James Melville's Haiku for Hanae appears to be the eleventh in a series of mysteries featuring the Japanese Inspector Tetsuo Otani of Kobe. The story takes place on the island in the Inland Sea called Awaji, and at a time when a bridge was being constructed from Awaji to the "mainland," the large island of Honshu, home to Tokyo, Osaka, etc.
Although written in the late 1980s, the story is told in retrospect, as Inspector Otani remembers this late 1960s case, as he and his wife approach the island for a visit 20 years later.
The murder victim is a Mormon missionary, one of the usual two on the island. Inspector Otani, sent from Kobe, is greeted—eventually—by the highest ranking police official on the island but who had turned over the case immediately to a young patrolman. This was fortunate both for Inspector Otani and for us, as this young man proves to be intelligent and hard-working. There is a fine cast of characters (in all senses of the word), and we see much of the Japan of the time, at least through the eyes of Melville, who is (or was, if no longer with us) married to a Japanese.
I found the story fine, and the encounters with various characters interesting. This is not great literature, and it is perhaps unfortunate that I read this novel after having read two Stieg Larsson novels. But to be published throughout the 1980s (and by Scribner) meant that Melville had quite a following, at least for that decade. As I recall, that was the time when the Japanese had bought most of California and were thinking of acquiring Washington State (where I lived), but then the bottom fell out of their economy, and they had to sell most of California back to someone. I wonder who owns it now.
Perhaps, then, we'll never see these books again. My own copy is a library removal, having left the library permanently after 2000. If our current catalog of writers of Japanese mysteries is any reflection of reality, few foreigners are writing much about Japan today. But with Murakami, Miyabe, and Kirino being translated from their native Japanese, the perspective for the reader might be all the more accurate.
--Michael Broschat, Jan 2010