Takagi, Akimitsu Books

The Tattoo Murder Case (Soho crime)

Akimitsu Takagi

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Disturbing Series of Murders 4 out of 5 stars.
9 of 11 people found this review helpful.

I like the post-war Tokyo setting of this story. References are made to the horrors and trauma of war suffered by former Japanese soldiers. It also describes the wide discrepancy between different groups of people as they hold onto wealth and status, or madly scramble to grab them. We also see glimpses of black market and yakuza life styles. The murders are creepy and disturbing, and the psycho-sexual world of tattoo customers is nicely underlined. I'm not sure I quite believe the Boy Genius as a viable character, but I'm going to read the other books by Akimitsu Takagi as they become available.

Editorial Review:

If you read mysteries for insights into other cultures and different periods, this excellent translation of the first novel by Akimitsu Takagi, who became one of Japan's leading crime writers, is an eye-opener. In 1947 Toyko, the limbs of a murdered woman are discovered in a locked bathroom. Her torso--covered with intricately beautiful tattoos by her late father, a highly controversial artist--is missing. A doctor finds the body, and his detective brother is put in charge of the case. They bumble around until the doctor's friend, jokingly called "Boy Genius," leads them to the murderer. Fans of golden-age mysteries by S. S. Van Dine and John Dickson Carr should enjoy this unusual combination of ingredients.

Honeymoon to Nowhere (Soho crime)

Akimitsu Takagi

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The ghosts of World War II hover over this richly detailed 1965 mystery, written by Japan's most famous crime writer, Akimitsu Takagi. Etsuko Ogata is engaged to be married to a university lecturer, but her father, suspicious of the groom's past, hires a private investigator. The PI uncovers a link to a notorious war criminal. The bride's father, a former prosecutor, also finds a younger brother with possible criminal connections who died in a suspicious fire. "One black sheep is bad enough, but he has two in his family," he tells his daughter. "One can't help thinking there must be an ominous streak in him, too..."

But the young woman is 26 and just getting over an infatuation with a man who married one of her friends. Inevitably she goes against her parents' wishes and marries Yoshihiro Tsukamoto--despite noticing other kinds of strange behavior in him. On the night of their wedding, just before they are to leave on their honeymoon on the super-express train to Kyoto, Yoshihiro gets a call which he says is from a university official, demanding his immediate presence on campus. He leaves the hotel and never returns; his strangled body is found later that night.

The prosecutor put in charge of the case is a rising star named Saburo Kirishima--the same man Etsuko pined for before he married her friend Kyoko. (He also appears in the equally excellent but very different The Informer.) His investigation focuses on the person who called the groom at his hotel. Was it the bride's father? Or a young colleague in his law office who wanted to marry Etsuko himself? Or could it have been someone connected with the groom's family? As the meticulous details pile up, we learn as much about middle-class Japanese life in the 1960s as we would from any nonfiction book--but this way, we get to have fun trying to solve the mystery. --Dick Adler

The Informer

Akimitsu Takagi

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

One of the reasons we read foreign mysteries (no matter where we live) is because they let us weave our way quickly into the cultures of other countries, using crime as the common thread. Akimitsu Takagi's books are uniquely Japanese: they are slightly stiff and formal at first, apparently treating bloody subjects in a calm and formal manner; only later do we realize how deeply we've become involved.

Takagi, born in 1920, wrote his first mystery at the age of 28. He quickly became Japan's most famous mystery writer--a self-taught legal expert whose heroes in the dozens of books he produced until his death in 1995 were usually prosecutors or police investigators. But in this story (part of the publisher's ambitious plan to introduce Takagi's books to a worldwide audience), the focus is on a young stock broker named Shigeo Segawa, trained at a giant brokerage house whose motto was "Money Is Everything." As Takagi tells us, "the pleasure of having money, the admiration for it, the longing for it, and the misery without it--these emotions had eaten their way into Segawa's bones long ago."

Crushed and made desperate by a stock market crash in the 1960s, Segawa gets involved in a shady industrial espionage scheme, and twice betrays one of his oldest friends--by seducing his wife and trying to steal the formula for a new chemical process. When his friend is murdered, Segawa becomes the logical suspect. But a sharp young prosecutor named Kirishima begins to think that perhaps the blame lies elsewhere--with the informer who told the dead friend what Segawa had done. Other Takagi classics available in paperback: Honeymoon to Nowhere and The Tattoo Murder Case. --Dick Adler