A Man

This is a very satisfying story about a man, his hidden identity, his family, and the attorney who tries to untangle the mystery. It's got a very distinctly Japanese sensibility. I loved the way Kido's mind worked. The view of interiority we are given for Kido and Rie makes for a very rich and contemplative story. I enjoyed the author's approach in telling the tale through the attorney. I adored the other book I read by Hirano, "At The End Of The Matinee," and preferred the translator of that book.

Keiichiro Hirano’s A Man follows the story of the deceased Taniguchi Daisuke - who was never Taniguchi Daisuke. His wife, Rie, discovers after his death that the man she married is not the man he claimed to be. She asks the help of an attorney, Kido Akira, in discovering who her husband actually was. Kido goes on an investigation to discover who Rie’s husband was, what happened to the real Taniguchi, and why a man would pretend to be another.The depths of identity that this story plumbs is astounding. Kido’s grasp of understanding the man he refers to for some time only as X and the slow unfolding of the truth is crafted masterfully. Which is fortunate, as this story is dependent on how this mystery is written. This is somehow still a quiet novel. The revelations in the story are focused on what occurred in the past. The present events, still shifting and suggestive, feel like day to day moments. Rie struggling to understand her eldest child, old enough to understand the loss of his second father. Kido’s struggle to confront the failing in his own marriage and what it might be doing to his son.Outside of the interpersonal relations, Keiichiro also examines the diversity of one’s personal view of their own identity versus how others might place that identity into a box. Kido is third generation Korean, an identity he does not hold closely due to being born and raised in Japan. Yet the outbursts of racism in the country and his changing belief of what part of his identity being a minority actually means to him. This is but one example of this, but others would spoil the book.Normally I don’t care much about spoilers, because if knowing what happens at the end ruins a book, it wasn’t really written well enough to read. I wouldn’t say knowing what happens would ruin this either, but another facet of my enjoyment was the slow uncovering of X’s past, what it would mean to Kido, what it would mean to Rie and her two children.The characters, both past and present, populate a Japan that feels so genuine. I say this as someone who has never been there, only consumed lots of different media from there, but I feel I can still say when a world feels real. Especially in a culture I know as being focused on the work. There are no long stretches of nothing, in this book. It all happens on the clock. Not only because this is part of Kido’s job, because the novel covers other cases he works on. Rie and “Daisuke” meet at her work. “Daisuke” dies at his work. Kido considers that he didn’t go anywhere on vacation because of troubles at home. Yet the subject of interest died young. Life is short, so how are you going to spend it? What is a lie when it helps you be the most honest of yourself?There is no answer for this, but it is such a personal question, it would be surprising if any of the characters in the book could answer it, let alone express it for the reader. I do not believe that to be the point.One complaint: for the life of me I don’t understand the accents put in the names, a purely translatory issue and one that does not detract from the book. But in no other translation of Japanese have I ever seen the names Daisuke or Rie written as Daisuké and Rié.Unless you are adverse to mysteries or slow reveals, I highly recommend this book.

“A Man” is in part a detective novel. The detective is a lonely man, caught up in an unhappy marriage, who is fascinated by the idea of taking on someone else’s identity as a form of escape from one’s own past, or present situation. The detective is a lawyer by profession, and does the investigation on behalf of a former legal client who learns that her deceased husband had assumed a false identity, and wants to know who he really was. As it happens, I recently read “The Woman in White” by Wilkie Collins which is also in part a detective novel that centers around a question of identity, but from a very different viewpoint. This novel is interesting enough, although I was not that taken with its thoughts on identity; the detective/lawyer also wrestles with the justification for capital punishment, and the situation of Japanese citizens of Korean descent. I was more interested in the relationships between lawyer and wife, client and husbands, lawyer and one of his sources. This source ascribes her cheerfulness to being a pessimist, and is the one fun character. The prose is relatively unadorned, as in many detective procedurals, not withstanding that this book is more than a procedural. My favorite passage was: “I mean, it’s not as if you love someone once and that’s it. You renew your love again and again over the long haul, through everything that happens along the way.” The prologue was a rather clumsy device whose main purpose seems to have been to introduce material, the detective/lawyer’s life after the novel’s events, that would normally be in an epilogue. Why did the lawyer not abandon a loveless marriage, on both sides, for what promised to be a loving relationship with a good woman, the source alluded to above? Was it his fears for the impact of divorce on his son? His wife “went pale” when she thought he was considering suicide, but I suspect she, a beautiful woman, would have found another partner soon enough, or is this much more frowned upon in Japan than in the US?

I came to learn a lot about Japanese culture through this story. I found the mystery to have a philosophical timbre. Lovely novel.

I very much enjoyed the the descriptive writing and the personal perspective of the main narrator. This story is in many ways unique to Japanese culture. At the center of the story is the work of a lawyer to unravel the mysterious true identity of a man who had secretly changed identities. That secret is not revealed until he dies leaving his wife and children in a Japanese social limbo. I had no problem becoming entirely invested in the tragic story of the woman who the narrator is helping and his introspection of his own life while pursuing the mystery of her husband's identity. The story is not an action-filled Whodunnit but contains very believable drama that transcends cultures. I don't know whether it's the work of the author or the translator but this is very well written. I could really understand and feel the emotional traumas experienced by the characters, some trivial or insignificant, some life-altering. All in all very much worth reading.

I read this book more to know the author then the story. So little by little I started liking the story too. It has a lot of Japanese cultural characteristics and you will need to a little bit os research.

The book has a very different writing style from what I'm used to. Reminded me of Murakami, but Keiichiro Hirano holds his own. Its not so much about the central plot as it is about the minds of the characters, their thought processes, their motivations. Hirano does a terrifyingly superb job of showing the reader these multilayered emotions while unravelling the plot. He explores questions of identity, relationships, career, and life choices to which most readers will relate. A very humane and satisfying read.

A boring load of self-indulgent drivel. I could barely keep my eyes open. Once, when about half way through, I awoke to find myself lying on the floor, mentally drained by the endless tedium, and having slithered off my chair. Terrible.

In a small town near Miyazaki on the southern-most island of Kyushu Rie Takemoto discovers that her late husband Daisuke Taniguchi was obviously a different person, as his brother upon visiting the remaining family does not recognize his brother on the pictures presented on Takemoto’s family shrine. Takemoto then asks Akira Kido a layer from a Yokohama law firm to investigate who her late husband really was. The story unfolds over several months of Kido searching for a clue, who the person behind Daisuke Taniguchi the real one and his “doppelganger” actually were. The story has to do with a scheme of swapping family registers and thereby attaining a different family name and personal history. The novel however is not just your standard detective story as Akira Kido is a naturalized Japanese citizen with Korean ancestry. So, he worries about his future among a growing xenophobic tendency among ordinary Japanese. He worries especially about a second big Kanto earthquake, said to happen every 90 years, with the knowledge that after the last earthquake 1923 countless Koreans living in Tokyo were murdered in the aftermath of the quake. Then for Kido being of middle age there are hints of the typical midlife crisis. He contemplates his marriage; we follow his thoughts on capital punishment and Roman law. Other topics turn up during the investigation: cocktails, forestry, boxing, domestic violence and child abuse and more. The author Hirano quotes freely from Anna Karenina and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with several Japanese authors also mentioned. And – a bit similar to Haruki Murakami – music is important too. All in all, a worthwhile read into modern Japanese society and peculiarities of the Japanese census and administration, where family documents are sometimes more important than the actual citizens.

’I have always thought of writing novels that, rather than making people's hands unable to stop turning to the next page, are so immersive that a reader would want to bask in it forever, in a state of both wanting and not wanting to turn to the next page’That statement is from Keiichiro Hirano’s website. It’s a statement that perfectly sums up, for me, Haruki Murakami novels.To compere Hirano to Murakami is probably unfair, because Murakami is one of my favourite novelists of all time. He does however, like Murakami, feature music, specifically Jazz. No opera though, or cats. I did find myself listening to Masabumi Kichuchi a lot after reading this!Does Hirano achieve the aim of his statement in A Man? Well yes I think he does. I loved his style, very subtle emotionally, something I find in Murakami’s work. He also has a fine eye for detail. There is a scene where one of the characters, Kido, is thinking of having a few drinks in a bar when a Masabumi Kichuchi piano solo comes on, ‘The tempo seemed to slowly dismantle time, each note a clear droplet that fell and spread overlapping ripples through the silent interior.’ I loved that description. Even though you may not have heard Kichuchi, you feel as if you can almost hear the music jn your head.A slight criticism is that the style isn’t consistent. This could be down to the translation, I notice this was mentioned in another review and I agree there were parts where it was a bit ‘chunky’ and didn’t flow smoothly. But this is a minor criticism and doesn’t deter you from enjoying the book.The story is about mortality and identity. What is it that defines you? We all at times look at other people and think their lives are better, what would it be like if you could live their lives? ‘But how would you achieve this? ‘Could mendacious sincerity, consummately performed, be the ultimate deception.’Hirano also covers heavy topics such racism and the death penalty. In fact he packs an awful lot into just under 300 pages (on the Kindle version). There is an awful lot to think about. On top of this A Man is also a detective story and is quite complex and dark.The story concerns Rie Takemoto, who’s second husband, Daisuke Taniguchi is killed in a logging accident. He had told her never to contact his family if he died, but after a year she writes to his mother.After this his brother arrives and it is discovered that the man who Rie had been married to was not all he seemed. This is the basis of the story but not all of it. It is multi layered.Rie employs a lawyer, Kido, to unravel the mystery of Daisuke. Most of the book is centred around him. He too has identity problems. He becomes obsessed with the story of Rie’s husband, who refers to as X.There is a lot of information given by Hirano about Japanese law, the family register system and Korean racism within Japan. It also deals with psychology and what makes us who we are. This may be too cerebral for some, but I didn’t find this. I found it entertaining and interesting, and at times yes, I did linger on a page wanting and not wanting to turn the page. I found at the end I had highlighted a considerable amount of the text. Text that I wanted to go back and read again.Despite my minor criticism I was impressed by A Man, so much so that I look forward to more translations of Keiichiro Hirano’s books. It’s beautifully written, It’s not an edge of your seat thriller but it is a good detective novel.