Soho Crime around the world

I'm a huge fan of New York publisher Soho Crime's output - particularly the translated fiction. Their catalogue covers detective thrillers from Japan to Norway. Here are some of the picks - dates are for original (foreign-language, where appropriate) publication:

Cara Black - PARIS

American author Cara Black is as impressively prolific as Janwillem van de Wetering (below) - her Aimée Leduc is a half-French, half-American private detective who throws herself into her cases, alongside dwarf, computer expert sidekick René Friant. The novels travel the arrondissements of Paris, imbuing each book with the atmosphere of the individual districts. 

WHAT THEY SAY 'Murder in the Marais provides a richly textured journey into the dark side of the City of Light.' - Linda Grant

CHECK OUT Murder in the Marais (1999)

Akimitsu Takagi - TOKYO

Another excellent translation - by Deborah Boehm - which brings Akimitsu Takagi's traumatic The Tattoo Murder Case (1948) up to date. Set in the aftermath of Japan's loss in the WWII and the destruction of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a trio of detectives try to crack a case of tattoo theft. Do also try Seichi Matsumoto's excellent Inspector Imanishi Investigates (1961)

WHAT THEY SAY 'Clever, kinky, highly entertaining...' Washington Post on The Tattoo Murder Case

CHECK OUT The Tattoo Murder Case

Helene Tursten - GÖTEBORG
Helene Tursten's Inspector Irene Huss is a judo-practising cop to rival Sarah Lund in a series of procedurals that marches in the steps of Swedish innovators Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö.

WHAT THEY SAY 'Huss is quickly becoming one of the most satisfying lead characters in the thriving world of Swedish crime fiction.' - Booklist

CHECK OUT Detective Inspector Huss (1998)

Janwillem van de Wetering - AMSTERDAM and beyond

Dutch Zen-adherent Janwillem van de Wetering's many mysteries feature police duo Grijpstra and De Gier, as well as their boss, the Commisaris. The books present a thoughtful view of Dutch policing and venture further afield - to New York, Japan and one-time Dutch colonies, including Aruba and Curaçao. Questioning and even mystical.

WHAT THEY SAY 'He is doing what Simenon might have done if Albert Camus had sublet his skull.' - John Leonard

CHECK OUT Outsider in Amsterdam (1975), The Japanese Corpse (1977) and The Streetbird (1983)

Haruki Murakami and 1Q84, part three - 'detective spelunking'

Haruki Murakami's new book features a character, Tengo, who wants to be a writer and reviewers have naturally picked up on this aspect of 1Q84. Some of the novel's thoughts on writing, editing and publishing replicate the author's views on translation, expressed in a piece by Murakami called 'To Translate and to be Translated' (2006) collected in a book to commemorate a symposium held by the Japan Foundation five years ago.

The three-part celebration - in Tokyo, Kobe and Hokkaido - was primarily aimed at international translators of Murakami's work and called A Wild Haruki Chase: How the World is Reading and Translating Murakami. Kobe, of course, is where the Japanese author grew up, while Hokkaido is one of the settings in the first of his books to appear in Britain, A Wild Sheep Chase (1990).

'If a translation can be read smoothly and effortlessly, and thus enjoyably,' Murakami writes, 'then it does its job as a translation perfectly well - that is my basic stance as the original author. For that is what the stories that I conjure and lay out are really about.'

Elsewhere, one of the leading lights behind the symposium, Professor Inuhiko Yomota, claims: 'The international "Haruki boom" gained momentum in the 1990s, around the same time as anime (Japanese animation) and Japanese-made computer games pushed into global markets. Unlike the works of his Japanese predecessors, such as Jun'ichiro Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata, Murakami's works are not being translated and consumed overseas as those of an author who represents Japanese culture.'

Though Murakami may not represent Japanese culture I disagree with Yomota's idea that international readers do not think of the author and his work as Japanese. The chief protagonist of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Toru Okada, may cook spaghetti and listen to Rossini, for instance, but his outlook and experiences are distinctly 'other'. While readers' 'political disillusionment, romantic impulses, loneliness and emptiness' may be assuaged by Murakami's texts, as Yomota has it, it is the books' alien setting that allows many non-Japanese readers to accept their unusual goings-on. To contradict Yomota's thesis, we 'fully realise that the author was born in Japan and that the books are actually translations.'

More compelling is the writer Richard Powers on how Murakami's work anticipated developments in neuroscience in the 1990s, specifically Italian researcher Giacomo Rizzolatti's discovery of mirror neurons. Working with monkeys in the lab, his team unexpectedly found that a macaque signalled from a part of its prefrontal cortex not only when moving its own arm but in reaction to the experimenters' movements. 'Now, in the looping, shared circuitry of mirror neurons, science has hit upon an even richer description of our communal, subterranean truths,' says Powers, 'the truths that Murakami's mirrorscape of symbols brings into existence with him.'

Kafka on the Shore (2005) and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1991, pictured top) are just two examples of novels containing such parallel narrative worlds. According to Powers: 'Murakami's characters, set loose between these intersecting worlds, are forced to embark on detective spelunking. They venture downwards into walled enclaves, climb into deep wells, or drop below the surface of seismically shaken cities, searching for the rules that connect the banal and the fantastic, the material and the mental.'

The formula is repeated in 1Q84 where an unrequited couple - Tengo and old schoolmate Aomame - find themselves in a parallel 1984. Much of the narrative is naturalistic: perhaps back in 1984 the same two characters are moving between the same points in their lives (rewriting a book, hiding out in an apartment, visiting a dying parent) without being aware of the supernatural elements that link these events in the world of 1Q84, with its two moons. Politically disillusioned, lonely, romantic and empty we may be but somewhere, Murakami insists, something magical and mysterious is happening if only in our minds.

The book's 1984/1Q84 nonetheless feels close to our own time; despite lacking mobile phones and the internet, Murakami is not interested in piling on the period detail so loved by others. And what does his hero, Tengo, eat this time out? Grilled dried mackerel with daikon radish, a miso soup with littlenecks and green onions to have with tofu, cucumber slices and wakame seaweed doused with vinegar, plus rice and nappa pickles; elsewhere he makes stir-fried shrimp and vegetables with boiled edamame in a procedure Murakami itemises like a recipe - you could follow this and make it at home.

'Tengo chopped a lot of ginger to a fine consistency. Then he sliced some celery and mushrooms into nice-sized pieces. The Chinese parsley, too, he chopped up finely... Next he warmed a large frying pan and dribbled in some sesame oil... When the vegetables were just beginning to cook, he tossed the drained shrimp into the pan... After adding another dose of salt and pepper to the whole thing, he poured in a small glass of sake. Then a dash of soy sauce and finally a scattering of Chinese parsley.'

after the quake

In January 1995, Japan's Kansai region was struck by an earthquake that killed nearly 6,500 people. The home of the parents of writer Haruki Murakami was destroyed; Murakami had grown up in the Osaka-Kobe area but was teaching in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the time. On 20 March followers of the Aum cult released sarin gas on the Tokyo underground, killing 11 commuters and affecting 5,000 others.

As has been well documented, Murakami had left Japan following the monstrous success of his novel Norwegian Wood, which has just come out as a film in the UK. When his teaching in Cambridge was completed, he decided it was time to return to Japan and investigate these events that had struck the core of his countrymen.

'I spent my last year abroad in a sort of fog when two major catastrophes struck Japan: the Osaka-Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo gas attack,' he is quoted as saying in Jay Rubin's critical biography, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words. '[These were] two of the gravest tragedies in Japan's post-war history. It is no exaggeration to say that there was a marked change in the Japanese consciousness 'before' and 'after' these events. These twin catastrophes will remain embedded in our psyche as two milestones in our life as people.'

His response was twofold: he spent 1996 interviewing survivors of the Tokyo gas attack, giving rise to the book of their testimonies, Underground. In the book's introduction, he tells of reading a letter in a magazine from a woman whose husband had lost his job because of the attack: 'A subway commuter, he had been unfortunate enough to be on his way to work in one of the carriages in which the sarin gas was released. He passed out and was taken to hospital. But even after several days' recuperation, the after-effects lingered on, and he couldn't get himself back into the working routine. At first he was tolerated, but as time went on his boss and colleagues began to make snide remarks. Unable to bear the icy atmosphere any longer, feeling almost forced out, he resigned...

'As far as I can recall there was nothing particularly plaintive about [the letter], nor was it an angry rant. If anything, it was barely audible, a grumble under the breath. "How on earth could this happen to us…?" she wonders, still unable to accept what had out of the blue befallen her family.'

That letter could also be seen as the starting point for Murakami's second action: a series of short stories serialised in August 1999 that came to be collected as after the quake. The six tales in the book are all set in February 1995, after the earthquake and before the gas attack. Many are naturalistic examinations of individual lives, which reach a pitch in Super-Frog Saves Tokyo, a comic monster tale of the type we may associate with kitsch Japanese Godzilla movies.

Both books are remarkable works from a contemporary author, which I recommend. I'm particularly touched that in September 1995 Murakami gave two public readings in the earthquake zone to benefit severely damaged libraries, 'in one of which,' Rubin writes, '[Murakami] had spent many days as a middle-school and high-school student and "dozing" in preparation for his entrance exams.'

UPDATE For its 28 March Japan issue, the New Yorker is reprinting one of the stories collected in after the quake, UFO in Kushiro. Shame they can't use The Seventh Man, which wasn't inspired by natural disaster but makes for an even more powerful take by Murakami that could be applied to the current tragedy and its aftermath.

In Britain, the Red Cross has launched an appeal to help Japan following the latest earthquake.

Paris syndrome

Right, this should be the last post inspired by Paris for a time. While I was there, I got to thinking about Paris syndrome, the sickness that affects mainly Japanese visitors to the French capital. Officials at the Japanese embassy say they have to help up to 20 tourists a year when their experience of a dream destination is destroyed by elevated expectations, the language barrier, cultural clashes, crime or plain rudeness.

This is not to be confused with Stendhal syndrome, whose symptoms of fainting, rapid heartbeat and so on are much the same, but is provoked by a particular sensitivity to overwhelming beauty - perhaps much like Henry Miller, 'wandering and wandering' along the Seine, below, though most usually inspired by art. Also named Florence syndrome, the 19th century writer Henri-Marie Beyle (Stendhal) was overcome in the city: on the porch of Santa Croce he was 'seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart; the wellspring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.'

The full-on breakdown abroad is a common outcome in the work of writer Geoff Dyer, whether on the beach in Mexico (Out of Sheer Rage), in Detroit (Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It) or at a pilgrimage site in India (Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi). I feel a sense of liberation somewhere no one knows me, surrounded by another language, but perhaps for some people this can prove too much.

My own relationship with Paris is different: I've been going there since childhood and, while the city hasn't changed that much, I wonder about myself reflected against it: the different, or maybe-not-so-different, mes that have visited, and stood in the same places (pictured, a bar I first visited more than half a lifetime ago). Those moments don't come in the full-time bustle of London, in the same way parents, because they are all the time with their children, don't see them growing up.

Turning Japanese

I'm annoyed I missed so much of the BFI Southbank's Ozu season and only latterly caught Early Summer and Late Autumn. One of the criticisms levelled at the second film is that it barely reflects the changing attitudes that were blowing through Japan at the time it was made (1960). While Yasujiro Ozu may by then have been working to an utterly serene template, I'm not sure this is fair when you look at Late Autumn through the prism of his earlier work. Taken against Early Summer, for instance, with which it shares the principal scenario about a young woman looking for a husband, certain formalities have clearly changed, as have attitudes to the younger generation.

Early Summer (1951) is a wonderful introduction to family relations, the ins and outs of getting married and even to eating and the layout of homes in Japan at the time. Nearly a decade on, some of the most haunting shots in Late Autumn are of the apartment block where this way of life has been transposed, though scenes between the younger cast can sometimes be reminiscent of a Cliff Richard film. (There's a touch of this in Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood but, a generation and a half on, his work feels like another world.)

I've just started a detective novel, Inspector Imanishi Investigates, by Seicho Matsumoto, drawn by the comparisons to Georges Simenon on the back. Published by New York's Soho Press, it's notable how Beth Carey's smooth translation beautifully assimilates any cultural lacunae; really impressive. First published in Japan in 1961, the author tackles more directly the shock of the new as a gang of young writers, artists, composers and architects are feted by the public in a manner that exceeds anything that has gone before.

Next up for me is Occupied City, the second part of David Peace's Tokyo trilogy. I'm sure Matsumoto's procedurals must have served Peace as some inspiration for the police work in his latest books. But Peace looks directly at the post-war environment, while his Japanese antecendents brush at it as against nettles.