipwright, William Adams takes to the sea in 1587, at age 23, commanding a supply ship carrying food and ammunition to the English fleet as it battles the Spanish Armada. A dozen years later he is commanding a ship going to the Spice Islands on a route around South America. At the end of nineteen catastrophic months, the 36-year-old Adams and twenty-four desperately ill and dying crew members arrive at the south end of Japan, the first Englishmen ever to do so. Giles MIlton writes an extremely readable, scholarly study of the opening (and in 1637, the closing) of Japan to western trade. Using many primary sources, Milton creates an exciting story of how Japan comes to be “discovered,” what its values and culture are, and why the intrusion of the west and the possibility of trade are eventually rebuffed. The contrasts Milton sets up throughout the biography attest to his appreciation of 17th century Japanese society and their superior “civilization” to that of the British at the time.
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Yukio Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy, of which this novel is the second in the series, incorporates four novels set in four different time periods, illustrating Mishima’s extremely conservative attitudes toward the changes in Japan from the 1912 to 1970. Born in 1925, Mishima had, throughout his life, mourned the loss of samurai ideals, including reverence for the Emperor. As the novel opens, Shigekuni Honda, a main character in Spring Snow, the first novel in the series, is now a judge in the Osaka Court of Appeals. He has reached the age of thirty-eight, a man leading a quiet life of reason who believes that his youth ended with the death of his friend Kiyoaki Matsugae, eighteen years ago. When he is asked to substitute for his Chief Justice at a kendo exhibition in Nara, some distance away, he accepts. The star of the exhibition is young Isao Iinuma, the nineteen-year-old son of Kiyoaki’s tutor during their childhood. Honda, who has always grounded his life in reason, soon has reason to believe that Isao is the confident samurai reincarnation of Kiyoaki, who was a sensitive man of passion and emotion a generation ago. As he follows Isao’s life, he gives an ironic blueprint for his own life in 1970.
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