This is a murder mystery where the main puzzle is why one writer murders another.  Set in modern Japan, Police Detective Kyochiro Kaga is trying to work out who murdered bestselling novelist Kunihiko Hida. The main suspect is Osamu Nonoguchi, who he used to know when they were both teachers in high school. These are the main three characters and the Detective is determined to uncover what extreme resentment could have led one person to kill another.  His search takes him to the past, and he goes all the way back to schooldays.  It turns out that there are many layers of story and there are different ways in which the details come out, from the perspective of the Detective, from Nonoguchi and from interviews with other people in the story. The central feature of the story is the lengths that someone has gone to hide the truth, and, stemming from this,  whether the crime was spontaneous or whether it was carefully planned.  Dark secrets are revealed, but the emotional tone of the novel is surprisingly flat. The characters do very little to directly express their feelings.  The most interesting feature of the story is quite cerebral: it is about the relation between a novelist and their writing, and how much an author’s style is unique. The unabridged audiobook is performed by Jeff Woodman, who has the task of taking on different character’s voices and trying to keep them separate, which isn’t always easy. The listener has to pay careful attention to know which character is speaking at any particular point, and it is occasionally confusing.

© 2015 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York