A Quiet Place

Author/Guide: Seicho Matsumoto

Why a Booktrail?

2023: A man looks in to the suspicious death of his wife

ISBN: 978-1908524638
Translator: Louise Heal Kawai
Genre: Crime

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What you need to know before your trail

While on a business trip to Kobe, Tsuneo Asai receives the news that his wife Eiko has died of a heart attack. Eiko had a heart condition so the news of her death wasn’t totally unexpected. But the circumstances of her demise left Tsuneo, a softly-spoken government bureaucrat, perplexed. How did it come about that his wife who was shy and withdrawn, and only left their house twice a week to go to haiku meetings ended up dead in a small shop in a shady Tokyo neighborhood?

When Tsuneo goes to apologize to the boutique owner for the trouble caused by his wife’s death he discovers the villa Tachibana near by, a house known to be a meeting place for secret lovers. As he digs deeper into his wife’s recent past, he must eventually conclude that she led a double life…

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Travel Guide

Japan

Much of the novel is set in Tokyo and in the Yoyogi area of the city where the wife was seen walking before she apparently collapsed and died in the street.

Yoyogi

“Ever since the strets of Yoyogi had been redone for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics,m the character of the area had changed completely. Still, if you got off the main roads, there was some of the old atmosphere left. Here and there you caught traces of the steep slopes that the artist Ryussei Kishida had dipicted in this 1915 painting “Road Cut Through A Hill'”