A battle of brilliant minds

[1]

By Keigo Higashino [2]

Rs 350

It is a relief once in a while to get away from the bleak, icy landscape of Nordic crime fiction to an ordinary, urban environment. So, here we are in Tokyo, not in the glitzy Shinjuku district, but in the eastern part of the city with its cramped apartment blocks that overlook cardboard shanties, where ordinary folk go about the business of living quietly and stoically because money is tight and on grey mornings, the Sumida River looks murkier than it really is.

This is the world of shop assistants and schoolteachers who emerge from their homes, separated by paper-thin walls, on their way to work. They go past shanties and see people with vacant eyes on benches with nowhere to go. This is the setting of Higashino’s novel. As we shall see later, the details have been carefully chosen and they will have a bearing on the plot.
In one of the many apartments of this drab grey world, a violent crime takes place. The crime is committed more in self-defence than with intent. The apartment belongs to Yasuko Hanaoka, a beautiful woman who lives with her teenage daughter Misato. The man who is killed is Togashi, Yasuko’s former husband, who had come to her home to extort money and when he attempted to molest young Misato, he was strangled to death by mother and daughter. Ishigami, their next-door neighbour, has heard it all and has chosen to protect them because he is secretly besotted by Yasuko. Of his devotion, Yasuko knows nothing, but every morning Ishigami buys a lunch box from Benten-tei where she works. He is a schoolteacher. He teaches maths and now he has decided to come to her aid. In the first 40 odd pages of the book, the reader knows who is killed, the motive, the perpetrators, the accomplice and his motive. What, then, is the peg on which the narrative hangs?
A few days later, a badly disfigured body is found on the left embankment of the Old Edogawa River near the sewage treatment plant. It is quickly identified as Togashi by the police from the half-burnt clothes found nearby. Further scrutiny and forensic evidence confirm the identity. The police team led by two homicide detectives, Shunpei Kusanagi and his partner Kishitani, begin their investigations.
The rest of the narrative develops in two strands. First is the police work which is modelled on the well-worn methods of a police procedural with leads followed up painstakingly, interviews conducted over several days and the slow build-up of the case till finally they all narrow down to two key suspects, Yasuko and her daughter. But their alibi is unbreakable even with the most rigorous scrutiny. This is where the investigation stalls. And this is where the second strand takes over and grips the reader, helping to propel the story forward.
Having reached a dead-end, Kusanagi approaches his friend and chess partner, Manabu Yukawa, who is a professor of physics at the Imperial University. Kusanagi has occasionally sought Yukawa’s help in difficult cases and he knows that he is dealing with one of the most formidable minds in Tokyo. In the course of their conversation, Kusanagi mentions Ishigami, the next door neighbour of the key suspect, Yasuko. Yukawa immediately remembers him from his college days as the mathematical genius whom he had befriended, but when he realised that he would never be able to match Ishigami’s brilliance, he switched from mathematics to physics.
What follows is an intensely engaging battle of two brilliant minds. One can read the rest of the book as either a complex game of chess or a seemingly unsolvable mathematical problem. The issue, as Ishigami tells Yukawa in one of their early reunions, is whether it is easier to solve the problem by oneself or determine the accuracy of another person’s result.
Is the problem resolved? On this, the reviewer must remain silent but suffice it to say that the denouement is quite startling. Some readers might find it a touch too melodramatic; for others it could be heart-breaking. Alexander O. Smith’s translation reads smoothly and the prose style is unpretentious and simple. The narrative is linear; the characters aren’t really developed but that is hardly the purpose of the book. What does come through in full measure, particularly in the last few pages, is the true impact of the word “devotion”. For those who care for such details, more than two million copies of the book have been sold in Japan and the film based on it has acquired cult status. The reviewer would like to sign off with a request to others who choose to read the book not to reveal the ending to anyone else who might want to pick it up. But one believes that no crime fiction buff would commit such a heinous crime.