Customer Reviews

The Voice and Other Stories: Short Stories by Japan's Leading Mystery Writer

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A successful businessman who once committed a crime with a partner now wants to keeps tabs on him...

A rising movie actor who is very cautious about his newfound success due to his secret murder of his lover - to which a single person was witness, and who is now his worst nightmare come to life...

A bar hostess so desperate for real love that she would arrange for pretenders to be murdered with other women as bogus love suicides...

A bank clerk hell-bent on revenge from a former co-worker who seduced his sister and left her for dead to cover up their affair...

A terminal-cancer stricken haiku poet who is tricked to be used as a pawn in the murder of another woman...

All these are examples of the short stories you'll find in this great book. Matsumoto's short stories really dazzle you as the criminals' motives are explained slowly and carefully. Adam Kabat does a terrific job in his translation. Mesmerizing... not to be missed!

Having two mystery novels of Seicho Matsumoto I had to get this book of short stories and I am very happy I did. Set in Japan, during the 50s and 60s, the stories are about unsolved crimes, 6 crimes which we, as the readers, follow along with the main characters, be they murders, bystanders or police. I really enjoy the feel of Matsumoto's Japan, a Japan still trying to find itself in a Post-World War Two/Cold War world, a mixture of train schedules, rare if modern phones, old fashion kimonos and tea.
I also enjoy the details he pours into each story. He gives you all the facts - he doesn't cheat and rarely tosses in come clue in the last sentence. I wish more of his work was in English!

I'm sorry to disagree with the other reviewers, but the book didn't impress me as five-star material.

Perhaps it's the reticent Japanese way of tale-telling, perhaps time isn't kind to this type of whodunits, but the fact is I found the stories ingenuous to the point of artlessness. They are basically police procedurals, sometimes told from the criminal's (identified as such at the outset) point of view, so the intellectual excitement of, say, an Ellery Queen novel is entirely absent. And they are narrated in a style too close to real life, thus lacking the tautness that is (or should be) a hallmark of the genre. In the blurbs you read about "infernal twisters", but believe me, there aren't any. And as in most real life cases, the suspect turns out to be the culprit: no others are allowed to provide a minimum of suspense.

On the other hand, the style also makes the stories charming and wistful, somewhat as a lifelike, criminal version of "Snow White" or "Little Red Riding Hood". Everything is plain, there are neither hidden meanings nor antiheroes or anguished existential musings. Traces of the old Japan surface almost constantly, and this is perhaps the stories' most attractive aspect.

All in all, if you can conceive of an idyllic criminal book, this is it. It isn't memorable, but if you read it, you'll wish you could live in such a time with such a people.