Review: "Malice"
Initial Thoughts on the Japanese Murder Mystery
This time, I want to take a look at Malice by Keigo Higashino. Malice is a murder mystery, so nothing odd there, right? Well, turns out that it was unique (for me) in that the suspect confesses to murder very early in the novel. As if that wasn’t enough of a twist… the detective investigating the case doesn’t believe the suspect, even when the detective has a confession and means readily available.
Here are some aspects of the novel that intrigued me:
Malice uses a dual-perspective narrative, alternating between the first-person accounts of the suspect and the detective. What you get is a layered and dynamic storytelling approach, allowing the you to see the same events from different, and conflicting, viewpoints.
As I mentioned, Malice reveals the killer early on. The real mystery lies in why the murder was committed and how the deception was carried out. This inverted structure keeps the tension high and focused my attention on motive and manipulation.
The novel dives into psychological motives rather than focusing solely on action or procedural detail. Higashino creates a methodical examination of human malice, envy, and resentment.
The story’s primary detective is the opposite of the hard-boiled, dig-a-slug-outta-your-own-shoulder archetype. His background as a former schoolteacher gives him an emotional sensitivity that is key to his investigative method.
Malice plays with the idea of subjectivity in storytelling. What I mean is that what’s written, what’s remembered, and what’s fabricated are all revealed through different perspectives and filtered through the attitudes, beliefs, and emotions of the characters. Since the main suspect is a writer, the book also serves as a meta commentary on how stories are told and truths are bent.
If some, or all, of this sounds vaguely familiar to you, perhaps you’ve read Gone Girl recently, which also is a character-driven mystery that features dual motivations in a similar way to this book.
After reading, I decided to dig into the cultural aspects of the book and how these aspects may have affected my impressions of the story.
I had a brief conversation with a good friend of mine who happens to be an expert in Japanese culture and history. If you don’t have one of these friends, I recommend finding one; they’re often seen in their native environments inside aikido schools and tucked away in the humanities department of your local college or university. My friend had a few observations that helped me understand the novel.
For example, I found it unusual that the police extracted a confession so quickly. My friend says that Japanese police usually extract confessions quickly compared to US police, in part thanks to differences in culture and in part to laws regarding holding and treatment of suspects.
I also wondered about the circular nature of the narrative, which reminded me of classic cinema such as Rashomon and some other Japanese novels that I’ve read. My friend said that, at its core, the Japanese language is about establishing and negotiating the relationship between participants in a conversation. I think the effect of that can’t be translated easily and is something lost in translation to English. It is regrettably a dimension of the book that I missed. All I could really get out of it was the circular nature of the narrative in Malice, repeatedly revisiting scenes from different viewpoints, is also a byproduct of the language.
Once I understood more about how the differences in language may have changed some of the nuances of the original, I was reminded of the time I read a Spanish translation of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. In the original text, Hemingway uses the image “But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.” In the Spanish translation I had, this became “Pero ninguna de estas cicatrices era reciente. Eran tan viejas como las erosiones de un desierto sin peces.” which is a fine translation, but doesn’t hit the same way.
As a writer, I enjoy studying the mechanics of writers from other cultures and how their stories are structured. I try to incorporate any of these techniques into my writing to give the reader a unique experience. Most recently, I borrowed the multi-viewpoint technique from the movie Rashomon when writing my first thriller, The Good Killers. I used this technique to present key scenes through the points-of-view of different characters and to provide backstory without resorting to exposition. One example occurs when the antagonist breaks into the home of the protagonist, and we see the character’s home and life from the antagonist’s perspective. Later in the book, the same location is shown from the protagonist’s point of view.
I think that I will definitely try to borrow some aspects of the masterful style of Higashino for a future novel.
Items mentioned in this post (ads):
“Malice: A Mystery” by Keigo Higashino
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
El viejo y el mar / The Old Man and the Sea (Spanish Edition) by Ernest Hemingway
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