Night Train to Kanazawa
Seicho Matsumoto and moving through space
Tokyo Express, Seicho Matsumoto’s 1958 debut novel, was on top of a stack of books at a store in Shinjuku. So I grabbed it, because it was thin and promised propulsivity, what with “express” right there in the title. You can rarely go wrong with a classic murder mystery.
The traditional translated title for Tokyo Express is Points and Lines. Both titles hint at one of Matsumoto’s recurring fixations, besides murders and the people who solve them: Trains, their schedules, and all the seductions of using rail as a way to move through space.
I carried Tokyo Express, and the other Matsumoto novels I eventually acquired, with me on a series of rail journeys. Shinkansen bullet trains between cities, regional commuter trains, local subways in Tokyo and elsewhere. I still haven’t recovered from discovering that Sendai, a city of only about a million people, has multiple gleaming subway lines. Not that you need me to tell you, but the train gods have not smiled similarly upon my country. Matsumoto’s rail-etched detective procedurals are a genre that sadly couldn’t exist in the United States, at least not since the 1920s.
Trains are both the problem and the solution in Matsumoto’s novels. In Tokyo Express, the murderer relies on cunning manipulation of rail schedules. A chance sighting at Tokyo Station kicks off a saga of poring over train schedules and ferry records as a pair of detectives piece together a clever plot. There are long overnight express trips to Fukuoka and sleeper cars to Aomori, punctuated by cigarettes on lonely nighttime platforms and stays in inns that are cheap but nonetheless have attentive keepers. It makes for a satisfyingly compact-yet-intricate story that is indeed propulsive not least because it is quite literally pulled along by the passenger trains of Postwar Japan.
Matsumoto’s most famous novel is anglicized as Inspector Imanishi Investigates (1961), despite the more precise translation being Vessel of Sand. (The original title seems to be a metaphor, and one that I still don’t quite get; I learned it when I was reading the book in a bar in Osaka and the bartender and a patron took an interest.) Tokyo is both the home and the center of gravity for the redoubtable Imanishi, a middle-aged detective who has to ask his wife to budget for his extracurricular investigations when he becomes obsessed with a stubborn case. As in all three Matsumoto novels I’ve read, the main thing one does in Tokyo is to leave it.
These three novels don’t feature much of the detailed urban exploration characteristic of classic American noir. Matsumoto isn’t trying to show off his knowledge of Tokyo and map the city’s underbelly. The capital city inhabited by Inspector Imanishi and other Matsumoto characters is a place to live a staid domestic life and do your job. You keep your head down in Tokyo until a salacious murder gives you a reason to take a train out of the city.
In the guise of a Matsumoto detective-protagonist, you might take the train to the house of a master craftsman on the Tohoku coast to follow up on a vague tip, or to a working-class neighborhood in Osaka that’s still recovering from firebombing to check suspect death records, or to an isolated peninsula that has an unusual dialect that fits into puzzling witness hearsay. You’ll stay a few nights at a cheap ryokan and hear about the admiration the locals have for the famed Tokyo Police. You won’t drink much because you can’t really afford it, being an honest cop. When you catch the bad guy, he may turn out to be a young up-and-comer who believes he can take shortcuts to the kind of glamorous success that a steady hand like you knows better than to dream about.
In Point Zero (1959), Matsumoto dispenses with police protagonists in favor of a young widow trying to unravel the disappearance of her melancholic husband. His fate turns out to be tied up with his past as—you guessed it—an officer of the Tokyo Police. He was tasked with arresting “pan-pan girls,” Postwar prostitutes who specialized in the desires of American GIs.
The ex-cop’s respectable widow, Teiko, learns about this louche history only after her husband disappears. She travels back and forth by train between Tokyo and Kanazawa, the city where her husband was working as an ad man before their marriage. She had wanted to visit the area during their honeymoon, but the thought seemed to sadden her husband. Even as she grieves him and seeks answers, Teiko doesn’t fail to enjoy the dramatic coastal scenery of the Hokuriku region as she rides the local rails. Not to spoil too much, but the book ends with her standing on the kind of sea cliff she’s been admiring all along through the windows of trains.
One cool thing about trains is that they make you aware of the ground you’re covering without requiring you to take responsibility for the challenges of the journey. You get to watch the world go by, with all its frictions having been smoothed for you. At their best, trains are a serene interlude between the more unpredictable spaces that are causing your problems. Even if you’re going to the scene of a murder as fast as possible, you can still—at least if you’re a Matsumoto character—sleep and daydream along the way.
Just as a train makes you more aware of textured space than an airplane would, a hard-copy book keeps announcing its heft. I lugged these Matsumoto novels around with me not only on an array of trains, but also in taxis and on long walks around West-Central Tokyo. They were consistent conversation starters, since Matsumoto remains, 60-70 years after his heyday, one of those writers everyone in his homeland has heard of even if they’ve never finished one of his books. Like a good train ride, the books themselves helped me begin to map out where I was.
Then again, on my actual train rides, I didn’t get much reading done. It was usually more interesting to just look out the window.
Calvin and Hobbes commentary is still on hiatus for now. I hope to bring it back soon.
A Poem
Anzai Hitoshi has a new blade.