Keigo Higashino (東野 圭吾) is one of the most popular and biggest selling fiction authors in Japan—as well known as James Patterson, Dean Koontz or Tom Clancy are in the USA.
Born in Osaka, he started writing novels while still working as an engineer at Nippon Denso Co. (presently DENSO). He won the Edogawa Rampo Prize, which is awarded annually to the finest mystery work, in 1985 for the novel Hōkago (After School) at age 27. Subsequently, he quit his job and started a career as a writer in Tokyo.
In 1999, he won the Mystery Writers of Japan Inc award for the novel Himitsu (The Secret), which was translated into English by Kerim Yasar and published by Vertical under the title of Naoko in 2004. In 2006, he won the 134th Naoki Prize for Yōgisha X no Kenshin. His novels had been nominated five times before winning with this novel.
The Devotion of Suspect X was the second highest selling book in all of Japan— fiction or nonfiction—the year it was published, with over 800,000 copies sold. It won the prestigious Naoki Prize for Best Novel— the Japanese equivalent of the National Book Award and the Man Booker Prize. Made into a motion picture in Japan, The Devotion of Suspect X spent 4 weeks at the top of the box office and was the third highest‐grossing film of the year.
Higashino’s novels have more movie and TV series adaptations than Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum, and as many as Michael Crichton.
This is the prequel to ラプラスの魔女, Laplace no Majo, a book I liked quite a bit. And this book is written very similarly.
Like in Laplace no Majo, we follow a relatively uninteresting man. This man then meets a mysterious high school girl, Madoka. In laplace, we slowly find out more about Madoka, which was the thing I liked the most about the book. Despite there being some questionable things, like why is this man spending so much time with a high school girl, the mystery was what kept me reading. This mystery was of course solved in Laplace. I know what's going on with Madoka. And while Laplace had a mystery of its own, with the deaths and such (which I cared about a lot less than the Madoka-mystery), Maryoku has no real plot.
We follow a man who happens to meet Madoka a bunch of times and she shows off her powers to help people. It's very *thing* solution *thing* solution. There is no real overarching plot, and because we already know about Madoka, there is little going on overall as the individual cases are often rather shallow as well.
The man we follow, Nayuta has connections to the case in Laplace. But since that case has already been solved it doesn't really give us much, and the connection feels rather shoehorned in in the final to last chapter.
The weird high school girl hanging with an older man vibe is still there. I still don't like that. Madoka hangs out with him, stays in his hotel room, etc.
And then this girl decides that because this man felt uncomfortable when she, a literal high schooler, wasn't fully dressed, when they were alone in a hotel room, that MUST mean he's gay. Look, I know the age of consent is incredibly low in Japan but I still think that a man not wanting to sleep with a woman he just met, or, as is the case here, with a high schooler, isn't indicitive of being gay? And not sleeping with a high school just makes him, well, not a hebephile? Normal??
There's this pattern in the second to last chapter of everyone telling Nayuta "he must be gay." From when he was young and starred in a film where his character was gay. "Because there's no way you could act that out that well if you weren't gay." It's like several characters around him try to convince him he's gay and it feels soo weird. Of course Nayuta acts a bit homophobic too, so we have the awful trope of he's homophobic because he's actually gay. I hate it.