All She Was Worth [Hardcover]

The novel tells the story of Shinsuke Honma, a middle-aged police detective who is off duty while recovering from a gunshot wound to his leg. The enforced inactivity has begun to wear thin on him, and a request from a distant relative to investigate the disappearance of his fiancée - Shoko Sekine tempts him into a freelance investigation that is part meticulous investigation and part social commentary. Shoko disappeared when it was revealed that she had gone through a personal bankruptcy. Honma discovers layer after layer of misdirection and subterfuge - the disappearance is only a reflection of the grim truth.

The telling of the story reveals many of the inherent differences between Japanese and Western writing, even as it pares away at a social problem - easy credit and indebtedness - that is universal in both cultures. The telling is extremely detailed, with a strong focus not on the plot, but on the social and family milieus of the characters. The style is very naturalistic, and may irk American readers who are so used to stories that are action based and plot driven. Yet there are opportunities here for the writer to indulge of some niceties of language, many of which come through despite it being a translation.

What Miyabe has chronicled is the lives of ordinary Japanese, carrying on with their lives, not the flashy high tech or Samurai mythos face of Japan that we see most often in imported Japanese culture. This is quite eye-opening, even as we realize that quiet desperation is just a Western phenomenon. In a sense, the plot itself isn't very important. In fact, the reader will know from fairly early in the novel what the crime is and who committed it. But the details of Honma's investigation, the bits of his family life, the fine grains of Shoko Sekine's own adventures, fit together like a puzzle, forming a compelling whole of their own. As such, this is an excellent introduction into what makes Japanese popular fiction tick.

After too many pages of that preachy 'debt is bad' prose, Miyabe sets Honma off in search of the missing fiancee. It's almost miraculous how just when Honma seems to have run into a dead end there is a phone call or some stranger shows up with information that gets his quest restarted. The chapters essentially follow the cycle: "Honma starts out with some information. The information leads to some small clue, but the clue doesn't seem to lead anywhere and the information runs out. A miracle happens and Honma gets some new information." The story gets tiring as this chapter format keeps repeating itself.

Miyabe introduces characters like Shoko Sekine's friends, but they don't seem to have any real relation to the plot except to give miraculous information as explained above. Frankly, by the end of the book it was difficult to discern who the author was talking about since there were so many phonecalls from so-and-so and contacts from such-and-such. The whole story began to unravel towards the end with so many loose ends crowding out the main story.

The end of the story itself is incredibly unsatisfying. After putting up with Miyabe's excessive use of secondary characters and miraculous clues and outright preachiness, she comes to the point of the story wherein the payoff is expected. Then she cuts it short. No payoff, no conclusion, just Honma sitting in a cafe across from the missing fiancee. He gets up to go talk to her finally, and ... the end.

Maybe Miyabe wanted the reader to use their own imagination to fill in the last gap, or felt that perhaps since there was so much information already given that simply repeating it at the end would have been redundant, or whatever. Unfortunately, as a reader I felt a little ripped off. There were serious questions as to why the fiancee did what she did. Not only that, but what are the repercussions of what she did? Will Honma go to the police (yes, he's a police) with the information he has? What will she do from now?

Such questions are left unanswered. I feel that after the work the reader has to go through just to get to that unsatisfying, completely incomplete ending justifies this low rating.

2 stars. Manipulative and preachy.