japanese summer of crime

In my weak moments I give in to my teenage love for japanese culture and when days get annoyingly hot, I love to read crime fiction. This summer I am all hooked on a series of historical crime novels revolving around the career of Ichiro Sano, a samurai-scholar having a hard time serving the shogun in 17th century Edo (now Tokyo) written by Laura Joh Rowland. The setting is historically mostly accurate, the plot is clever and I just happen to like the fact that there is no naive depiction of feudal japan as being the “good old times” of martial arts. Corruption, political isolation, intrigue, bureaucracy and a social class in decline, torn by the obligations of a strange code of conduct like the bushido build a very intriguing setting for gruesome murder cases and very dramatic build-ups. It`s not as grim and gritty as I usually like it but you can learn a lot about life and power structure in this period of japanese history. Granted, sometimes the dialogue is a little cheesy and the characters are not all that well developed but hey, it`s not Umberto Eco. There is a meta plot there so you better read the series in the order of publication. And there are Ninjas too!

There is a dirt cheap paperback including the firts two volumes of the series in german.

Good summer/beach reading.

If you are more into comics I can recommend the ongoing series of Usagi Yojimbo by Stan Sakai. Crisp clean black and white books about the journey of a ronin through the cities and landscapes of feudal Japan (17th Century). Not as serious as it might sound but not as ridiculous as the use of anthropomorphic animals for samurais might suggest. I guess the, mangare are just as many people who learned about japanese history from these books than there are people who got into european history by reading Asterix.

Even better (read: darker, more fatalistic) is the story of Lone Wolf and Cub. A real “landmark in graphic fiction” as Dark Horse puts it. Amazing visuals and about 7000 pages of story should seal the deal.

Picture of the Samurai by Okinawa Soba

Usagi Cover from Dark Horse