Tokyo Express is a classic of the genre. Seichō Matsumoto has been compared to Hitchcock, Maigret and Simenon, and Tokyo Express is by reputation his masterpiece. It’s taut and it’s tight; it’s full of noir and it pretends to be interested more in puzzles than in people, and to be sad about that. But then this is a thriller that hides its thrills between the covers of a railway timetable. Jesse Kirkwood’s modern translation has brought this 1950s bestseller to a new audience.

We get the feeling that Matsumoto isn’t loving living in the 1950s. He tells us of the ‘tidelands of Kashii’ and quotes an eighth century poem, only to tell us that ‘the harsh present has no time for such lyricism’ and, besides, there are two dead bodies on the beach. These are supposedly young lovers who have committed a joint suicide. The thing is, there’s no real evidence to suggest that the two people concerned were in a relationship. Plus, the dead man is implicated in a corruption scandal linked to the national government. The detective from Tokyo, Kiichi Mihara, doesn’t buy it, and nor does his local counterpart, Torigai Jutaro. The young white collar crime detective and the unhappy rural veteran have contrasting approaches but forge a mutual respect. But this is not a novel in which the lives and loves of the police crew call for our attention. The case takes long enough to solve as it is. Our heroes have to use analogue methods of detection – paper lists of passengers, diagrams hand-drawn on envelopes – and after new theories are dreamt up it’s weeks before the evidence can be gathered to test them. 

The slowness, the calmness of it all, and the eeriness of the case give the whole thing a dream-like quality. Matsumoto has his characters snooze along the length and breadth of Japan, but himself writes of the ‘vague melancholy of long journeys’ and I found this to be ideal entertainment on a night flight. Yet the style of the prose is not slow: it’s very precise with little extra detail provided. There’s no fat: the facts are stark (to the extent that they are knowable), just as they are in a railway timetable, and everything is laid before you. Not for Matsumoto the self-indulgent chapter that’s half-finished before the character being talked about is actually named. We are with Mihara and Torigai as they work things out. Pretty quickly there’s a main suspect – but they have a supposedly watertight alibi. The detectives’ challenge is to find the flaw in that alibi. And it’s the puzzle, not the people, that concerns us; the clues have our attention rather than the scandal of political corruption that runs all the way up to the ministry. And yet the characters are confident and engaging. Matsumoto is no dumb misanthrope. He just wants us to love transport timetables and who could argue against that? When the twist comes – and of course there’s a twist – it’s completely earned.

The result of all this is a novel that is both timeless and – with its weariness – absolutely of its time. It’s short, it’s quirky and its reputation is utterly deserved.