A Midsummer’s Equation – An Enjoyable Third Outing for Detective Galileo

Ever since the English translation of Devotion of Suspect X (in 2011), Japanese author Keigo Higashino has developed a strong reputation as the writer of mesmerizingly complex crime fiction. If crime novels are a form of tourism, Highashino’s writings could very well acquaint us with unique food, locales, philosophical renderings, people’s attitude, and other alleged eccentricities pertaining to the nation (which we address as ‘Japaneseness’). Of course, we read crime fiction to also gaze into a country’s desolate quarters permeated with bleak notions that aren’t advertised in the shiny brochures. However, Higashino’s novels don’t take a conventional plunge into dreary Japanese underworld. Much of the crimes committed in the author’s stories are related to domestic conflicts and the perpetrators (and victims) mostly hail from middle-class, inherently carrying a strong sense of morality and are persistently swimming against the rapidly changing tides of economic climate.

While readers of crime fiction in translation might be marveled at the rise in Japanese crime novelists in the recent past (Natsuo Kirino, Kanae Minato, Hideo Yokoyama, etc), the detective stories in Japanese literature has a long tradition. From Edogawa Rampo, Seicho Matsumoto to Yukito Ayatsuji and Soji Shimada, Japanese crime novels in the past century had underwent a lot of changes as well as stuck itself to idiosyncratic cultural and moral notions. Keigo Higashino’s approach incorporates elements of human psychology, Eastern philosophy, and Sherlock Holmes-like sleuthing processes. Like any other crime writer around the world, Higashino bestows the key to unlock his complex puzzle upon his fictional alter-ego Manabu Yukawa, who is revered as ‘Detective Galileo’. Yukawa isn’t, however, a badge-carrying detective, but an associate professor of physics whose deep intellectual reflections and strong knowledge of science brings swift solutions to hard-to-crack cases. A Midsummer’s Equation (translated to English by Alexander O. Smith in 2016) was the third book in ‘Detective Galileo’ series (followed by Suspect X & Salvation of a Saint). Similar to the two previous books in the series, the central crime looks like an easily decipherable case, but over time the robust facts emerging from the case the task of nailing a suspect becomes daunting.

While Suspect X & Salvation of a Saint revealed the suspect/perpetrator earlier in the narrative and simply tracked down the answers to questions ‘How’ & ‘Why’, A Midsummer’s Equation starts off as whodunit murder/mystery. The story beings with 11-year-old Kyohei on his way to spend his summer vacation at an old seaside resort ‘Green Rock Inn’, managed by his aunt and uncle, Setsuko and Shigeharu Kawahata. En route to Hari Cove, Kyohei takes the same train as Manabu Yukawa. Despite the fastidious and ungreagrious nature of Yukawa, he comes to the boy’s rescue over an altercation of using mobile phones during travel. Kyohei also sort of recommends his aunt’s inn to Yukawa for his indeterminate stay at the coastal town. Yukawa is traveling to Hari Cove to attend series of public meetings organized by DESMEC, a big corporation which wants to dig up the mineral resources on the ocean-bed The concerned local citizens have formed the group ‘Save the Cove’ and the meetings are to assuage the tension regarding the project.

For years, Hari Cove has gradually lost its tourism revenue. Even at the middle of summer, Green Rock Inn has only one reservation. Now with DESMEC’s promise for steady jobs, the town’s natural beauty is also threatened. Thirty-year-old Narumi – Shigehiro-Setsuko’s daughter & Kyohei’s cousin – is one of the dedicated patrons of ‘Save the Cove’ movement. She and her friends in the group take the conference on undersea mining prospects very seriously. During the meeting, she sees an elderly man -- a total stranger – nodding towards her. Later, Narumi finds out that the old man named Mr. Masatsugu Tsukahara is the one reserved a room in their inn. Thanks to Kyohei, the inn also has another guest (Yukawa). In the night after the meeting, Tsukahara goes missing and later is found dead on the rocks lining the coast. No foul-play was initially suspected. But Tsukahara’s identity raises some questions. Soon, Yukawa using his analytical genius mind arrives at a theory behind Tsukahara’s death. Nevertheless, it takes a detailed investigation led by prefectural and Tokyo department police to get to the whole of truth (which is full of twists and turns).

Masaharu Fukuyama plays Yukawa aka Detective Galileo in the movie adaptations

 What I love about Higashino’s novels are the steady, fluid pace and dense details that come out of a seemingly simple scenario. Moreover, a good number of the smaller details expand our initial understanding of the characters, which in turn allows for in-depth examination of themes like guilt, penance, crime and punishment. Like many fictional sleuths, Yukawa makes an intriguing central character because of him lacking in courtesies and social niceties (at the same time he keeps up with reader’s scientific expectations). Scientific pursuit of truth is the sole preoccupation of Higashno’s protagonist. He goes after truth in a manner that somehow often results in strictly moralistic and unexpectedly bleak conclusions. But in A Midsummer’s Equation, Yukawa unveiling of secret doesn’t lead to entirely dark developments. There’s a touch of Zen and Eastern philosophy, when the physicist tells (to bewildered Kyohei) the importance of dispelling evil through truth and goes on to suggest how truth can allow us to make informed choices in our future.

Eventually, A Midsummer’s Equation was more emotionally satisfying (despite lacking the subtlety of Malice and Suspect X) than what I consider to be the author’s underwhelming novel – ‘Journey Under the Midnight Sun’. Although ‘Journey..’ was critically acclaimed, I found the central mystery in the novel to be dragging on and on as it introduced lot of subplots that didn’t do much to advance the plot (it was messy rather than being a labyrinth). The central protagonists of that novel are also so unsympathetic and are only perceived through the eyes of underdeveloped minor characters. Furthermore, the ultimate reveal and the easily predictable episodic twists were totally dissatisfying for me. A Midsummer’s Equation might be smaller in scope compared to ‘Journey’, but the human drama and emotions are sufficiently convincing (the only odd part is teenager Narumi’s momentary rage, even though the author incorporates lot of details to convince us on the character’s psychological underpinning). Altogether, A Midsummer’s Equation is a well-crafted addition to the ‘Detective Galileo’ series, delivering series of marvelous narrative twists while also maintaining surprising emotional resonance. 

Hell House – A Spooky and Risque Haunted House Fiction

American author Richard Matheson’s Hell House (published 1971) was hailed as one of the best haunted house horror fiction, following Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. However, unlike Shirley Jackson’s penchant for conjuring psychological terror, Mr. Matheson’s horror elements are more visceral, jumping headlong into savagery. Hell House’s story outline is pretty similar to ‘Hill House’: a motley crew of paranormal investigators and scientists are hired to go into an infamous haunted house and try to comprehend its mysteries. The haunted abode in question here is known as ‘Belasco House’, described earlier in the novel as the ‘the Mount Everest of haunted houses’. A dying newspaper tycoon buys the mansion and he hires three members to find proof about the truth of afterlife. The magnate believes that the answer could be found in the titular place, amidst its whirlwind of non-human entities.

The evil of Hell House was created by one man named Emeric Belasco, through his obsession for debauchery and murder. He built this as a retreat to primarily initiate unsuspecting individuals into his perverted and depraved thinking. Previously, two crews have investigated the house in 1931 and 1940, but both teams were met with gory demise, except for a young, blessed medium Benjamin Fischer. Fischer is once again chosen for the 1970 expedition into hell house. The other two members are: Florence Tanner, an obscure Hollywood actress now turned into mental medium, and Dr. Lionel Barett, a physicist and parapsychologist, who firmly believes that hauntings are merely residual electromagnetic-energy that has built up in the house over the years. He doesn’t believe in ghosts and especially censures the notion that apparitions contain personalities.

Accompanying middle-aged Dr. Barrett in his journey is his young wife Edith, a character which more or less aligns with readers’ perspective, since the paranormal researchers keep on explaining their conflicting opinions to her. The hired investigators have a week to prove whether the spirits or entities exist. Fischer, who bears the mental scars from his last exploration, keeps his mind close. But Florence, the eager medium, attempts to contact with the souls lingering in the mansion, only to invite Barrett’s ridicule. Meanwhile, Barrett waits for the arrival of his custom-built machine, which he believes will liquidate the electromagnetic energy that evokes varying psychic phenomena. Then as expected, the mental onslaught and physical intimidation commence.

Pamela Franklin plays Florence in the 1973 movie version

Hell House is quite risque and profane compared to Shirley Jackson’s sexless stories. Earlier into the novel, Matheson cooks up a situation, where one female strips and the other ogle at the ‘fullness of breasts and warmth of loins’. Since Emeric Belasco’s sins were spelled with details, the sexual deviance and maniacal behavior only escalates. The repressed past of Edith and her sexual frustration over Barrett’s impotence were clearly used to create sensationalism and shock value. The bouts of sexual violence and exploitation would definitely put off lot of readers. While Matheson manages to keep the readers on the edge through his depiction of physical attacks, his characters aren’t multi-layered or strong enough to make us really care about them. Contrary to depth of characterization in Shirley Jackson’s Hill House (or even in Stephen King’s works – the author cites Matheson as his greatest influence), Hell House is a grimly fascinating arrangement of thrills and scary situations. Belasco’s huge mansion is described as ‘Charnel house of fancies’. The same could be said about the novel, which isn’t a great horror novel, but engaging enough to make us dream about the atrocious spectres. 

The novel was adapted into a movie titled The Legend of Hell House (1973) by John Hough and the script written by Matheson himself. It was a decent adaptation and a must-see for those interested in haunted-house films. Novelist and screenwriter Richard Matheson is often cited as the man who set forth a distinct path for tales of sci-fi and horror, which was followed by generations of writers and film-makers. I am Legend (1954), The Shrinking Man (1956), and What Dreams May Come (1978) are my three favorite Matheson novels. 

 The Legend of Hell House Trailer

Voices from Chernobyl – Investigates Truth and Pain Hidden from World

"Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone - the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth."

On the morning of April 26, 1986 an ill-conceived maintenance test at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in northern Ukraine set off a disastrous chain reaction in the core of Reactor No. 4. The uranium fuel rods were ruptured and a steam explosion blew the roof off the reactor, chucking uranium and graphite into air. As a result more than 50 tons of radioactive particles were released into the atmosphere, first blanketing the nearby city of Pripyat. In the next few days the radioactive cloud drifted over Europe and eventually it appeared in every corner of the world. What was more harrowing about the Chernobyl disaster was the response from Soviet regime: total silence and concealment. It was only when the Swedish nuclear plant and monitoring stations across Scandinavia reported abnormally higher levels of radioactive particles, which were traced back to Ukraine-Belarus border that the calamitous nature of the Chernobyl mishap was known to the world. Moreover, only three days after the explosion, Soviet news agency TASS issued a brief statement acknowledging the accident at the nuclear plant.

Scientists, journalists, environmentalists and activists who have closely followed the Chernobyl disaster and its survivors don’t see it as an event like the unprecedented floods or planned terrorist attacks. The scale of devastation in Chernobyl isn’t limited by time. It could be understood when you learn that the Cesium in the soil around the Zone [a forbidden 30-kilometer landscape close to the nuclear power plant] and beyond will be reduced by half in 180 to 320 years. Subsequently, it was predicted that the contaminated area would become totally habitable for humans in 20,000 years. Belarus received 70 per cent of the fallout of iodine, cesium, strontium and plutonium radionuclides.  Meanwhile, the people clinging to the land in and around Chernobyl are putting up a tough fight with their long-term toll.

Svetlana Alexievich

There has been lot of detailed and definitive version of the explosion and its aftermath in Chernobyl. Novels have been written by mythologizing the event. But no other work about Chernobyl in literary circle gained as much attention as Belarusian writer/journalist Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (published in 1997, the English translation by Keith Gesson was released in 2005). Svetlana Alexievich, who won Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, was best known for recording history by collecting stories from ordinary people. Her literary method gets as close as possible to carry actual human voices and confessions, worn down by suffering and oppression. The chorus of individual voices exhibited by Alexievich creates a kind of strong cumulative effect which allows us to glimpse into the profound agony of an alienated society, unlike any reiteration of fact and evidences. “I often thought that the simple fact, the mechanical fact, is no closer to the truth than a vague feeling, rumor, and vision. Why repeat the facts - they cover up our feelings. The development of these feelings, the spilling of these feelings past the facts, is what fascinates me. I try to find them, collect them, and protect them”, writes the author whose literary method forges a bond between survivor and reader.

‘Voices from Chernobyl’ is divided into three parts, each part consisting of multiple monologues [which are actually transcribed interviews between the author and individuals whose life are irreparably changed/damaged by the Chernobyl disaster]. Alexievich’s book starts and ends with an unsettling testimony of two widows. One was the young wife of a firefighter who went to the nuclear plant to put off the fire at the reactor. The other is the wife of a liquidator (one of the 600,000 men drafted in to do the dangerous task of burying the topsoil and to kill every animal in the zone). The fate of firefighter particularly disturbed me, especially when his wife (Lyudmilla Ignatenko) says, “I pick him up, and there are pieces of his skin on my hand, they stick to my hands……I clipped my nails down till they bled so I wouldn’t accidentally cut him” (the man got 1,600 roentgen -- unit of radiation exposure – when 400 roentgen is considered a lethal dose; even the burial site of the firefighters at a Moscow cemetery remained radioactive).

 Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (Reactor 4)

Other monologues describe the incompetence and corruption of Party Bureaucrats, the denying plus distracting tactics of Kremlin, the heroism and subsequent torment of unsuspecting soldiers, liquidators, scientists, etc. The voices of ordinary citizens-turned-survivors explore the terrible human cost of the catastrophe. What Alexievich’s expertly collected monologues avoid is the gaze of a tourist. She avoids taking advantage of Chernobyl myth to give us tall tales of gallantry and villainy. The monologues even include people, who are skeptical of the written word to describe Chernobyl [“There’s nothing heroic here, nothing for the writer’s pen”, says a cynical liquidator]. In between the monologues of grief and death, Alexievich also captures certain perspectives that are too shocking so as to generate a surreal feeling. For example, the bikes, tractors and household objects smuggled out of zone, the liquidators working on top of the reactor for hours to clear the graphite, the testimony of a man who has killed many animals, but only remembers burying a poodle alive since his whole group lacked a bullet. Most outlandish was the belief carried by clean-up crews that vodka offers some defense against radiation. While many survivors convey the devastation of the accident caused on next generation of children (from leukemia to all sorts of birth defects), some observe how the place still managed to be ordinary [“The men drank vodka. They played cards, tried to get girls”]. Amidst the distressing tales of loss also remain little spots of dark humor: for example, a scientist reminisces on the disaster like this: “the era of physics ended at Chernobyl”, or when presenting the death-bed conversation between a wife and her ailing husband: “Are you sorry now that you went there? He shakes his head no and writes for her, "When I die, sell the car, and the spare tyre, and don't marry Tolik." Tolik is his brother. She doesn't marry him.”

Chernobyl is full of inscrutable extremes and unknowns. In general perspective, it not only evokes tragedy, but also generates a kind of awe or morbid fascination. Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl invokes the deep pain and complexity, pertaining to the man-made catastrophe without harboring a hint of misguided enthrallment. The expression of these people, burdened with intolerable hardships, may be fragmented and lack the strong literary cadence. Yet it resonates with truth and pain which inundates our eyes with tears and plagues our mind with questions. 

 A 17-minute short film from Juanita Wilson inspired by a 'monologue' mentioned in Voices From Chernobyl

 

Eden – The Follies and Obscurities of Human-Alien Contact

Polish author Stanislaw Lem is an expert when it comes to writing stories about human space explorers stumbling upon alien worlds and cultures. The inherent human urge to anthropomorphize an alien civilization and the absolutely unbridgeable gap between human and extraterrestrial intelligence (in terms of technical, biological, cultural, etc) is a recurrent theme in Mr. Lem’s works. Eden (published in Polish in 1959 and translated to English in 1989) was the first of the author’s novels to explore the subject of first contact, a theme scrutinized more in his following works, Solaris (1961), The Invincible (1964), and Fiasco (1986). These travelogue plus cautionary tales (set in bizarre alien worlds) largely works due to Lem’s deeply perceptive nature to envision human condition from an outsider’s perspective. Of course, like many of East European and Soviet Union sci-fi writers of the time, Lem’s highly imaginative premise imparted profound social criticism on Stalinist regime and the Iron Curtain.

Eden starts off like a typical SF expedition story with six members of a spaceship, crash-landing on an Earth-like planet, of course named ‘Eden’. All the six men are identified only by their titles: the Captain, the Engineer, the Doctor, the Cyberneticist, the Chemist, and the Physicist (occasionally the Engineer is called by his real name Henry; the meaning of providing name only to Engineer remains inscrutable). Lem’s expertise doesn’t exist in creating character-driven stories, but in place of it he includes strong ideas and theories. Similarly, the six men of Eden are prescribed a certain personality: the Captain being a stern leader, the Doctor exhibiting empathy, the Cyberneticist preoccupied by his defective robots, etc. They remain as ciphers throughout to carry the author’s grave insights about the first-contact. Nevertheless, the profound strangeness swirling in the 'Edenite' atmosphere keeps the characters and readers on the edge.

The spaceship is badly damaged and it would take few weeks to repair it. Previously, only a probe has been sent to the planet. So the crew decides to use the accident to explore the planet which has a breathable earth-like atmosphere, and if possible seek help from the local intelligent alien species. The ship has crash-landed in a knoll that’s situated at the center of a desertscape. In the subsequent days and weeks, the six men go on an expedition in four directions and stumble upon eerie, incomprehensible things. The foremost odd thing they come across is the planet’s vegetation: giant calyxes; spider-like veins; blossoms that takes flight like butterflies. Then they happen upon a broken-down bio-mechanical factory, which manufactures complex, unfathomable products. Odder still are the planet’s intelligent species, called by the six as ‘Doublers’ (since it consist of two symbiotic life-forms). Mass graves, weird skeletons inside glass jars, pits with deformed alien corpses, disk-shaped flying things, taped footage of every-day alien life, Lem’s concoction of the ‘doubler’ society retains an unsettling, harrowing tone.

An illustration of alien called as 'Doubler' [Pic courtesy: Deviant art -- https://www.deviantart.com/spaceexplorer/art/Eden-tribute-to-Stanislaw-Lem-367363511]

 Eden is definitely not one of Lem’s masterpieces. It lacks the deeply philosophical tone of Solaris or Fiasco and far removed from the playfully satiric tone, found in Ijon Tichy stories (a fictional space voyager encounters bizarre civilizations and creatures in cosmos). It isn’t also hard science-fiction like The Invincible. Nevertheless, Eden contains a lot of strangely terrifying scenarios to warrant a read. Moreover, this isn’t an escapist fantasy or space opera with human kind joining hands with alien race to establish brotherhood across cosmos. Lem doesn’t indulge with gratuitous violence, although he keeps alive the fear of unknown. While some of the chapters dealing with the ship’s repair are slow-moving and tedious, there are quite a few spine-chilling situations scattered throughout the expedition. One intriguing confrontation between humans and the alien ‘doublers’ happens at the planet’s metropolis of sorts. The characters’ discovery of the alien structures that leads to feelings of terror and confusion was similar in tone to the ‘discovery’ in Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness.

The last few chapters are equally brilliant and disturbing. The chapters where the men eventually establish a communication of sorts with the astronomer 'doubler' is absolutely riveting and demonstrates why Lem is a gifted sci-fi master. The story of anonymity, oppression, censorship, biological experimentation, and internment pieced through the clumsy mode of communication established with the Doubler stays grimly fascinating (possesses certain parallels from modern human history). Lem also contemplates the ethical issues of imposing values and interpretations on situations humans can’t understand (“…these are beings with a physiology, psychology, and history different from ours. You can’t transplant a model of our civilization here…”, the Captain remarks). Furthermore, the author makes a valid argument against the naivety of humankind with dreams of interfering upon the culture & politics of intelligent alien civilization (an allusion to Fermi Paradox and the concept of otherness). Altogether, Eden isn’t a great SF novel, but definitely worth reading to experience Stanislaw Lem’s mesmerizing excursion through strangely captivating milieus and life-forms.