Silent Parade + People Who Eat Darkness
February has not been a great month. I’d complain about my not being able to get much reading (or writing) done, but there are arguably bigger problems out there. Like, for instance: a war in Europe; tanking economies across the world; and the other global pandemic of collapsing mental health.
My grand plan was to crack open the new Detective Galileo mystery and immerse myself in the fictional Japan of diabolical murderers, well-intentioned cops and physicist detectives, thus turning my back on reality. If you’ve read Keigo Higashino, then you’ll know that he’s usually very good at offering such an escape. (If you haven’t read Higashino, then The Devotion of Suspect X and The Salvation of a Saint are fantastic.)
The best part of a good Higashino mystery is that you savour the details instead of speeding through the book. Then, once you’ve finished, you spend a few days looking like a lunatic to the rest of the world, because for every now and then, you’ll remember a moment from the book and be transported back into its world — which to everyone outside your head looks like you sitting there with a glazed, blank expression on your face.
Once I finished Higashino’s newest mystery Silent Parade, I did not have a glazed, blank expression on my face. Instead, I stomped over to the nearest Japanese restaurant and ordered what came closest on their menu to the takiawase that Higashino mentions repeatedly while talking about the restaurant run by the parents of a murder victim. That was my reward to myself for not having abandoned Silent Parade.
Higashino is one of those authors who turned the traditional structure of the whodunit on its head with exquisite elegance. Within the first few chapters, Higashino makes the reader think they know the identity of the killer, who is almost always a horrible person. It seems the only thing left for both the reader and the police to do is to figure out how bad guy was killed. And then, just when your smugness has reached a peak, Higashino slides a twist into the tale. By the time the story ends, smugness has left the building and your jaw is on the floor.
Technically, Silent Parade follows this familiar pattern. During an annual street festival, a dead body is found by the police. The victim turns out to be Kanichi Hasunuma, who was accused of murder in two cases and walked free because of lack of evidence. When the police had investigated Hasunuma in the past, they found a wealth of circumstantial evidence against him, but they couldn’t figure out exactly what he’d done to his victims. Also, Hasunuma didn’t confess to the crimes and as a result, he was acquitted.
The mystery of who killed Hasunuma reunites detective chief inspector Kusanagi and detective sergeant Kaoru Utsumi with Professor Yukawa (aka Detective Galileo). This is the fourth mystery in the Detective Galileo series, but it also works as a standalone.
There are a lot of dead bodies in Silent Parade. Before Hasunuma’s death, there’s the discovery of two women’s skeletal remains in an abandoned house that caught fire. One of the women was an aspiring young singer named Saori, who disappeared some years ago. Hasunuma was suspected of kidnapping her. Elsewhere and unseen by the reader are the dead bodies of a girl and her mother who died approximately 20 years ago. Hasunuma was suspected of having murdered the girl. The mother took her own life soon after the girl’s death.
With so many mysteries and dead bodies, the last thing Silent Parade should have felt was long and boring. Part of the problem is that most of the book is descriptions of the people who make up Saori’s community and Higashino doesn’t succeed in making them feel like rounded characters. Instead, the crowd of characters just becomes confusing. The point that Higashino seems to be making is that it takes a village, whether it’s to raise a child or pull off a murder. On the face of it, these are everyday people without a criminal background, but when the institutions fail them by releasing Hasunuma, they’re driven to execute the perfect murder.
Had Higashino been able to make these people feel real and credible, maybe Silent Parade wouldn’t have felt as slow as it does. Instead, all the people rallying around Saori’s family feel like interchangeable tokens that Higashino listlessly moves around in this board game of a plot.
This is not to suggest Silent Parade is a bad read. It’s just dissatisfying and I did wonder whether the translation was part of the problem, but I don’t think so. I think Giles Murray did the translation of this one and while the tone of the book is so dry that it’s almost clinical in parts, you never stumble over a word or sentence. (You can read an interview with Murray and another translator of Higashino’s writing here. Both of them offer lovely descriptions of Tokyo.) The problem is that the novel feels unevenly paced. It moves with geological slowness in the early parts and then suddenly takes on a frantic pace towards the end.
Also, the grand reveal of the novel is very clever and twisty, which is is what we expect from Higashino. However, even in its best moments, Silent Parade feels contrived. Sure, the method used to kill Hasunuma is ingenious but Higashino doesn’t answer all the questions that he raised in those turgid buildup to the novel’s conclusion.
If you’re in the mood for an intense pageturner with disturbing crimes and an eerie villain, allow me to point you towards People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry. It’s non-fiction at its best.
Published in 2012, People Who Eat Darkness is set in Tokyo in 2000 — that’s TWENTY TWO years ago. I feel even older than I usually feel — when a young British woman named Lucie Blackman disappeared, seemingly without a trace. Blackman had gone to Tokyo with a friend in the hope of earning enough money to pay off the debts she’d accumulated back home. Parry’s book is Blackman’s story as well as the story of those who knew her. It’s also about the man who killed her, and the way institutions like the police and judiciary work in Japan.
One of the most fascinating parts of People Who Eat Darkness is when Parry explains how the police work in Tokyo, which has a ridiculously low crime rate (particularly for violent crimes). I kept thinking of Silent Parade while reading Parry on how the Japanese police have so little experience with serious crimes that they don’t always know how to conduct investigations into them. The Japanese system also pays great importance to the confession from an accused, which the police didn’t have either in the real-life case of Lucie Blackman or in the fictional case in Silent Parade.
(Of course, I was also thinking of the ‘confessions’ that the police so often claim in charge sheets filed in India, which I doubt anyone believes to be true. If the police claim a confession after interrogation, we’re usually sure that it’s been forced out of the accused.)
There’s a noir quality to People Who Eat Darkness and it’s easy to imagine Parry as a trench coat-wearing figure, slipping past the neon signs and gliding over the pavements of the bar district of Roppongi. But there’s more to People Who Eat Darkness than a sad and sordid tale of sex and violence. Parry asks sharp and difficult questions about identity and belonging, and what lengths a person will go to in order to feel powerful or in control. Blackman’s blonde hair shines as bright as any neon sign, signalling a foreignness that is sometimes a valuable currency and at other times makes her vulnerable. Her murderer, for all his evil, is very much a product of Japanese society. Yet within Japan, the media depicts him as someone foreign and non-Japanese.
The man accused of kidnapping and murdering Blackman was eventually arrested and it was discovered that Blackman was not his only victim. The trial against him continued for years and had twists that no self-respecting writer of crime fiction would have written into a story because it would have seemed outlandish. However, partly because we know it’s true and partly because Parry is a gifted storyteller, People Who Eat Darkness leaves you feeling for practically every person who is featured in its pages.
Unsurprisingly, I felt in urgent need of some feelgood reading after these two books and after much searching and abandoning, I landed upon Dating-ish by Penny Reid. It reminded me a lot of the delightful, The Love Hypothesis — professorial heroes, lots of fun banter, and a heroine who does not simper. A lot of the book is about artificial intelligence and the way it could be used to care for people. That was very, very interesting. Also, on a completely different note, I kind of liked how the hero in Dating-ish freely admits that he started working out because he wanted women to notice him.
And with that, I will take your leave. Take care, stay safe, and thank you for reading. Dear Reader will be back soon.
