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mystery with a travelogue flavour
(Review date: Oct 2011)
This is a detective mystery novel in the author's series of books featuring amateur detective Asami Mitsuhiko; however the books in the series are all stand-alone so there's no need to have read any of the earlier ones.
I've read a few of the other books in this series, and they all have a strong flavour of travelogue to them. Each book is set in some particular part of Japan which is usually named in the title (in this case Takachiho is a minor tourist destination in Kyuushuu with some impressive natural scenery), and the early chapters include detailed descriptions of the area and often how the characters got there; the author has very clearly done his research. Occasionally this veers close to self-parody: at one point the text quotes the exact number of bicycles registered in the town...
The 伝説 of the title refers to the myth that Takachiho is where the gods first descended to Japan from heaven, and also the location of the cave where Amaterasu hid from the world. This isn't a supernatural series, but the local legend typically plays a thematic role. In this case it also helps to bump up the reading difficulty, since a big chunk of one of the early chapters is an explanation of the myths which I found pretty heavy going.
I really enjoyed the plot of this book; it's a complex tangle of people dead or missing, various actors with obscure motives, and vague links to past events which only gradually become clear. I do find the series detective a bit of a weak character. Asami is a freelance journalist and author who's acquired a reputation as a great detective. Conveniently, his brother is a highly ranked Tokyo police chief, so Asami can generally persuade the local police to let him in on investigations. I didn't really get much of a sense of him as a person, though -- mostly he just seems to serve the purpose of pushing the plot forward and solving the mystery. He also in this book had an annoying tendency to tell the lead female character to stay at the hotel or go back to Tokyo and generally try to get her to "stay where it's safe"...