KindlePrintReviews

Soul Cage

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Written by Tetsuya Honda, translated by Giles Murray — On some scaffolding nine storeys above the Tokyo skyline, an unnamed narrator is having an exchange with Tadaharu Mishima, a deadbeat dad and sometimes construction work who has a pachinko problem. They are on their lunch break….
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KindlePrintReviews

The Ginza Ghost and Other Stories

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Written by Keikichi Osaka, translated by Ho-Ling Wong — Tokyo has changed a great deal in the past century or so. There have been two catastrophic earthquakes, heavy bombing during World War II, and spiralling property prices that led to an eventual collapse. On the…
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PrintReviews

Deep Red

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Written by Hisashi Nozawa, translated by Asumi Shibata — Kanako Akiba is 11 years old and just like any other sixth-grader, laughing with her friends and sharing scary stories late at night on thespring trip. But when her teacher barges in and tells her she’s been…
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KindlePrintReviews

The Moai Island Puzzle

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Written by Alice Arisugawa, translated by Ho-Ling Wong — Golden Age mysteries are formulaic and, far from being a flaw, it’s a major part of their appeal. The stories follow patterns, and the reward for readers is not in being tricked by a new and…
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iBookKindlePrintReviews

The Silent Dead

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Written by Tetsuya Honda, translated by Giles Murray — Recently I lamented the decline of the classic police procedural – but how quickly I’ve been proven wrong. The genre appears truly alive and well, not least of all in Japan, where authors such as Hideo…
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iBookKindlePrintReviews

Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama

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Translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies — The main attraction of a police procedural is the opportunity for readers to watch the characters develop over a series of short, complex novels – Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, for example, or Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s Martin Beck series. Both offer…
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Features

First look: Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama

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Here’s an innovative approach to an eye-catching early review copy of a crime novel. It looks, in the picture, just like an ordinary compact cassette from back in the 1980s, but in fact it’s a whopping book of 634 pages – the latest Japanese crime…
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