Originally written: 15/09/19. Contains spoilers.
In all honesty, I’m not really sure what to say. It took me less than a week to read – started on Monday, finished early Sunday morning – and for six hundred or so pages, that’s not bad. My biggest take away was the book’s sheer human element. I confess that I don’t read that many crime novels, but I can’t recall having read one before wherein the characters all felt so… real.
They all felt like everyday people, just going about their lives and doing their jobs. I loved this book for that alone, never mind everything else.
I have to say though, that I felt there were large chunks of text that bogged the rest of the story down. Entire pages would be dedicated to Mikami’s thought processes regarding various people and things, and at first I read it all! I wanted to piece together the mystery myself, so I didn’t dare skip a word. About halfway through, I gave up on this initiative, and began scanning over paragraphs for important information instead. I felt it was excessive.
As for the mystery itself, well, it got me! I felt certain that Ayumi’s vanishing would, in the end, somehow turn out to be connected to Six Four, but no. We never find out what happened to Ayumi. Narratively speaking, I’m happy with this. As someone invested in Mikami’s happiness, I wish we found out. I wonder whether Yokoyama actually knows the answer, or if it’s ambiguous even to him.
So they caught Shoko’s killer! Amamiya did the groundwork and spent fourteen years tracking down his daughter’s killer himself. This book was an excellent commentary on the idea of the police as an entity. After they messed up and allowed Shoko to be killed, all they were concerned with was protecting the image of the police. The final chase, with the victim’s father leading her killer down the same bloody trail he had once driven himself, was fantastic.
Something else this book really nailed was atmosphere. So good.
The Six Four killer hid his tracks well, and it’s going to take the police beyond the narrative to charge him, but he has been caught, and I like that not everything is resolved by the end. Ayumi is still missing, but there’s hope. The killer hasn’t been charged yet, but he has been caught.
The inclusion of the Media Relations/journalist plot line was the best part for me. By the end, Mikami’s office were almost like a little family. It was great. And I rolled my inner eye every time Akikawa was mentioned.
Overall, I loved this book! My one complaint is that I felt a lot of text in it was unnecessary and drowned the real story, but the story and characters were both so good that I don’t really care that much.
The Tea Room 