A man is dead, on a beach. Suspicious? I should bally well say so. Suicide? Yes, but how? Well, surely he simply shot himself and then hid the gun? Well, no, actually it looks as if he died by cyanide poisoning, as did the young lady found beside him. A classic lovers' suicide, then, by the look of it; an open and shut case. Well, just a minute there, you're forgetting rumpled detective Jutaro Torigai: kare wa kisoku ni shitagawanai ippikiōkami no keikandaga, kekka wa dashite iru.
The suicidal couple are quickly identified as Kenichi Sayama, an assistant section chief at a government ministry, and Hideko Kuwayama, known to everyone as Toki, a waitress at a Tokyo restaurant. So what were they doing at a beach near Fukuoka, many miles south-west of Tokyo and indeed on a whole different island?
Questioning the locals in the vicinity of the beach doesn't reveal much, apart from a couple of sightings of a couple walking in the vicinity of the local railway stations, though the timings of the sightings don't really add up properly. More information is forthcoming back in Tokyo, where it transpires that Sayama and Toki were spotted boarding the express to Fukuoka by a couple of Toki's fellow waitresses from the restaurant, in the company of one of their regular customers, prominent businessman Mr. Yasuda. Meanwhile it is revealed that the ministry that Sayama worked for was embroiled in a corruption scandal - maybe Sayama knew some inconvenient things? Could he have been rubbed out? But how could someone have engineered not only his suicide (or apparent suicide) but that of his clandestine lover as well?
Torigai and his Tokyo counterpart Kiichi Mihara start with the obvious stuff: what were the lovers doing for the few days between being sighted at the railway station in Tokyo and being found on the beach, and what do the waitresses and Mr. Yasuda know? Mihara, a diligent and slightly obsessive guy, soon comes across an oddity: Yasuda and the waitresses could only have had a clear view across the railway lines to the platform from which the express departed during a specific four-minute interval a few minutes before the departure of Yasuda's train. Is this too much of a coincidence? Could Yasuda have engineered things in some way? Was he concerned about revelations of corruption affecting some of his lucrative business dealings with the ministry?
All of this speculation is a bit pointless, though, since the actual murders (if they were murders) happened several days later and several hundred miles away, and it turns out Yasuda has a cast-iron alibi for that period, as he was in Hokkaido for a business trip, a trip also involving a lengthy rail journey from Tokyo. Or was he? Isn't just happening to be right at the far end of the country a bit too convenient? Mihara begins picking away at every aspect of Yasuda's seemingly painstakingly-constructed alibi and sees it start to unravel: no-one actually saw him on the train until a few stops from its final destination, Sapporo, the telegram he supposedly sent earlier from the train was sent by someone else, and his bed-ridden wife Ryoko just happens to be an authority on the minutiae of rail timetabling. Coincidence? OR IS IT?
Anyway, Mihara's persistence eventually cracks the case (SPOILER ALERT from here on, naturally): Yasuda really was at the beach on the night in question and then travelled to Hokkaido by plane in time to hop on the train a couple of stops from Sapporo and make it look as if he'd been on it the whole way. Not only was Ryoko - genuinely incapacitated by chronic tuberculosis, but not, as it turns out, completely bed-ridden - instrumental in concocting the railway scheduling ruse that enabled Yasuda to establish the pretence of Toki and Sayama being lovers (they knew each other, but that was it), but she also was at the beach on the night of the murders and helped her husband do the deed - in the process revenging herself on Toki whom she knew to have been actually her husband's lover, not Sayama's. Her husband's primary motive, as the detectives had already surmised, was eliminating a potential whistle-blower in the corruption investigation who might have jeopardised some lucrative business arrangements, and as a handy by-product offing an erstwhile lover whom he'd got a bit bored with.
Like most murder mysteries the solution here doesn't really stand up to being thought about too much, but the unpicking of the mystery is very satisfying. The shift in viewpoint about a third of the way through from Torigai, who you'd assumed would drive the investigation, to Mihara is a bit jarring - Torigai only popping up thereafter to exchange a couple of letters with Mihara and be the recipient of Mihara's summing-up at the end wherein it is revealed that the Yasudas conveniently offed themselves in their own lovers' suicide pact when they felt the investigative net closing in on them. The minute dissection of rail timetables may not be for everyone, but the whole thing is only 149 pages in my nice new Penguin Classics edition. The original English translations had the title Points And Lines, which I think is probably better.
Previous novels on this list to have been translated from the original Japanese are The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea and the two Murakamis, Norwegian Wood and Dance Dance Dance.
Postscript: I meant to add that this is another book on this list to feature a map, two in this case, the first just a general map of Japan presumably included to illustrate how Tokyo is pretty much in the middle of the country and Fukuoka and Sapporo at opposite ends, and the second to make a bit of sense of the murder location and the maze of train lines that cross and intersect near there.
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