Detail - In this compelling murder mystery focusing on the murky world of online chat rooms, veteran Desk Sergeant Takegami finds himself investigating the double murder of a teenaged girl and a middle-aged man, who has created his own shadow family' on the Internet. This is a murder mystery focusing on the dark world of internet chat rooms populated by people attracted by the chance to be whoever they want to be. Police investigating the murder of a middleaged office worker discover emails on the victim's computer that indicate he had been a regular participant in an internet chat room. Detail - Birthdays suck! For her eighteenth, Mirissa Colson receives a package from the mother who abandoned her over a decade ago.
It is a shame that this single volume is the only novel of Miyuki Miyabe's that has made it into translation. In Japan, Miyabe is a highly successful writer whose novels have been adapted into 10 films as well. Here she is only barely known, represented only by a single detective story - All She Was Worth. All She Was Worth by Miyabe, Miyuki and a great selection of related books, art and collectibles available now at AbeBooks.com. - All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe - AbeBooks abebooks.com Passion for books.
The family secret it reveals transforms her life from trying on prom dresses to battling an ancient race of demons. Her nineteenth brings forth an even more treacherous foe—one maniacal demi-god bent on ruling the world. So much for dating.Thankfully, the years of martial arts and sharpshooter training her ex-Navy SEAL dad put her through gives her the perfect skill-set to build upon. When she’s called on to save the world—literally—Mirissa finds she has a lot more in her arsenal than just a mean roundhouse kick. Burgeoning powers she previously thought impossible, like controlling the elements and sensory expansion, give her some confidence. But when she’s hurled into a world teeming with preternatural beings, Mirissa finds herself outmatched and outgunned.
Detail - A young boy finds his destiny in a world of fantasy. L to R (Western Style).
The Bravest Story Ever Told Young Wataru Mitani's life is a mess. His father has abandoned him, and his mother has been hospitalized after a suicide attempt. Desperately he searches for some way to change his life-a way to alter his fate. To achieve his goal, he must navigate the magical world of Vision, a land filled with creatures both fierce and friendly. And to complicate matters, he must outwit a merciless rival from the real world. Wataru's ultimate destination is the Tower of Destiny where a goddess of fate awaits.
Only when he has finished his journey and collected five elusive gemstones will he possess the Demon's Bane-the key that will unlock the future. Charity, bravery, faith, grace and the power of darkness and light: these are the provinces of each gemstone. Brought together, they have the immeasurable power to bring Wataru's family back together again. Young Wataru Mitani's life is a mess. His father has abandoned him, and his mother has been hospitalized after a suicide attempt.
Desperately he searches for some way to change his life-a way to alter his fate. To achieve his goal, he must navigate the magical world of Vision, a land filled with creatures both fierce and friendly. And to complicate matters, he must outwit a merciless rival from the real world.Wataru's ultimate destination is the Tower of Destiny where a goddess of fate awaits. Only when he has finished his journey and collected five elusive gemstones will he possess the Demon's Bane-the key that will unlock the future.Charity, bravery, faith, grace and the power of darkness and light: these are the provinces of each gemstone. Brought together, they have the immeasurable power to bring Wataru's family back together again. Detail - In volume 4 of Miyuki Miyabe’s blockbuster mystery, the police investigation into the serial killings focuses on identifying the women depicted in a stash of horrific photos and videos found in Hiromi Kurihashi’s Tokyo apartment, and locating the killers’ hideout. Meanwhile, Shigeko Maehata’s journalistic career takes off with her in-depth reports on the serial killings.
A stroke of good fortune brings her into contact with Yumiko Takai as well as Koichi Amikawa, also known as Peace, who has taken Yumiko under his wing and is supporting her claims that her brother was innocent. Available in e-book format in five separate volumes, to be released through summer 2016. Other e-books in English by Miyuki Miyabe: Apparitions: Ghosts of Old Edo The Book of Heroes ICO: Castle in the Mist Brave Story Praise for Miyabe: “A window into contemporary Japanese life.”?San Francisco Chronicle “Enormously compelling combining expert pacing and psychological nuance to ultimately haunting effect.”?Publishers Weekly, starred review “Miyabe is a subtle observer of a country on the cusp. Her American readers can only hope for more chances to see through her eyes.”?The Los Angeles Times “Absorbing an artful blending of puzzle-solving and social commentary.”?Washington Post. Detail - Slowly, the answers are uncovered by sixteen-year-old Mamoru, the nephew of the taxi driver currently being held by the police on charges of manslaughter for the death of the third victim.
Determined to help his uncle, the enterprising young protagonist discovers that the girl killed by his uncle's taxi had participated in a devious scam. Slowly, the answers are uncovered by sixteen-year-old Mamoru, the nephew of the taxi driver currently being held by the police on charges of manslaughter for the death of the third victim. Determined to help his uncle. Detail - High fantasy and true love come to life in this novel based on the hit video game.
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Reads L to R (Western Style), for audience A. When a boy named Ico grows long curved horns overnight, his fate has been sealed-he is to be sacrificed in the Castle in the Mist. But in the castle, Ico meets a young girl named Yorda imprisoned in its halls. Alone they will die, but together Ico and Yorda might just be able to defy their destinies and escape the magic of the castle. Based on the video game filmmaker Guillemo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth) called a 'masterpiece', Japan's leading fantasist Miyuki Miyabe has crafted a tale of magic, loss, and love that will never be forgotten.
Detail - A series of murders shocks Tokyo’s Shinjuku ward, but Shigenori, a retired police detective, is instead obsessed with a gargoyle that seems to move. College freshman Kotaro launches a web-based investigation of the killer, and comes to find that answers may lie within an abandoned building in the center of Japan’s busiest neighborhood, and beyond the Gate of Sorrows. In this New Adult sequel to Miyabe’s The Book of Heroes, you will meet monsters from other worlds and ordinary horrors that surpass even supernatural threats.
Here is a deftly written thriller that is also a 'deep and moody' (NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW) journey through the dark side of Japan's consumer-crazed society. Ordinary people plunge into insurmountable personal debt and fall prey to dangerous webs of underground creditors-so dangerous, in fact, that murder may be the only way out. A beautiful young woman vanishes, and the detective quickly finds she was not whom she had claimed to be. Is she a victim, a killer, or both? In a country that tracks its citizens at every turn, how can two women claim the same identity and then disappear without a trace? A decent police procedural this, with lots of good touches but a few flaws. On the plus side of the ledger are the sleuth, a widower with an adopted son and a gammy leg; an ingenious believable premise of stolen identity; and the completely authentic setting of the seedier side of 90s Japan trying to keep the bubble inflated on borrowed money.
But in the minus column, a couple of pages demand to be skipped where a lawyer spouts exposition on the dangers to, and legal standing of heretofore not aforementioned folks affected by bankruptcy and personal debt that read suspiciously like Miyabe had just discovered an online legal dictionary and the cut and paste function on her word processor. More critically, I thought the novel lacked a little tension. At no point was our sleuth or his kid in any danger; every hunch proved to be correct; and I kept waiting for the twist which never arrived. It felt like Miyabe could have done more, tested the characters or taken the plot a little further, but had stayed comfortably in the black, instead of pushing for broke. Still, worth a read. Pertama kali melihat cover novel ini saya langsung penasaran untuk membacanya. Cover hasil karya Eduard Iwan Mangopang ini sangat menggambarkan isi dari cerita novel ini, dimana ada wajah sesosok seorang wanita dengan latar belakang kehidupan hiruk pikuk perkotaan.
Warna merah juga sangat pas karena bisa menarik perhatian para pembaca untuk melihat dan membeli novel ini. 'Mencari Jejak' juga sangat pas untuk terjemahan judulnya. Konsumerisme serta pemakaian kartu kredit secara berlebihan merupakan tema yang diangkat. Melihat begitu banyaknya masyarakat Jepang yang berperilaku sangat konsumtif, tidak heran jika tema tersebut memang layak untuk dibahas.
Tahun 1980 sampai 2000 merupakan tahun dimana pemakaian kartu kredit sedang diperkenalkan kepada masyarakat Jepang. Maka banyak sekali masyarakat yang terlilit utang pada tiga tahun tersebut sebagai akibat dari dampak pemakaian kartu kredirt secara berlebihan. Bahkan pada bab 11 sang penulis menjelaskan tentang permasalahan dan detail-detail akibat pemakaian kartu kredit yang mulai menjadi gaya hidup masyarakat Jepang. Penjelasan tersebut juga sangat membantu saya untuk memahami penyebab tokoh Shoko Sekine mengalami kebangkrutan pribadi. Sangat banyak sekali tokoh-tokoh yang terdapat didalam novel ini, sehingga membuat saya sedikit bingung untuk mengingat setiap tokohnya, ditambah lagi dengan nama-nama orang Jepang yang sulit untuk diingat. Tokoh Shunsuke Honma juga sedikit mengingatkan saya kepada tokoh Cormoran Strike ketika Honma berjalan pincang dan mengeluhkan rasa sakit di kakinya.
Menggunakan sudut pandang orang ketiga yaitu Honma, sangat membantu saya untuk memahami karakternya dan juga pemikirannya yang cerdik. Novel ini juga memiliki alur maju dari awal hingga akhir, walaupun ada sedikit alur mundur ketika dalam percakapan untuk menceritakan kehidupan Shoko Sekine dan kehidupan pelaku yang mencuri identitasnya sebelum mereka berdua menghilang.
Adanya sedikit alur mundur ini juga membantu saya untuk merangkai setiap motif dan alasan dari pelaku, mengapa dia pada akhirnya memilih Shoko Sekine sebagai target untuk dicuri identitasnya. Gaya bahasa yang ditulis Miyuki Miyabe juga mudah untuk dipahami serta tidak bertele-tele dan hasil terjemahannya juga sangat baik. Meskipun ada beberapa istilah dalam bahasa Jepang yang sulit untuk dipahami, tapi tidak terlalu mengganggu ketika membaca. Selain itu hampir tidak ada typo sama sekali yang membuat saya sangat lancar untuk membaca novel ini. Bagi sebagian orang mungkin akan merasa bosan ketika membaca novel ini karena hampir tidak ada konflik yang menarik. Walaupun konfliknya kurang, tetapi saya selalu dibuat penasaran dengan fakta-fakta yang ditemukan oleh Honma.
Alasan utama kurangnya konflik didalam novel ini karena sejak awal kasusnya adalah mencari orang hilang sehingga membuat konfliknya tidak semenarik kasus pembunuhan. Kebanyakan latar tempat yang dipakai adalah Tokyo, Osaka dan Utsunomiya.
Penggunaan latar kota Tokyo menurut saya sangat cocok dengan tema yang diangkat. Kota Tokyo merupakan ibu kota negara Jepang sehingga tidak aneh jika pemakaian kartu kredit dan perilaku konsumtif terjadi pada sebagian besar masyarakatnya dengan hadirnya berbagai macam bank dan penyedia jasa kartu kredit. Secara keseluruhan saya sangat menikmati novel ini karena berhasil membuat saya penasaran akan pelaku serta motifnya mencuri identitas orang lain. Saya juga jadi lebih mengetahui tentang kejamnya dunia peminjaman uang melalui kartu kredit yang banyak melakukan kecurangan dan penipuan kepada para penggunanya. Ada satu hal yang sedikit mengecewakan dari novel ini adalah Miyuki Miyabe tidak memberikan kelanjutan cerita setelah pelaku ditemukan, sehingga membuat saya masih penasaran. Novel yang sangat saya rekomendasikan karena selain membaca cerita fiksi, saya juga diberikan ilmu baru tentang konsumerisme yang terjadi di Jepang.
Baca selengkapnya di: https://tmblr.co/Znxzkq2DKOWpa. More like 3.5 stars really There are, I believe, two types of mystery, which differ based on their attitude to crime. The first type, the classical, sees crime as an aberration in a fundamentally healthy society.
Criminals commit their crimes purely for personal reasons: there is no connection between crime and larger societal ills. Agatha Christie novels of the 20’s and 30’s, for instance, often have a Communist character, and suspicion naturally falls on him, because he’s a Communist, but he is never the criminal, not because Christie was a fellow traveler but because she refuses to admit that there could be any connection between the injustices a Communist is (at least nominally) opposing and crime, which occurs only because some people are bad.
In the classical type of mystery, the police may not be very good at their job, but even if they are idiotic bunglers their goal is to see justice done, and they work with the detective, often quite closely. Once the crime has been solved and the criminal arrested, society can return to its previous placid equilibrium, confident that everything is for the best. The second type, the noir, takes the opposite view, in which crime is the natural result of a fundamentally corrupt society.
Wealth and power lead to crime, and also make it difficult for justice to be done. The police are usually working against the detective here, even if, as is sometimes the case, he or she is one of them: sometimes they are, of course, simply corrupt, but even if honest and well-intentioned, they are inevitably compromised by their position in a corrupt power structure, the dictates of which they are forced to follow because that is, in the end, their job. (Noirs need not be ideologically left-wing, by the way: right-wing fantasies of vigilante justice can also fall under this rubric.) Even when the crime is solved in a noir, there’s no guarantee that justice will be done: the detective can discover whodunit, but, unlike in classical mysteries, sometimes that’s not enough.
“All She Was Worth” falls on the noir side of the line, because it is very clear that the real culprit is the uncontrolled rise of consumer lending in Japan in the late ’80s and early ‘90s (when the book is set). However, rather than using the format to make this abstract problem more concrete by creating a crime which is directly tied to, say, an executive at a credit-card company, Miyabe chooses to leave a fair amount of distance between the social forces that gave rise to the crime and the criminal herself. This is an interesting gambit, one that is admittedly more realistic - most credit-card company executives don't commit crimes - but makes most of the usual elements of the noir unusable. For instance, there is no violence in the book, not because Japan is not a very violent country — it isn’t, of course, but our detective, Shunsuke Honma, is a policeman taking a leave of absence after being shot in the leg, so clearly violence is possible — but because the powers-that-be, not being directly implicated in any crimes, have no need to send goons to beat Honma up.
In fact, Honma encounters virtually no opposition to his sleuthing, which is a problem, as the noir detective usually figures out who’s responsible by finding out who’s trying to stop the investigation. Without this, it’s hard for us to connect the dots Miyabe wants us to connect, so she gives Honma a long (but entirely friendly) interview with a bankruptcy lawyer to make sure we acquire the necessary background. Even the usual order of the investigation is disrupted, as we learn who the criminal is very soon after we learn that a crime has been committed: it’s the questions of how and why that occupy Honma for most of the book. The result is that there’s not much in the way of suspense. We know the criminal, and we know, roughly, the nature of the crime: most of the book just consists of Honma filling in the details. It’s a rather bureaucratic procedure, so it makes sense that bureaucracies also produce many of Honma’s clues: for instance, you will learn quite a bit about Japan’s family registration system.
(The whole investigation is very modern for a 1990 value of modern: the trails that Honma follows are of paper, not footprints.) But bureaucracies are not, generally speaking, intrinsically interesting, and in the absence of suspense all that’s left to keep the reader reading is the character of Honma himself. Luckily, he is mostly up to the task, with some of the book’s best scenes being the domestic ones in which the investigation only barely figures. Honma is a widower with a 10-year-old son, who still hasn’t quite gotten over the loss of his wife and worries that his job takes him away from home too often. Such worries are especially pronounced in this case, given that it’s not part of his job: he starts investigating as a favor to a cousin of his late wife, and keeps going after the cousin repudiates him — he didn’t like the results Honma was getting — because he’s curious.
And also because he feels increasing sympathy for both the victim and the criminal: it’s this empathy that makes him in turn an easy character for the reader to empathize with. The secondary characters, many of them young women who knew either the criminal or the victim (both young women as well), are also quite well done, and serve to create a secondary theme around the paucity of options available to young women in Japan in 1992. All the young female characters are either doing some sort of essentially secretarial job, or are engaged in one form or another of sex work. Almost as much as the credit card debt, it’s this sense of limited options that seems to have trapped both the criminal and victim: and of course the two work together as well, as sex work, which pays better than the secretarial jobs, is often the only way to pay off that debt. This general feeling of walls closing in creates a sympathy for the characters that makes us want to know more about them, and it is this, rather than the usual desire to solve the mystery, that drives the book. However, the nature of the mystery is such that we never meet either the criminal or the victim, so there’s a limit to the extent to which this can replace good old-fashioned suspense. “All She Was Worth” is better than you would expect a non-mysterious mystery to be, but it’s still not entirely successful.
Let's face it, All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe has a rather good English translation, the translator Alfred Birnbaum does have some good writing going for him, and his English does make the story catchy; but on the other hand, the Chinese translation that I read is just one great flat boredom. I like that the heroine(?) isn't some spoilers removed, she is just a girl struggling to survive in a really bad situation, I also like the story addresses the horror of a young woman found herself weighted down by her parents' debt and with gangsters hot on her heels demanding her to pay back the money by selling her body, no one can help her, even the laws fail to protect her, etc. Perhaps it isn't entirely fair for me to rant this book 2 stars because in the time I read this book I wasn't really in the mood for realism and criticism on society in crime & mystery novels, but.the writing and the story just failed to hold my interest after 40 or so pages, so.bye bye book.