Murder and Memories

The Sandpit | Nicholas Shakespeare | Vintage | 448 pages | Rs 599

Foreign correspondent John Dyer returns to Oxford from Brazil with a young son, Leandro, little expecting to find himself in danger. After enrolling Leandro in a smart prep school, Dyer begins a humdrum routine of dropping his son off and going to the library to research his book. Leandro’s schoolmates have rich and powerful parents, and Dyer finds himself hobnobbing at the school football matches with an international banker, a Russian oligarch, an American CIA operative and a British spook.

Leandro becomes friendly with a boy whose father turns out to be an Iranian nuclear scientist, Rustom Marvar, on a temporary posting at a research lab in Oxford. A chance conversation with Marvar leads the scientist to a breakthrough in the problem of fusion.

When Marvar disappears with his son, Dyer realises he might have been the last person to have spoken to him. Dyer soon finds himself and his son in peril, and a person of interest to a host of sinister groups including the other rich parents, all suspicious of his friendship with Marvar, and who think the Iranian may have revealed the solution to him. While figuring out what to do, Dyer scrambles to protect his son from deadly foes and hide the fact that he knows Marvar’s secret.

The Sandpit is an elegiac, elegant, ruminative foray into John Dyer’s memories: as a son, a husband, a grieving widower, and a single father. In Dyer, Shakespeare crafts a delicately drawn character with a haunting sense of grasping at will’o wisp memories, grappling with a sense of not having lived a life fully, while chained by grief for a lost love.

We are put firmly in Dyer’s psyche, and the trials and tribulations he faces reveal the many layers that make up his self: the regrets, the memories, the small triumphs such as his son’s success as a footballer, and the courage. It makes us warm to Dyer, to his foibles and vulnerabilities, and we cheer him on when he meets Miranda.

The pace is tense but never breathless. It is akin to finding a river in the evening on a balmy night, hearing a fish plop, that’s the feeling we have at the end after a tense standoff about Dyer’s dilemma. The solution neatly pulls on the strings from Dyer’s past, curls into it, and ties an elegant knot. A splendid addition to the spy thriller genre.

Butter | Asako Yuzuki | Fourth Estate | 464 pages | Rs 599

Manako Kajii is incarcerated in the Tokyo Detention Centre, convicted of killing several lonely businessmen who she is accused of having seduced with her gourmet home cooking, learnt at a Tokyo cordon bleu school. The lady has maintained a stoic silence, and has refused to be interviewed by journalists. Until Rika Machida, an up-and-coming journalist writes to her on the advice of her best friend (Reiko) asking Kajii for the recipe of beef stew. “No woman can resist sharing information once you ask for their recipe,” Reiko tells Rika.

Inspired by the true crime case of a con woman known as the Konkatsu Killer, Butter is more than just Rika’s quest for a scoop. When the two women meet, Kajii challenges Rika to cook and eat gourmet meals, and instructs her on the first dish: hot rice with top class butter.

“The cold butter first met the roof of her mouth with a chilly sensation contrasting with the steaming rice in both texture and temperature…soon enough, the melted butter began to surge through the individual grains of rice…the taste could only be described as golden—a shining golden wave…”

Rika, who has thus far existed on convenience store Bento box meals and a tepid relationship with a publishing executive, finds herself sucked into Kajii’s world. This is a world of voluptuous tastes, and with each mouthwatering meal, something unfurls deep within Rika. Her memories flow out: of her father whom her mother and she abandoned when Rika was five, of finding him in his apartment three days after his death, her relationship with her best friend (Reiko) and Reiko’s fraught relationship with her husband, the urge to have children, the pressure on Japanese women to conform and be good wives, remain slim, hew to society’s twiggy-like conception of beauty (a five-foot-five-inch woman who weighs 50 kilos) — all these are up for challenge as Rika devours buttery ramen and tarako pasta (spaghetti strands cloaked in a coating of minuscule fish eggs and butter), and swells to 60 kilos. Rika’s boyfriend is irritated with her weight gain until he realises it is for her assignment. But their text message exchange disturbs Rika, making her feel like she has accidentally crunched a mouthful of sand.

In her search for Kajii’s mysterious past, Rika comes to recognise the insidious vitriol that is poured into a woman’s ears. “Kajii was neither beautiful nor thin. What the public found most alarming, even more than Kajji’s lack of beauty, was the fact that she was not thin. From early childhood everyone had it drummed into them that if a woman wasn’t slim, she wasn’t worth bothering about.” It fascinates Rika that Kajii had given herself the permission to remain plus-sized and not to lose weight, “a decision that demanded considerable resolve.”

Along the way, Rika comes to understand herself, what she has spurned, hidden away, and what she needs to do to be whole again and live life on her own terms.

An oft repeated truism is that crime fiction provides a great lens to examine societal ills. Butter measures up to it brilliantly through its searing examination of Japanese society’s fat phobia and the norms caging the feminine spirit. It is a startlingly clear-eyed scrutiny of modern Japanese femininity, and its observations can be applied to Everywoman in other parts of the world too who are in subservient positions to men. It pins down and challenges the concept of femininity in Japan and through a series of encounters between the journalist and the serial killer, unfurls the layers Rika needs to peel off to find out who she is.

The reading experience of Butter is like having the taste of cold butter warmed gently by your tongue, evoking memories, realisations, and epiphanies as it glides through your senses. Yet, it is not in the least bit strident or didactic. Its tone is gentle and ruminative, an umami style of storytelling that leaves us with an unctuous taste in our readerly experience. Best read during or after a gourmet meal.

The Gathering | CJ Tudor | Michael Joseph | 416 pages | Rs 799

In an alternate universe where vampires live in colonies near human settlements, a police detective, Barbara Atkins, comes to a remote Alaskan town to investigate the murder of a teenager. Pointing to video footage showing a vampyr’s involvement, the townspeople want the vampyr colony culled, and it is up to Barbara to officially decide the matter. But Barbara will not authorise it until she is sure about the identity of the murderer. Soon she finds out the video footage was faked, and that there are old and bloody secrets being hidden from her. When the town’s police chief is injured by an intruder and must be airlifted out, Barbara has to rely on the former police chief who almost lost his life in a previous investigation 25 years ago and now lives in the forest. Before the townspeople take the law into their own hands, they have to figure out the link between the 25-year-old murder and their investigation and solve the question of whether they are hunting for a psychopath or a bloodthirsty monster.

The Gathering is a fast-paced story with a snarky main character whose own back story ties in neatly with the theme. The undercurrent of humour threading through makes for an enjoyable read.

Asako YuzukibooksButterCJ Tudorcrimecrime thrillerNicholas ShakespearesuspenseThe GatheringThe Sandpit