#61 of 2008 - The Tattoo Murder Case by Akimitsu Takagi

One of the greatest things about mystery novels, in addition to the prospect of solving a case before the solution is revealed on the page, is the amount of emotional depth that can be lent to the characters. Nothing brings out familiarity and camaraderie between an author and their audience like conflict and mortal danger, and crime novels have both in spades.

Crime is also an incredible vehicle for social observance. Reading foreign mysteries are the best way, aside from spending large sums of money at your local travel agent’s office, to get a feel for a country’s many overlapping societal layers. You have criminals, law officers, academics, local businesspeople, religious officials and many others weaving their way in and out of the narrative, sometimes the focus of a chapter and sometimes the colorful background.

This is a book written for the Japanese by a young Japanese writer. Both the novel’s date of birth and setting are 1947, just after the country’s defeat in World War II. Though there is little outright hostility directed towards the Western occupiers, there is a pronounced sentiment of loss, regret and bewilderment that permeates the narrative as thick as beef and potato stew. These people are survivors; ordinary citizens who’ve been conscripted and sent to hell only to return to a half-destroyed city, or people who never left and witnessed the air raids firsthand. Nobody in this story is untouched, innocent or naïve. Criminal or not, they’re all damaged in one way or another.

The crime appears early in the novel. A temptingly beautiful yet troubled young woman is brutally murdered, her torso and parts of her arms and legs carted away. Her head and the remaining portions of her arms and legs are found in a locked bathroom with the faucet still running, washing all the blood down a drain in the floor. Her home has been ransacked and her belongings stolen. Even the tattoos that adorned her body are gone, every bit of her that was inked having disappeared. From here we are led through twists and turns, given information about the then-prohibited Japanese tattooing underworld, in the hopes of finding this woman’s killer. Instead, what we find are more bodies and a deepening sense of dread as the case goes from very hot to tepid to cold.

When the killer, the killer’s motives and the methods employed are finally revealed at the end, the solution is obvious enough to cause the reader to nod and say, “Yes, that makes perfect sense now!” But nothing is so obvious that it would make the reader feel stupid.

This is Takagi Akimitsu’s first novel, written before he was 30, and the first to be published in English by SOHO. Two others, The Informer and Honeymoon to Nowhere, have been published in the years since The Tattoo Murder Case’s debut.


5/5

#60 of 2008 - Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

I had to buy a dictionary for this one, an Oxford American with additional thesaurus features.

I didn’t know if I’d make it through this book in a reasonable amount of time. The premise is intelligent, captivating, but the language is dense with lesser known words and product references and the sentences are constructed so oddly that I was sure this was going to be one of those books that looks and feels fantastic but you-as-reader are never able to sink below the surface with. The kind of book that makes you feel inadequate, stupid even, as both a writer and a reader. The kind of book that’s just too much for you.

Like David Foster Wallace, or Pynchon, or DeLillo, all of whom I have unread works of sitting on my shelf, just waiting for me to attempt to take them on. Tomorrow, I tell myself, or next week, or next month, I’ll give them a whirl. But right now I’m reading for pleasure, damn it, not to tax my brain or grant me some kind of temporary bragging rights that will last until the next epic work shows itself to me. Not right now.

And, of course, those days have yet to come. Even The House of Leaves is still waiting for me, I’m sad to say.

However, things didn’t turn out the way I’d expected them to. Pattern Recognition takes a while to pull you into its orbit, and even longer to achieve rhythmic balance between mind and prose, but once you’re in you’re golden.

Just make sure you have your dictionary beside you and a browser open to Google, should you need them.

At the heart of this story lies Cayce Pollard, an uber-nerd living and working in the heart of chic as a “cool-hunter” for advertising agencies. In her spare time, she posts on an Internet forum devoted to a series of nameless, unidentifiable bits of film footage that emerge in random on different websites, seemingly out of sequential order. Who creates the footage, why, and how? She cannot figure it out, despite lengthy debates with her online friends, and eventually her online and real world realities blend together when she is hired by one of her current clients to begin a new job, actually a partnership, of finding the footage’s creator.

On top of this, Cayce has a severe allergy to several well-known corporate insignias, a mix of physical and neurotic reactions that leave her nearly unable to function at the mere sight of them. Didn’t know the name of the Michelin Man was actually Bibendum? You will after reading this. You’ll know what a Curta calculator is as well, but only after looking it up so you can picture it as it’s described on the page. Prada, Tommy Hilfiger, Apple and several dozen other recognizable logos make appearances here, either as severe allergens or harmless artworks.

Considering what Gibson is best known for (cyberpunk), this felt oddly mainstream, too close to real, actual life. Pollard’s father has gone missing in the 9/11 tragedy, and her mother’s coping mechanism includes going to live in a hippy commune with people who analyze recorded audio for ghost whispers. Between the constant references to pop culture, current (or very recent) events and corporate giants, this could be one of those “ripped from the headlines” type of stories, or even a cheap cyber-thriller. It is both of these, and yet it is neither as well.

What it really is, at its core, is an explanation to the rest of the world, the people who don’t understand the duality of Internet enthusiasts, of how people can live and befriend online, and how eventually the digital world spills out into the real.


4/5

#58 of 2008 - Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

This is one of those books that I picked up and put down numerous times over the course of the summer. I’d read a chapter, set it down, pick it up, read another chapter, lather, rinse, repeat. Due to the complexity of language and the technical details, the Clear Island chapter near the end kept me from finishing the book time and again.

I finished the book today, and I must say that despite the lapse between reading the first seventy percent by July and what I’ve read today I am very impressed. This is an excellent debut novel, full of detail, layers and layers of people crossing each others’ paths and back again.

I’m not going to be able to do this novel justice by reviewing it now, so I won’t. It’s a definite reread candidate, though, and this time I won’t be slowing down or stopping until I’m done.

A Rambling Introduction

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