A huge (+600 pages) book by a Japanese author, the first (of several) translated into English.
There were two layers to the plot – a kidnap and a murder which took place 14 years before main plot – and a story of interminable wrangling between three (?) departments within a large Japanese police force; crime, admin and media relations.
This side of the plot (which dominated most of the book) was largely incomprehensible; it didn’t help that I didn’t annotate the characters (but there were too many) or that they all had similar names – three of the key ones were Mikami, Minako (his wife) and Mikumo, a member of his department. The killer (never proven) was Mesaki, the policeman who catches him Matsuoka. And that is just the memorable characters whose names begin with M. A is even worse.
But the conflicts within the police departments and with the press were not that interesting. The crime narrative was very clever – the police fucked up the original investigation by failing to record the killer’s call to the father of the kidnapee/murderee. So the father telephones individually the entire phone directory of the city until he hears a male voice that he recognises and sets up an elaborate sting involving the faked kidnap of this guy’s daughter. That bit was clever plotting. Shame about the main plot!
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