All She Was Worth

"I really enjoyed this book. I wanted to include other women writers as well, to be honest, but I felt that I couldn’t eliminate the first four I chose. It’s another social realism mystery. There are loan sharks, there’s credit card debt and bankruptcy, there’s identity theft. It’s a mystery story about capitalism and the bubble economy. This is one of the most successful economic and business-themed crime mysteries. There are many business mysteries in the market, stories written from the top down, from the view of the government or business insiders. This book, on the other hand, is from the consumer’s point of view, how they deal with credit card loans, how their lives are messed up by the materialistic economic mindset. It’s easy to think that if you get into debt, it’s your own fault, it’s a personal matter. This book makes us deliberate a moment and scrutinizes this matter from different perspective. It’s saying, ‘It’s not the fault of individuals, it’s the market.’ Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Japan’s rapid economic growth after the Pacific War, and especially in the wake of the Korean War in the 1950s, triggered a ‘my home’ boom. Loan sharks also increased, because many people could not afford their mortgage. Credit cards became popular in the 1960s. It made people more materialistic, there was the illusion that you could make yourself happy by spending money. Purchasing more than you can afford is surely its own burden. But this story also looks at immature regulation due to conflict between government departments, the lack of education about personal finance in school, the lack of a safety net for people who got stuck in this trap. It’s the same as a road accident when a truck driver falls asleep due to overwork and hits another car. Should we only blame the driver? Or does the management of the company the truck driver works for also be accused? What about the department of national traffic safety, which allows people to work for so long? I also want to address the excellence of the protagonist who solves this mystery. He is a police detective, but off duty because of an injury sustained in a previous case. The off-duty investigation gives him a different angle in approaching the case; he is eager to dig into what the motivation was that made the suspect perpetrate the murders. He wants to relieve the criminal from a life forever under threat, rather than just catching the criminal. The gap between his approach and that of his partner, who is still on duty as a police detective, makes for a superb protagonist in this story. For me, this book is going in the same direction as the Seicho Matsumoto book. He’s writing about people sacrificing themselves for the growing Japanese economy. Miyabe’s book is also about that, but the subject matter is more up-to-date. It’s a good book. In the 1980s, everyone thought the Japanese economy would keep on growing. But then the bubble burst in early 1992, after the peak at the end of 1991. This book was published in 1992. The story is not entirely about the Japanese economic bubble, but it describes aspects of the materialistic consumer mindset. It is very hard to pick. I have so many favourite stories. But if I need to pick one, there is a story of his that is always at the top of the crime mystery lists in Japan, which hasn’t been translated into English yet. I shouldn’t say too much about the details, but I can say that he learned about detective mysteries from lots of classic Western detective mystery writers like John Dickson Carr, David Hume, Gaston Leroux, the Ellery Queen series and more. In this particular case, it was inspired by Van Dine and Agatha Christie. Hopefully someday it will be translated."