I've been away from home for three months. I lost my mind and walked to the end of the earth. But I'm home now and I read Tokyo Express by Seichou Matsumoto. I've not read many detective books (only Higashino Keigo and China Mieville come to mind, yet Mieville is far from a detective book author). But aren't most stories detective stories? There is always a mystery to solve, and a hero to detect. Most mystery stories I've seen are told in the television series format, like Dark, True Detective, or that recent show about a Scottish detective who has to find a woman who's trapped in a pressurised water tank by an evil old couple. All with the tropes that cover the viewer like the childhood blanket, the alcoholic but talented detective, the unwilling and distrusting police chief who eventually betrays the protagonist, a killer who listens to classical music, flashbacks of a dead spouse their face luminous under a morning blanket.
Yet Tokyo Express, written in 1958, contains none of it. It's a dense novel about a couple of cops trying to break a suspect's alibi using train timetsables that's refreshingly realistic. There are no Sherlock Holmes deductions, though Matsumoto's Tokyo detective reuses the eureka moment trope in the cafe no less than three times. There is no Alex Cross style climactic showdown or chase scene either. But it was still a fun read for commuting since I sold my car. I've been reading approximately 30% more since I stopped driving. I can't say my legs are happy, though. Or my nose.
For the last 3 weeks I've been thinking about only one writer in the entire world. That person is Ursula Le Guin. Four years ago I took a seminar about The Dispossessed, which I found so boring, the only thing I remember about it is sad swollen-eyed Nitya Sivakumar, telling me her boyfriend dumped her because she smoked too many cigarettes. Four years after that I bought The Left Hand of Darkness from a bookstore in București while some Romanian author gave an interview on her work. A suitably strange book about nonbinary aliens. I read it in a mouldy berth on a Soviet-era sleeper train chugging its way into Moldova. And last week I read the six Earthsea books and pirated three more of her SF works.
SF meditations about gender are a dime a dozen. What amazed me, though, was the depth of feeling and understanding in describing the outdoors. I've read no other writer who depicts hiking so accurately, yet you'll never find the word in her oeuvre. I think she does so by depicting: place, time and presence. The place is nature and balance with nature, sustainability, yin and yang, themes that run through many of Le Guin's work. Time and presence are perhaps the same. The act of hiking slows down time... One is forced to experience life at a maximum speed of 5km/h. It is also *grounding*, it forces one to be present lest you slip off a ridge or bump into a bear or step on a snail. Le Guin was no larper. She understood it all intimately.
But this isn't about Le Guin, I've already written more than I did about Matsumoto. Sorry about that. As for grand adventures, I find that I am in a Tehanu-like mood. After surprising my knees with 17,174m of elevation gain and glissading down Bulgarian mountains, for now I want to sleep under clean sheets and cook good food. I don't want to look at my sleeping bag or take any trains for 6 months at the very least. But after that the Patagonia calls to me, the Himalayas call to me.