Shinjuku Shark by Arimasa Osawa

This is the first novel in a police procedural series -- apparently of nine books to date -- which has been massively popular in Japan. (Turned into live-action movies and manga, winner of several major popular literary prizes, massive sales -- that whole deal.) But it took from 1990 until 2007 to be translated into English.

It's been translated by Andrew Clare, and either given a very flat, matter-of-fact style, or maintained that style from the original Japanese. This is not even in the same hemisphere as a Chandler or even a McDonald; Osawa uses words like rough building blocks and cements them together into rough, solid sentences. Don't expect the prose to sing here; the dialogue in particular is flat. (Since that all may be deliberate, I won't count it as a criticism.)

Our hero is Detective Samejima, a lone wolf policeman in a society much, much harder on lone wolves than our own. Samejima was originally a "career" officer, but was too self-righteous and driven to go along and get along, so now he's got a dead-end posting in Crime Prevention in the crime-ridden Shinjuku pleasure district of Tokyo. He gets no support from his fellow officers or supervisors, and will never get another promotion.

But he still is obsessed with justice, and isn't willing to play by the usual rules, which is why the local yakuza call him the "Shinjuku Shark." (If the book were written with more attitude, that would probably become tiresome, but the staccato meat-and-potatoes prose keeps the cliches from being too obvious.)

The plot of this book involves a serial killer of policemen, and, in a very Japanese twist, the killer is using a hand-made gun (created by a man Samejima has put in prison twice and is stalking again), since obtaining regularly manufactured guns is just about impossible in Japan.

I didn't love Shinjuku Shark, and I'm not sure why it was so popular when it was originally published -- from my perspective, it's a decent, if a bit pedestrian, police procedural without as much local color or detail as I'd expected. But I'm not Japanese, and this isn't 1990, which may account for much of the difference. I do hope to read the second book once it's published here, since that's considered by many to be the best in the series. And Shinjuku Shark is a solid police procedural -- it might not be a great book, but it's a pretty good one.