Masako Togawa (1931–2016)

The titular key belongs to the K Apartment House, a building intended exclusively for women to live in. The building has existed since the end of the Second World War and some of the occupants have been there since the beginning. A lot of neurosis hangs in the air, and a lot of secrets lurk behind closed doors. The storytelling is, as the Goodreads summary has it, “spare” and “unembellished”, which comes through in Simon Grove’s translation. The story is told in a slightly non-linear way, beginning with the present day, when the entire apartment house is being movedm and then jumping back seven years to bring the reader up to speed on the secrets and the lives of the women who live in the building. Each chapter is clearly marked with the time (e.g., “Four months before the building is moved”) and tends to follow one occupant of the building. I found this a very quick read, and I did not anticipate how one of the storylines would play out. Recommended if you’re interested in Japanese crime fiction.… (mais)

* I would like to thank NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to review an advance copy of this book. *

The K Apartments are a tower of residences reserved for single women. The young ladies in residence since the war, and the staff, have now grown to become old maids.

The book's opening recounts a car accident in which someone is killed outside the K Apartments. Surprisingly the victim, dressed as a woman, turns out to be a man. What was a man doing in the K Apartments dressed as a woman?

Togawa twists this initial mystery as he introduces us to a series of unhappy women who were involved in this scandal and its aftermath. Resentments and jealousies between them lead to acts which compound the scandal, all of it set against a backdrop of an impending construction project that may reveal the grim secret of the K Apartments.

This is an unusual crime story. There is no central investigator character and the plot gets developed through the agency of several characters who gradually learn more about what is going on. For most of the book I felt that this was pretty mundane, but Togawa pulled off some plot twists towards the end that totally reversed my opinion. I'm definitely going to seek out more of his work.

This book is being released in a new series of international crime novels from Pushkin Vertigo. I've read this one and Emma Viskic's Resurrection Bay and both were very good, so it looks like this imprint is worth keeping an eye out for.… (mais)