Calling all sociologists …

… especially if your area is East Asian studies. After a long, drama-packed, psychologically compelling buildup, a murder has finally been committed in Akimitsu Takagi’s The Informer. The first named police officer on the scene is a chief detective, followed only afterward by the homicide inspector who takes charge of the investigation.

Here is where the sociology comes in. The motif of a superior officer given unexpected priority repeats a pattern I’ve noticed in my admittedly limited experience of Japanese crime stories. In Akira Kurosawa’s movie Stray Dog, the senior officer, played by Takashi Shimura, guides the junior, played by Toshiro Mifune, investigating with him, interrogating with him, and keeping him in line. If my memory serves me well, a senior officer also plays an especially prominent role in at least one of Seicho Matsumoto’s novels as well.

These instances all seemed a contrast to what I'm accustomed to, in which a police novel has one lead investigator. In the case of The Informer, the contrast with American and British police procedurals seemed especially marked. In murder mysteries from the U.K. or America, if any police are named as appearing on the scene before the lead homicide investigator, they are likelier to be of lower rank, a patrolman or a constable, rather than higher.

Your job, readers, is to help me figure out if this means anything and, if so, what? Does it reflect differences between Japanese and Western police procedures? Differences in the way Japanese storytellers think about authority? Is it even typical of Japanese stories at all, or is it just a quirk of the few that I know?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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The business of crime and the crimes of business – Akimitsu Takagi’s The Informer

I’m just a few chapters into this 1965 mystery of murder and industrial espionage, but it took far less than that to see how skillfully Takagi humanizes what could easily be a remote subject. The protagonist, a disgraced former stockbroker named Shigeo Sagawa, has an endearing love for the market, so much so that a reader may almost feel sorry for him now that he can no longer trade shares.

His readiness to jump from self-pity to a willingness to betray friends, sometimes within the space of a single sentence, makes him a character of compellingly human weakness. No doubt this will tighten the emotional screws on the reader once the schemes into which Sagawa lets himself be manipulated slip beyond his control.

And here’s where you come in, readers. By coincidence, perhaps, the only other business-crime story that comes immediately to mind is also Japanese – Akira Kurosawa’s movie The Bad Sleep Well. Since I’m such a newcomer to the world of business as a setting for crime stories, I’ll ask you to help me out. What other crime novels, movies or stories have used the corporate world as a setting? What makes these stories work? And, if they are primarily crime stories rather than thrillers – and don’t ask me to define that term here – what makes them so?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Akimitsu Takagi
Japanese crime fiction
Asian crime fiction