Inspector Imanishi
Apr. 10th, 2023 03:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: Inspector Imanishi Investigates, by Seichō Matsumoto
This was selected as I was skimming my to-read list for a filler item on an Amazon order. It is set in 1960s Japan, which is a long way away now in time and space. There is a cultural shift; it reads like a modernised world, but not quite the modern world. The story begins with the early morning discovery of a corpse in a railway yard on the edge of Tokyo; for some time the body goes unidentified and Imanishi's various leads all seem to run cold. Yet there are other, possibly natural, deaths occurring around Imanishi as he probes and questions. Some of Imanishi's questioning and reasoning remind me of le Carré's Smiley; impenetrable and at the time apparently barely related to the story, yet shown later to be vital. But his domestic arrangements are perhaps more like Maigret, with a long-suffering wife and a child used to a largely absent father, and the bohemian, intellectual and social climbing aspects of some of the characters and the plot fit Christie's style. Unlike the Seishi Yokomizo books I read last year, this has no listing of characters at the start; in this case I think that would have been beneficial, as there is quite a large cast and to a Western reader some of the names are easily confused. I suspect someone familiar with Japanese culture would observe more in the novel, but it was still a very good read. The pace is initially sedate and yet the tension is always there.
This was selected as I was skimming my to-read list for a filler item on an Amazon order. It is set in 1960s Japan, which is a long way away now in time and space. There is a cultural shift; it reads like a modernised world, but not quite the modern world. The story begins with the early morning discovery of a corpse in a railway yard on the edge of Tokyo; for some time the body goes unidentified and Imanishi's various leads all seem to run cold. Yet there are other, possibly natural, deaths occurring around Imanishi as he probes and questions. Some of Imanishi's questioning and reasoning remind me of le Carré's Smiley; impenetrable and at the time apparently barely related to the story, yet shown later to be vital. But his domestic arrangements are perhaps more like Maigret, with a long-suffering wife and a child used to a largely absent father, and the bohemian, intellectual and social climbing aspects of some of the characters and the plot fit Christie's style. Unlike the Seishi Yokomizo books I read last year, this has no listing of characters at the start; in this case I think that would have been beneficial, as there is quite a large cast and to a Western reader some of the names are easily confused. I suspect someone familiar with Japanese culture would observe more in the novel, but it was still a very good read. The pace is initially sedate and yet the tension is always there.