Inspector Imanishi Investigates – A Whodunit with Interesting Social Context

Seicho Matsumoto (1909-1992) was one of Japan’s best-selling and most prolific crime novel writers. He has written hundreds of detective and mystery novels, but only a handful of them have been translated into English. Unlike the works of his contemporary Edogawa Rampo (pseudonym of popular mystery fiction author Taro Hirai) Mr. Matsumoto’s stories focused on the social themes of the era, especially the bleaker aspects of postwar Japanese society. Matsumoto’s sleuths aren’t geniuses, but they solve the crimes through dogged perseverance. Another fascinating aspect of the author’s work is the way he instills the sense of place, providing us an armchair tourism of Japanese cities’ culture in that particular era. The central mystery I feel is secondary in Matsumoto’s novels since the focus largely falls upon characters, local culture, postwar devastation, etc.

Matsumoto’s Inspector Imanishi Investigates was first published in 1961 and translated to English by Beth Cary in 2003. The eponymous detective’s work ethics, his formal relationship with his wife, his idiosyncrasies (love for bonsai and haiku) the determination with which pursues each and every little lead reminded me of Martin Beck, a fictional Swedish police detective who featured in ten novels by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, written between 1965 and 1975. The plot kicks off with the discovery of a corpse under the tracks of a stationary train at a Tokyo station in the early morning hours. The victim isn’t killed by the train. He was strangled, his face bashed to an extent that makes identification nearly impossible.

Detective Eitaro Imanishi of the Homicide Division of Tokyo Metropolitan Police arrives at the scene, and the ensuing investigation bestows him with a single clue: according to witnesses in a bar the previous night, the victim spoke with a northern dialect, and the word ‘Kameda’ is overheard in the conversation between the victim and his companion/alleged murderer. The investigation proceeds very slowly but progresses steadily, thanks to the detective’s tenacious nature. He takes day-long train trips to rural areas, writes formal letters to inquire different precinct police departments. Some of the people supposedly connected to the investigation mysteriously die even though it’s closed off as natural death. The destruction of records at the end of World War II also impedes his inquiries. Nevertheless, Imanishi figures out that the crimes are somehow connected to a member of Nouveau Group, nihilistic Westernized artists gaining prominence in the early 1960s.

Matsumoto’s novel offers a dissection of a society, where gender roles are clearly delineated. Like any classic detective fiction, the woman in Inspector Imanishi Investigates remain dependent, vulnerable, quiet, and often confined to peripheral portions in the action. It’s a typical portrayal of 1960s household in Japan, and the women (Rieko and Emiko) who don’t confirm to their social roles are met with bleak ending. Such dated character sketches makes the work a bit unexciting. But Matsumoto excels in constructing a tightly-woven mystery. While early 1960s were generally known for Japan’s astounding post-war economic recovery, the author paints an unsavory portrait of a divided Japanese society, where war’s impacts are still felt.  Overall, Inspector Imanishi Investigates offers fine crime fiction tourism with nice social and cultural references pertaining to a particular era in Japan. 

The Hot Zone – A Bit Out-Dated yet a Thrilling Account of a Lethal Virus

“We don’t really know what Ebola has done in the past, and we don’t know what it might do in the future.”

Richard Preston’s 1994 non-fiction book The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story covers the outbreaks of Ebola in Africa (a deadly virus) and the virus' alarming outbreak at a monkey-house in Reston, Virginia in 1989. Named as Ebola Reston, the new virus strain found in a US laboratory was eerily similar to Ebola Zaire, which was first reported in Congo in 1977 (and from 2014 has ravaged across West and Central Africa killing thousands of people). Unlike the other pernicious Ebola viruses, the Reston virus caused only asymptomatic infections and couldn't cause disease in humans. The Hot Zone was often praised for its gripping narrative, which at times reads like a chilling horror literature. Of course, since it’s a twenty-five year old book, some of its portions are clearly outdated. Epidemiologists have also found problems with Preston’s amplified writing style and the way he supposedly twists the true nature of Ebola to keep the readers ‘terrified’, keeping up with the promise presented in the book title (the book was adapted into a six-part miniseries this year by Nat Geo channel).

The first two chapters of The Hot Zone are brilliantly written; the visceral account of what Ebola does to human body was so disturbing and scary to read. Although some of Preston’s choice of words to describe the people dying of Ebola (‘liquefy’, ‘bleeding out’) were criticized to have stoked sensationalism and unfounded fears (about the disease), the riveting prose keeps us wholly engrossed (provided you don’t take Preston’s description as the only clinically accurate version). The Hot Zone was written at a time when the general public had no knowledge of Ebola virus (even the scientific community was then coming into grips about the emerging, extremely deadly viruses) and some of the big fears addressed here were allayed over the years (like Ebola was ‘possibly airborne’).

 At the same time, the criticisms laid out against Preston’s book, for instance that it totally exaggerated the dangerous of Ebola in humans, were found to be misconception after the 2014-2016 West African Outbreak, which killed over 11,000 people. The current Ebola epidemic in Central Africa (particularly in Congo) that was first declared on August 1, 2018 has resulted in 1,700 deaths and counting. The vaccination and treatment efforts of the selfless doctors in Africa are also thwarted by the military conflicts in the region and the continent's lesser-developed healthcare system.

The Hot Zone has the undeniable quality of creeping us out (“Ebola Zaire attacks every organ and tissue in the human body except skeletal muscle and bone. It is a perfect parasite because it transforms virtually every part of the body into a digested slime of virus particles”). Although the origin of Ebola virus is still a mystery, Preston kicks up the scare factor by focusing a lot on the Kitum cave (in Mount Elgon National Park, Kenya). The author’s description of the place makes it seem preternatural, where invisible, primitive enemies are waiting to wreak havoc on the entire human race. Even Preston’s own journey into Kitum cave doesn’t reveal anything about Ebola. Similar to the vivid chronicle of Ebola symptoms in Charles Monet and Nurse Mayinga, the peek inside Kitum cave simply contains the power to terrify the readers, but adds nothing much from a scientific perspective.

Preston brings a much-needed interesting subtext into his ‘thrilling’ narrative late in the book, when he talks of deforestation of tropical rain forests and the aftermath of AIDS epidemic. “In a sense, the Earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of the concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rot-outs in Europe, Japan and the United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions. Perhaps the biosphere does not 'like' the idea of five billion humans”, writes Preston, contextualizing how the rapidly enlarging host of deadly viruses is linked to human’s adversarial impact on environment.

Having finished The Hot Zone, I have now started to read David Quammen’s 2014 book ‘Ebola: the Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus’, which is said to be toned down and less dramatic than Preston’s book. Also, I am interested in reading Richard Preston’s updated follow-up to his 1994 book, Crisis in the Red Zone (published July 2019).