GoKawiilWhen local police investigate the death of a young couple on Kashii beach, a rocky strip on the eastern side of Hakata Bay on the island of Kyushu in the south of Japan, they assume it’s a lovers’ suicide. The pair is neatly dressed with no sign of distress, just the bloom of rosy cheeks from ingesting cyanide.
The tradition of lovers ending their lives together, called shinjū, was big in the middle of the Edo period, at the turn of the eighteenth century, but experienced a resurgence from the 1920s through the fifties. Perhaps most famously, the novelist Osamu Dazai attempted it in 1930. He survived, but his girlfriend died, and the failed attempt marked everything he touched thereafter, including his most celebrated novel No Longer Human. (Dazai and another woman tried it again in 1948; sadly, they succeeded.)
So while the events of Seicho Matsumoto’s mystery Tokyo Express unfold in 1957, police fall back on a long tradition to explain these bodies on the beach. Case closed. But not everything adds up. A single receipt undermines the whole picture.
Seicho Matsumoto, Tokyo Express , translated by Jesse Kirkwood (Modern Library, 2025).
The Victims
The story begins in a Japanese restaurant in Tokyo, where industrialist Tatsuo Yasuda frequently comes to entertain his guests, government officials with whom he’s wangling deals and contracts. Rumors of corruption mean the host protects the anonymity of his connections. Thankfully, the waitresses don’t ask many questions. One in particular, Toki, is Yasuda’s regular server. She’s also the woman found on the beach.
She was last seen by Yasuda and two other waitresses from the restaurant on platform 15 of the train station, boarding an overnight with a handsome young man. “And who is he?” asks one of the girls. There were rumors Toki had a lover, but no one had yet seen or met the man. But here they were together!
His name is, as it turns out, Kenichi Sayama. He serves as assistant section chief at Ministry X, responsible for procurement. Embroiled in allegations of corruption, Ministry X is currently under investigation, and Sayama is a key witness in the scandal. He’s the man found on the beach alongside Toki.
Yasuda spots the couple on the platform when the two servers accompany him to his own train on platform 13, headed home for his weekly visit with his tubercular wife, Ryoko, in Kamakura. The bodies are found a week later.
Birth of a Story
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