Recommend: No<\/p>\n\n\n\n
English teachers during highschool are the influencers of the education system. I never look back and think: wow, Mr Smith really did a killer job teaching Polynomials in Math class. But commonly I reflect: wow, there are two whole genres of book I probably would have never read if it weren\u2019t for my English teachers. The first being Gothic, which is emerging in my reading habits more and more as I explore dystopian fiction. BRAT certainly had modern allusions to gothic tropes, like a decaying house and disconcertingly morphed objects. The second genre, which I appreciate but dabble in less, is crime fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tokyo Express is a quintessential expression of a particular \u2018cozy crime\u2019 subgenre. Two detectives, each residing in a different island of Japan, work together, and separately, to uncover the truth behind an alleged joint suicide of two purported lovers. From what these detectives can ascertain, these lovers had never been seen together by anyone else, and there are doubts around the depth of their relationship. To commit suicide together but hardly know each other\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The crime was not very interesting, predominately because the characters were not very interesting. Very little time is given to any of the players, and much of the story dedicated instead to train timetables and maps. The mystery was heightened by way of having these suspected murders occur in the context of a broader political scandal, but if I didn\u2019t care about the individual characters to begin with, why would I care about Ministry X? This feels like a very \u2018Japanese\u2019 take, where caring about an institution is not a stretch of the imagination. If this was an American novel, the institution would have been relayed from an intensely personal lens in order to hold audience\u2019s attention. I am thinking Kendall Roy rapping for his Dad in Succession. I am thinking Kevin Spacey\u2019s dog dying in Margin Call.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are failings in the writing around the deaths too, with the prose being very cold and yet lacking any gruesome detail. So the tone is not disaffected, but surface-level and bored. Perhaps I\u2019ve been dulled by the hyper-violence of gritty 1990s novels. If there\u2019s not rats eating a woman from the vagina out, it just doesn\u2019t get me going.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There was also the issue of the revelations of the crime being pretty obvious, particularly the one that hinged on the detective understanding that the criminal may have caught a plane instead of a train. Again, maybe it\u2019s my modern assumptions hurting the novel, maybe back in the 50s commercial planes weren\u2019t widespread as they are now. Sadly, Tokyo Express does feel dated. Telegrams were a big part of one chapter. What even is a telegram? When I Googled it the first result was \u201cTelegram Messenger, commonly known as Telegram, is a cloud-based, cross-platform, social media and instant messaging (IM) service\u201d. Something has been lost in translation across generations here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was also disgruntled with the structural choice to end the novel with an epistolary back-and-forth of letters between the two detectives. It\u2019s here that the mystery is unravelled, albeit post-fact and with no emotion. Ending any novel with letters is going to be a downer. It is cheating the reader out of catharsis or a grand release of tension \u2013 it\u2019s the easiest way to do a quick, descriptive wrap up of the plot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Toyko Express was a disappointment. At it\u2019s best it was a calming read and distinctly Japanese. At it\u2019s worst it was obvious and emotionally out of touch with its characters. Crime fiction has more to give.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yes, careerism is a depressing thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":595,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews_books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=593"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":616,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593\/revisions\/616"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}