A spare, deceptively candid novella, Seicho Matsumoto’s “Suspicion” is as much about crime as it is about truth, human bias and belief.
Translated by Jesse Kirkwood and out this month from Penguin Classics, it is Kirkwood’s second Matsumoto translation, after the acclaimed “Tokyo Express” in 2022.
Matsumoto (1909-1992), winner of both the Akutagawa Prize and the Kikuchi Kan Prize, didn’t publish his first novel until he was 40. Yet he quickly established himself as a master of Japanese crime fiction, publishing over 30 detective novels, hundreds of short stories and nonfiction works on both modern and ancient Japanese history.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.