Point Zero
By Matsumoto Seicho
Translated by Louise Heal Kawai
Bitter Lemon Press (2024)
ISBN-13: 978-1913394936
Review by Laurence Green
1950s Japan - all at once both modern, familiar to the Japan of now, but also… only a short decade on from the horrors of World War 2. A time of change, of flux, of hidden histories and dark secrets rapidly buried beneath the ceaseless change that enveloped the nation at that time. It is into this heady world of new hopes and dreams that Teiko marries Uhara Kenichi, a promising ad-man. All seems well - but after a four day honeymoon, Kenichi suddenly disappears. Teiko is left to pick up the pieces - searching somehow for what happened to her husband - is he dead? Or worse - as she begins to piece together the past - could his disappearance be linked to his involvement with the notorious “pan-pan girls”; women who worked as prostitutes for American soldiers in the period immediately following the war?
It has to be said that for all its intriguing premise, while Point Zero lacks the utter compulsive drive of Matsumoto’s masterpieces Tokyo Express and Inspector Imanishi Investigates - recently re-issued by Penguin Classics - it resolutely exists in the same meticulously detailed “real-world” Japan of commuter towns and ordinary citizens. Matsumoto’s gift as a writer is an uncanny eye for detail that wrings out the very essence of everyday life in the smallest of observations. Contemporary Western crime writers like Ian Rankin have made whole careers out of this laser-like precision and fidelity to the urban environs of their characters, but Matsumoto’s work must have felt truly revolutionary back in the Japan of the 1950s/60s when readers would have been more familiar with old-school ‘locked room’ mysteries and the Victorian whiff of Sherlock Holmes.
All the ingredients of a classic thriller are here - a litany of locations traversed by train, mysterious family members, small-town cops, the whiff of the erotic. Matsumoto teases each of these elements but invariably plays his cards close to his chest - at every step the reader is put to work. While Point Zero can absolutely be enjoyed in the typical lean-back experience of an easy-reading thriller, to truly understand it and the mystery at its heart, you’ll need to put your brain into overtime, playing the detective that is conspicuously absent from the book.
Indeed, if there’s something truly fascinating at the heart of Point Zero, it is that the protagonist is not a cop, sleuth or legal practitioner - they are simply a wronged wife, looking for the truth. There is a barely suppressed hysteria to her actions, a ceaseless that in the context of her situation, seems entirely understandable and relatable - what would we do if the person we loved most in the world suddenly disappeared?
What’s more, Point Zero’s willingness to engage with a theme as potentially controversial as that of the pan-pan girls - a symbol of all that must have been most taboo in the frenetic climate of the immediate Post-War era in Japan - marks it out as having a keen edge that while not overtly political, is certainly unafraid to venture into the darkness that exists beyond the warm comforts of the mainstream. Again and again, Matsumoto paints a Japan that feels like it’s almost within touching distance, mere centimetres beyond the lens-like window of the novel’s pages.
The true test of any mystery novel must be the conclusion, and here Point Zero confounds and excels in equal measures. The final stretch of the book tumbles a little too easily into a kind of massive exposition dump that feels more like reading a dry, provincial crime report than a stunning denouement to hours of build up - a classic case of telling, rather than showing, the truth behind the crimes. But then, as a final gasp of genius, just as you think the novel has nothing left to say, it plays its winning card: an elegiac reveal that wraps everything up in a couple of pages and leaves the reader with an irresistibly wistful vista that somehow contains in it guilt, pathos, life, death and sorrow. It feels a little strange to call a mystery novel 'beautiful', but in its own darkly seductive way, Point Zero wholeheartedly is.