A Quiet Place

A Quiet Place
Seicho Matsumoto

Cover of A Quiet Place

Tsuneo Asai is on a business trip in Kobe when he receives the news that his wife had died. Eiko had had a weak heart, so, while her death was sudden, the heart attack causing it was not exactly a surprise. The circumstances of her death, however, are puzzling: What did she do in that neighbourhood in a part of Tokyo they had never visited before?

When Tsuneo visits that neighbourhood to apologize for the trouble caused by his wife’s death, he notices a number of love hotels on top of the hill. Immediately, the idea that his wife must have had an affair takes hold, and Tsuneo is determined to find out the truth.

This is not your typical “whodunit” crime novel, since the death of Eiko was from natural causes. Still, Tsuneo acts like a sleuth on his quest to unravel his wife’s apparent double life, which makes this a compelling read. Once the truth is found, Tsuneo must make a decision, which turns the story into the direction of obsession and what can happen when you don’t let sleeping dogs lie…

Seicho Matsumoto (1909 – 1992) was born as Kiyoharu Matsumoto, an only child, in Kyushu. He never finished secondary school, and worked as an adult making layouts for Asahi Shimbun. His first short story was entered in a 1950 competition and won him third prize. Six years later, he had quit the newspaper and worked full-time as a writer and until his death in 1992, he wrote more than 450 works, only a handful of which were translated into English. His detective and crime fiction, where he not only depicts the crime but also Japanese society and its ills, was very popular in Japan. He won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1952, the Kikuchi Kan Prize in 1970, and the Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 1957. He served as the president of Mystery Writers of Japan from 1963 to 1971.

I discovered Seicho Matsumoto through a friend of mine, and these crime novels are well crafted and fun to read. Try for yourself and get the novel from amazonhttps://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Place-Seicho-Matsumoto/dp/1908524634.