1) "The Master of Go" by Yasunari Kawabata
I wondered whether the point might be that foreigners were not meant for Go"" (an outwardly simple but essentially very intricate game resembling chess), commented the late Kawabata, here in the guise of the reporter Uragami. The American reader, however, following the chronicle of a six-month Go match, based on Kawabata's reportage of a 1938 contest, might translate this in western terms into a battle of sense and (in the non-pejorative meaning) sensibility. And yet at the core is an irreducible Japanese ethos and aristocratic commentary. The Go Master is elderly, fragile and ill, ""one so disciplined in an art that he had lost the better part of reality,"" playing his last match against a young, agitated, powerful opponent, Otake. As Black and White forces on the board attack, withdraw and position themselves, so do the Master, Otake and the onlookers, as the physical landscape adjusts and moves accordingly. As heat shimmers or cold rains wash in the background, the match continues off and on for half a year. Throughout the Master is pitted against ""a modern rationalism to which fussy rules were everything, from which all the grace and elegance of Go as an art had disappeared."" At the close the Master is defeated by his own sudden anger at the ""eccentric flight"" of Otake's attack, in which a work of art was destroyed by ""insensitivity to the feelings of an adversary."" A subtle and patient work which demands as much of the reader.
2) "Salvation of a Saint" by Keigo Higashino
A Tokyo CEO’s determination to run his marriage as a business is ended by a dose of arsenous acid.
Information technology company president Yoshitaka Mashiba knows what he wants, and what he wants is a child. If his wife Ayane, a noted patchwork quilter, can’t give him one after a year of marriage, he’s prepared to divorce her and move on to some likelier candidate. But his plans are thwarted when someone poisons his coffee during a weekend when Ayane is conveniently away in Sapporo. Is the killer Hiromi Wakayama, the apprentice quilter whom Yoshitaka had taken as his mistress? She seems the last person in the world who’d poison her lover, but she was clearly the only person present when he died. Detective Kusanagi, of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, searches in vain for other suspects, but the real question this claustrophobic mystery poses isn’t whodunit but how it happened—how and when the poison got into Yoshitaka’s coffee cup without leaving traces anywhere else, not even in Hiromi’s cup. For better or worse, Kusanagi (The Devotion of Suspect X, 2011) finds that every time he and his junior colleagues eliminate each possible way some absent party could have doctored Yoshitaka’s coffee, consulting physicist Manabu Yukawa, aka Detective Galileo, comes up with some alternative scenario that’s even more preposterous.
A retro puzzler that recalls Anthony Berkeley’s classic The Poisoned Chocolates Case in its structure: a hyperextended short story whose complications keep unfolding and proliferating till it’s grown to novel length.
3) "The Housekeeper and the Professor" by Yoko Ogawa
From Japanese author Ogawa (The Diving Pool, 2008), the story of a struggling single mother who takes a job looking after an elderly mathematician with an unusual disability.
When the Akebono Housekeeping Agency dispatches the unnamed heroine to the shabby cottage occupied by the titular academic, there is little reason to think she would last any longer than the previous nine women who briefly worked there. He’s clearly not the average client. Seventeen years earlier the professor was in a devastating car accident that left him brain damaged, only able to remember 80 minutes at a time. He gets through the day solving math problems, and attaches notes to his clothes to remember what he needs to do. His memories prior to the accident, however, remain crystal clear, and he survives off the generosity of his widowed sister-in-law, on whose property he lives. Initially he’s not much of a talker, but the sweet, almost childlike housekeeper takes a liking to the vulnerable old man, even as she has to reintroduce herself to him every day. He teaches her about the elegance and order of numbers—his passion—while she dotes on him like a daughter. Through his lessons she sees the unexpected poetry in math and sets about solving some problems of her own. She also introduces him to her ten-year-old son, who he nicknames “Root” because the flat top of his head reminds him of the square-root sign. The professor instantly bonds with the fatherless boy, so she and Root spend more and more time at the professor’s home. The trio begins to resemble a family, with an unspoken understanding of each other that transcends language and convention. Trouble calls, though, when the sister-in-law, who has her own complicated history with the professor, misinterprets the housekeeper’s kindness as something more devious. Ogawa’s disarming exploration of an eccentric relationship reads like a fable, one that deftly balances whimsy with heartache.
Simple story, well told.
4) "All She Was Worth" by Miyuki Miyabe
5) "Some Prefer Nettles" by Junichiro Tarvizaki
6) "The Sound of the Mountain" by Yasunari Kawabata
7) "In the Miso Soup" by Ryu Murakami
Hipster Murakami (Coin Locker Babies, 1995, etc.) follows a sex tour guide through the sleazy demimonde of Tokyo’s worst streets during three nights on the town with a serial killer.
Kenji has one of those jobs you just can’t tell your mother about. As a “nightlife guide,” he basically spends most of his evenings shepherding American tourists through strip clubs and brothels. At 20, Kenji is young enough to try just about anything—except, to his family’s chagrin, college—but even he is kind of grossed out by some of his customers. His latest is an overweight American named Frank, who is not just gross but weird. Alternately servile and truculent, Frank claims to be a Toyota parts importer from Manhattan, but he shows little interest in cars and doesn’t seem to know much about New York. That’s not so surprising in itself—most of Kenji’s customers lie about their backgrounds—but Frank doesn’t seem terribly interested in sex, either. And the fact that he changes hotel rooms every few days makes Kenji wonder whether he might not be connected in some way to a string of grisly murders that have been terrorizing Tokyo for the last few weeks. Most of the victims have been girls involved in “compensated dating” (i.e., prostitution), so everybody in the sex industry is pretty much on edge. Kenji’s 16-year-old girlfriend Jun thinks he’s overreacting, but she advises him to drop Frank anyway just to be on the safe side. Of course, that would be too simple and, as it turns out, too sensible. Soon Kenji finds himself at the bottom of something uglier than even he could ever have imagined. Maybe, if he makes it out okay, he’ll consider going back to school after all.
A blistering portrait of contemporary Japan, its nihilism and decadence wrapped up within one of the most savage thrillers since The Silence of the Lambs. Shocking but gripping.
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