Arrested for a Late Manuscript: Seicho Matsumoto’s ‘Tokyo Express’
- When local police investigate the death of a young couple on Kashii beach, a rocky strip on the eastern side of Hakata Bay on the island of Kyushu in the south of Japan, they assume it’s a lovers’ suicide.
- The pair is neatly dressed with no sign of distress, just the bloom of rosy cheeks from ingesting cyanide.
- The tradition of lovers ending their lives together, called shinjū, was big in the middle of the Edo period, at the turn of the eighteenth century, but experienced a resurgence from the 1920s through the fifties.
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- When local police investigate the death of a young couple on Kashii beach, a rocky strip on the eastern side of Hakata Bay on the island of Kyushu in the south of Japan, they assume it’s a lovers’ suicide.
- The pair is neatly dressed with no sign of distress, just the bloom of rosy cheeks from ingesting cyanide.
- The tradition of lovers ending their lives together, called shinjū, was big in the middle of the Edo period, at the turn of the eighteenth century, but experienced a resurgence from the 1920s through the fifties.
Sources: Millersbookreview