Tokyo Express

I listened to this as an audiobook and really enjoyed it. A detective story set in 1950’s Japan, a world of telegrams, punctual trains and these new-fangled aeroplanes, and without ubiquitous CCTV, mobile phones or email. It was nice to have a story that relied on human recollection (and its fallibilities), paper records and telephone calls.

The language and style was very simple, hardly any description except where the location was important to the plot and the characters frequently summarised the deductions so far, which was very helpful.

Ironically with a story this simple few of the characters had much depth or even back story (it was only five hours after all). I didn’t identify the actual culprit so that was a good twist and I liked the letter device as the final chapter which explained everything and brought things to date with the consequences for all the players.

So this was a short interesting read and I’m a little conflicted – I enjoyed the immediacy of a short book but I do think that I would have liked to have known the characters, especially the detectives, a little better.

Clever plotting, simple storytelling, compelling narrative. Would recommend.