Rasdhar

 Japanese honkaku (tr: orthodox) mysteries are structured around rules of deductive reasoning. Through the strategic disclosures of clues, the author leads a careful and attentive reader to the book???s conclusion, sometimes around a twist as well. Honkaku novels emerged in the 1920s, in direct response to the western ???Golden Age??? of detective fiction (Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, etc). Pushkin Vertigo has been translating these to English of late, and last year I read several of them. This book, The Aosawa Murders, by Riku Onda, is part of a newer generation of shin honkaku novels, which advocate a return to this classical style of mystery novels, with ???fair play to the reader??? as a guiding principle. 

In The Aosawa Murders, the identity of the killer is made clear quite early on; you are told that they were identified but killed themselves before they could be convicted. Initially it looks like the mystery we???re untangling is not who did it, but why they did it ??? but by the end of the book, you???re once again asking, was it really that person???s fault? Or was another hand involved? 

This complex story is also narrated in the form of a book about a book about the murder. We are told early on that the crime being investigated is the mass murder of the rich, well-known Aosawa family, through poison delivered in the form of a gift of bottled drinks at a multigenerational birthday celebration. Twenty-seven people are killed, leaving only a housekeeper, who swallows some poison but survives, and young Hisako Aosawa, the beautiful, visually-impaired daughter of the family, who didn???t drink anything. The delivery man, thought to be the killer, is tracked down by detectives, but not before he has already committed suicide. Decades later, Makiko Saiga, a neighbour and one of Hisako???s many admirer-friends, writes a book about the murders, trying to uncover why a seemingly unconnected man would want to kill so many people in an apparently motive-less crime. Her book, The Forgotten Festival, is the only thing she ever publishes, a deeply-researched nonfiction account that has since been forgotten. A few decades later, the Aosawa Murders is purportedly a book about this book, looking back at the events of the murder, the book that followed, retracing Makiko's steps, and re-examining the clues that have since emerged. 

If this sounds too complex, it doesn???t feel that way when you read it. Each chapter is in the form of an interview with the nameless author, who talks first to Makiko about her book, and then to various people involved, including the detectives, a friend of the killer, the housekeeper Kimi, the book's publisher, and finally, the beautiful Hisako herself. On first reading, the end of the story might seem ambiguous ??? but if you???ve been paying careful attention, and you go back, all the little clues fall into place, and you???ll know exactly what happened, even if the author hasn???t laid out explicitly in so many words. The careful, attentive reader is rewarded (which explains so many discontented Goodreads reviews). I enjoyed it. 

This book is about the healthcare industry, medical care, and wellness, chiefly in an American context.

I should clarify that I personally, staunchly stand by scientific research in this regard, and am dismayed by the rise of anti-vaccination movements, and the general distrust of medicine during Covid. Having said that, I do understand that the way healthcare is structured in the US, and more globally, the history of discrimination on gender, race, and sexuality in health care, do provide grounds for doubting the industry as a whole. There's a tension between these two concepts in Ehrenreich's book that she can't quite resolve, so she goes back and forth between “the insurance companies are making you take medicines you don't need” to “stop believing junk you read on the internet”. I believe the goal was to establish nuance, but her style is very anecdotal, and so easy to be skeptical about in itself. Even when she's debunking points, her tendency to draw conclusions based on singular examples that range from op-eds to twitter posts is very disconcerting. I'm not saying all writing should be data-driven, but surely claims about scientific research should be somewhat better sourced.

On the plus side, there's a lot of interesting fact and detail in the book that I wanted to follow up on. In particular, she discussed the work of Robert Trivers, a scientist, member of the Black Panther Party (they later ex-communicated him), and one of the first to identify the genetic stakes in parenthood. She referenced his book, Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist, which I immediately wanted to read. 

The book in general is quite glum. Her theme seems to be largely, ‘death is inevitable, why even bother'. Consider this excerpt: “So much then, for the hours - and years - you may have devoted to fitness. The muscles that have been so carefully sculpted and tone stiffen when calcium from the dead body leaks into them, causing rigor mortis, and loosening only when decomposition sets in. The organs we nurtured with superfoods and supplements abandon their appointed functions.....Everything devolves into a stinking pool, or what may sound even worse, a morsel in a rat's digestive system.” She wrote this book at 76, after surviving cancer, and deciding for herself that she was done with scans and checks and probes. I understand that she was tired. But this isn't a model for everyone, especially the young. While we are all going to die, we do have to live until death. The inevitability of death is no reason at all to give up on living, or living well. In an NYT review, Parul Sehgal wrote, “It???s reasonable, even honorable to so coolly make peace with the inevitable. But I confess wanting a bit more raging against the dying of the light.” I agree! 

Her characters remain absolutely insufferable as usual - they are largely one-dimensional (her heroines all have anxiety and complain a lot, her heroes have no personality but nice voices and nice eyes and many muscles). Look, I understand that the function of books like this is to let the reader project their own fantasies onto the minimally-developed characters, but having read good romance, I have a very low tolerance for bad romance. However, I have no one but myself to thank for subjecting myself to this, and cannot in all fairness, accuse her books of excessive whining (whinery?) if I am here whining about them too. 

I do think that she did try to tackle the typical ‘city girl goes to small town, falls in love with local carpenter, abandons evil career, discovers love and babies' trope, but the problem is that she keeps telling you how she's about to subvert it, and then she barely manages to. It would be really interesting to see the trope actually subverted by an author who understood that you can show without telling. 

This is a book about the Sri Lankan civil war, but it is not just a book about the Sri Lankan civil war. It is really a book about justice, indifference, and courage, amidst unspeakable violence. Early in the book, Ganeshananthan narrates how Sinhalese men went down the street, seeking out Tamil homes and businesses to burn, Tamil people to slaughter, in the middle of riots. They used electoral rolls to find and identify these people and places. In 1992, when Mumbai, India was gripped by riots, the Shiv Sena party did the exact same thing - using electoral rolls to find Muslim houses, drag out the men and beat them, drag out the women for worse. I know, because I was there, and because I belonged to a family that had Hindus, and Muslims, Christians and Jews, we had our front door marked in the middle of night by rioters who left posters identifiying us that said 'Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain' ('Say with pride we are Hindus'), and we had friends and families who tried to help us by printing signs to cover up these posters, which said 'Prem se kaho hum insaan hain' ('Say with love we are human'). In her late dementia, my grandmother, gripped with memories of those days, would wake up at night, saying 'They're coming, they're coming'. So, I didn't live through the civil war in Sri Lanka, and I can't speak for this experience, but my own lived experience is caught so acutely in her finely-crafted expression of this kind of violence that I wept, and so I cannot be objective about this book; only to say that I was gripped by it.

We could not believe it - to begin to believe all this, we had to write it down. You must understand: I have to tell myself again, because even though I was there it seems impossible.

I can, however, tell you what it is about: in Jaffna, 1981, Sashikala Kulenthiren, known as 'Sashi', grows up in a Tamil family that prizes education above all. Her four brothers are dedicated to their education: Niranjan, the eldest and gentlest, is almost qualified as a doctor; her next two brothers, Dayalan and Seelan are studying to be engineers, her youngest brother, Aran, is still in schoo, like her, and Sashi and her neighbour, a boy she calls K., are both hoping to get into medical college. As the Sri Lankan civil war begins, and signs of ethnic violence emerge, Sashi loses her brothers one by one: to violent death, to those that join in groups for reasons just and unjust, and ultimately, to those that escape the conflict altogether. The book follows Sashi's life; through medical school, through her family's travails, through until she is in New York, in 2009, making a futile bed to have the U.N. intervene in a bloody conflict that world ignored. Although this is a fictional account, it was built on two decades of research, Sashi's mentor in the books, Anjali Premachandran, is based on the real life doctor, human rights activist, Rajani Thiranagama, who was assassinated after publishing a book documenting the violence, torture, and rapes committed by both, the Indian Peacekeeping Forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Sashi's story may be fictional, but the extraordinary courage that she showed, in her profession as a doctor and her work, is based on the works of dozens of real people who put their lives on the line to document horrors that the world ignored. Ganeshananthan handles this complex, difficult, subject matter with a touch so deft that it never feels overwrought or exploited for sensational effect. There is emotion, but not melodrama.

Early in the book, the local library where Sashi and her brothers study is burned down by Sinhalese policemen. As a young teenager, she insists on going to see the damage despite the risks; her brothers take her. As she says:

They had torched the elegant palace of white rooms where Seelan and K and I had studied, its clean and well-lit shelves, the rare book section with the beautifully lettered palm leaf manuscripts. Dayalan had shown some to me when had first begun working there. Ninety thousand volumes gone, some of them original and single copies. Our past, but also - oh, the beautiful wooden tables where I had turned the pages of my textbooks and my brothers' textbooks! - the future. Imagine the places you grew up, the places you studied, places that belonged to your people, burned. But I should stop pretending that I know you. Perhaps you do not have to imagine. Perhaps your library, too, went up in smoke.

Towards the end of the book, as Sashi is without any of her brothers, without her friend K, without her mentor, without her family, she says, "I want you to understand: it does not matter if you cannot imagine the future. Still, relentless, it comes." This is how the book is written, directly addressed to the reader. It is a difficult approach to sustain, but Ganeshananthan does it, so that you turn page after page with Sashi, following her fight through her fear and loss and grief until it has honed her into a woman who is walking into a future she can't imagine, but with her spine held straight, no matter the cost. I can't even tell if you I liked this book or I hated it: only that I wept through it. If that's not a testimony to the skill of the writer, I don't know what is.

 Earlier this year I read Mary Roberts Rinehart's Miss Pinkerton, which is about a nurse named Hilda Adams. Perceptive, organised, and efficient, she occasionally assisted the police with delicate inquiries, enabled by her work providing at-home care, usually to the very rich. Her usual partner in these efforts was Inspector Fuller, a policeman who vociferously defended her talents to all doubters, insisting she was as effective as any of his policemen. Fuller affectionately calls her ???Miss Pinkerton??? for her detection skills.

The Haunted Lady is the fourth, and last of Rinehart's Hilda Adams novels. She did have a small run of short stories to follow, but the series ended here. It really is a shame that we got so few of these, because they are quite charming, and on the whole manage to avoid the common pitfalls of mid-century mystery novels such as overt anti-Semitism, classism, sexism, and racism. I say “on the whole” because these books are, after all, a product of a certain time and era and it's a bit hopeless to expect them to reflect our sentiments today. But problems, as there are, are less obvious than those I encountered in books by Ngaio Marsh or Agatha Christie, for example. Really the only jarring note in this book is when Inspector Fuller says he'd like to take Hilda over his knee after she does something that puts herself at risk - the kind of thing that might happen in I Love Lucy. I know it's meant playfully and is supposed to show how he's concerned about her and also, that it doesn't actually happen (she'd kick his ass) , but I still didn't like it, even as a joke. What I did like most about these books is Hilda's inner conflict: she's constantly torn between feeling revulsed at poking around the private lives of people she's meant to care for, and at the same time, her strong commitment to seeing justice done in the face of crime. It lends the books a nice depth and tension that a boilerplate mystery might lack.

In The Haunted Lady, an elderly, wealthy woman named Mrs. Eliza Fairbanks is perturbed by a series of occurrences in her house. She hears odd noises, finds rats and snakes released in her chamber, and finds her belongings disturbed despite locking her door. Given her age, most people assume that she???s approaching senility, or is paranoid. Mrs Fairbanks, though, is strong-willed, decisive, and firm, and insists she isn???t imagining things. When the sugar for her strawberries is found to be laced with arsenic, she is finally taken seriously. Inspector Fuller of Scotland Yard calls up Miss Hilda Adams, the efficient, observant nurse, and asks her if she will stay at the Fairbanks residence and keep an eye on the old lady, while they try to find out what is happening. 

At the Fairbanks House, Hilda finds a whole cast of suspects. There???s Marian, Eliza???s daughter, who divorced her unfaithful husband, resulting in scandal and ire from Eliza. There???s Frank, Marian???s husband, now married to their former governess, Eileen, who is broke and still paying alimony. There???s Jan, their daughter, seemingly the only guardian of Eliza???s welfare, but Jan is in love with Eliza???s doctor, and they both need money to get started in life. Of course, there???s the doctor too. And then there???s Eliza???s son and daughter-in-law, weak-willed, impoverished Carlton, and Susie, his gauche, ill-mannered wife, who need money as well. When Eliza Fairbanks, who holds the purse strings, is stabbed inside her locked room, Inspector Fuller and Miss Hilda Adams have to figure out who it was that killed her ??? and how? 

The mystery is of the ???had I but known??? variety, combined with a standard locked-room setup, with plenty of clues sprinkled in to aid the reader, but still a satisfying twist at the end. It???s actually Hilda who does most of the detecting, putting herself at risk sometimes, and amassing a series of clues. When she explains it at the end to Inspector Fuller, he is mixed with frustration and admiration and perhaps something more. ???Oh, subtle little Miss Pinkerton!??? he tells her. ???Lovable and clever and entirely terrible Miss Pinkerton! What I am to do about you? I???m afraid to take you and I can???t leave you alone.??? The reader may well agree. I really enjoyed it.