A Quiet Place - Moé for Solarpunk Books

Paperback, 231 pages

English language

Published 2016 by Penguin.

ISBN:: 978-0-241-74420-8

(1 review)

While on a business trip to Kobe, Tsuneo Asai receives the news that his wife Eiko has died of a heart attack. Eiko had a heart condition so the news of her death wasn't totally unexpected. But the circumstances of her demise left Tsuneo, a softly spoken government bureaucrat, perplexed. How did it come about that his wife, who was shy and withdrawn, and only left their house twice a week to go to haiku meetings ended up dead in a small shop in a shady Tokyo neighbourhood?

When Tsuneo goes to apologize to the boutique owner for the trouble caused by his wife's death he discovers the villa Tachibana near by, a house known to be a meeting place for secret lovers. As he digs deeper into his wife's recent past, he must eventually conclude that she led a double life...

2 editions

nerd teacher [books] reviewed A Quiet Place by Seicho Matsumoto

Engaging despite being about bureaucrats.

4 stars

Matsumoto is probably one of my favourite mystery authors, and I really must say that I'm annoyed that they keep referencing him as "Japan's Agatha Christie." This isn't to denigrate either him or Christie; I find them both fun to read (despite the problematic aspects). But it is to say that 'the West' really needs to stop comparing people who only really seem to share genres and little else, and we definitely need to stop erasing their names to insert the name of someone from 'the West'. (Also, having read both Matsumoto and Christie, I can say that they aren't... really similar unless you only look at a small sliver of her work while ignoring the broad structure of Matsumoto's. So it's a fundamental misunderstanding of both by marketing teams.)

ANYWAY, that aside, I love this kind of 'mystery' that actually is much more of a thriller, and that is …

Matsumoto is probably one of my favourite mystery authors, and I really must say that I'm annoyed that they keep referencing him as "Japan's Agatha Christie." This isn't to denigrate either him or Christie; I find them both fun to read (despite the problematic aspects). But it is to say that 'the West' really needs to stop comparing people who only really seem to share genres and little else, and we definitely need to stop erasing their names to insert the name of someone from 'the West'. (Also, having read both Matsumoto and Christie, I can say that they aren't... really similar unless you only look at a small sliver of her work while ignoring the broad structure of Matsumoto's. So it's a fundamental misunderstanding of both by marketing teams.)

ANYWAY, that aside, I love this kind of 'mystery' that actually is much more of a thriller, and that is kind of what Matsumoto does best. He did it with Suspicion, and he did it here as well. Instead of solving the mystery, you're watching the mystery develop. And you're never quite sure when it'll happen or how it'll happen until it does, and I find that refreshing.