A noir mystery so well-written and cleverly structured that it overcame my usual dislike of reading about narcissistic hipster yuppies, not to mention my usual dislike of multiple plot elements which are too spoilery to mention.

Nick’s wife Amy has vanished without a trace, and Nick’s very first chapter contains unsettling musings about the beauty of her skull and the confession that he lied repeatedly in his interview with the police. His narration, which begins the day vanished and continues forward from there, alternates with Amy’s diary, which begins when they first met and also continues forward. Nick is clearly concealing some secrets, but did he kill her? Amy’s narration seems more subtly unreliable, detailing how she makes herself into a paper-thin image of the perfect woman, as portrayed in the shallow magazine quizzes she writes. Is she really fooling herself?

I guessed the main twist upon hearing the premise, and another about a quarter of the way into the book; if you’ve read a lot of mysteries, you will have come across these twists before, though probably not half so well-executed. So the pleasure for me was in the excellent prose and the suspense of the unfolding, in the details rather than the broad strokes. I knew where the story was headed, in general terms, but the smaller twists took me by surprise. I was up till 3:00 AM reading, and have no regrets.

Warning: even for noir, the characters are incredibly unlikable. I did care what happened to them, but not because I liked them.

You can read the beginning of the book here.

Giant spoilers lurk below.

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God knows if I'll ever see this weird little book again, but I have to record some choice quotes as I read it here in Ryoso Kawasaki, with a lovely view of the ocean and a pagoda tower before me, along with a can of hot coffee. It's a truly odd mixture of fantasy, history, folklore, and Miyajima tourism promotion.

The author's introduction explains that he visited Miyajima after a hurricane, and began pondering its tragic history: across the ocean from Hiroshima, and the site of the war between the Heike and Genji clans.

The story begins as an unnamed miko (shrine maiden) secretly gives birth on Miyajima, where women are not supposed to give birth as it's impure. (She got pregnant by secretly having sex with a man in the stable of the mechanical white horse, which was clean since neither horses nor monkeys are allowed on Miyajima. By the way, I have a photo of a white horse statue here, which is probably what was referred to. It's creepy.) Omens were bad: the fortunetelling thing where omens were predicted by seeing how crows eat dumplings didn't go well. That is called otoguishiki, and since googling it turned up a photo of a crow flying off with a dumpling, I assume it's real.

She is spotted by tengu, who tells her if she has sex with him, he won't tell anyone about her baby and will give her the ability to see the past. She does so (no details, alas) but it of course turns out to be a curse. No mention of what happened to her baby. The author plunges into a history of the Heike clan which assumes all readers are as up on it as he is. I am not. But it's entertaining anyway, complete with a really gross two-page description of exactly how to cut someone in half diagonally.

Things are bad in Kyoto: There are even stories of people being so hungro that they ate other people. Ever since then, it has come to be said that human beings taste like pomegranates.

Tomoe Gozen just turned up. Usui commends her beauty, horsemanship, and martial prowess.

After describing how an arrow pierced a fan across the sea (I'm sure this is a famous event from the Heike tales), Usui pauses some tourist assistance: As for Miyajima souvenirs or gifts, there is nothing better than the momiji manju. It was conceived by the proprietress of an inn in Momijidani after the Meiji era started.


A gay quarter existed, and men very much fancied and fully enjoyed it. The legend that there is a very jealous Goddess named Ichikishima-Hime in Miyajima and that when a married couple visits the island, the two will be torn apart, came from the thinking of protecting the male paradise.

A sequel to Regeneration, the historical novel about shellshocked WWI soldiers being treated at a psychiatric hospital.

This was harder for me to get into at first than Regeneration, because the early section concentrates on Billy Prior, the bisexual soldier with class issues, now reassigned to domestic intelligence due to asthma. Prior is interesting but chilly, hard to like. He’s maintaining a girlfriend and having discreet encounters with men on the side; he’s working for an agency devoted to persecuting and jailing pacifists, deserters, and gay and lesbian people, when he’s bisexual himself and has pacifist friends. The first section, which is about Prior’s inner conflicts as embodied in various figures from his low-class past who are now unjustly jailed or on the run from the war he’s trying to return to, is well-done but, for me, more intellectually than emotionally engaging.

To my relief, the novel then returns to Rivers, the psychiatrist, who is once again treating both Prior and Siegfried Sassoon, who has been sent back to England after being wounded again. It’s amazing from there out – suspenseful, and satisfying on every level. All the therapy scenes, and the way that people’s psychological secrets were unraveled, were beautifully done – clever but not reductionist.

There were a number of plot surprises, which I will put under a cut.

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I highly recommend this novel. All else aside, it’s one of the best uses of a repeated motif – the eye – I’ve ever encountered. Warning for horrific wartime violence, and the aftermath of that violence.