Akimitsu Takagi

• Born: September 25, 1920
• Birthplace: Aomori, Japan
• Died: September 9, 1995
• Place of death: Tokyo, Japan

Types of Plot: Police procedural; amateur sleuth; espionage

Principal Series: Daiyu Matsushita and Kyōsuke Kamizu, 1948-1960; Saburō Kirishima, 1964-1988

Contribution

One of Japan’s leading writers of detective and espionage fiction, Akimitsu Takagi garnered both popular success and critical acclaim during his lifetime. His intricate and cleverly plotted police procedural s are favorites of fans of the genre. Critics applaud his creation of psychologically intriguing human beings, whether the characters he presents are the victims, the criminals, or the investigators. Additionally, Takagi expanded the form and focus of the Japanese detective novel to more closely parallel contemporary life. He was among the first Japanese authors to write a novel in the financial-fiction genre. His varied repertoire includes historical thrillers, industrial crime fiction, and courtroom dramas. [Kirishima, Saburo]}

Equally important are Takagi’s portrayals of Japan and its citizens in the postwar era and in the decades of recovery, the 1950’s and 1960’s. Takagi’s cityscapes provide an image of a culture and a people in transition. In several works featuring State Prosecutor Saburō Kirishima, the courtroom becomes a microcosm of Japanese culture, a place where concerns about changing values and ethics, innovations in business and industry, and tensions between generations and between genders can be voiced, if not necessarily resolved.

The growing appeal of Takagi’s novels among English-language readers bodes well for additional translations of his detective novels, which range from police procedurals to accounts of industrial espionage. Critics have compared Takagi’s work favorably to that of another master of Japanese detective fiction, Seichō Matsumoto, the popular author of Ten to sen (1958; Points and Lines, 1970) and Suna no utsuwa (1961; Inspector Imanishi Investigates, 1989).

Biography

Akimitsu Takagi was born Seiichi Takagi in Aomori, Japan, on September 25, 1920. After completing secondary studies at Daiichi High School, he attended Kyoto Imperial University, majoring in metallurgy. Employed by Nakajima Aircraft, Takagi lost his job because of the ban on military industries imposed by the Allies following their victory over Japan at the end of World War II.

When a fortune-teller revealed to Takagi that his future career was in fiction, not metals, he began to write detective novels. A man of reason even at the age of twenty-eight, he sought expert advice to confirm the seer’s prediction. Takagi sent the manuscript of his first novel, Irezumi satsujin jiken (1948; The Tattoo Murder Case, 1998), to Edogawa Ranpo, a popular and respected Japanese writer of mysteries. On Ranpo’s recommendation, the novel was published. As was foretold, Takagi’s initial detective novel received positive reviews.

After the success of The Tattoo Murder Case, Takagi continued the series featuring Chief Inspector Daiyu Matsushita, a member of the Tokyo police force. These novels are set in the era immediately following World War II, and on occasion, historical incidents (such as the firebombing of Tokyo) feature in the plot. Characters in Takagi’s later works, including novels in the Saburō Kirishima series, continue to reflect their creator’s personal interest in legal matters. Takagi was a self-educated authority on the law, and most of his protagonists are either detectives (amateur or professional) or public prosecutors.

Recognition of his work arrived early for Takagi. In 1949, while still in his twenties, he won the Mystery Writers of Japan Award for The Tattoo Murder Case; however, it was not until the 1965 publication of Mikkokusha (1965; The Informer, 1971), based on an actual incident of sabotage in Japan’s manufacturing sector, that he was elevated to a position among Japan’s elite writers of detective fiction. Consequently, his previously published novels, which had been successful in their own right, again found their way to the best-seller lists.

Takagi suffered a stroke in 1979 but continued to write and publish works of fiction into the late 1980’s. His final years were spent in declining health; by 1990 additional strokes had ended his writing career. He died in Tokyo in 1995.

Analysis

Akimitsu Takagi’s writing style is terse, reflecting a Japanese sensibility in both its reserved use of dialogue and its reliance on minimalist description. However, his concise style of writing should not be construed as dispassionate, as certain critics have called it. Takagi’s most memorable characters, Kenzo Matsushita in The Tattoo Murder Case and Etsuko Ogata in Zero no mitsugetsu (1965; Honeymoon to Nowhere, 1995), ache with suffering on learning that their lovers have been murdered. The emotions of the bereaved are often conveyed to readers through what is not explicitly expressed. Despite the very modern circumstances of their pain, Takagi’s characters are steeped in traditional Japanese behaviors that require them to constrain their words and emotions; their suffering seeps out despite their efforts at containment. The restraint the author exercises in his use of language serves to intensify his characters’ miseries even as the objects of their desires are forever removed from their embraces.

A typical Takagi novel intentionally mirrors in its structure and style the tension that existed in Japanese society from the late 1940’s through the 1960’s. The traditions and social customs associated with a culture as venerable as Japan’s inevitably came into conflict with the rapid changes the country faced after its defeat in World War II. First Japan recovered from the devastation the war had wrought; then it rebuilt itself into a modern industrial power. Takagi personalizes this broad conflict between tradition and change by reconfiguring its scale; in his novels it is individual men and women who struggle against imposing societal forces in a more localized venue. Issues of identity within the community emerge as the new men and women of Japan question what it means to be a citizen in the modern era. Depending on the novel in which they appear, those individuals might be on the side of the law or the very criminals the investigator seeks.

A recurring motif in Takagi’s novels is the individual’s search for romantic fulfillment in a sterile society. Men and women are depicted as equally infused with sexual passions, and erotic subtexts permeate most of the plots. However, there are few fulfilled characters in his novels because their passions frequently get mixed up with their (or others’) criminal pursuits, resulting in the loss of the desired object. The prospect of better futures for most of Takagi’s characters is bleak, even for those who remain standing at the close of various novels. Neither the resolution of a mystery nor the administration of justice can alleviate the weight of the pessimism that pervades his writing.

Although scholars have commented favorably on Takagi’s innovations in style, format, subject, and character, he is not without detractors. Critics cite his overreliance on stock generic devices, such as his fondness for puzzles, coincidences, dead ends, and sensationalistic story lines, as evidence that Takagi is not as original a fabricator of detective fiction as his reputation suggests. Others criticize Takagi’s tendency to introduce third parties late in his novels. Typically these characters use extraordinary methods to resolve the mysteries that have frustrated others. The boy genius character in The Tattoo Murder Case is a prime example of this particular tendency and yet it is worth noting that this same novel merited its author the Mystery Writers of Japan Award within a year of its publication.

The Tattoo Murder Case

The Tattoo Murder Case is a classic of Japanese fiction and the first of Takagi’s novels to be translated into English. Not surprisingly, it is his most popular novel among English-speaking readers. Set in late 1940’s Tokyo during the aftermath of the Japanese defeat at the end of the World War II, The Tattoo Murder Case features as its chief investigators two recently reunited brothers, Kenzo and Daiyu Matsushita. Newly released from military service, the younger sibling, twenty-nine-year-old Kenzo, joins his older brother, Chief Inspector Daiyu Matsushita, in Tokyo. A criminal investigator with the local precinct, Daiyu allows his younger brother to accompany him on missions.

Kenzo’s ambition is to transfer his training as a military medic to a position on the police force, but he is distracted by a beautiful woman. He begins an illicit affair with Kinue Nomura, a tattoo artist’s daughter and a mobster’s mistress. Kinue is an illustrated woman. Thanks to her father’s deft hands, her body displays a one-of-a-kind design that holds numerous men, including Kenzo, enthralled. Among her admirers is Professor Hayakawa, alias Dr. Tattoo, whose macabre collection of ornamented skins retrieved from the bodies of the dead is well known among the investigators. Body art plays a role in this police procedural, which provides a fascinating glimpse into a deviant strain of Japanese art and culture. Though tattooing was illegal and socially taboo in postwar Japan, the practice was continued in secret. Tattoo artists had a loyal clientele, chiefly composed of mob bosses and prostitutes. The tattoos described in the novel are based on symbols drawn from Japanese mythology and provide important clues to the motives and the means of the killer of Kinue.

To resolve the case, the brothers require the skills of a third detective, the hyperintelligent prodigy Kyōsuke Kamizu. In the final section of the novel, Kamizu provides the answer to the riddles posed by this case: How did the limbs and head of Kinue end up locked inside a room with no apparent exit and what became of her tattooed torso? He solves the puzzle in a fastidious and timely manner, one reminiscent of the detective maneuverings of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and his legendary gray matter.

The Informer

Culled from newspaper accounts of an actual case of industrial espionage, The Informer became Takagi’s most popular novel in Japan. The novel begins from the perspective of Shigeo Segawa, a young Tokyo stockbroker caught making illegal trades, and charts his downward spiral. When Segawa’s acquaintance, Mikio Sakai, agrees to hire the young man despite his previous dismissal, the new employee soon finds himself working not as a salesman, the advertised position, but as an industrial spy. Segawa sets aside his initial moral qualms and soon becomes implicated in escalating acts of criminal activity, including sabotage. When his employer’s financial target, Shoichi Ogino, is killed, Segawa emerges as the lead suspect in an investigation headed by Saburō Kirishima, a state prosecutor. When Kirishima enters the plot, the novel’s point of view shifts from Segawa to that of the prosecutor. The Informer offers a compelling case study of a businessman so desperate to attain economic security that he risks things more dear than money. Takagi wrote a number of novels that center on economic crimes, but critics consider The Informer the best of them.

Honeymoon to Nowhere

Despite her realization that she is growing older and could become a burden to her family, a lawyer’s daughter refuses the suitor her parents offer her in Takagi’s Honeymoon to Nowhere. Initially, Etsuko Ogata reasons that the man, a junior member of her father’s firm, would be a good provider. Though at first she is inclined to acquiesce to her parents’ wishes, her heart demands passion and overrules logic. Emboldened, she defies her parents and finds her own prospective mate, Yoshihiro Tsukamoto, an industrial management professor. She fakes a pregnancy to gain her shocked parents’ permission to wed Tsukamoto. They wed, but after Tsukamoto receives a telephone call on their wedding night, he flees the nuptial chamber and does not return. When his body is recovered the following day, the mysterious circumstances of his death set the stage for a courtroom drama orchestrated by State Prosecutor Saburō Kirishima. The prosecutor must search through a jumble of evidence and discard several red herrings before he is able to identify the guilty suspect from among a cadre of likely candidates. By novel’s end he successfully identifies the killer, whose envy and avarice have arrayed the new bride in the clothes of mourning.

Principal Series Characters:

• Chief Inspector Daiyu Matsushita is a highly regarded member of the Tokyo police force. In his inaugural case, Daiyu welcomes his brother Kenzo into his home following the younger man’s release from military service.
• Kenzo Matsushita is a World War II veteran and amateur sleuth. Frequently he calls on his older brother, an actual detective, for assistance in solving the troubling crimes he encounters, beginning with the death by dismemberment of his tattooed lover. Kenzo is more naïve and trusting than his older brother, on whom he relies for guidance.
• Kyōsuke Kamizu is a young genius, a master of six languages, a student at Tokyo University, and an accomplished amateur sleuth who assists the Matsushita brothers in their investigations of mysterious deaths. He is a recurring character in a number of Matsushita novels.
• State Prosecutor Saburō Kirishima , an intelligent and discerning man, is respected by his detective colleagues. Most impressively, Kirishima possesses an aptitude for determining with precision the guilt or innocence of a suspect.

Bibliography

Brainard, Dulcy. Review of The Tattoo Murder Case, by Akimitsu Takagi. Publishers Weekly 244 no. 52 (December 22, 1997): 41. Looks at the novel as a complex tale of obsession set in postwar Japan. Comments on Takagi’s emotionless style of writing.

Munger, Katy. Review of The Informer and Honeymoon to Nowhere, by Akimitsu Takagi. The Washington Post, July 25, 1999, p. X08. Examines Japanese morality and social structure through the lens of Takagi’s police procedurals. Also critiques the author’s techniques and characters.

Williams, Janis. Review of Honeymoon to Nowhere, by Akimitsu Takagi. Library Journal 124 no. 13 (August, 1999): 147. Classifies the novel as a conventional but ultimately satisfying police procedural.

Williams, Janis. Review of The Tattoo Murder Case, by Akimitsu Takagi. Library Journal 123 no. 2 (February, 1998): 113. Enumerates the complicated family relationships that intertwine with Japanese traditions and a complex story line in Takagi’s novel.

Zaleski, Jeff. Review of Honeymoon to Nowhere, by Akimitsu Takagi. Publishers Weekly 246 no. 22 (May 31, 1999): 71. Compares novels written by Takagi to those written by mystery writers Patricia Highsmith and William Irish and identifies their connecting thread: characters entangled in compelling but potentially lethal intrigues.