Hon no mushi

Ironically, it was after I traveled to Japan that I began reading Japanese writers. My husband introduced me to Murakami, and I discovered the short stories of Hisaye Yamamoto in one of the anthologies I was assigned to teach.

Upon arriving in the Northwest I reconnected with another teacher I had met while participating in the JET Program in Japan. She immediately got me to join the Pacific Northwest JET Alumni Association, and I immediately signed up for their book club. Be sure to click on the link for a great list of Japanese authors and titles.

This month’s book, published by Seattle’s Chin Music Press, is Why Ghost’s Appear  written by Todd Shimoda and art by LJC Shimoda.

Mizuno Ren, an entomological illustration specialist, has disappeared. His mother hires a private investigator to find him. The search leads him to spurious fortune tellers, government clerks, travel agents specializing in sex tours, and, yes, a doppelganger.  Throughout the search, the detective feels his own soul splitting apart as he speculates on another case he investigated 20 years before.

Returning again and again to Mizuno’s mother, the detective finds her a much more complex personality than he had first thought. He observes “most people, nearly all I should say, are quite simple. They’ve developed a routine in life, they exist by four or five rules, have four or five experiences on which they’ve defined their lives.”

I kept waiting for the narrator to reveal himself, ala The Sixth Sense, to be an obake, but that never happens. I think. Like a lot of Japanese fiction, this novel is mystical and sometimes mysterious.