Cosmopoetica

My only disappointment with Inspector Imanishi Investigates was discovering that it’s the only novel in the late Seicho Matsumoto’s Imanishi series (at least one blurb implies there is a series) that has been translated into English. Close on the heels of that disappointment was learning that Matsumoto died in 1992.

I was excited to find out, however, that this novel was made into a 1974 film titled Suna no utsuwa (aka Castle of Sand), which not only garnered an impressive number of awards, but has been called “one of the masterpieces of Japanese cinema.”

In the novel, Inspector Imanishi—an older, haiku-writing policeman in Tokyo—is investigating the brutal murder of a retired policeman, found beaten to death near a Tokyo train station. Along with Yoshimura, a younger policeman who sometimes assists him, Imanishi doggedly pursues the killer, through many seemingly hopeless dead ends, for years. Utimately Imanishi uncovers a complex crime that involves members of an elite young group of “Noveau Art” intellectuals: musicians, writers, architects and critics.

The depiction of Japanese life in the late 50s/early 60s (I think…the exact dates are never given) is fascinating. There’s no question that the events in the novel are of a different time and place, the whole suffused with a foreignness that is enhanced by the very utilitarian translation. Imanishi, representative of the older order, dignified and mannered, is starkly at odds with the young intellectuals who are determined to remake art, architecture, and finally politics into a new form suitable for their perception of modernity. Yoshimura, who is of the same age as the revolutionary-minded Nouveau crew, is nonetheless an admirer of Imanishi, learning from the older, weary detective crucial methods that are in danger of being lost in a new political landscape.

That Imanishi is also a (very modest) author of haiku, a formal and intensely polite man, whose depiction never veers into cliché significantly enhances the complex, but believable plot. Inspector Imanishi Investigates is more than just a murder mystery, but a fascinating cultural artifact.

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