And another Japanese Week has come to an end.
I'd love to say that it was planned from the beginning to start and finish it with a book review, even more of the same genre...unfortunately, this is just a (well accepted) coincidence.
Takeshi Nishida is one of the ace inspectors of Tokyo police's homicide squad but because of his not typically Japanese character, he often gets on his superiors' nerves (one in particular) and has jeopardized almost every chance for a promotion in the past years.
Not that he cares about promotions, he likes his job as it is, but the case he's about to investigate proves to have quite a few difficult questions to answers.
Yuki Funagawa is found dead in his apartment in Shinjuku by his girlfriend (or better, ex-girlfriend), with an umbrella stuck in one eye...The murder weapon is pretty obvious and when the forensic says they found two sets of fingerprints, the case looks ready to be wrapped up. One set belongs to Makoto Ogawa, director of a company that produces bolts and screws. But the other set...how did the Emperor of Japan's fingerprints end on an umbrella used to commit a murder?
Furthermore, the umbrella is of the common type that you can get for almost nothing in every konbini (convenience store) of the country. Those umbrellas are often forgotten in restaurants, train stations or stolen so Nishida has to check every person who came across it, even if briefly.
From Mr. Ogawa, who was the original purchaser of the umbrella, to an Odakyu Electric Railway employee and a girl working in a hostess bar, then an Italian exchange student and an American living and working in Japan all the way to a Tokyo University student and his grandfather...they're all linked to the umbrella it's Nishida's task to understand how and who used it last.
While immersed in the reading I found it hard to believe this is Tommaso Scotti's debut novel because it is written so well that it may pass for a more experienced novelist's work rather than a rookie's.
As you probably guess from the name, the author is Italian but has been working and living in Japan for the past 10 years and that's why the descriptions of Japanese rules and society are so detailed and spot on.
Takeshi Nishida is an hafu, a japanized word took from the English 'half' and it's used to describe people who have a non-Japanese parent; in Nishida's case, his mom was American.
Because of this, Nishida is caught in between two realities: the strict and rules obedient Japanese society against the more vocal American one...I guess that the author, being himself a foreigner, took his personal experiences as a source to highlight the differences between Eastern and Western cultures.
Story-wise, at first, I was a bit confused on the reasons why we had the background of characters that are not directly involved in the murder, but I soon realized the purpose as inspector Nishida is following the umbrella's journey from the person who first bought it to the murderer and, when all blanks were filled, it gave a more profound bigger picture.
I really hope this novel gets to be translated at least in English because it's worth for the global stage: it's intriguing, there are a few 'what the heck' kind of moments, and the ending seems to suggest there are probably going to be more cases with inspector Nishida as the protagonist.
Soo...this was it!
Thank you for joining this year's Japanese Week, I hope you found it interesting.
I'm planning to do another Irish Week since the last was in 2017 and, living in Ireland at the moment, I actually have no excuses not to do it, so look forward to it!
In the meantime, thanks for stopping by.
読んでくれてありがとうございました！
My vote: 8½/10
Ph: lafeltrinelli.it
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