The Third Lady

I found this book in a buy-six-for-a-euro bin outside of a dry cleaner in Paris. It was actually buy one book for a euro, but the person who wrote the sign made their "le" look like the number 6 so I got an even better bargain. In any case, I'm glad to have stumbled upon this little bin of surprises.

The story begins outside of Paris, in Fontainebleau, where Daigo meets a particular Fumiko in a hotel on a dark and stormy night. Entranced by this woman's profile, Daigo approaches her and they begin to talk but when the lights go out after a thunder clap, their conversation turns dark. Daigo ends up making a promise he's not sure he can keep to a woman whose face he never even saw. Then, a few months after returning to Japan, the man he show more wanted dead turns up murdered.

A great premise that follows Daigo as he wonders if Fumiko is the cause of this death and if he really is up to fulfilling his part of that dark secret. It was a great page turner and, although I was able to guess the twist, it was still a wonderful twist that kept me emotionally invested till the very end.

And Shizuko Natsuki -- although my French version was actually translated from the English version -- has such an ease in her writing that I really enjoyed. This is my first book by her but I also have her Hara-kiri, mon amour, purchased from the same bin.

I still don't know how to rate crime fiction as I don't read much of it but the sheer enjoyment I got out of this certainly deserves 4 stars, I would say. show less

The translation skims along on a sea of cackhandedness, making occasional clumsy leaps into workmanlike, and the premise gets more implausible the more you think about it. But this has something--both as a character sketch--a man who kills not because he is a Westerner who lost his job or had other kids make fun of him and it teasened out his cracks and led to madness; not because he is a stereotypical Japanese with a debt to repay; but because he allows his Japanese debt to pay--his sense of preexisting aloneness and then obligedness to a mystery women he meets in a French chateau, a woman who just as he does, wants someone dead, this sense rises quickly into a broader feeling of connection, and that becomes his pretext--interpreting show more being true to his Fumiko's wishes, as he sees them, in a way that allows him to do evil and yet not feel evil. That's more complicated and twisted than the cliche narratives as up above, and this book also reminds you how crazy obsessed with the West Japan was in the 1970s, while not pulling all the exoticizing moves that it would have done had it not been a J book by and for Js. show less

The blurb on the back of this book says that the book "recalls Strangers on a Train..." by Patricia Highsmith, but this one is even more convoluted. If you haven't read the Highsmith book, and you want to see the comparison for yourself, Strangers on a Train is on my list of favorite books I've read in my lifetime. The Third Lady is sort of like this, but with several twists in the story that stay with you all the way until the end.

It all begins with a chance meeting in France between two Japanese people. One is Kohei Daigo, who works as a researcher and has discovered that a certain product that seems to cause cancer that was sent to his lab passed as being safe. Daigo knows, however, that his boss is in bed with the manufacturers & show more that the lab results are false. The other person is a woman, Fumiko Samejima, who starts talking to Daigo while the two of them are alone together in a small salon in a Paris hotel during a storm which knocked out all of the electricity. It is dark, they cannot see each other, and choose to sit back to back and share secrets. She wants a certain person to die, while he wants his boss to die because of his part in causing several young children to die of cancer. The brief interlude is over quickly and they both go back to their normal lives. Imagine Daigo's surprise when his boss turns up dead. Now he is faced with a dilemma...is the mystery woman the murderer, and if so, does he now owe her?

It will keep you guessing right up to the last, and I didn't get it so I was quite happy. If you like Japanese murder mysteries (not a cozy, so forget it), you'll enjoy this. I love them...they're very twisted and focus a lot of the absence of morality within society so tend to go a bit deeper than what's coming into bookstores nowadays. show less

un sujet assez original, mais au fil duquel on se perd un peu,