This is where I say my now catch-phrase “I’m a bad person and I like bad endings”. Everyone dies is easily my favorite book ending but really I liked how this book wrapped, but if you check my Natively review you’ll see I gave it a 2. This is because the lead up had me so frustrated for so long that even though I liked the ending, it didn’t redeem the book for me. My overall feeling when I look back is annoyance at the writing style, which is a bummer because the story I think has redeeming qualities. Maybe because it’s the author’s first work, and maybe because, as either an Amazon or Bookmeter reviewer put it, this is police fantasy, not police procedural.
I’ve gotta say I didn’t see how the wife was going to be involved, but I could sense she would be, somehow. I also thought the letters between the detectives were cute. It was a nice change of pace from the rest of the book and shows that perhaps if the author leans more into character writing in other books there’s a chance I’d vibe with it.
I honestly think the ending was quite a nice wrap-up in contrast to the more convoluted later half of the book. I think it’s a shame we couldn’t confront 安田さん and see his reaction instead it was more like “My wife is dying I’m probably about to get caught too so let’s go out together”, however I think the letter format was quite nice and thought 三原’s writing was more preferable to read than the other’s detective letter that had too much unnecessary 敬語 for my liking.
admittedly I couldn’t keep up that much at the end with how many unnecessary timetables (or at least it felt like that to me) there were so I just left all the calculating to 三原. That is where I think this book suffers the most in the fact that it mentions 50 different time points each down to the exact minute and expects you to keep track of all of them somehow (or not?)
I think the part that I liked the most was character interactions and the whatever pieces of psychology we could infer behind each character and their actions.
Overall it was quite fun but I probably wouldn’t recommend it to someone IRL so 3★ out of 5🙌
I liked the ending! Nice how everything falls into place at the end. No “deus ex machina” event that would probably have been disappointing for me. I had not expected his wife to go to Kyushu and actually murder someone there. I had “only” expected her to have helped in the background with planning the murder.
From me, 4★. Not my favourite, but a very decent book in my opinion. Glad we got to read it together!
What was a bit tiring for me was not that the book focused much on timetables as such, but just the simple fact that the numbers were almost all in Kanji. I had to translate them into numbers in my head every time.
And that there seemed to be a lot of expressions for numbers that are a bit vague like 三十五六 to express that someone is approximately 35 or 36 etc. I do not even remember how this is done in other novels, but it struck me as being very frequent and got on my nerves at times.
I finished the book about a week ago, I was happy with the ending!
I thought at first the plane trick was cheap but having to work to figure out how people lied to cover it up saved it for me. The book was a bit slow for me but it wasn’t too long at least and not too difficult to read (other than things like the numbers being in kanji)
That’s fair! Since I’m interested in what Japan looked like back when this book was ridden, a lot of my mental images are based on modern Japan, so I might watch for that atmosphere.
This is old documentary rather than old movie, but you reminded me of it. 1961 30 minute documentary about the slum areas of Japanese cities at the time:
It has something of an “observing an alien species” vibe to it which feels rather of-its-time: we never actually hear from the people living there, it’s all just shots of the locations and their lives with narrator voiceover…
Started this a bit late, but I’m done . I didn’t dislike any of it, and wasn’t particularly bored, but the book also didn’t leave much of an impression. The timetables didn’t bother me since I just let the detective explain the conclusions I should draw from them . I recently read another train-based mystery novel with even more generic main characters, so that aspect didn’t really bother me either.
I do wish that these travel mysteries would have more of the action happen on the train itself though. Overnight train rides have a unique vibe that doesn’t come across when the police are just solving the case after-the-fact.
The author’s name for the other (sadly boring) book sounded familiar so I checked my shelves. Looks like I read 天使の傷痕 | L33 by him and liked it a lot, but it’s also not one of his location mysteries which I think some authors just churn out
I had a look at the author’s page on Natively, and he does seem to have written a lot of murder mysteries with pictures of trains on the cover
内田康夫 was another prolific location-based mystery author (most of his books aren’t listed on Natively); I quite like his stuff, in a “you know what you’re getting and it won’t be amazing but it will reliably be readable and entertaining” way.
I suspect this subgenre was popular with salarymen who didn’t have the time or money to actually go on holiday to these places… Probably also fun for the authors to be able to take holidays and call them “research”
but really I liked how this book wrapped, but if you check my Natively review you’ll see I gave it a 2. This is because the lead up had me so frustrated for so long that even though I liked the ending, it didn’t redeem the book for me. My overall feeling when I look back is annoyance at the writing style, which is a bummer because the story I think has redeeming qualities. Maybe because it’s the author’s first work, and maybe because, as either an Amazon or Bookmeter reviewer put it, this is police fantasy, not police procedural.
. I didn’t dislike any of it, and wasn’t particularly bored, but the book also didn’t leave much of an impression. The timetables didn’t bother me since I just let the detective explain the conclusions I should draw from them 
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