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Title: All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe, Alfred Birnbaum, E. Floyd ISBN: 4-7700-1922-X Publisher: Kodansha International Pub. Date: April, 1997 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.26 (31 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: wonderful mystery
Comment: I am not much of a reader in mystery books. In fact, I'm not much of a reader in general. But a friend who reads nothing but mysteries mentioned this book and I picked up on it after that.
I must say that it is a wonderful mystery. It provides several interesting insights. It makes you realize the complexity a detective of any type must face, especially this one. It also makes you admire the person he's assigned to find from the available clues and unknowns to all the trails the detective must follow and reexamine. Several times, I was amazed at all things a detective has to remember when he's presented with new clues and information.
This book also showed me a lot about Japanese culture from basic everyday living to financial history. From her book, I learned a lot about the hardships of ordinary people in that country just to make ends meet. After reading this book, you realize the complexity of the whole entire case.
I am not an expert of mystery novels but I enjoyed reading it through the entire time. I see why mystery novels can be so compelling to read for some.
Rating: 4
Summary: Terrific mystery reveals much about Japanese culture.
Comment: When Shunsuke Honma, a detective recovering from a gunshot wound, is asked by a young relative to try to find his missing fiancee, Shoko, this "simple" request quickly evolves into much more. Honma also finds himself dealing with issues of credit card debt, bankruptcy, identify theft, and possibly multiple murders.
While the reader is pre-occupied with the complications of this fascinating mystery, s/he is also learning a great deal about how Japan "works" on many levels--the process of job-hunting, the importance of family and the use of the family register, the Public Employment department, attitudes toward women and their changing roles in society, attitudes toward adoption, and how the economy is changing as credit becomes more readily available. These topics add a fascinating new dimension to what might otherwise be a fairly standard, though extremely well written, mystery, keeping the reader thoroughly engaged on a level other than plot.
Cleanly written and straightforward, the novel is also unusual in that Miyabe develops character more successfully than many other mystery writers. Honma is a real person who seems older than his 42 years, with real worries and real domestic problems, and we come to know him, his life with his 10-year-old son, and his hopes for the future. This mystery is a welcome change of pace, still lively and absorbing even ten years after its initial publication.
Rating: 2
Summary: Unsatisfying
Comment: This long and preachy novel by Miyabe falls far short of expectations. The primary character detective Honma sets out on a hunt for his nephew's fiancee who has gone missing. In the process he learns all about how the Japanese credit system works and how the unwitting are sucked into the whirlpool of debt. He gets a nice long lesson from several characters about how people who are in debt up to their eyeballs are just everyday folks who got caught up in something they didn't realize was so bad for them.
After too many pages of that preachy 'debt is bad' prose, Miyabe sets Honma off in search of the missing fiancee. It's almost miraculous how just when Honma seems to have run into a dead end there is a phone call or some stranger shows up with information that gets his quest restarted. The chapters essentially follow the cycle: "Honma starts out with some information. The information leads to some small clue, but the clue doesn't seem to lead anywhere and the information runs out. A miracle happens and Honma gets some new information." The story gets tiring as this chapter format keeps repeating itself.
Miyabe introduces characters like Shoko Sekine's friends, but they don't seem to have any real relation to the plot except to give miraculous information as explained above. Frankly, by the end of the book it was difficult to discern who the author was talking about since there were so many phonecalls from so-and-so and contacts from such-and-such. The whole story began to unravel towards the end with so many loose ends crowding out the main story.
The end of the story itself is incredibly unsatisfying. After putting up with Miyabe's excessive use of secondary characters and miraculous clues and outright preachiness, she comes to the point of the story wherein the payoff is expected. Then she cuts it short. No payoff, no conclusion, just Honma sitting in a cafe across from the missing fiancee. He gets up to go talk to her finally, and ... the end.
Maybe Miyabe wanted the reader to use their own imagination to fill in the last gap, or felt that perhaps since there was so much information already given that simply repeating it at the end would have been redundant, or whatever. Unfortunately, as a reader I felt a little ripped off. There were serious questions as to why the fiancee did what she did. Not only that, but what are the repercussions of what she did? Will Honma go to the police (yes, he's a police) with the information he has? What will she do from now?
Such questions are left unanswered. I feel that after the work the reader has to go through just to get to that unsatisfying, completely incomplete ending justifies this low rating.
2 stars. Manipulative and preachy.
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Title: The Tattoo Murder Case by Akimitsu Takagi, Deborah Boliver Boehm ISBN: 1569471568 Publisher: Soho Press, Inc. Pub. Date: June, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Honeymoon to Nowhere by Akimitsu Takagi, Sadako Mizuguchi ISBN: 1569471541 Publisher: Soho Press, Inc. Pub. Date: June, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Salaryman's Wife by Sujata Massey ISBN: 0061044431 Publisher: HarperTorch Pub. Date: 04 April, 2000 List Price(USD): $7.50 |
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Title: Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seicho Matsumoto ISBN: 1569470197 Publisher: Soho Press, Inc. Pub. Date: November, 1994 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Informer by Akimitsu Takagi, Sadako Mizuguchi ISBN: 1569472432 Publisher: Soho Press, Inc. Pub. Date: July, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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