Inspector Imanishi Investigates

A train is travelling from Tokyo to the remote island of Kyushu. Two strangers share a compartment. By the time the train arrives, one of them will be dead. Inspector Imanishi — quiet, methodical, a man who writes haiku in his spare time — will spend the next two years following a thread of evidence that leads from the provincial cities of postwar Japan to the heart of Tokyo’s artistic bohemia, uncovering a crime whose roots lie not in the present but in the darkest period of Japan’s recent history.

Seicho Matsumoto’s Inspector Imanishi Investigates, published in Japan in 1961 and now considered one of the essential works of Japanese crime fiction, is a novel of extraordinary atmosphere and social depth. The postwar Japan it describes — still bearing the wounds of defeat and occupation, wrestling with questions of cultural identity and historical memory — is rendered with the precision of a writer who understood his society from the inside.

Compelling as pure crime fiction and indispensable as social history — one of the landmarks of Japanese literature. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.