The goby and the shrimp

"The pistol shrimp digs out a little hole to live in. But every once in a while, something else comes and sets up camp in the shrimp's hole — a little fish, called a goby. The goby isn't a freeloader, however. In exchange for a place to live, he hangs out at the entrance to the hole and wags his tail whenever enemies approach, letting the shrimp know what's coming. It's what biologists call a symbiotic relationship."

In Under the Midnight Sun, by Keigo Higashino, Detective Sasagaki has been watching the shrimp for twenty years, hoping to catch out the goby.

It starts with the murder of a pawnbroker. The shrimp is a little girl at the time, whose mother has an undefined relationship with the victim. And grim events seem to follow the girl throughout her life. She grows into an enterprising woman whose calm demands respect, or fear.

"You know how the sun rises and sets at a certain time each day? In the same way, all of our lives have a day and night. But it's not set like it is with the sun. Some people walk forever in the sunlight, and some people have to walk through the darkest night their whole lives. When people talk about being afraid, what they're afraid of is that their sun will set. That the light they love will fade. That's why you're frightened, isn't it?"

It's a mostly enjoyable read that covers a lot of aspects of a changing society, from dance clubs, tea ceremonies, and matchmaking services to booming financial markets, pirated video games, and fringe sex trade operations.

This book sprawls more than the other Higashino books I've read, and has a large cast of characters. Apparently, the novel was originally published in a serialized fashion, which goes a long way toward explaining the pacing. Every chapter switches to a new scene, and for the first part of the book to a new set of players. To my mind the chapters were overly long and bogged down in stage-setting unnecessary to the main story. It makes sense for serialization but as a novel it could be tighter — it shouldn't take 200 pages to get one's bearings and feel invested in the outcome.

Still, the characters are mostly well drawn, and the at-times heavy subject matter is balanced with moral insight and good humour ("It was Akemi's stated belief that a life lived in fear of stinking like garlic wasn't worth living."). The title remains enigmatic to me.

Reviews
An interesting perspective in the South China Morning Post:

Journey Under the Midnight Sun isn't a whodunnit or even a whydunnit but a what-exactly-is-being-dunnit. It is also an extraordinary work of popular fiction. You could read it as a potted history of modern Japan, an exploration of a crumbling social order (gender, class, money, obedience), a ludic literary puzzle that plays with genre expectations: Higashino's many allusions veer from mysteries to "classic girl's school story". But at no point does he forget his fundamental raison d'ecrire: to provide a tantalising mystery that keeps the pages turning.

See Contemporary Japanese Literature for a fantastic review that covers the problematic elements of this novel — notably the author's treatment of women and the detective's less-than-credible obsession with the case. While I definitely noticed these flaws, I chose to overlook them in my pursuit of entertainment.

The only map we have is woefully lacking

"You used a map to get to this inn yesterday, did you not? Because of that map, you are able to find our way up the road without getting lost. Likewise, in order for us as a species to walk the correct path in life, we need a very detailed map that will tell us what the world is like. Except our map in incomplete, almost entirely useless. Which is why, even now, in the twenty-first century, people are still making mistakes. War and the destruction of the environment and countless other things persist because the only map we have is woefully lacking. It's the mission of scientists to fill in those missing pieces."

A Midsummer's Equation, by Keigo Higashino, is a perfectly delightful old-school mystery story. By which I mean, no hi-tech pyrotechnics, no weird sex, no ultra violence, no obscure specialists in esoteric fields of study you've never heard of. Just a suspicious death, some good old police work, and a fairly innocuous nest of family secrets.

That's a good thing.

It also makes the "Japanese Steig Larsson" proclamation stamped across the front cover silly, though I won't dispute that Higashino deserves to be better known. I loved The Devotion of Suspect X. A Midsummer's Equation is not as innovative a puzzle, but it confirms Higashino as a reliable writer to fall back on when I'm in the mood for a mystery.

Despite physicist Yukawas's insistence on the pursuit of pure truth and knowledge for its own sake, he seems very much concerned with moral truths. It is clear that for him the right path is the one leading to the greatest benefit for humanity. While logical, it may not be strictly legal. And that makes it quite different from many of the mysteries I've read in recent years in which legal justice tends to prevail.

This novel is not thriller. It's a tearjerker.

The validity of someone else's solution

Within the first couple dozen pages of The Devotion of Suspect X, by Keigo Higashino, there's a murder. The main characters are sketched out in simple, broad, vivid strokes. Yasuko, with the help of her daughter, kind of accidentally kills her abusive ex-husband. We're sympathetic toward Yasuko; the jerk deserved it. Their neighbour, Ishigami, a high-school math teacher and genius, offers to help cover up the incident.

A body's discovered in due course, and the investigation gets underway. Turns out that Ishigami went to the same school as Detective Kusanagi, the cop on the case, and they have a mutual friend, Manubu Yukawa, a brilliant physicist, to whom Kusanagi often turns for advice.

And so the mathematician and the physicist — theory and practice — face off.

"You're familiar with the P = NP problem, right? Yukawa asked from behind him.

Ishigami looked around. "You're referring to the question of whether or not it is as easy to determine the accuracy of another person's results as it is to solve the problem yourself — or, failing that, how the difference in difficulty compares. It's one of the questions the Clay Mathematics Institute has offered a prize to solve."

"I figured you might be." Yukawa smiled and tipped back his glass.

Ishigami turned back to the desk.

He had always thought of mathematics at a treasure hunt. First, one had to decide where to dig; then one had to determine the proper excavation route that led to the answer. Once you had a plan, you could make formulas to fit it, and they would give you clues. If you wound up empty-handed, you had to go back to the beginning and choose another route. Only by doing this over and over, patiently, yet boldly, could you hope to find the treasure — a solution no one else had ever found.

Therefore, it would seem that analyzing the validity of someone else's solution was simply a matter of following the routes they had taken. In fact, however, it was never that simple. Sometimes you could follow a mistaken route to a false treasure, and proving that it was false could be even harder than finding the real answer.

Which was why someone had proposed the exasperating P = NP problem.

This book is a treasure, not a false one. Some readers cry foul over the ending, but I think that's because they have fallen into the kind of trap Ishigami sets for his students, mistaking this book for a geometry puzzle, when really it's an algebra problem. One would do well to remember too that Yasuko, Ishigami, the cop, and the physics professor are each trying to solve a different puzzle, with different information at hand.

The resolution is logical, it fits perfectly; it is also heart-rending.

I read this book over a weekend, and it evoked in me all the wow of when my grade 7 teacher read us The Witness for the Prosecution, and it occurs to me he may have been trying to teach us the lesson to avoid the trap, question our assumptions, watch for our blind spots, not just how to construct a perfect alibi.

Background
The review that put this book on my radar: Reading Matters.
Excerpt.