Tokyo Express - Seicho Matsumoto

One thing you will have noticed about the writing of Seichi Matsumoto if you've read any of his work before, is his attention to detail. Character traits and intuitions are interesting but can not always be trusted when it comes to investigating crime. Exploring the fine details of the process is more revealing, and my goodness in Tokyo Express the author's attention to detail is never more meticulous as his lead police detective investigator probes the smallest details of railway timetables in the most precise detail, certain that the answer to the mystery he faces lies somewhere in them.

Tokyo Express opens with the death of a couple found on Kashii beach in the Kyushu region in what - despite the unusual choice of location and the unseasonable weather - has all the characteristic appearances of double suicide. Veteran Hakata police officer at Hakata, Jutaro Torigai finds a few unusual features at the scene however that lead him to investigate further. None of them really add up to anything substantial, but they bother him and he can find no answer to his questions. His observations are however of interest to Inspector Kiichi Mihara from the Tokyo police, as the dead man Sayama was due to testify as a witness in a bribery investigation involving Ministry X where the man worked. 

That might sound suspicious, but suicide in such circumstances is not unusual in Japan, where a lower level employee will try to save face for himself and his bosses - but why choose a double-suicide with a young woman who was a waitress in a Tokyo bar. Suspicion, without any real foundation of motive, falls on Yasuda, a businessman who often frequented the bar and was often served by the waitress Toki. He conveniently witnessed Sayama and Toki leaving the train station on their journey to Kyushu, and had even brought two of Toki’s waitress colleagues along, who also witnessed and were surprised at their colleague having a secret lover they knew nothing about; one she would commit suicide with a week later. Yasuda’s alibi however is rock solid and backed up by railway timetables, and a motive moreover cannot be established, but police are determined to pursue the case.

The more the police investigate, the more they are convinced that the deaths were killings, but the facts don't add up, and indeed they even seem to run against the established facts in the train timetables, which in Japan simply cannot be disputed. Detective Mihara is sure that there must be a flaw in Yasuda's alibi somewhere, but the suspect he is dealing with is something of an expert in railway timetables, a businessman who travels Japan widely and regularly to his hometown where his sick wife lives. The very fact that he is so precise and that he seems to have convenient witnesses on hand on each of these journeys is however what makes the detective so suspicious. It's too good to be true, but how do you break a perfect alibi?

One interesting feature of Seicho Matsumoto's writing, aside from the clarity and precision with which he lays everything out, is how it often considers different perspectives, showing how easily we rely on one testimony and can fail to look at other perspectives for new angles. We get many different views here in Tokyo Express and insights into attitudes across a wide range of people from all parts of Japanese society. The diligence, the solid ground work puts you in mind of Columbo by way of Maigret and Poirot, but the flavour is distinctly Japanese in subject, in character and in the precision of the writing that lays out the case and its complications with admirable clarity, unafraid to explore blind leads and dead ends, testing all other theories in the search to find a true one.

Reading notes: Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumoto was first published in Japan in 1958 and is considered something of a classic, as well as being Matsumoto's masterpiece. I personally favour Inspector Imanishi Investigates, but this is indeed classic crime fiction. It probably wouldn't be possible other than for the fact that the precision of the Japanese train timetables, the railway system legendary for the punctuality of its train departures and arrival times. And apparently that is still the case, as Michael Portillo's recent terrific BBC TV series 'Great Japanese Railway Journeys' shows. The English translation of Tokyo Express was first published in 2023 by Penguin Classics. I read an eBook copy provided by the publisher through NetGalley. The author apparently uses the actual real timetables for all the journeys detailed in the mystery, and apparently reproductions are included in the printed version.