bibliogramma | Sujata Massey: The Salaryman's Wife (Reply)

In recent years, I've been consciously on the look-out for female writers of mystery/thriller/detective/whatever novels featuring female investigators (whether professional or amateur) in settings that depart from what so often seems the norm - modern day big-city America.

To this end, I have just tried out the first novel of another new writer - Sujata Massey. What intrigued me about the writer is that she is the British-born daughter of parents from Germany and Japan, living in the U.S. And writing about an American-born daughter of American and Japanese parents living in Japan. This struck me as a very interesting assemblage of influences and choices.

Overall, I enjoyed The Salaryman's Wife - it is a decent mystery novel, with a fair amount of action, although I must admit that the killer was obvious from quite early on, as the pertinent clues were made quite visible. This may be due to this being Massey's first novel, and one hopes that future novels will be less easy to solve. But that wasn't all that much of an issue for me, because I enjoyed watching the character growth of protagonist Rei Shimura. Shimura begins the book as a young woman feeling out of place and uncomfortable - as a half-Japanese woman who speaks the language well but is still learning kanji, who is an expert on Japanese art and antiques but does not assimilate well into the culture, particularly in terms of significant differences between Japanese and American gender roles - and this shows in a certain awkward combination of insecurity and bravado. Over the course of the novel, she becomes more confident and secure within herself, and I am quite interested in seeing how this growth alters the way she is presented in the next novel.

I also enjoyed the window that the novel creates into Japanese culture - in business, in media, in personal relationships.

My main gripe is the romantic element. She falls rather rapidly in lust with a blond Scottish lawyer working in Japan who is initially one of the prime suspects in the murder, without there being much rhyme or reason for the attraction, at least in my opinion. I prefer that if there is going to be romance in a novel, that it be based on mutual respect and some degree of commonality in interests, worldviews, and the like. At my age, I've learned that while lust can be short-term fun (and I'd never suggest that a protagonist refrain from responsible sex-play), if you're going to frame a sexual relationship as a romance, please give us more than lust and the heightened arousal that comes from a shared intense experience to ground it in.

But that's rather hard to find. So I'll just breeze over that bit and enjoy Rei and her relationships with parents, relatives and friends, all of which have much more depth in the novel.