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 Tidal Zone – A Mesmerizingly Written Novel about Contemporary Parenthood

“Civilization, after all, survives on repression: probably all marriages, all families, require the silencing of words that, once spoken, could not be unsaid.”

Few pages into English writer Sarah Moss’ The Tidal Zone (published in 2016), I was thoroughly engrossed by the beauty of the author’s prose and the deeper truths it discloses. Moss brilliantly decodes human emotions in a way that immediately makes us recognize, understand, and empathize with the characters she has sketched. This is my first Sarah Moss novel and although the synopsis didn’t seem that interesting, I’m glad to have had the determination to give it a try. The Tidal Zone is an exploration of 21^st century family life and parenthood, which opens with a rather gloomy incident, pushing a middle-class English family to look beyond the drudgery and bliss of their domestic life. It sounds like something director Michael Haneke could make, even though Moss’ tender observations and intimate point-of-view narrative isn’t saddled with misanthropy.

Sarah Moss’ fifth novel unfurls from the perspective Adam Goldschmidt, a stay-at-home dad who does a bit of hourly-paid teaching at the local university. He also spends his free time researching on the postwar rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral. However, Adam’s biggest joy is being the primary caregiver to his two lovely daughters: bookish and assertive 15-year-old Miriam and the precocious 8-year-old Rose. Adam is married to Emma, a workaholic GP with no talent for domestic duties, but greatly qualified to be the family’s sole breadwinner. There’s neither a sneering commentary on how children are affected when the parental roles are reversed nor unbridled scorn is reserved for the mom who ‘chooses’ career over children. Frustrations are expressed over Adam-Emma’s increasingly distant married life, sans the usual cliched message of motherhood.

What’s primarily interesting about The Tidal Zone is the inner monologue of an anxious Adam. He thinks (and worries) a lot, but like every one of us, he endlessly edits his inner flow of words to offer the allegedly prompt replies. As an unemployed PhD, Adam provides insights on range of themes: from post-World War II England to healthcare politics and the design of corporate housing estates. His insights about his family members are equally interesting, particularly his concern for his rebellious elder daughter, who says “patriarchy and hegemony and neoliberalism, several times a day”. And through his perceptions, we can discern the kind of person Adam is: a caring, generous, absurdly anxious, and an imperfect husband and dad. Adam’s existential malaise is stoked when Miriam, at school, goes into anaphylactic cardiac arrest. For some unknown reasons, Miriam heart has stopped. But thanks to CPR performed by a teacher and perfect timing of the paramedics, Miriam is saved.

Nevertheless, the family’s life and dynamics is transformed irrevocably. The sudden discernment of his daughter’s mortality evokes great fear within Adam. He has to face the hardships of the domestic life in the wake of this, while also enduring the fears about his children’s future. An incident from the past makes Adam wonder whether Miriam’s situation is genetic. But he curbs his anxieties and holds the family together. He still takes Rosie to school, who can’t easily fathom the reasons behind her sister slacking off at hospital, watching TV. He puts up with Emma, who approaches the crisis in a very GP-like manner (offering diagnosis rather than acknowledge the chasm of uncertainty). But we understand this is Emma’s coping mechanism. And although we might be far removed -- culturally or socially -- from the Goldschimdt family, the emotional unrest described here could be understood and easily related with. From capturing the boredom, desperation, and joys of family life to the silent horror of hospital environment, Sarah Moss’ has written a very 21^st century story with admirable clarity and depth.

The Tidal Zone, however, seems to fall a bit short of greatness since  I began to lose interest in the story in the middle-portions. I can understand that the novel is a character study and an exploration of contemporary English life. Yet the historical aspects of the novel (Coventry Church) and the story of Adam’s hippie father’s journey in chase of American dream weren’t as absorbing. It brings a sort of thematic depth to the tale, which I didn’t care for much (from an emotional viewpoint). The most intriguing aspect of the novel was Adam’s attempts to connect with Miriam, once after learning the fears and restrictions she has to put up with. These father-daughter conversations not only reach emotional depths without a bit of sentimentality, but also contain a fine dose of caustic wit (Miriam says, “If it happens again and I don’t survive, burn me, OK? It’s better for environment; there isn’t room for everyone to be buried”, to which Adam remarks, “It can’t be better for the environment. Burning requires energy and generates smoke. Burial’s just entropy.”) Moreover, everything about Adam and Miriam’s relationship is beautifully depicted; the father who is very proud of his daughter’s bold assertions even though he publicly plays the role of typical dad (“You can’t speak like that” he says to curtail her declamations). And you get the sense of how Miriam is both frustrated and moved by her father’s overwhelming attention. Overall, The Tidal Zone despite its minor structural flaws is a poignant and extraordinary novel about parental love.   

 

Watership Down – A Spellbinding Fantasy Adventure Novel

“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”

Richard Adams’ classic fantasy novel Watership Down, like many other classic works of literature, endured myriad of obstacles to get published (in 1972 by Rex Collings). In fact, the genesis of Watership Down is as much fascinating as the detailed fantasy world of anthropomorphized rabbits. Richard Adams originally began telling the tales of sapient animals to his two daughters on a trip. By this time in the 1960s, Oxford-educated Adams, also a war veteran of World War II, worked in the British Civil Service. Encouraged by his family and inspired by naturalist Ronald Lockley’s ‘The Private Life of Rabbit’, he started writing the story, which took him two years to complete. Then Adams faced at least seven rejections from publishing agencies. But over the years after its publication, the book sold more than 50 million copies (at age 54, Adams became a full-time author; he wrote novels and wrestled with ideas for stories up until his death in 2016, at age 96). Now Watership Down has cemented a position in the fantasy literature hall of fame right alongside J.R.R Tolkien, C.S.Lewis, etc.

A lot of first-time readers of the novel would stumble across a kind of disparity between their expectations and the writers’ tone. The image of rabbit may withhold a childish appeal, but the preoccupations of Adams’ anthropomorphized rabbits are very adult in nature. The story deals with themes of tyranny, survival, leadership, reproduction, and freedom that may appeal more to older children and adults (it gained a reputation of being ‘not-so-appropriate children’s book’). It is because much of the naturalistic/realistic details about the rabbits’ existential quest are drawn from Adams’ experience in Second World War. His acquaintance with rebels, soldiers, and officers makes up for the human adult-like mental state of the rabbits.

Watership Down opens in Sandleford Warren, a quiet home to many rabbits. Among these, brothers Hazel and Fiver (less than a year old) go through their routine of nibbling grass at sunset. Hazel hopes to gain more weight and join the ranks of Owsla – the strong inner circle. Fiver is an oddball runt of his litter, oft disregarded by others in the warren. When Fiver comes across a sign board in the field, he gets agitated and has a premonition. Hazel takes Fiver to the Chief Rabbit and he warns about bad things waiting to happen. The Chief Rabbit brushes away Fiver’s warnings and finds it impossible to entirely move their warren. Hence, Hazel and Fiver decides to leave the warren. And before long, they are joined by Bigwig, the strongest of their warren and a member of Owsla. After mild altercations, eleven rabbits including Hazel and Fiver make a difficult journey across fields and roads that are infested with humans’ hrududil (automobiles) and other kinds of enemies.

Author Richard Adams

During tough times, a story-telling rabbit named Dandelion narrates the adventures of El-ahrairah, the persistent hero of rabbits’ folklore. The stories are full of cunning and bravery which inspires our heroic rabbits to keep going in order to find a safe place in the hill. The band of rabbits first stumble into a seemingly peaceful warren, invited to live there by a giant, well-bred rabbit named Cowslip. All the rabbits in the warren looks healthy, although they are melancholic and strangely the population is low. Once again Fiver warns of sinister things lurking in the warren. But only when the rabbits of Cowslip's Warren fail to appreciate the marvel of El-ahrairah’s stories do the freedom-seeking rabbits led by Hazel grasp the diffidence and sinistral things pervading the warren. The unmasking of the Cowslip’s secret pushes Hazel and others to congregate on Watership. The top of the hill is asserted as perfect place for building a new warren, since the view would warn them of any enemies in the area. Hazel continues to find new ways to strengthen their warren. By this time, two injured rabbits from their old warren (Sandleford), also its only survivors, carry bad news that confirms Fiver’s premonition. However, the immediate problem preoccupying Hazel is to find does (female rabbits), without whom the warren will not thrive. The quest for does sets Hazel and his rabbits on a hazardous adventure that brings them face-to-face with a tyrannical General (Woundwort) of an excessively controlled warren known as ‘Efrafa’.

Richard Adams always rejected the idea of interpreting too much from his story. He has remarked, “It was meant to be just a story…..simply the story of rabbits made up and told in the car.” Nevertheless, Adams’ claims didn’t stem the flow of allegorical readings over the decades, some of which I find very interesting. Some critics/bibliophiles latch on to the book’s religious allegory, some focus on its folkloric elements, and few others find strong references to primitive humans and their civilizations. What I particularly gleaned from Watership Down is the perpetual conflict between quest for freedom versus the allure of safety and security. This is a theme that’s central to the human hierarchical societies of 20^th & 21^st century as we relentlessly mull over the boundaries of freedom and need for safety. The other significant element addressed in the novel is encroachment of lands for industrialization so as to solely satisfy the human needs. Mr. Adams constantly evokes the beautiful image of the pastoral, and the intrusion of this pleasant space by human footsteps, cars and other machineries deeply conveys the foolhardiness and stolidness of our race.

A still from Martin Rosen's 1978 adaptation of the novel

I immensely liked the way the author gradually builds up character traits for each rabbits, making it easy to differentiate one from the other. Adams flawlessly zeroes-in on the group dynamics and how these different-minded rabbits come together in nerve-wracking situations. The surefooted leader Hazel, the belligerent Bigwig, the intuitive Fiver, all of whose knowledge unchained from hierarchical politics enormously benefits the rabbits of Watership Down in grave situations. In fact, numerous lessons on leadership, group dynamics, and authority roles were weaved out of the way these rabbits smartly maneuver themselves from imminent catastrophe.

In many ways, there are similarities between Tolkien’s quest of the hobbits and the rabbits’ goal. Adams, like Tolkien, had conceived distinct mythology and language (Lapine) for their fantasy world, although not as obsessively as the creator of Middle-Earth. Primarily, both are about ragtag band of young heroes braving a greater enemy. While Tolkien doesn’t offer any explanations for the absence of detailed female characters (with inner lives), Adams blames it on the impassivity of the male rabbits, who desires bunch of does, not for romance but to build a stable population in the warren (of course, if Watership Down is published now, it would have drawn heavy criticisms for not portraying liberated, self-dependent does). Any way, it’s better to read the book for what it is (a beautifully written epic adventure) than for what it is not.