百年の時効

百年の時効 was absolutely amazing, it’s such a great police procedural and so well written, so well documented and so engrossing all along.
The novel really shines with its setting, it spawns three eras, Showa, Heisei and Reiwa, and we follow four police detectives working on the same case: the brutal killing of a family that took place in 1974.
The novel is a real exploration of Japan’s society, politics and economical landscape of the second half of the 20th Century, everything felt very real and very documented. Real criminal cases, persons and major events that completely shook Japanese society are present in the novel, but what I really loved is that they also affect our plot and our fictional characters, even sometimes dramatically, so the story felt very real and anchored in reality. Many times I had the feeling that I was reading romanised true crime and had to remind me that it was fiction… that’s how real it all felt.
The police detectives we follow are also all very different, influenced by their generation, their background, the era in which they grew up. It’s also true for the way investigations are conducted, from the time when the police actually cooperated with criminal organisations, to the developments in psychology or forensics. I personally found this aspect of the novel very interesting, it sometimes gave me Mindhunter vibes!
Not only does the novel spawns decades, but the plot is also closely linked to Japanese history: the setting is not just a setting, it influences the plot, so we travel through these eras while investigating the case. I really loved it, the author really managed to keep the novel engrossing, with a really good pace all along. It never felt like the case was a pretext to depict Showa society or something like that, the plot really stays central all along and it was impossible to put the book down.
The novel is really a solid police procedural, but it also borrows from other genres, sometimes feeling like a financial thriller, sometimes like a shakai-ha mystery depicting societal corruption and the connections between politicians, banks, yakuza and the police, sometimes like a honkaku mystery (the end in particular felt like the big reveal of detective novels).
The plot is very complex, there are a lot of ramifications and it’s important to have a clear vision of the characters’ relationships and what happened when. Even though I read it everyday until I finished it, I still had to take some notes to remember important facts or how characters were linked.
There is not a single thing I didn’t like, I find 百年の時効 really impressive, I really hope it gets translated into English!

袈裟斬り’s name comes from a Buddhist monk’s stole 袈裟 and the way it hangs across the chest.