James Nicoll Reviews

2005’s The Devotion of Suspect X is the first in Keigo Higashino’s Detective Galileo mystery series. First published as Yogisha X No Kenshin, the English translation is by Alexander O. Smith with Elye J. Alexander¹.

Togashi proclaims that he is no longer the abusive embezzler whom Yasuko Hanaoka divorced. He insists that he still loves Yasuko and still wants to be a loving father to Yasuko’s daughter Misato. Perhaps he does. He certainly enjoys the money he bullies out of Yasuko. As long as he lives, Togashi will never leave mother and daughter alone.

Cut to: Yasuko and Misato viewing Togashi’s cooling corpse, showing bruises and ligature marks.

Enter a mathematician.

After divorcing Togashi, Yasuko created a new life for herself and her daughter Misato. A former hostess, Yasuko now runs a small shop that sells box lunches. Among her regular customers, teacher/mathematician Ishigami.

Ishigami possesses three noteworthy qualities: he is a genius, he lives next door to Yasuko, and he is utterly smitten with Yasuko. Despite soundproof walls and Yasuko’s best efforts to conceal the aftermath of the murder, Ishigami immediately deduces that Yasuko has killed someone and has a corpse to dispose of. He offers to help. Yasuko has no choice but to accept.

A dead man is found near the Old Edogawa River. Although the dead man’s face has been smashed and his fingerprints burned off, Detective Kusanagi and his colleagues soon assign an identity to the body: disgraced car salesman and unindicted embezzler Shinji Togashi. It does not take the police much longer to settle on a likely suspect: Togashi’s ex-wife Yasuko.

The investigation runs aground. Yasuko and Misato both have alibis. on the night the dead man was murdered mother and daughter saw a film together, then did karaoke. The police are not swayed by the supposed alibis. However, they soon discover that while the alibis are vague and difficult to confirm, they are even harder to disprove. There’s no hope of conviction given the evidence they have.

Just as Yasuko has the services of a convenient genius, so too does Detective Kusanagi. Associate professor Manabu Yukawa is no cop, but he can sometimes help out his friend Kusanagi. Kusanagi asks Yukawa to assist.

Yukawa soon encounters Ishigami. Years ago the two were friends. Yukawa is fully aware that Ishigami is his intellectual peer. Yukawa soon arrives at a compelling theory of how Togashi died and what role Ishigami played in the murder. Delivering the proof the courts require will be far more difficult.

~oOo~

The prose in this translation is a bit flat, and the narrative very matter of fact. I’ve encountered this in other translations. As I cannot speak or read Japanese, I cannot tell if this reflects Japanese prose conventions² or if it’s due to a translation that doesn’t convey the full quality of the original prose.

The novel never makes any pretense of being a whodunnit in the conventional sense. The murder… well, killing, because murder seems a bit judgmental given that Togashi went to some trouble convincing his ex-wife and former stepdaughter that he would never give them a moment’s peace as long as he was alive… occurs on stage. There is no seem to be any question about who did it.

The obvious comparison is the vintage television mystery series Columbo. The audience knows who, how, and why. The question is, how can the detective, or his non-tenured academic equivalent, connect the dots and convict the responsible parties? Yukawa suspects Ishigami is implicated and Ishigami knows Yakawa suspects Ishigami. Which genius will prevail?

However, there is one important difference between that old TV show and this novel, which is that unlike the entitled rich people Columbo so often faced off against, Yasuko and Misato are very sympathetic killers. In fact, despite their profoundly unsympathetic victim, both feel guilty about killing Togashi. It turns out regular people are not hardened killers just under the skin.

Many readers will no doubt hope Yukawa fails or at least manages to catch only Ishigami. Which as it happens, is also what Ishigami is hoping for. Readers who want to know how it plays out must buy the book.

The Devotion of Suspect X is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: There is a discrepancy about translation, with online sources crediting Alexander O. Smith alone, while the cover is also credits Elye J. Alexander.

2: I was a bit shocked by an eyebrow-raising comment about health care:

“It wasn’t hospital policy to tell patients about their cancer without family consent, so I’m not sure whether she ever knew what she had.” 

I wonder if these policies have changed in later years (the novel was published in 2005).