Natsuhiko Kyogoku’s debut novel arrives with a genuinely compelling premise: a woman pregnant for twenty months, a husband who vanished from a locked room, and the shadow of an ancient Japanese spirit—the ubume, a ghost born of a woman who dies in childbirth—hanging over a crumbling clinic in postwar Tokyo. For readers drawn to the intersection of folklore and mystery, this setup promises something atmospheric and unsettling.
The novel’s greatest strength is, frustratingly, the source of its greatest weakness. Kyogoku is clearly a man of enormous intellectual curiosity, and his occult detective Kyogokudo is a vehicle for extended, elaborate meditations on the psychology of belief, the neurology of self-deception, and the philosophical underpinnings of why humans need the supernatural. These passages are not without merit—the central idea that the brain actively rewrites reality to protect itself from unbearable truths is genuinely fascinating, and it pays off in the novel’s twist. But Kyogoku does not trust his reader. He explains, and then he explains again, and then he explains the explanation. By the time the actual mystery accelerates, the narrative momentum has been thoroughly bled dry.
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I first read Miura Shion’s The Great Passage ((舟を編む, Fune wo Amu) back in 2020, right after I watched the film version, but reading it meant I skipped a lot of it. Unfortunately, this is what I tend to do when I read a book for the first time. It takes me several reads before a book is truly read. So, if I read a book just once there’ll be a lot of it that I’ll miss. Anyway, I recently decided to listen to the audiobook on Scribd. Audiobooks force me to pay attention to every word although I sometimes zone out. When this happens I usually rewind the narration. Somehow, I am more likely to do this than reread a paragraph.
The story is about a group of lexicographers at a publishing house, called Gembu, and their latest project, ‘The Great Passage’. At the start of the book, the editor, Akari Kohei announces that he has to leave to care for his sick wife. The director of the department, Professor Matsumoto, says that he will never find another editor as good and devoted to dictionary making as Akari is. This makes Akari determined to find a replacement before he leaves. It seems like an impossible task given that you come to realise that it would take as it becomes evident that it takes a rare type of person to live up to Akari and Professor Matsumoto’s exacting standards. To add to the challenge, Akari has to make his selection from the existing employees of the publishing house: Although a large company, most of the staff view making dictionaries as boring and a waste of time. 
It took me a while as I’ve been busy with editing deadlines, but I finally finished reading Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa.
While away on a business trip, Tsuneo Asai, a section chief in the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, learns that his wife, Eiko, has died suddenly back in Tokyo. It transpires that Eiko suffered a fatal heart attack while walking up a hilly street in a part of the city that Asai is certain would have been unfamiliar to her.
Originally published in The Star in 2009
daphne lee 