The Tattoo Murder

English language

Published Feb. 21, 2022 by Pushkin Press, Limited.

ISBN:: 978-1-78227-828-3

(1 review)

Tokyo, 1947. At the first post-war meeting of the Edo Tattoo Society, Kinue Nomura reveals her full-body snake tattoo to rapturous applause. Days later she is gone. A dismembered corpse is discovered in the locked bathroom of her home, but her much-coveted body art is nowhere to be found.

Kinue’s horrified lover joins forces with the boy detective Kyosuke Kamizu to try to get to the bottom of the macabre crime, but similar deaths soon follow. Is someone being driven to murder by their lust for tattooed skin, and can they be stopped?

1 edition

nerd teacher [books] reviewed The Tattoo Murder by Akimitsu Takagi

Annoyingly Engaging

3 stars

I call it 'annoying' because I honestly didn't want to put it down most of the time when I was reading it, opting to walk around the city reading it.

I wish I could comment on whether or not the translator's work held a quality that was inline with the original, but I don't read or speak Japanese with any degree of fluency. However, the translator's work was really well done and held its own engaging quality, which also made the characters quite endearing in their own ways. It often felt as if they worked in translator notes into the text (rather than making footnotes) in order to explain aspects of Japanese culture that most people might not be familiar with.

Though the description for the book mentions Kyosuke Kamizu as the detective, he doesn't show up until somewhere after the middle of the novel, in chapter 43. It was …

I call it 'annoying' because I honestly didn't want to put it down most of the time when I was reading it, opting to walk around the city reading it.

I wish I could comment on whether or not the translator's work held a quality that was inline with the original, but I don't read or speak Japanese with any degree of fluency. However, the translator's work was really well done and held its own engaging quality, which also made the characters quite endearing in their own ways. It often felt as if they worked in translator notes into the text (rather than making footnotes) in order to explain aspects of Japanese culture that most people might not be familiar with.

Though the description for the book mentions Kyosuke Kamizu as the detective, he doesn't show up until somewhere after the middle of the novel, in chapter 43. It was a bit surprising because I kept expecting him to pop up somewhere along the way much earlier, but that doesn't detract from the story. It's rather well-constructed and quite interesting, and the clues provided (along with the red herrings) genuinely do well to keep the audience thinking about the possible solutions.