A Body To Die For

"Bart, I have a riddle for you. What is the sound of one hand clapping?"
"The Simpsons"

 

Never seen a full sumo match before now I think about it.

 

Disclosure: I translated Yamaguchi Masaya's Death of the Living Dead. What, you haven't read it yet? Go read it!

 

Kazumi hadn't been in Sam's life for a long time as his stepmother before she passed away, but she had a great influence on Sam's life, and it sparked a life-long interest in Kazumi's home country of Japan. After losing his father too, Sam decided to emigrate to Japan. Fortunately, his stepuncle reassures Sam he's welcome in Japan in a letter, and soon, Sam found himself boarding the ship on its way to Kannon City, a harbor city known for its gigantic statue of the Bodhisattva Kannon (which also serves as a lighthouse). Sam has studied the language and culture of Japan in the States, but of course, there's a lot one can only learn "on-site". However, soon after he lands in Japan, he finds himself involved in several curious murder cases that are inticrately connected to Japanese culture, from a harakiri ritual where the head is stolen to a murder in a locked tea ceremony room. After solving these cases successfully, Sam, who now goes by the nomer Tokyo Sam, decides to open his own detective agency, and after getting the right licences, he's all ready for business in Kannon City, but what Japanese wonders await him in Yamaguchi Masaya's short story collection Zoku: Nihon Satsujin Jiken ("The Japan Murder Case: A Sequel", 1997)?

Or, if you have read the first Tokyo Sam book, you'd know that the "real" author of this book is one "Samuel X", an American who got all his knowledge on Japan from books and stuff, but who had never visited the country itself. Yamaguchi, supposedly, came across this book in a used book shop, and found it so curious, he decided to translate it after managing to contact Samuel. The Japan as envisioned in the book was set in the modern world, but was at the same time an amalgation of  'all the cool Japanese stuff Samuel knew' with a good dash of cultural misunderstandings, with for example people using mobiles, but also samurai walking around, and people still using rickshaws. After the success of this translation, Yamaguchi contacted "Samuel" again, and it turned out he had an unpublished manuscript lying about for a sequel, and after some nagging by Yamaguchi, he got permission to translate this second book.

Yes, this is just a framing story, but it's a really fun one, and it was what made the first book so special: the setting was incredibly unique as it was about a fictionalized, idealized and misunderstanding-filled Japan, imagined by someone who had never visited the country and made up of stereotypes and very broad interpretations of Japanese culture. But, Yamaguchi also used this laughing-mirror Japan to present mystery plots that were only possible in that very unusual Japan, making use of ideas and concepts that were genuinely Japanese, but still transformed in a way that felt unnatural, in a deliberate manner. If this had been written by a non-Japanese author, they would have been criticized due to their complete mispresentation of actual Japanese culture, but because we had a Japanese author do this, it resulted in a very unique experience, as it was Yamaguchi's knowledge of actual Japanese culture, but also the stereotypes that allowed him to write this.

 

The book opens with Kyojin no Kuni no Gulliver ("Gulliver in the Land of Giants"), which starts with Tokyo Sam opening his detective agency, and soon he is visited by his first client: a sumo wrestler he met the day before via a shared acquaintance. While this wrestler belongs to a sumo stable which focuses not on competitive sumo, but in ceremonial sumo, they do occassionally participate in matches, and recently, there had been tragic accident during one of this wrestler's matches, and his opponent passed away after tripping in an unfortunate manner. But a few nights ago, in the garden, he heard his dead opponent calling out his name and he swears he saw the man's head sitting on one of the garden lanterns. Tokyo Sam is to find out whether this is the handiwork of someone trying to scare him, or the actual floating ghost-head of his opponent. Sam visits the sumo stable where he learns about ceremonial sumo, and during his visit, the stable is also visited by wrestlers from the stable to whom the dead wrestler belonged, and these wrestlers are clearly still very pissed about the deadly incident. Tokyo Sam of course suspects wrestlers from the other stable are trying to scare his client, but one afternoon, after following up on a lead and returning to the stable, he finds one of the wrestlers has been murdered. He loses consciousness due to a timely earthquake, but then finds the body gone, and later finds the gigantic body hanging from a torii gate. Who has committed this murder, and why?

This is a fairly long story (about 2/3 of the whole book), more like a novella, and feels quite different from the stories in the first book because of it, even if it has a lot of recurring characters and does have the same slapsticky feel at times. The story uses the extended page count to slowly set-up the story, and the story focuses more on Tokyo Sam's adventures/investigation than previous stories, even with chase scenes and Tokyo Sam going undercover in search for clues. I personally liked the more "problem-focused" approach of the previous book more, but your mileage may vary here, and while of course the Japanese aspects in this story are fictionalized up to a degree, learning about other types of sumo besides competitive sumo was quite interesting. As a mystery story, I think the tale has some good ideas, some others I'm rather indifferent to. There's one clue for example regarding symbolization that is really good, and very well based on Japanese culture which I think even local people might fall for pretty easily, and that works really well in the context of the book: presenting misunderstandings about Japanese culture even Japanese might have. But other parts like how the (big) sumo wrestler's body disappears from the stable and ends up hanging from the torii gate I found not as interesting, especially not because a certain revelation related to that trick seemed to fall flat for me: the way it was presented here, the "revelation" didn't feel like one, and just a weird oversight by everyone until the story decided it should become relevant now.

 

Jitsuzai no Fune ("The Ship of Existence") has Tokyo Sam befriending a travelling zen monk, who has been planning to visit a local temple Tokyo Sam thought to have been abandoned. The monk brings back a manuscript written by an American who had also been visiting the temple titled The Ship of Existence, where he questions his understanding of zen and pleads for help. Tokyo Sam, mesmerized by the manuscript makes his way to the temple, where he sees the American being killed by a figure. What is going on? To be honest, even after reading the story I don't really know. This story is completely different from the previous stories, delving into zen and philosophy to basically work towards a punchline. I have seen Yamaguchi do something similar in a different short story, so to me, this felt a bit like a rehash, but the way it was told here, via zen koan problems to make Tokyo Sam realize something, just didn't appeal to me personally. This might be an interesting story if you're into zen philosophy, but I found this so extremely different from the other stories, I just couldn't enjoy it at all.

I liked the first book in this series a lot, but I have to admit I didn't like Zoku: Nihon Satsujin Jiken that much. While the first story is alright, it misses the impact the stories in the first book had, and it's fairly long despite the mystery plot not being that dense. The second story is just a completely different type of mystery, being based on philosophy, and that's just not really a topic that really interests me, and I found this story really not fun to read at all. So overall, I was a bit disappointed with this second volume of Tokyo Sam, as I did enjoy the first book a lot. This is also the last book featuring Tokyo Sam, so it's a bit of a sad way to end the series for me, but nothing to be done about it!

 

Original Japanese title(s): 山口雅也『續・日本殺人事件』:「巨人の国のガリヴァー」/「実在の船」