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. Perhaps most famously, the novelist Osamu Dazai attempted it in 1930. He survived, but his girlfriend died, and the failed attempt marked everything he touched thereafter, including his most celebrated novel No Longer Human. (Dazai and another woman tried it again in 1948; sadly, they succeeded.)
So while the events of Seicho Matsumoto’s mystery Tokyo Express unfold in 1957, police fall back on a long tradition to explain these bodies on the beach. Case closed. But not everything adds up. A single receipt undermines the whole picture.
The Victims
The story begins in a Japanese restaurant in Tokyo, where industrialist Tatsuo Yasuda frequently comes to entertain his guests, government officials with whom he’s wangling deals and contracts. Rumors of corruption mean the host protects the anonymity of his connections. Thankfully, the waitresses don’t ask many questions. One in particular, Toki, is Yasuda’s regular server. She’s also the woman found on the beach.
She was last seen by Yasuda and two other waitresses from the restaurant on platform 15 of the train station, boarding an overnight with a handsome young man. “And who is he?” asks one of the girls. There were rumors Toki had a lover, but no one had yet seen or met the man. But here they were together!
His name is, as it turns out, Kenichi Sayama. He serves as assistant section chief at Ministry X, responsible for procurement. Embroiled in allegations of corruption, Ministry X is currently under investigation, and Sayama is a key witness in the scandal. He’s the man found on the beach alongside Toki.
Yasuda spots the couple on the platform when the two servers accompany him to his own train on platform 13, headed home for his weekly visit with his tubercular wife, Ryoko, in Kamakura. The bodies are found a week later.
Birth of a Story
Born in 1909, Seicho Matsumoto fell in love with detective fiction as a young man, reading both Japanese translations of western mystery writers and the homegrown stuff then emerging. Working in advertising at the Japanese news daily the Asahi Shimbun, he decided to try some writing of his own.
Short stories and a novella won him acclaim in the early 1950s—including the Akutagawa Prize—and freelance gigs began multiplying. In 1954 Kishu Okada, an editor at Tabi (“Travel”), asked Matsumoto to write for his magazine, then published by the Japan Travel Bureau. Over the next two years, Matsumoto published three articles in Tabi, along with his work for other outlets.
With his writing opportunities increasing in tandem with his reputation, Matsumoto finally resigned from the paper in 1956, though the decision proved difficult. As Makoto Sakai tells it in his recent biography, Matsumoto Seicho no Showa (Seicho Matsumoto’s Showa Era), he hated working at the paper. Dubbed “grubby Matsu” by his colleagues, he chucked his employee badge in a pond at one point. But he also liked the security of the job.
“Although the number of requests for manuscripts gradually increased,” Sakai reports Matsumoto saying, “I couldn’t easily decide to leave the company because I was worried about the future. At first, I wasn’t so busy, but soon I had to write every night after returning from work.” Finally, after a nudge from fellow novelist Yasushi Inoue, he took the plunge into full-time writing.
Matsumoto needn’t have worried. He soon had more work than he could manage, and the people at Tabi had just the idea to keep him busy.
Okada’s boss, the editor-in-chief Ayako Totsuka, enjoyed mysteries and considered serializing novels a brilliant way to keep readers returning to the magazine, issue after issue. She wanted a serial Tabi could publish throughout 1957. A savvy businesswoman, Totsuka also liked working with fledgling writers because she could keep their fees low. Since Matsumoto was a relative newcomer and hungry to keep the work flowing, Totsuka figured the magazine could get him on the cheap.
Rock-Solid Alibi
The official account of Toki and Sayama’s double suicide begins to slowly collapse when local police retrieve a dining-car receipt from Sayama’s overcoat. Only Sayama ate. This puzzles the aging inspector Jutaro Torigai, who can’t imagine two lovers boarding a long-distance train and only one of them dining. Even if the person wasn’t hungry, wouldn’t they join in and at least order something to drink? It’s the thinnest of intuitions, but it prevents Torigai from accepting the conclusion of double suicide.
Meanwhile, police in Tokyo pressing the corruption investigation against Ministry X have lost their principal witness, someone involved at the center of the scandal. Inspector Kiichi Mihara travels south from Tokyo to the scene of the suicide to see what he can discover. Though Torigai can offer little, the two begin uncovering inconsistencies that unsettle the official ruling.
It’s enough for Mihara to keep going. Mihara believes Sayama was killed to silence him. But everywhere he turns his suspicions are met with the incontrovertible facts of dates and times, dictated by train schedules, ferry manifests, telegrams, and plane tickets. The entire investigation involves the logistics of traversing Japan with the primary suspect leaving a paper trail that points away from guilt at every juncture.
And yet, as Mihara pushes the case, the very method the killer employs to obscure the crime eventually reveals his connection to it. What about this gap of four minutes in the train schedule? It takes how long to move from Point A to B? How can a suspect be on the opposite side of the country from the crime they supposedly committed? Who was seen where?
On-Time Arrival?
When Okada and Totsuka approached Matsumoto with the idea of writing a mystery, they knew he possessed the chops to write the story—they’d seen that in his prior work. They also knew Matsumoto loved railway timetables. Coordinating local and long-distance travel for millions of people is a logistical marvel, and Matsumoto found the tables fascinating. Plus, he was a stickler for hands-on research.
As far as the mechanics of the mystery were concerned—how Matsumoto would work out the details—the editors were in safe hands. Okada checked small details like the four-minute gap and they checked out. Published under the title Ten to Sen (“Points and Lines”), the serial offers a tidy plot, perfectly conceived and executed, with a humanist concern that captured readers.
What the editors couldn’t count on, however, was Matsumoto delivering his manuscripts on time. Because he’d jumped ship from the Asahi Shimbun, Matsumoto took every commission that came his way and struggled to keep up with his deadlines. While writing Tokyo Express, he worked on three other serializations—four projects at the same time, all published in installments.
Editors would prepare an entire issue of Tabi and then fret over Matsumoto filing his bit. Recalled Totsuka,
While all the other manuscripts were submitted, sometimes even finalized and ready for printing, “Points and Lines” was still not ready. The phrase ‘waiting for Seicho’ was coined . . . Eventually, we became so neurotic that we resorted to joking about how to commit the perfect crime and kill the author.
With so many competing deadlines, Matsumoto kept prioritizing the weeklies he was writing for, pushing the installments for Ten to Sen further down the list. At one point, Totsuka sent a courier to retrieve an expected installment, only to find the delinquent writer had fled his house. Matsumoto, however, forgot who he was dealing with. Tabi was, after all, published by the Japan Travel Bureau, and Totsuka was a hardass.
“Investigating passengers on transportation is second nature to me,” she said.
I used leading questions at his empty house and found out he was heading to Hakata . . . I found the flight number for the Japan Airlines plane, called him back to the phone at Haneda just before takeoff, and threatened him by saying, “Write it on the plane. A Travel Bureau employee in Hakata will come to meet you.” He seemed surprised to learn that we had a nationwide investigative network and arrest organization (even inns would cooperate).
By “come to meet you,” she meant “take you into custody.” Matsumoto was arrested on arrival, according to some accounts.
The Payoff
As an editor, I have had plenty of authors who struggled to deliver on time. Heck, as a writer, I’ve struggled to deliver on time. But I’ve never threatened an author with arrest for failing to write. It worked. Inspector Mihara used train timetables to capture the killers (and there’s a tease for you; there’s more than one). Totsuka used similar means to capture her writer. “Since this drastic measure, the manuscript has been coming in a little better,” reported Totsuka.
“There’s no escaping the Japan Travel Bureau,” said Matsumoto. “They’re even more formidable than the newspapers.”
Part of the trouble was that Matsumoto had no idea how much readers loved the unfolding book. Tabi didn’t pass along reader mail. Big mistake. Since the plot was fixed in advance, Matsumoto struggled to sustain his enthusiasm during the writing. Meanwhile, other publications he was writing for let him know what readers thought. His energy followed the feedback.
But Tabi readers were anxious for more. Points and Lines/Tokyo Express proved a massive sensation. Once the serial finished, the book publisher Kobunsha stepped in, and Ten to Sen went on to sell over a million copies. His editors had to coerce him to finish, but the book launched Matsumoto’s career.
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