You get told as a kid to never judge a book by its cover, but I’m going to let you off the hook with Hanzai Japan. The cover of this collection of stories shows life in Japan on a tilt; petals swirl over an ultra-modern and slightly trippy skyline while a Japanese lady in a leather burglar mask peers out with intense eyes.
I mean, damn, that’s a pretty cover.
Inside you’ll keep finding forlorn and beautiful petals falling between a typeface and format that are both eccentric and delicious. Before you even ingest the content of the words, before you even really know what you’re reading, you already find yourself soaking luxuriously in something fresh, funky, modern, and quintessentially Japanese.
That’s what this ride’s all about.
Haikasoru’s Hanzai Japan boasts an anthology of “fantastical and futuristic crime stories from and about Japan,” and boy, does it have these in decadent abundance. The stories are a fairly even mix between those originally written in English and those translated from Japanese to English. Every story in this collection has a basis in both the underworld of crime and in the archipelago of Japan. Plus, every last story in the collection is as cool, imaginative, and maudlin as it is desperately weird.
Even the introduction is strikingly odd, setting up the collection as a twisting assortment of speculative crime thrills full of cunning surprises – and the intro has a twist itself, talking warmly of the very un-Japanese Edgar Allen Poe and his love of the mystery novel, plus his disregard for the Golden Age rules of the genre.
Every single story is extraordinarily-gorgeously-elegantly-improbably well-written while remaining desperately weird and genuinely unnerving often, even sometimes scary. Each story brings a different style, but each also shares a sort of universal fluidity of intricacy and rhythm that makes the collection as a whole flow smoothly, even when the tide of each renewed plot turns off into a new direction. When I try to pick a favourite, I remember all of them. The preposterous sense it all makes, the feel of riotous colour, the liberal and gleeful swearing: all of it makes this collection so much fun to read.
You may not be surprised to read that there are surprises everywhere, from holographic vampires to serial killers who use honey as their weapon of choice. At different points in the book I half-wanted to be a zombie sumo wrestler, craved a demonic tattoo, and felt very sorry for a road map. But my biggest surprise was that I learned more new French phrases than Japanese ones. The beautiful descriptions are esoteric, ephemeral, and solid – like thick fog you feel you could part with your hands. The only straightforward thing about this book is its name – Hanzai literally translates as crime.
It’s this spirited, loving, bloody rebellion against the genre rulebook that makes these stories tick, that brings them together. Winding through points of view from an ex-pat young woman exploring the quiet deaths of a broken-down theme park, to two American fuckboys getting wasted and in serious trouble in New York’s Little Tokyo, to a group of Yakuza bank robbers watching a PowerPoint on how best to utilise Godzilla in their latest heist, Hanzai Japan shows both Japan and the West through broken lenses, a playful perversion of how we see ourselves and the other.
There’s one more crucial rule that all of the stories follow. One key to a good mystery is to have good clues – keys hidden like spiders for us to find in the cracks or in the open. This book promises “more keys, stranger locks.” And the locks are very strange indeed.
