A spare, deceptively candid novella, Seicho Matsumoto¡¯s ¡°Suspicion¡± is as much about crime as it is about truth, human bias and belief.
Translated by Jesse Kirkwood and out this month from Penguin Classics, it is Kirkwood¡¯s second Matsumoto translation, after the acclaimed ¡°Tokyo Express¡± in 2022.
Matsumoto (1909-1992), winner of both the Akutagawa Prize and the Kikuchi Kan Prize, didn¡¯t publish his first novel until he was 40. Yet he quickly established himself as a master of Japanese crime fiction, publishing over 30 detective novels, hundreds of short stories and nonfiction works on both modern and ancient Japanese history.
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