SHITAMACHI SCAM

Investigators in Tokyo attempt to untangle a conspiracy scamming the elderly in Pronko’s crime novel.

Det. Ishii, a pugnacious female cop who works for the women’s crime task force, is contacted by Nobuko Ueno, an elderly woman who believes she’s the target of a sagi, or fraud, to bamboozle her out of her home, the only valuable property she possesses. Ishii organizes a sting to trap the perpetrators, but it goes terribly wrong, and Ueno is killed by an errant scooter. While Ueno’s death might have been an unfortunate accident, Ishii is convinced she was murdered. She joins forces with Det. Hiroshi Shimizu from the homicide department, a specialist in forensic accounting, to sort out the astonishingly complex conspiracy to prey upon the “greying population”—it’s a professional operation that’s as “as smooth and stable as a four-cylinder motorcycle engine.” The ring, led by Takuya, a maddeningly slippery criminal, takes whatever they can: pensions, life savings, even their marks’ homes. The victims are usually female, if only because they tend to live longer than their male counterparts, and often live in Shitamachi, an older, traditional, and cloistered section of eastern Tokyo. The author weaves a subtle and complicated tale with impressive skill, one in which multiple crimes seem completely disconnected but turn out to be pieces of one bleak puzzle. At the heart of this intellectually nuanced novel is the decay of old Japanese traditions, the social mores that discouraged the kind of predation that now afflicts the most vulnerable. Japanese culture is notably deferential to its elderly population, but, according to Det. Ishii, that veneration is increasingly a thing of yesteryear (“Japan’s tradition of respecting ancestors, teachers, parents—anyone older—goes back to Confucian scholars and feudal manners…but it’s all gone, isn’t it?”). Takuya is a personification of this nihilistic shift. His father abandoned him as a child and his mother died young; he was raised by a drunken grandfather who died when Takuya was only 16 years old, leaving him nothing but debt. While he’s a despicable grifter, it’s not hard to see how he could turn against elders who did so little for him; his psychological portrait is deftly painted by Pronko. Det. Hiroshi is damaged, as well; he’s also lost his parents, and he’s so stung by the loss that he neglects to use his inheritance. He’s not particularly traditional—he has a pregnant girlfriend, Ayana, and performs his professional duties with great diligence but little satisfaction. There’s something heroic about his decency, given that the societal structure that once supported such rectitude seems to be in a state of rapid decline.

Pronko’s knowledge of Japanese life is simply extraordinary—with painstaking care, he limns its shadowy contours and ambiguities. Tokyo emerges as a kind of protagonist all on its own, a melancholic and beleaguered character that somehow refuses to fully surrender its historic majesty. This is not an unchallenging read—the details of the conspiracy are many and dense, and readers will at times experience the same frustrated bewilderment as the detectives who struggle to unravel it. Pronko’s work amply rewards readers for their labor, however, with an absorbing drama conveyed with incisive intelligence.

A gripping crime drama that’s rich with insights about modern Japan.