A Quiet Place, by Seicho Matsumoto

A wife dies suddenly. Are suspicious circumstances involved?

Tsuneo Asai is a government bureaucrat working in the agriculture department. He has spent many years studiously doing all the right things to advance his career. One day while on a business trip he gets a phone call. The news is not good. His wife, who has long had a heart condition, has suddenly died. Discombobulated and shocked, he leaves the business meeting and goes about organising the funeral and other details. 

The relationship with his wife, Eiko, had not been a particularly close one. She was his second wife, and their intimate life together had pretty much ended. However, there were details about her death that don’t seem quite right. Why was she in a rather seedy part of town, where there are hotels that serve as a rendezvous point for secret lovers? Could Eiko have had a secret lover?

As Asai begins to investigate this possible double life, more and more clues point to a tantalisingly complex story. 

Famed Japanese master crime writer Seicho Matsumoto published A Quiet Place in 1971. It appears now as a Penguin Modern Classic, with a 2016 translation by Louise Heal Kawai. There are many twists and turns in this gripping crime mystery, and the story takes a shocking, completely unexpected turn half way, pivoting from a tale of a wife’s sudden death to a psychological thriller along the lines of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, The Tell-Tale Heart. Gripping and seductive  crime fiction.

A Quiet Place, by Seicho Matsumoto. Published by Penguin Modern Classics. $24.99

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