Meet the Japanese author who inspired ‘Drishyam,’ ‘Monica, O My Darling’

Japan’s notoriously reclusive but hugely popular detective writer Keigo Higashino, 64, is often billed as the country’s Stieg Larsson. In the league of bestselling American writers like James Patterson, Dean Koontz or Tom Clancy, Higashino’s novels have been adapted into movies and TV series more frequently than the works of Michael Crichton, Clancy or Robert Ludlum. According to his publisher Minotaur, the thrillers by Higashino, set in Tokyo’s underbelly, sell as well as novels by Jeffrey Archer and J. K. Rowling do. In recent years, Higashino has caught the fancy of filmmakers in Asia.

From Jeethu Joseph’s edge-of-the-seat Malayalam thriller ‘Drishyam’ (2013) — which has led to Hindi remakes; Abhishek Pathak’s ‘Drishyam 2’ released on Friday — to Vasan Bala’s neo-noir, quirky comic thriller ‘Monica, O My Darling,’ Higashino’s mystery thrillers are making their way to the marquee in the continent; besides India, his works have been adapted into movies in Japan, China, Thailand, Vietnam and South Korea.

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The storyline of ‘Drishyam’ bears close resemblance to the plot of Higashino’s ‘The Devotion of Suspect X’ even though the filmmakers have denied any link. Bala’s critically acclaimed film, an intelligent adaptation with cultural references all our own, is based on Higashino’s 1989 novel, ‘Burutasu No Shinzou’ (‘Heart of Brutus’), which has apparently not been translated into English yet.

‘The Devotion of Suspect X’

Published in Japanese in 2005, ‘The Devotion of Suspect X’ is third in Higashino’s popular “Dr. Galileo” series, which revolves around a physics professor with an incredible knack for solving impenetrable cases. It emerged as the second highest-selling book in Japan, selling over 800,000 copies.

‘The Devotion of Suspect X’ also won the Naoki Prize for Best Novel, considered to be the Japanese equivalent of the Booker Prize, and the National Book Award. It was made into a motion film in Japan in 2008; directed by Hiroshi Nishitani, ‘Suspect X’ spent four weeks at the top of the box office and was the third highest‐grossing film of the year.

The novel’s foreign rights were also sold in several countries, including Thailand, China, Russia, France and Spain. South Korean actor-director Bang Eun-jin adapted it into ‘Perfect Number’ (2012) and Taiwanese actor-director Alec Su into a movie by the same name in 2017. Another adaptation in Hollywood is believed to be in the works.

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In India, filmmaker Sujoy Ghosh, who directed ‘Kahaani,’ is set to adapt the novel for a Netflix release. The as-yet-untitled film will mark Kareena Kapoor Khan’s OTT debut, and will include Jaideep Ahlawat and Vijay Varma in lead roles. Ghosh, who initially started working on this several years ago with Ekta Kapoor’s Balaji Telefilms, will be co-producing the film, along with Akshai Puri, Jay Shewakramani and Thomas Kim.

Incidentally, ‘The Devotion of Suspect X’ also marked Higashino’s first major foray into the US market upon its publication in 2011. Earlier, in 2004, another of his novel, ‘Naoko’ — an ingenious take on gender relations — had a limited print run in English translation. 2011 also saw the release of ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’, David Fincher’s 2011 neo-noir psychological thriller based on the novel by Swedish writer Stieg Larsson, which was published posthumously in 2005; its English translation appeared in 2008. It triggered the  world’s interest in the crime fiction genre all over again. And filmmakers started scouting for thrillers.

“Murder mysteries cross well between cultures because people have bad sides as well as good. People show their true natures in the act of committing a crime,” Higashino told the ‘Wall Street Journal’ in an interview in 2011. Commenting on his imperatives as a crime writer, he said: “Some writers aim to move their readers, others want to write beautiful sentences. I want readers to be continually surprised by my ideas.” Eleven years on, the world continues to be fascinated by his ideas, as the spate of films based on his novels proves.

The background

Born into a lower class Osaka family in 1958, Higashino got into mystery fiction when he was in high school. A graduate in Electrical Engineering from Osaka Prefecture University, he started writing novels during his stint as an engineer at Nippon Denso Co, Japan’s leading producer of automobile components which is now known as DENSO. He was only 27 when he was awarded the Edogawa Rampo Prize for ‘Hokago’ (‘After School’) in 1985. It validated his dream to be a writer. In the years that followed, he quit his job and embarked on his journey to be a full-time writer in Tokyo.

In 1999, he received the Mystery Writers of Japan Inc award for his novel ‘Himitsu’ (‘The Secret’). Translated into English by Kerim Yasar, it was published by Vertical in 2004 under the title Naoko. In 2006, after being in the running for the prize for five times, Higashino won the 134th Naoki Prize for Yogisha X no Kenshin, which came to be known as ‘The Devotion of Suspect X’ in the English world.

Besides winning the major awards in Japan, Higashino’s novels register sales in millions. Several of his novels, including ‘Byakuyakou’ (‘Into The White Night’), ‘Samayou Yaiba’ (‘The Hovering Blade’) and ‘Inori no Maku ga Oriru Toki’ (‘When the Prayer Curtain Falls’) have been adapted into movies.

The form, content and style

In his novels, Higashino depicts the Tokyo that has rarely been seen in the West. While Haruki Murakami’s novels portray the real-life Tokyo — the labyrinthine metropolis, from the hole-in-the-wall bars at Shinjuku to the surfer spots at Tsujido, comes alive in his novels — in Higashino’s universe, it’s “a landscape of tatty apartment buildings, concrete expressways and riverbanks where homeless men skulk in cardboard huts”.

Higashino’s characters are ordinary people with their sets of flaws and failures: factory workers, assistants toiling away at shops, and the owners of small businesses — all of them caught in the daily struggle to support families broken by strained relationships or marital collapse, marking out their lonely lives in their own distinct ways.

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‘The Devotion of Suspect X’ does not follow the classical whodunit structure; rather, it inverts the tradition which has been sacrosanct in crime fiction. So, the reader gets to know early on in the novel who the murderer is. According to Higashino, Japanese people prefer this format, in which “the effects of characters’ actions and intentions, in terms of emotions such as guilt and anguish, become clearer only towards the end of the story.”

In 2015, Higashino admitted that his content and style had changed from his earlier writings in which he treated the motivation of killing as the most important element. His later novels follow the same template: the killer’s identity is revealed early on and we follow the rest of the story wondering why and how the killer manages to get away.

Besides anime, Japan has had a strong tradition of murder mystery. While Higashino admires Western crime writers, he sees his work rooted in the tradition of classic Japanese writers like Edogawa Rampo (1894-1965) — the first Japanese modern mystery writer and the founder of the Detective Story Club in Japan — and Seicho Matsumoto (1909-1992), who depicted the darker side of Japanese society.

“I am much more influenced by Japanese authors and so my work naturally has that Japanese sense of old-fashioned loyalty and concern for human feeling…I want people to read my work and come to understand how Japanese people think, love and hate… I want them to be impressed that there is a Japanese person who came up with such unusual stories,” he told the ‘Wall Street Journal.’

Coming Soon: ‘A Death in Tokyo’

‘A Death in Tokyo,’ the latest mind-bending mystery from the modern master of classic crime, will be published early next year. Translated from the Japanese by Giles Murray, it is the third mystery featuring Tokyo Police Detective Inspector Kyoichiro Kaga (after ‘Newcomer’, which was published in 2018).

According to a release by his publisher, it is about a public murder that — as is the case with many mysteries — doesn’t quite add up. In the Nihonbashi district of Tokyo, a man who appears to be very drunk staggers onto a 17th century canal bridge, which was reconstructed in 1911, and collapses under a rather unusual statue of a Japanese mythic beast — a kirin — that stands guard over the district from the bridge.

The patrolman, who happens to witness the scene unfold, walks up to the man to rouse him, but discovers that he was not passed out, but dead; also, he was not drunk, he was stabbed in the chest. However, since the crime is not committed where the man dies, the key to solving it is to find out where the man was attacked and why he made a superhuman effort to drag himself to the Nihonbashi Bridge.

On the same night, a young man named Yashima is also injured in a car accident while attempting to flee from the police. The police find the wallet of the murdered man on him. When Kaga is assigned to the team investigating the murder, he must employ his acumen to uncover what actually happened that night on the Nihonbashi bridge. Also, whethere there was any connection between the murdered man and Yashima? As Kaga embarks on the investigation, it takes him down dark alleys and into the unknown past.