Tokyo Express – Seichō Matsumoto (1958 transl. Jesse Kirkwood 2022) 149 pages

Tokyo Express is very much a howdunit and whydunit, as the whodunnit is seemingly fairly obvious from the start. This was my first time reading crime master Seichō Matsumoto and I was hugely impressed.

A young couple are found dead on Kashii beach near a shrine, having drunk cyanide. The local Fukuoka police are quick to decide a double suicide. There is nothing to suggest otherwise, but one of the team, Torigai Jūtarō, a long-standing and rather dishevelled detective, isn’t so sure.

“His overcoat was as battered as the clothes beneath it, his face unshaven, and his tie twisted and worn.”

Reminiscent of Lieutenant Columbo (whom he predates), Torigai is sharp-minded and unegotistical too. He starts trying to unravel how the couple came to be on the beach at that time. The young woman called Toki is dressed in a kimono and was a waitress at a restaurant in Akasaka; the man in Western clothes was Kenichi Sayama, an employee at Ministry X, currently under investigation for corruption. They were witnessed getting on the titular train by two of Toki’s colleagues, and it seems pretty clear that their bearing witness was engineered by a businessman called Tatsuo Yasuda.

Quicky Torigai establishes that a lot rests on that train journey and the timings of what happened when. He’s also baffled by a receipt from the buffet car found on Sayama’s body which recorded a food order for just one person.

“A scene formed in Torigai’s mind: the dark silhouette of a man, silently and briskly leading a woman to the beach, and the woman saying: What a lonely place.”

When Kiichi Mihara turns up from Tokyo, an outwardly very different detective takes over. The case is attracting attention due to the corruption in the Ministry, and Mihara works for the Second Division which investigates white collar crime.

“There was something in his cordial tone that reminded Torigai of an insurance salesman.”

The two investigators agree that the deaths are suspicious, and they also realise Yasuda is likely involved. However, trying to crack his alibi about where he was and when proves extremely difficult.

“Yasuda was always consulting the railway timetable. Did that perhaps mean he knew it secrets? In any case, his familiarity with the train times had to signify something. What if Yasuda’s entire alibi was built on it?”

This is one of the most procedural of police procedurals I’ve ever read. Everything hinges on the tight timing of trains, ferries and planes (a premise that would not remotely work in the UK as it depends on all the transport running to time, which as Magnus Mills pointed in out in my earlier read this month, will never occur). Torigai fades into the background, as Mihara tries to pick it all apart but keeps hitting brick walls.

“That crack in the wall had been nothing but a mirage. Mihara felt crushed. He held his head in his hands and, for a moment, could only stare at the piece of paper in front of him.”

I knew a bit about Tokyo Express before reading it, including that all the timings are based on the actual timetables of the time in the novel, and I wondered if it would be impossible to follow/bogged down in the logistics. But Seichō Matsumoto does a great job of carrying the reader along and there’s even a few surprises in store. The relationship between the two detectives is warm and endearing. I don’t know if they appeared in his subsequent novels, but even if not, I’d be keen to read more by this author.

“Mihara liked to ride the trams of Tokyo. Often, he would board without a specific destination in mind. Odd as it might seem, whenever he was at a loss for ideas, he would simply sit on the tram and allow his thoughts to roam. The tram’s steady trundle, its gentle swaying, induced in him an almost euphoric state of contemplation.”