Review | Newcomer, by Keigo Higashino, a genre-splicing masterclass in crime fiction
- Distrust of the ‘other’ is the foundation of the Japanese author’s latest novel
Newcomer
by Keigo Higashino (translated by Giles Murray)
Minotaur Books
If you want to know why Japan’s Keigo Higashino is the most popular novelist in Asia – and quite possibly the world – you could do worse than read this new English edition of Newcomer.
The novel, first published in Japanese in 2009, effortlessly unites two separate – and for many contemporary crime writers incompatible – genre traditions. On the one hand, Higashino is a master of the plot as a puzzle (and a puzzle as the plot) after the fashion of crime’s Golden Age authors such as Agatha Christie. On the other, he doesn’t see a series of reality-defying twists as anathema to sharp social commentary or psychological insight.
This finely judged balancing act made 2005’s The Devotion of Suspect X a bona fide masterpiece and to my mind the single finest crime novel of the 21st century, but it is also present in Newcomer.
The title refers to several people, most obviously Kyoichiro Kaga, a promising and some say brilliant Tokyo detective who has been transferred to Nihonbashi district – although most of the locals he encounters translate “transfer” as “demoted”. Yoriko, who runs a local restaurant with her n’er-do-well husband, certainly believes Kaga is squandering his talents. “This is one smart detective … I don’t know why he’s wasting away as a precinct cop here in Nihonbashi, but I bet he’s got an impressive record.”
