Devils in daylight

Originally published in 1918, this captivating short novel exemplifies why Tanizaki is considered an innovator of modern Japanese literature. After a sleepless night working on a manuscript for his editor, Takahashi receives a call from Sonomura, an old friend who suffers from an unspecified mental illness. Sonomura asks Takahashi to accompany him to witness a murder: having found and decoded a secret message, Sonomura believes he has determined the time and place a person will be killed. Sonomura's wild speculations are validated when the pair arrives at the scene of a "quiet and seductive" crime. The mystery unfurls. As a reluctant accomplice to a wealthy madman whose mind has been corrupted by "moving pictures and crime novels," Takahashi must defer to Sonomura's judgment in order to navigate the dark corners of Taisho_-period Tokyo. Takahashi becomes a fixture in a dubious plan to get closer to one of the suspected killers and possibly solve the disappearance of a missing Japanese nobleman, Viscount Matsumura. Vincent's translation of Tanizaki's work adopts a more formal style of speech common among affluent English speakers in the early 20th century. The voice and language are well suited for a narrative that frequently references works by Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. The prose is cunning and compelling, evoking classic Asian folklore and elements of Don Quixote. Readers are never entirely sure what to believe-the narrator is unreliable and often questions his own story. Is what Takahashi experiences delusion-has he contracted Sonomura's illness? (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

In this newly translated novella, written in 1918 by early-20th-century Japanese literary master Tanizaki (Red Roofs and Other Stories, 2016, etc.), two friends go in search of a murder that may or may not be about to happen.Narrator Takahashi receives a phone call one morning from his wealthy friend Sonomura inviting him to come watch a homicide in secret. Sonomura says he doesn't know "who's going to kill whom" or where the murder will take place but is certain it will happen "in a certain part of Tokyo" around 1 a.m. Although Takahashi thinks Sonomura may have slipped into insanity, he agrees to accompany him on his search for the murder out of a sense of responsibility as a friend. In describing how he has come to know a murder will be committed, Sonomura says he was at a movie theater when he witnessed a man and woman plotting behind another man's back, using a cryptogram Sonomura deciphered using his knowledge of Poe's story "The Gold-Bug," in which characters use a similar code to find a lost treasure. After much searching, Takahashi goes home but Sonomura comes for him after midnight, sure he has figured out the crime's location. Despite Takahashi's claim not to take Sonomura seriously, his anticipation concerning what he may get to witness is palpable. Through knotholes in a storm shutter ("as if peering through the viewfinder of a movie camera," the translator says in an afterword), the friends watch an erotic, violent scene that mesmerizes Takahashi. In the aftermath Takahashi, himself a novelist, struggles to distinguish fact from illusion. The novella is hauntingly Hitchcock-ianalthough written before Hitchcock made filmsbut readers not fluent in Japanese may want to read the translator's afterword beforehand to appreciate Tanizaki's use of Chinese characters and Japanese phrases to create puns and layers of meaning English-speaking readers might miss. Tanizaki laminates a murder mystery and psychological study onto a rumination about the nature of fiction itself. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.