Tokyo mystery falls short

In Search Of A Distant Voice, by Taichi Yamada, Faber & Faber, €14.60.

Taichi Yamada’s Tokyo is a lonely place, where marriages are arranged by paternalistic employers, and civil servants who work late can drink pre-packaged cups of sake before crashing out for the night in office rest-stations.

It’s a sterile world, suffocatingly conformist, and an appropriate backdrop for this story about the ramifications of guilt and the constructs of identity.

‘‘Eight years ...