Reading crime stories can be a claustrophobic experience. Entering the criminal mind is not unlike squeezing into the airless tunnels of a rodent.
The Miura Peninsula, the setting for much of Ayako Sono's darkly grained novel, "No Reason for Murder" -- a place of black, sandy beaches and impenetrable woods, a shabby mix of old farms, small factories and residential plots of the kind found all over Japan -- is, in the main character's words, "no longer as harmonious as it once was." Dissonance of place becomes a correlative objective for the abnormal social environment that produces crime. As the setting for an unlikely series of murders, the peninsula is transformed into a landscape as narrow and confining as a morgue. In many ways, this is a book about confinements: the parameters of home, family and work; the lanes and tracks of the peninsula that lead to dead ends; desultory housing estates; the barrier of the sea.
Sono is a Catholic, one of that small band of Japanese who, living in a nominally Buddhist country with a strong though often subliminally applied Confucianism, must moderate native values with those of the Vatican. As a novelist, Sono stands in a line of literary descent from Graham Green to the Catholic writer Shusaku Endo. The characters of Sono's novel inhabit the zone that Endo called "mudswamp Japan," a term that describes the inner world of the Japanese as he saw it, a place of moral indifference and insensitivity to sin.