Book review: Keigo Higashino's Journey Under the Midnight Sun is a subversive treasure

If David Foster Wallace had written a thriller, it would probably read something like a novel by Keigo Higashino. Compulsion, games, systems within systems, cultural bewitchment, politics: these two writers would have had a lot to discuss.

Unlike Wallace, Higashino hit the big time straight away. His debut, The Devotion of Suspect X, was one of Japan's bestselling books, with sales exceeding two million copies. It was a blockbuster of the strangest and most unsettling kind. Two people meet in a Tokyo bento shop. One is a single mother fleeing an abusive marriage. The other is a brilliant, withdrawn maths teacher whose instantaneous "devotion" to the young woman makes a term like "stalker" feel inadequate.

While the story explores the sorts of emotional states that are crime fiction staples - obsession, voyeurism, love, trust, betrayal - rarely have their workings been narrated so vividly. This is a novel as concerned with the workings of an individual consciousness as with murder plots. Then again, what made The Devotion of Suspect X such a popular success was its author's skill at excavating unbearable tension from the most mundane situations, building anxiety and unbalancing expectations.

Journey Under the Midnight Sun, the third Higashino novel to be translated into English, offers more of the same. At its dark heart is another tautly enigmatic relationship between a man and a woman. There are appalling acts, but our interest lies not in grisly details but in the ripples that undulate for years after. As one character notes towards the end: "Two decades. Kazunari couldn't understand how something that happened so long ago in Osaka could be having such an effect on his personal life in the here and now."

Indeed, the victim - a middle-aged pawnbroker, Yosuke Kirihara, whose body is discovered in an abandoned building - quickly fades from view. So too does his widow, Yaeko. Even the apparent main players - Isamu Matsuura, a nasty piece of work whom Kirihara employed, and Junzo Sasagaki, who investigates the crime - are relegated to bit-part roles, reappearing at odd moments in the digressive drama to come.