The Go-Toba Legend Murder Case is the first novel in the legendary Mitsuhiko Asami series by Yasuo Uchida. If only the book was actually as good as the reputation.
A young woman’s corpse is found in the overpass of the Miyoshi train station. (Uchida thinks it’s important for you to know that the woman was extremely ugly and mentions this several times.) The police determine that the culprit likely boarded a train to Hiroshima after murdering her, so a young up-and-coming inspector from Hiroshima is assigned to lead the investigation. We follow Nogami, a local Miyoshi cop who is given the task of investigating the victim’s movements, while the main task force tries to gather witnesses and figure out which train station the culprit got off at.
Through his investigation, Nogami learns that the victim, Miyako Shouhouji, had a bit of an interesting past: several years ago she got caught in a landslide during a research trip which resulted in her losing her memory. She was in the middle of making the same trip, at the recommendation of her neurologist to try to jog her memory, when she was murdered. However, she wasn’t supposed to be in Miyoshi on the day she died, and so apparently had made some sort of detour.
None of Miyako’s cash or jewelry appeared to have been stolen. However, the prologue of the book describes Miyako discovering a book in a bookstore, and a man seeing her reading that book on a train—yet no book appears to be present when her corpse is found. So there is an additional mystery there for the reader, with some dramatic irony. (Nogami eventually finds out about the book and investigates it himself, thankfully.)
As it turns out, in the incident where Miyako lost her memory, the friend she was traveling with lost her life. Mitsuhiko Asami is that friends brother, who crosses path with Nogami in his investigation. Mitsuhiko senses that there’s more to the girls’ deaths than meets the eye, and resolves to assist Nogami with his investigation.
The book is, in a word, boring. Neither the train station nor the book nor Miyako’s ugliness are particularly exciting hooks, at least to me. The story functions very close to a police procedural, with a heavy focus on the police’s investigation, and an almost active avoidance of suspects or the people involved in Miyako’s life. There’s a particularly mind-numbing segment near the beginning where the police go into detail on the various train routes which was just awful. (The fact that no train schedule was included made that section particularly hard to follow—but apparently that’s an issue with the ebook version I got, as the paper release has one.)
Go-Toba was the 82nd Japanese emperor, from 1183 to 1198, and who continued to exert great influence on his next three successors. He came into conflict with the Kamakura shogunate, but lost that fight and was exiled to the Oki Islands. There is a legend that the route he took to the Oki Islands is slightly different from the official route recorded in the history books. …That’s literally the whole legend. Miyako was researching this, and following the alleged path Go-Toba supposedly took on her trips. That’s where the entire title comes from, which feels a bit lacking to name your whole book after.
Mitsuhiko is supposed to be smart, but a lot of what he says feels like baseless conjecture. He’s right, at every turn, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that he doesn’t deduce as much as spout random leaps in logic.
I don’t think the book is outright misogynistic, but it feels like Uchida definitely has outdated gender views. I read this as part of a Wanikani book club, and someone there described the book as “salaryman wish fulfillment,” which I think perfectly encapsulates its ethos—“my wife doesn’t understand how hard my work life is and I can’t explain it to her, but if she ever did realize she’d really appreciate me.”
I think the Mitsuhiko Asami series is generally supposed to fit into the travel mystery genre, but I didn’t feel like I got much local flavor from this book (especially since so much of the beginning is devoted to the dry inner workings of the police and their investigation). Miyako’s journey was tied to Go-Toba’s supposed path, but besides that nothing felt tied to the particular location.
Because the book places so little focus on the characters, it makes the killer pretty easy to guess by sheer lack of anyone else to accuse.
Nogami is kind of an idiot. There’s a particularly infuriating moment when Nogami is looking for information on a certain person, a witness mentions something describing this person in all but name… and Nogami just walks away. Fortunately he realizes and returns on literally the next page, but it’s still annoying when it happens!
There aren’t really any “tricks” in this novel, and the culprit does do something involving trains (because they obviously did, given how many characters are devoted to describing the train lines), but it’s still not clear to me even in hindsight why the culprit needed to take this convoluted series of trains and couldn’t just ride one train from A to B.
The Go-Toba Legend Murder Case isn’t awful, but I have a lot of qualms and not much to praise. For easy travel mysteries/police procedurals that don’t require much thought or investment, I suppose books like this could be a decent comfort read, but if you have taste similar to mine you’ll probably be longing for more (shin)honkaku fare.
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