弦月の風―八丁堀剣客同心

underwhelming historical crime fiction

(Review date: November 2010)

This book is in the historical crime fiction genre; it looks like it's one of a series of books featuring the same lead character, 長月隼人. Hayato is a 隠密廻り同心, which, as the book helpfully explains, is the kind of Edo-period policeman responsible for investigating the nastier and more complicated cases; he's also an accomplished swordsman. This time around the case he has to solve is a series of crimes committed by a gang of thieves whose m.o. is to break into merchant houses on stormy nights when they're unlikely to be heard or seen, kill all the inhabitants and take their valuables.

With a crime like that, this was never very likely to be a whodunnit-style guessing game about who the criminal was or what the method was; the plot instead progresses very straightforwardly as Hayato steadily tracks down the gang. This felt very linear and unexciting to me: it seemed to be a long series of "find a little guy; interrogate him or tail him through the streets of Edo; use the information to find the next guy" sequences, repeated until the whole gang was located. I never really felt drawn in by this, and Hayato never seemed to get any false leads or be seriously blocked in his progress.

Unfortunately this isn't really a book to read for the characters either. There doesn't seem to be much effort to tell you what Hayato thinks about anything, so his characterisation doesn't really go much beyond "crime fighting samurai". In particular there's a torture interrogation scene at one point (which I really wasn't expecting, although I suppose it's probably the kind of thing the Edo police would have done). I was expecting to read something about how Hayato felt about doing this: does he have a (possibly anachronistic) dislike of using torture, does he enjoy it, is it just another part of the day job? But it didn't really -- we just got several pages of nasty things being done with needles until the thief finally cracked and gave the information we needed to move on to the next link in the chain. And the criminals get almost no characterisation at all, since the whole novel is done from the perspective of Hayato and a few of his men.

I'm tempted to suggest that it's the city itself that comes closest to being a real character -- it certainly gets the most description as we trail the gang members around its various districts. Unfortunately the Edo period flavour means problems for Japanese learners as it brings with it obscure vocabulary. There's also a tendency to old-fashioned kanji usage choices from time to time (generally Daijisen had the alternatives but the Green Goddess did not). Some of the characters speak with accents ('~yasu' instead of '~masu' and the like) but I didn't generally find that a problem.

In conclusion, I'd suggest not bothering with this series even if you're a fan of historical fiction. At least I only borrowed it from the library :-)