This is a collection of short stories that were first published between 1985 and 1988 in different magazines. In other words, these short stories were written by Higashino at the very start (1985) of his career.
There are three volumes of short stories published by Kobunsha: 『犯人のいない殺人の夜』, 『怪しい人びと』and 『あの頃の誰か』.
Review
Not only did I love these short stories, but I was also glad to read some of Higashino’s first writings. All the short stories are entertaining, easy to read, suspenseful, and Keigo Higashino always manages to surprise his reader at the end, even in a 40 pages short story.
That being said, I don’t consider this collection to be the best I have read. I prefered 『嘘をもうひとつだけ』or 『探偵倶楽部』which are also collections of short stories. In these two books we follow the same detectives throughout the stories: Kyoichiro Kaga in the first one and the Membership Detective Club in the second one.
But I really enjoyed reading 『犯人のいない殺人の夜』. I need to read more books by Keigo Higashino to confirm this, but I think that I particularly like his writings from the 1980s and 1990s. While I found some of the short stories better than others, I also found that they all had this particular style that I love so much in Keigo Higashino’s books.
I read this book very fast and could not put it down once I started a short story. If you like short murder mysteries,『犯人のいない殺人の夜』is a good choice!
About
I’m learning Japanese, Korean and Chinese to read mystery novels and play video games in these languages.
Learning languages has always been one of my favourite hobbies, but I’m not a social person, I don’t like to meet new people and make friends, this is just not me. I keep hearing that languages are meant for communication, that we have to actively use them, talk with natives, etc. and for a long time, I thought it was weird to learn languages just to read books, with zero interest in communication.
Now I don’t really care what people think, and this blog helped me a lot to stop doubting myself and just do what I enjoy doing.
How interesting! I can easily see myself devouring this book. Thank you for the review. 🙂
Thank you for your comment 😊 I plan to read the two other collections of short stories this year too!
Hi. Are the books mentioned here below or above N3 level? Thanks
Most of the books I talk about are novels, so I would say that they are more on the N2-N1 side. However, I can recommend ちょっと今から仕事やめてくる by 北川恵海 (Emi Kitagawa) and ビブリア古書堂の事件手帖 by 三上延 (En Mikami). Both are light novels, the first one is about work and I think that you can read it with N3. The second one is a mystery, the beginning might be a little difficult, but once you get into the story, I would say it is a N3-N2 level.
I also found that Haruki Murakami was very easy to read, definitely worth giving it a try if you are working towards N2.
I haven’t talked about it much on my blog recently, but Miri Masuda’s manga series すーちゃん is great to start reading in Japanese.
Thanks for your comments and suggestions! 🙂