When I was in Princeton back in late August and stopped in to Labyrinth Books, I picked up a copy of Seicho Matsumoto's Inspector Imanishi Investigates, a 1961 mystery novel published in Japanese under the title Vessel of Sand. Thus far it is not great. A little plodding, very much a procedural, as they say in mystery/cop narrative circles. It is not in and of itself pulling me through and giving me the energy infusion I wrote of recently, so I'm tempted to just put it aside, chalk it up, and move on.
And yet. I know there are things in this book that I don't find in other places. For one, just its description of the Japanese landscape and geographic names have had me looking things up and familiarizing me with the scale of the place. Plus it dovetails nicely with Phil Knight's description of his own engagement with Japan in the 60s, the post-war recoveriness of it all. The packed, hard seat long haul trains, so reminiscent of the Soviet Union. Just the sense of how early it was for Japan, how modest was its place in the development of the global economy then, knowing after the fact that it would build to a crescendo in 1989 and then implode into a state of significant ancillary status on the the world stage, as if it in some sense recapitulated the history of England or the Netherlands -- major mercantile forces that puffed up then shrank back to appropriate scale. It is all so very Chekhovian.
Really, it reminds me that I would really like to go to Japan sometime. And that I should keep folding Midnight Diner on Netflix into my viewing schedule. The place is just interesting, even if this novel isn't so much.
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