The Lady Killer

AI-generated depiction of a 1960s Tokyo bar

Masako Togawa's The Lady Killer was certainly a suspenseful reader. However, the whodunit aspects of this mystery were rather easy to predict. After all, there were really only two viable suspects of the serial killings of Honda's lovers. Fortunately, the author's experiences in the nightlife world of 1960s Tokyo lend a rather realistic setting for this gruesome novel. Dive bars, cheap restaurants, brothel Turkish bathhouses, gay bars, and other elements of the seedy underbelly of Tokyo feature prominently in this tale. Ichiro Honda's escapades across this urban landscape in search of new women to "hunt" eventually instigate a series of quite chilling murders designed to frame him. Togawa uses as one of the "detectives" a lawyer at a firm eager to defend Honda once he's arrested and framed for the murders of some of his past lovers, juxtaposing a more solidly middle-class conventional person exploring the criminal and sordid nightlife of Tokyo to investigate the truth of what occurred. The ultimately disappointing unveiling of the murderer was predictable, although striking at the heart of the matter of Honda's problems with marriage.