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?
Set in a seedy Tokyo of bomb sites, dive bars and Yakuza gangs, The Tattoo Murder is one of Japan's most ingenious and legendary whodunits.
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It was the summer of 1947, and the citizens of Tokyo, already crushed with grief and shock over the loss of the war, were further debilitated by the languid heat- 1
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(Pushkin Press, 6 October 2022, e-book, 384 pages, borrowed from Glasgow Libraries via BorrowBox)
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I really liked The Tattoo Murder. In many ways this is a typical detective novel come murder mystery. The book is a bit grimmer than similar titles with the strange, sinister violence of the murders. The pacing of the book is spot on as the police struggle to catch the madman before he kills again to cover his crimes and hide his identity. This book reminds me a lot of the investigations of Sherlock Holmes. I really enjoyed it.
