Seicho Matsumoto, Inspector Imanishi Investigates (Suna no utsuwa), 1961
This is a truly Japanese novel. Although one might immediately object that there is no supernatural element and so how could it be Japanese, I'd argue that the coincidences that make the story possible can only be attributed to the supernatural.
I write this without criticism. There are hundreds of cases each year that don't get solved. They don't get solved, because there were no coincidences. This one had them, and so it gets solved.
What most lends a Japanese flavor to the book is its strict translation. Everything the Japanese people say to one another gets translated, even when everyone knows it's just formalistic and not actually meant. That's all part of being Japanese.
The Japanese male who is at the center of our story—Inspector Imanishi—is certainly not lovable. But he is a good cop (in both senses of the phrase), and one wonders how many cultures could have supported the kind of long-term effort toward solving this case that we see in this novel.
I especially like the "back of head thinking" that happens to a great degree in this story. As I have so often experienced, myself, much brain activity is not conscious. At a certain point, it comes into consciousness, and other thoughts and actions can proceed from it. Inspector Imanishi accepts this phenomenon, and it pays off.
The story is old, I suppose, having been written about 50 years ago. There is a certain degree of description of the effects of WWII and, especially, the effects of American bombing on the Japanese civilian population, and all this makes eminent sense when you realize that it was only fifteen years before the writing of the book that Japan surrendered.
We travel a lot in the story, and that's always nice. Much is made of the differences in Japanese dialects, although it is also apparent by that 1960 time frame that modern forces were uniting the local dialects into Standard Japanese. I remember visiting the mountain-farmer homes of my wife's relations, and hearing them discuss how people on the other side of the hill couldn't even speak recognizable Japanese (and probably the same conversation was going on over the hill).
Many details of domestic life are offered us, however unwittingly (the author was writing in Japanese for Japanese people). They coincide with my own observations of Japanese society (made some ten years after the writing of this novel), but I'm sure modern Japanese life is quite changed.
A good mystery, and according to Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_of_Sand its film version—Castle of Sand (1974)—is highly regarded in the history of Japanese cinema. Available on DVD.