All She Was Worth

Miyuki Miyabe, 1992 [Alfred Birnbaum, 1996]

(May 2012)

I don’t usually read all that many crime books (except when I do). This one was almost an impulse purchase. I’m lucky enough to work in a city which has a few decent sized department stores with reasonable selections of English language books, so I’ll spend the occasional lunch-hour seeing what’s available, and resisting the temptation to buy them all.

Over recent years there have been a few publishers putting out more and more Japanese stuff in translation. I suppose the popularity of Haruki Murakami is a large part of it, but it does get slightly annoying when every Japanese author is compared to him simply on the basis of nationality, no matter how ill-deserved the comparison might otherwise be.

That said, if it’s the price to pay for getting more stuff out there, it’s no great hardship. Especially genre stuff. It should be clear by now that I’m no genre snob, almost the reverse. A lot of ‘Literary Fiction’ comes across as all style and no substance; elegant turns-of-phrase built on foundations of tedium and petty introspection. I couldn’t give a shit about how the middle-class piano tutor feels when she discovers her dead mother’s affair with the economics lecturer who was her father’s best friend from school. For example.

And for a long time it was either just the Japanese equivalents of this or the ‘classics’ that were available in translation. The middle-class shamisen tutor who discovers her etc etc and so on. This is one of the world’s great bibliophile cultures. It’s the only place where printed newspapers' circulations aren't in complete free-fall and book stores are everywhere; glorious, groaning cathedrals to the written word. It would, I feel, be a mistake to judge the entirety of Japanese Literature on what has until recently been available in translation, for the same reason it’d be a mistake to judge English Literature solely on Dickens and Ian McEwan.

So the existence and availability of the more ‘pulpy’ end of the spectrum is to be applauded, but it would be unfair to describe this book as pulp. Even though at heart it’s an almost quaintly traditional police procedural. Woman disappears, man tries to find her. What previously hidden skeletons could be lurking in her closet?

It’s atmospheric and fairly well paced, despite the occasional overly detailed explanation regarding bankruptcies and the family-register system. These are easily forgiven though, seeing as it’s something of an exploration into identity and personal and social responsibility in ‘modern’ Japan. I use quote marks because this book is two decades old, and many of the changes it saw coming are still just around the corner. Supposedly. The day women stop “reach[ing] their late twenties and find they’re still cleaning up the office and making tea,” is still almost here, the antiquated and ‘dead weight’ family register system is still completely unfit for purpose and in dire need of change, and attitudes towards fiscal responsibility remain, “a gray zone where the authorities tend to say, ‘Yeah, there are bad thing going on, but let’s not be too quick to point any fingers.’”

My personal theory is that the Lost Decades were social and cultural as well as economic. Japan has essentially been in a holding pattern since the Bubble burst. This book was written just after that and while the occasional change does jump out at you (the protagonist has to camp in a café to use the payphone, and remarks on the novelty of a businessman using a mobile), what’s really jarring is the changes that haven’t happened. I want to say, ‘haven’t happened yet,’ but given it’s been twenty years that ‘yet’ feels sadly redundant.