All She Was Worth

As I continue to grind forward with Japanese on DuoLingo, I decided to ping my friend Chris, who has been teaching Japanese literature at Michigan for a while now, for some kind of book that might help me me sort out issues both with how DuoLingo presents the language and with things that strike this anglophone person as odd. How interrogative and associative particles are used, etc. Chris suggested a book, and when I looked it up online, I saw that there was a mystery from the 1930s I had read by an author with the same last name (Kindaichi). "Oh yeah, Japanese mysteries, I always enjoy reading them," I thought.

So I went to the public library and picked up another novel by Kindaichi and, while I was there, used my preferred search engine to look up "Japanese mystery writers" and got a list. I picked up one by Miyuki Miyabe, the 1992 All She Was Worth, which won both Best Mystery Novel and Best Novel in Japan for the year, according to some prize-granting organization.

I was not sad to have picked it up. A good solid novel, about a widowed and injured detective out on leave after injuring his leg in an altercation with a perp, who gets dragged into investigating the disappearance of the young fiancee of a distant nephew, a banker and a bit of a dickhead. Before long, I found myself reading about the consumer credit crisis that happened in Japan in the 80s after the economoy experienced the turbocharged growth that led Japan, by 1989, to challenge the US for global economic supremacy, when the land under the Imperial Palace or somesuch in Tokyo was worth about as much as all of California. In fact, I found myself reading a bunch of technical finance stuff on a Saturday, technically violating my financial shabbos proscription against thinking about money on Saturday. I cut myself some slack because it was a novel, after all, and it was an accident.

I won't go deep into the plot so as not to spoil it for any random reader who happens upon this post. Reading this book helped me learn more about Japan while lying on a couch eating metaphorical bonbons, so it served its main purpose. Not much not to like.