The Devotion of Suspect X

Japanese thrillers are apparently exhausting. My husband and I independently picked up two different, translated mysteries at the library only to discover that the first three pages were devoted to the peripatetic wanderings of the protagonist. Still, while he quit under the weight of trying to follow a character through the maze of Tokyo, I pursued Ishigami on his walk to work as a high school math teacher in Keigo Higashino's book, The Devotion of Suspect X. The route along the river does turn out to be somewhat relevant to the plot, but it did take a long time to get there.

Ishigami is a brilliant mathematician who has taken a job as a maths teacher mainly in order to devote more time to his own work. There simply isn't enough time in the day with all the distractions in life to solve the unsolvable. That's a plot point that comes back later, too.

One of the welcome distractions from the dreary business of despairing over non-math students having to take math comes from Ishigami's middle-aged neighbor. Yasuko is a pretty, single mom who used to work in a club. She's moved on to a better life selling bento boxes, but she can't outrun her good-for-nothing ex-husband. Things happen, lousy husband is killed, Ishigami comes to the rescue with a plot worthy of his spectacularly mathematical brain. Everything would be fine if he were only matching wits with Kusanagi, the assigned detective, but throw a genius physicist into the works and you've got a cat-and-mouse of intellects. Yukawa, the physicist, is better known as Doctor Galileo and is a recurring character in Higashino's books and movies. In this case, he's also a former classmate of Ishigami's so, as they say: this time it's personal. But whether he wants to clear his old friend, Suspect X, or not, is a big part of the plot.

The brain play is as exhausting as tracing a route through the city. There were definitely times where I no longer cared about the mystery, but I kept reading because that's what you do in a mystery. I thought I knew the who, I thought I knew the how. So what was I waiting for? Ishigami becomes creepier as the story goes along and I was annoyed by that. Oooh, how original--the vaguely autistic genius is a stalker! But, suddenly (and it does take a while), the plot twists again and nothing is quite as it seems. The book ends in a somewhat Twilight Zone, or Hitchcock way (trust me) so I forgave the cultural stumbling blocks I had to navigate.

This is not a seat of your pants mystery/thriller, but I ended up enjoying the aesthetics of a Japanese-style mystery. Apparently Keigo Higashino is a critically acclaimed writer as well as a best-selling author in Japan, just be prepared to commit to reading his books.