Tanizaki laminates a murder mystery and psychological study onto a rumination about the nature of fiction itself.
In this newly translated novella, written in 1918 by early-20th-century Japanese literary master Tanizaki (Red Roofs and Other Stories, 2016, etc.), two friends go in search of a murder that may or may not be about to happen.
Narrator Takahashi receives a phone call one morning from his wealthy friend Sonomura inviting him to come watch a homicide in secret. Sonomura says he doesn’t know “who’s going to kill whom” or where the murder will take place but is certain it will happen “in a certain part of Tokyo” around 1 a.m. Although Takahashi thinks Sonomura may have slipped into insanity, he agrees to accompany him on his search for the murder out of a sense of responsibility as a friend. In describing how he has come to know a murder will be committed, Sonomura says he was at a movie theater when he witnessed a man and woman plotting behind another man’s back, using a cryptogram Sonomura deciphered using his knowledge of Poe’s story “The Gold-Bug,” in which characters use a similar code to find a lost treasure. After much searching, Takahashi goes home but Sonomura comes for him after midnight, sure he has figured out the crime’s location. Despite Takahashi’s claim not to take Sonomura seriously, his anticipation concerning what he may get to witness is palpable. Through knotholes in a storm shutter (“as if peering through the viewfinder of a movie camera,” the translator says in an afterword), the friends watch an erotic, violent scene that mesmerizes Takahashi. In the aftermath Takahashi, himself a novelist, struggles to distinguish fact from illusion. The novella is hauntingly Hitchcock-ian—although written before Hitchcock made films—but readers not fluent in Japanese may want to read the translator's afterword beforehand to appreciate Tanizaki’s use of Chinese characters and Japanese phrases to create puns and layers of meaning English-speaking readers might miss.
Tanizaki laminates a murder mystery and psychological study onto a rumination about the nature of fiction itself.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2491-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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