Tokyo Express

Seicho Matsumoto's Tokyo Express, translated by Jesse Kirkwood, is a fun (and short!) detective novel from the 1950s. Featuring an older provincial cop and a detective from Tokyo Metropolitan Police, this novel revolves around cracking a seemingly perfect alibi of the person who killed a key witness. The victim, a lower-level government employee important for the investigation into corruption of his government ministry, is killed (but faked as a love suicide). A waitress from a Tokyo restaurant, is believed by local police to have died with the government ministry employee. When a few things about the case don't add up, the local police officer does a little bit of investigating that raises more questions about what actually happened. In Tokyo, the younger detective also investigates the matter, which takes him across Japan from Kyushu to Hokkaido. In order to crack the suspect's alibi, timetables for trains and domestic flights becomes key. Perhaps to highlight just how common corruption was in 1950s Japan, with near impunity for higher level ministry officials like Ishida, the novel ends without a satisfactory conclusion for the sleuths, despite his success at cracking the seemingly impenetrable alibi). It is also somewhat held back by the bare details provided on the central characters. Mihara, for instance, is revealed to have a wife in the end of the novel. Exposition sometimes suffers from jarring transitions or lackthereof. But as a suspenseful and clever mystery novel, it is largely successful.