JAPONICA BOOK REVIEW

Reading “Mami Suzuki: Private Eye”

Simon Rowe’s entertaining tales of a female investigator in Kobe

DC Palter
Japonica Publication
3 min readFeb 5, 2024

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Mami Suzuki: Private Eye by Simon Rowe. Image ©Simon Rowe. Used by Permission.

A little less than a year ago, I reviewed Pearl City, Simon Rowe’s award-winning collection of short stories.

My favorite of that collection was the title story, “Pearl City”, about a female private investigator named Mami Suzuki digging into the mystery of pearls disappearing from a processing factory in Kobe.

When I heard Rowe had written a new collection entirely about P.I. Suzuki, it went straight to the top of my reading queue. I wasn’t disappointed.

Mystery novels are common, short stories less so, novellas rare. Too short to publish as stand-alone books and too long for literary journals, novellas don’t fit the standard publishing model. But by collecting four novellas together, each a separate Suzuki mystery, Rowe has created something new and unique that harks back to the Sherlock Holmes collections of yesteryear.

This collection also reminded me of Different Seasons, a collection of 4 novellas by Stephen King, without a doubt his most impressive literary work. (2 of those stories were adapted into the movies Stand by Me and Shawshank Redemption.) Although King had written these stories earlier in his career, he hadn’t been able to get them published until he put them together into a single collection under the theme of four seasons.

Rowe’s Mami Suzuki similarly consists of 4 stories, three of which are tied to unique seasons in Japan: the start of new jobs in springtime, the typhoons of summer, the gathering of Shinto gods after the autumn harvest.

Suzuki is a single mother, living in Kobe with her daughter and her own aging mother. Struggling financially, she works at the reception desk of the Orient Hotel. And like most private investigators, at least fictional ones, she drinks too much for her own good.

Like all great mystery novels, Mami Suzuki is not about the who of a whodunit but the exploration of why. The investigator has license to shine a flashlight into the hidden corners of society to understand why a husband finds the need to run away from his family, why someone is stealing pearls in affluent Kobe, and why the spirit of a dead man is unable to find peace. Rather than a police procedural that ends with the arrest of the culprit, Suzuki helps each find the reconciliation they need.

The 4 stories of the collection are:

  • Pearl City: Pearls are missing from the Tokai Pearls company in Kobe. Suzuki is hired to uncover the thief.
  • Land of the Gods: A top sushi chef in Kobe is missing. Suzuki heads to rural Shimane prefecture in search of him.
  • Sounds of the Tide: The brother of a tea ceremony teacher in Himeji drowns in Okinawa. A fortune teller says his spirit is troubled. Suzuki looks into the circumstances of his accident.
  • Isle of Cats: A young woman working at Kobe’s Ikuta Shrine is pregnant. The girl’s family hires Suzuki to find her boyfriend, an apprentice priest at the temple who has disappeared.

Working as a private investigator while holding down her hotel job and taking care of her daughter causes practical complications. Although Suzuki claims to avoid missing persons and divorce cases, standard fare for private investigators in Japan, her precarious finances mean she can’t turn down these jobs even when they require her to leave town.

In the final story in this collection, her absence from work sends her life in a fresh direction. I can’t wait to read the next installment of Mami Suzuki.

Note: some links are Amazon affiliate links from which the author will earn a few pennies.

If you enjoy mysteries focused on Japanese culture, check out my own novel, To Kill a Unicorn, about a Japanese hacker searching for his missing friend, an exploration of Japanese culture amidst the insanity of Silicon Valley.

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Japonica Publication
Japonica Publication

Published in Japonica Publication

Japonica: the publication for everything Japan: culture, life, business, language, travel, food, and everything else.

DC Palter
DC Palter

Written by DC Palter

Entrepreneur, angel investor, startup mentor, sake snob. Author of the Silicon Valley mystery To Kill a Unicorn: https://amzn.to/3sD2SGH

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