文庫版 姑獲鳥の夏

supernatural flavoured mystery with a lot of philosophical discussion

(Review date: Dec 2010)

This is a strong contender for the best book in Japanese I've read this year; it's certainly the longest.

It's a mystery novel with a supernatural flavour, set in Tokyo in the early 1950s.

The narrator, Sekiguchi, is a writer of magazine articles. At the start of the story, he visits a friend, named Chuuzenji Akihiko but who mostly goes by the nickname Kyougokudou from the name of the second hand bookshop he owns. Sekiguchi wants to discuss a rumour he's heard about a woman whose husband mysteriously vanished and who has apparently been pregnant for some 20 months without giving birth; he's hoping to get some information on long pregnancies in Japanese history and legend from Kyougokudou, who is something of an expert in folklore and odd information. (Kyougokudou frequently acts as something of an authorial stand-in, as you might guess from the coincidence of names.)

However, Kyougokudou ducks this question and instead leads the conversation off down a tangent into what consciousness actually is, whether we can really trust our senses, and whether the modern scientific viewpoint is really the right way to think about youkai. This turns out to be deliberate setup on his part to get Sekiguchi in the right frame of mind for the answer to his original question, which Kyougokudou thinks Sekiguchi would otherwise have completely misinterpreted.

This tangential philosophical discussion takes up basically the whole of the first hundred-page chapter, and there is more of the same scattered through the rest of the book. The author's aim in starting the book with this apparent huge digression, I think, parallels that of the character: to put the reader in the right frame of mind so they don't insist on interpreting subsequent events purely from the modern Western scientific viewpoint.

The missing husband turns out to be an acquaintance from Sekiguchi and Kyougokudou's schooldays (Sekiguchi has a rather poor memory so hadn't realised this); Kyougokudou feels obliged to investigate further. More precisely, he sends Sekiguchi. This setup reminded me of some of the Sherlock Holmes stories where Watson is obliged to investigate some case on his own; after bumbling around investigating as best he can, Watson returns home and confesses his bafflement to Holmes, who of course declares the matter obvious and solves the problem based only on what Watson has told him. Like Watson, Sekiguchi tries his best but feels rather out of his depth; also like Watson he asks the questions the reader has and provides an excuse for the detective to exposit on what's actually going on...

The book does a very good job of setting up a set of linked mysteries (the oddly long pregnancy; the missing husband; and others) so that by the middle of the book you definitely want to keep reading simply to find out what on earth is going on. There is a slightly weak section perhaps two thirds of the way through where some things are solved by Kyougokodou using information which hadn't previously been revealed to the reader, which felt slightly like cheating to me. However this isn't a major flaw, and the book does tie up all the plot elements very nicely in the end.

This isn't an easy read for a Japanese learner. It's a long book, and the discussions about consciousness for example I found a bit challenging on the vocabulary front. The kanji usage is slightly old-fashioned; I don't know if this is intended to match the 1950s setting or if it's simply the author's personal preference. There is usage of pre-simplification forms, and grammar words like せい and は ず are written in kanji rather than the more usual kana. There are also a few quotations of Classical Japanese, although these are largely skippable or guessable.

I'd definitely recommend this book if you're happy reading shorter novels and are looking for something slightly longer and more challenging. If you like your mystery stories action-packed, this might not be the novel for you, though -- the philosophical discussions are an integral part of the book and I suspect that if you don't like them you won't really enjoy the novel.