Murder to the Minute
Seichō Matsumoto, trans. Jesse Kirkwood, Tokyo Express
Penguin Modern Classics, 160pp, £9.99, ISBN 9780241439081
reviewed by William Davies
Since the beginning of the Golden Age of crime writing, trains have provided countless opportunities for excitement and tension. Whether it is trains caught at the very last second, events glimpsed through the windows of speeding carriages, or trains shuttling from the city to the countryside, where, if you agree with W. H. Auden, the best murder mysteries take place, trains have long been a source for drama. Trains can also be their own little worlds of hope and peril. When Agatha Christie put Hercule Poirot on the Orient Express on 12th December 1934, she hit on the formula for a near-perfect closed-space mystery. Find a reason to stall the carriages in the middle of nowhere, fade from night to morning, reveal the body. With no one getting on or off, everyone is a suspect. Sleepy conductors stay up through the night, nodding off at just the right, or wrong, moment. The detective hunts for clues cabin by cabin, knowing all the while that a killer lurks somewhere on board.
There is another tradition of travel mysteries, though, that finds drama in the minutiae of how trains operate in daily life. For some writers of the Golden Age of crime, such as the more granular, procedural authors like Freeman Wills Croft, trains could provide the substance of the thrills, as well as crucial elements in the investigations: the minute-by-minute tensions of timetables; the alibis that live or die on exact timings; the knotty puzzle of who was where and when. The drama is in the everydayness. The brief ubiquity of trains in murder mysteries has a lot do with their increasing affordability in the early twentieth century. As readers took more trains, writers made more use of them, depicting not just the upper-class carriages favoured by Christie but the middle and lower as well. In The Hogs Back Mystery from 1933, set during the construction of the A31 bypass in the Surrey Hills, Wills Croft’s Inspector French must make do with the cheapest tickets he can find as he retraces the steps of the missing Doctor Earle. His methods surpass his means, though, as he painstakingly combs the crime scene, tests each of his theories, and slowly follows up on leads, recording them in minute detail. Not for French is the Poirot parlour bluff going to draw the killer into boasting or confessing. In his attempt to recreate the days leading up to Earle’s disappearance, French reconstructs every journey, by foot, bicycle and train. The suspects are apparent fairly on; what matters is cracking the alibis. Sadly, despite their popularity in the thirties, the taste for number-crunching procedurals declined in favour of more fanciful, quick-paced whodunnits. Fortunately, with a puzzle suitable for whiling away any train journey, Jesse Kirkwood’s excellent new translation of Seichō Matsumoto’s classic murder mystery, Ten to sen, has joined the Penguin Modern Classics list under the title Tokyo Express. It is a welcome addition to a cluster of Japanese murder mysteries now available in English that are indebted to the Golden Age of crime.
First serialised in Japan in 1957 and published as a novel in 1958, Tokyo Express follows two detectives trying to unravel the case of a double suicide by cyanide on a secluded beach near Fukuoka. With three witnesses of the couple boarding a train from Tokyo, and their last days accounted for by innkeepers and telephone records, it seems a tragic case of a passionate suicide pact. Yet when Torigai, the scruffy, chain-smoking local police detective, and Mihara, the young investigator from Tokyo, discover a dining carriage receipt for only one meal, they become suspicious of the circumstances surrounding the couple’s deaths. Why would two people who appear to have died in a lover’s suicide dine apart on their last journey together?
The novel starts with the witnesses who saw the couple leave Tokyo. A businessman, Tatsuo Yasuda, is dining with a government official in the Koyuki restaurant in Akaska. Within the first page, the narrator recounts the bribery scandal that has disrupted Japan’s post-war government. Yasuda is not implicated directly, but he is careful to remain discrete about his meetings with government figures. He is otherwise easy-going and friendly, radiating ‘the easy confidence of an experienced businessman.’ This charm convinces two of the waitresses in the restaurant to accompany him on a day out, though his favourite waitress, Toki, is not among them. Yasuda asks the waitresses to see him off for his train. From the platform, he spots Toki boarding a train and exclaims this to the waitresses, pointing out the man she is with. Though curious about Toki’s apparent secret relationship, the three pay it no further mind, and the waitresses watch Yasuda get on his train. Toki is one of the victims found on the beach the following morning, lying next to a man who turns out to be a government worker.
We begin the investigation in the company of Torigai on Kashii Beach looking at the bodies. Odd things about the scene strike him, like the arrangement of the couples’ limbs or Toki’s strangely clean white socks. Despite his eye for detail, Torigai is self-effacing and riddled with imposter syndrome. Only forty, he already excuses his (usually correct) hunches as mere ‘senility’. Mihara is quite different. Enthusiastic and energetic, he is ideally suited to the bustling Tokyo streets where he spends his days. Mihara is looking to rise through the ranks of the capital’s constabulary, but unlike what one might find in Western police dramas, he is deferential to his superiors and respected by them in turn.
Mihara does most of the detective work in Tokyo Express, travelling the length of Japan, one train, and the occasional ferry, at a time. Each journey is intricately accounted for, from platform to timing. Maps and diagrams are mercifully regular, inviting readers to check Matsumoto’s accuracy. All travel times ‘mentioned in this work’, a note at the back of the novel states, ‘are taken from the timetables of 1957, the year in which the incident took place.’ Matsumoto shares much here with Wills Croft, who so adamantly believed in fair dealing with readers that, in Inspector French’s case summaries, he would include the page numbers where each clue appeared in the preceding chapters.
Fair play has a strong tradition in Japanese murder mysteries and is a proud adaptation of this Golden Age tradition. Referred to as honkaku fiction (orthodox or authentic, but also faithful), procedural mysteries first flourished in Japan in the late forties with Seishi Yokomizo’s novels. Yokomizo took the patterns of Western mystery fiction, particularly of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, and applied them to murder mysteries set in rural Japan. They celebrate logic and well-made puzzles. Matsumoto brought the genre into the cities in the 1950s with Tokyo Express and his Inspector Imanishi novels, and a new heyday came in 1987 with Yukito Ayatsuji’s The Decagon House Murders. The Honkaku Mystery Writers Club of Japan was founded in 2000 to support this tradition and is behind much of the impetus to get these and other writers into English with publishers like Bitter Lemon Press, Pushkin Press, and Soho Crime.
What sets Tokyo Express apart from the Golden Age tradition and the rural noir of a writer like Yokomizo is a far darker, more political edge to the mystery. Champions of Matsumoto have celebrated his Hitchcockesque intensity, and the novel certainly has echoes of Strangers on a Train, but the sinister aspects of Tokyo Express are not reducible to the schemes of psychopathic killers. Instead, Matsumoto offers a jaded vision of post-war Japan, in which the corruption scandal described at the start of the novel intertwines further and further with Mihara’s investigations. Japan is presented as a place of suspicion and shadowy threats, with a democratic capitalism that has become bloated and corrupt. The trains are always on time, the documents are always filed, and Mihara can get his beloved cups of coffee, but, behind the scenes, the system is morally bankrupt. It is hard to shake the feeling that something more sinister than just the incident on the beach has taken place; that we might be reading just one among many accounts of deaths that appear too simple and too convenient at first glance.
Like the best procedural novels, Tokyo Express advances through tiny revelations and reconsiderations, through the ecstasy at a breakthrough after a long journey, and the crushing defeat when an alibi remains intact. ‘Mihara was dumbfounded. Once again, he held his head in his hands and despaired’ is the chorus of the novel, right up until the final pages. This is where the story’s emotional journey lies and, like so many of the Golden Age crime novels, it invites readers to join the detectives in trying to distinguish essential clues and red herrings. The smiling Yasuda readers meet at the beginning of the novel is soon the top suspect, but countless witnesses confirm his whereabouts before, during and after the apparent suicide has occurred. Is his alibi too perfect to be believable? Mihara must travel up and down Japan to find out. Or is Mihara simply suspicious of Yasuda because of his cheery demeanour during a murder investigation? In the sparse language of the novel, a detail like a smile can convey a host of meanings waiting to be unpicked.
Matsumoto’s stress on the inherent drama of investigative process, delivered through Kirkwood’s cool, crisp translated prose, is a timely antidote to the (sometimes unsettling) popularity of phenomena like true crime podcasts, where the emphasis is as much on the gruesome details as it is on the case and the evidence. Novels like Matsumoto’s are macabre in their own ways, but the victims remain part of a puzzle and are not just a pretext to indulge in the worst aspects of humanity. Murder is tragic in these stories, but it also motivates detectives and readers to work out what happened.
For those used to modern psychological thrillers like The Girl on the Train or the sometimes-fantastical abilities of Christie’s detectives, the technical details of Tokyo Express will be tough going at first, but Matsumoto spaces the breadcrumbs just close enough that readers, like Mihara, do not lose hope. Even without a 1957 Japanese timetable in hand to check the story’s authenticity, Tokyo Express is the perfect commuter novel, fiendishly perplexing like a sudoku in book form. We can only hope that more of Matsumoto’s work is translated soon. In the meantime, we could do worse than read the growing number of Japanese mystery writers finally available to English readers or rediscover the best of the classic Golden Age procedurals they so readily recall.
There is another tradition of travel mysteries, though, that finds drama in the minutiae of how trains operate in daily life. For some writers of the Golden Age of crime, such as the more granular, procedural authors like Freeman Wills Croft, trains could provide the substance of the thrills, as well as crucial elements in the investigations: the minute-by-minute tensions of timetables; the alibis that live or die on exact timings; the knotty puzzle of who was where and when. The drama is in the everydayness. The brief ubiquity of trains in murder mysteries has a lot do with their increasing affordability in the early twentieth century. As readers took more trains, writers made more use of them, depicting not just the upper-class carriages favoured by Christie but the middle and lower as well. In The Hogs Back Mystery from 1933, set during the construction of the A31 bypass in the Surrey Hills, Wills Croft’s Inspector French must make do with the cheapest tickets he can find as he retraces the steps of the missing Doctor Earle. His methods surpass his means, though, as he painstakingly combs the crime scene, tests each of his theories, and slowly follows up on leads, recording them in minute detail. Not for French is the Poirot parlour bluff going to draw the killer into boasting or confessing. In his attempt to recreate the days leading up to Earle’s disappearance, French reconstructs every journey, by foot, bicycle and train. The suspects are apparent fairly on; what matters is cracking the alibis. Sadly, despite their popularity in the thirties, the taste for number-crunching procedurals declined in favour of more fanciful, quick-paced whodunnits. Fortunately, with a puzzle suitable for whiling away any train journey, Jesse Kirkwood’s excellent new translation of Seichō Matsumoto’s classic murder mystery, Ten to sen, has joined the Penguin Modern Classics list under the title Tokyo Express. It is a welcome addition to a cluster of Japanese murder mysteries now available in English that are indebted to the Golden Age of crime.
First serialised in Japan in 1957 and published as a novel in 1958, Tokyo Express follows two detectives trying to unravel the case of a double suicide by cyanide on a secluded beach near Fukuoka. With three witnesses of the couple boarding a train from Tokyo, and their last days accounted for by innkeepers and telephone records, it seems a tragic case of a passionate suicide pact. Yet when Torigai, the scruffy, chain-smoking local police detective, and Mihara, the young investigator from Tokyo, discover a dining carriage receipt for only one meal, they become suspicious of the circumstances surrounding the couple’s deaths. Why would two people who appear to have died in a lover’s suicide dine apart on their last journey together?
The novel starts with the witnesses who saw the couple leave Tokyo. A businessman, Tatsuo Yasuda, is dining with a government official in the Koyuki restaurant in Akaska. Within the first page, the narrator recounts the bribery scandal that has disrupted Japan’s post-war government. Yasuda is not implicated directly, but he is careful to remain discrete about his meetings with government figures. He is otherwise easy-going and friendly, radiating ‘the easy confidence of an experienced businessman.’ This charm convinces two of the waitresses in the restaurant to accompany him on a day out, though his favourite waitress, Toki, is not among them. Yasuda asks the waitresses to see him off for his train. From the platform, he spots Toki boarding a train and exclaims this to the waitresses, pointing out the man she is with. Though curious about Toki’s apparent secret relationship, the three pay it no further mind, and the waitresses watch Yasuda get on his train. Toki is one of the victims found on the beach the following morning, lying next to a man who turns out to be a government worker.
We begin the investigation in the company of Torigai on Kashii Beach looking at the bodies. Odd things about the scene strike him, like the arrangement of the couples’ limbs or Toki’s strangely clean white socks. Despite his eye for detail, Torigai is self-effacing and riddled with imposter syndrome. Only forty, he already excuses his (usually correct) hunches as mere ‘senility’. Mihara is quite different. Enthusiastic and energetic, he is ideally suited to the bustling Tokyo streets where he spends his days. Mihara is looking to rise through the ranks of the capital’s constabulary, but unlike what one might find in Western police dramas, he is deferential to his superiors and respected by them in turn.
Mihara does most of the detective work in Tokyo Express, travelling the length of Japan, one train, and the occasional ferry, at a time. Each journey is intricately accounted for, from platform to timing. Maps and diagrams are mercifully regular, inviting readers to check Matsumoto’s accuracy. All travel times ‘mentioned in this work’, a note at the back of the novel states, ‘are taken from the timetables of 1957, the year in which the incident took place.’ Matsumoto shares much here with Wills Croft, who so adamantly believed in fair dealing with readers that, in Inspector French’s case summaries, he would include the page numbers where each clue appeared in the preceding chapters.
Fair play has a strong tradition in Japanese murder mysteries and is a proud adaptation of this Golden Age tradition. Referred to as honkaku fiction (orthodox or authentic, but also faithful), procedural mysteries first flourished in Japan in the late forties with Seishi Yokomizo’s novels. Yokomizo took the patterns of Western mystery fiction, particularly of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, and applied them to murder mysteries set in rural Japan. They celebrate logic and well-made puzzles. Matsumoto brought the genre into the cities in the 1950s with Tokyo Express and his Inspector Imanishi novels, and a new heyday came in 1987 with Yukito Ayatsuji’s The Decagon House Murders. The Honkaku Mystery Writers Club of Japan was founded in 2000 to support this tradition and is behind much of the impetus to get these and other writers into English with publishers like Bitter Lemon Press, Pushkin Press, and Soho Crime.
What sets Tokyo Express apart from the Golden Age tradition and the rural noir of a writer like Yokomizo is a far darker, more political edge to the mystery. Champions of Matsumoto have celebrated his Hitchcockesque intensity, and the novel certainly has echoes of Strangers on a Train, but the sinister aspects of Tokyo Express are not reducible to the schemes of psychopathic killers. Instead, Matsumoto offers a jaded vision of post-war Japan, in which the corruption scandal described at the start of the novel intertwines further and further with Mihara’s investigations. Japan is presented as a place of suspicion and shadowy threats, with a democratic capitalism that has become bloated and corrupt. The trains are always on time, the documents are always filed, and Mihara can get his beloved cups of coffee, but, behind the scenes, the system is morally bankrupt. It is hard to shake the feeling that something more sinister than just the incident on the beach has taken place; that we might be reading just one among many accounts of deaths that appear too simple and too convenient at first glance.
Like the best procedural novels, Tokyo Express advances through tiny revelations and reconsiderations, through the ecstasy at a breakthrough after a long journey, and the crushing defeat when an alibi remains intact. ‘Mihara was dumbfounded. Once again, he held his head in his hands and despaired’ is the chorus of the novel, right up until the final pages. This is where the story’s emotional journey lies and, like so many of the Golden Age crime novels, it invites readers to join the detectives in trying to distinguish essential clues and red herrings. The smiling Yasuda readers meet at the beginning of the novel is soon the top suspect, but countless witnesses confirm his whereabouts before, during and after the apparent suicide has occurred. Is his alibi too perfect to be believable? Mihara must travel up and down Japan to find out. Or is Mihara simply suspicious of Yasuda because of his cheery demeanour during a murder investigation? In the sparse language of the novel, a detail like a smile can convey a host of meanings waiting to be unpicked.
Matsumoto’s stress on the inherent drama of investigative process, delivered through Kirkwood’s cool, crisp translated prose, is a timely antidote to the (sometimes unsettling) popularity of phenomena like true crime podcasts, where the emphasis is as much on the gruesome details as it is on the case and the evidence. Novels like Matsumoto’s are macabre in their own ways, but the victims remain part of a puzzle and are not just a pretext to indulge in the worst aspects of humanity. Murder is tragic in these stories, but it also motivates detectives and readers to work out what happened.
For those used to modern psychological thrillers like The Girl on the Train or the sometimes-fantastical abilities of Christie’s detectives, the technical details of Tokyo Express will be tough going at first, but Matsumoto spaces the breadcrumbs just close enough that readers, like Mihara, do not lose hope. Even without a 1957 Japanese timetable in hand to check the story’s authenticity, Tokyo Express is the perfect commuter novel, fiendishly perplexing like a sudoku in book form. We can only hope that more of Matsumoto’s work is translated soon. In the meantime, we could do worse than read the growing number of Japanese mystery writers finally available to English readers or rediscover the best of the classic Golden Age procedurals they so readily recall.