The Moving Blade: Michael Pronko

The Moving Blade
Michael Pronko
339pp

This is the  second book in the Detective Hiroshi Mystery series by Tokyo writer Michael Pronko. Though I didn't get a chance to read the first book beforehand, I don't really think it's necessary and reading either first seems to work.

Pronko, a professor in Kanto, started writing by tackling numerous essays about Tokyo, many released in collections still available. Last year Pronko made the leap to fiction  and created his English speaking Detective Hiroshi.

This time around, a young American/Japanese woman returns to Tokyo after years living in America. Though she had hoped this would be a chance to reacquaint herself with her long unseen father, it turns into a trip back for his funeral... along with a lot of trouble.

Jamie, the daughter, begins a search, first to find out who her diplomat father really was, but soon, to find out why he died.  A few more murders and encounters ensue and Jamie finds herself in a deep hole and one where Detective Hiroshi is the only one she knows she can trust.

Samurai swords, cultural miscommunication, robberies, and clues of a secret leading right to the top lead us on a mysterious chase, and it works, especially during the first half of this thrilling mystery.

The characters are quickly well established and the setting of Tokyo is used well as a maze of backstreets and wrong turns.

This all is probably enough to recommend the novel as a whole, so, the following criticisms should be taken with that grain of salt, or maybe sugar anyhow.

My first issue is that many of the minor criminals throughout this work are tossed aside as simple Korean pay-for-play miscreants. I'm not sure how true such things are, and there are certainly rumors to suggest that they are true (and I think they are at a certain point revealed as North Koreans, possibly to allow them to be hated more safely), but I think it's the kind of detail that might allow the book to work better if removed. It is not really connected to anything important and if the small time crooks had been Japanese... it would have felt less distracting.

Second, I didn't really understand the sexualization of our main female character. There is no sex in the book to speak of, but from time to time a character will reveal his desires for Jamie, and at other times the author himself (or the narrator's voice anyway) will add a little bit himself.

At one point a Korean thief steals something (the Mcguffin) hidden in a delicate place on the young woman's person and the character decides to comment that if, oh good golly just if he had the time, he would spend a bit more time... you know... sexually assaulting!! It's an odd choice, and doesn't add anything to the book. Sexual thrillers can work wonderfully, but this is not that, and didn't need it.

Personally, I would have thought it might have been best to have Jamie be about 17 years old, which would have allowed for a desexualization of the character, and also made a few of the relationships feel purer. Pronko seems to have felt that an added bit of mystery lay in whether our two heroes would end up together... but in my humble opinion the answer was too obvious too early to be worth adding.

Finally, I think the book would have worked better about 50 pages shorter. There are too many similar circumstances that didn't need to repeat themselves, and would have seemed even more realistic only occurring once. This also would have let the strong points of the work shine through even brighter. To be fully disclosed, my biggest complaint is often book length (I tend to think many mystery writers aim for 300 pages when 200 is more fitting to the genre).

So, a recommendation, based on the overall mystery and the characters, which win over a bit of over length and a few odd choices. I would happily read more of these mysteries, along with more of Pronko's writing. His strengths won out.