I was really looking forward to this book. I previously watched the Netflix series and was familiar with the original Sekisui Home swindle on which the book was based. I'd read parts of the book in Japanese, and was planning to review the English version for Japonica, the journal of Japanese culture.

Unfortunately, something went wrong with the translation. It is not very good. In fact, it was impossible to finish.

I went back and looked at the Japanese original, and it's decent. The translation, though, suffers from 2 problems. First, the dialogue in the original is written in heavy Osaka dialect. Imagine a mafia novel set in NYC. It's tough to translate. Unfortunately, it gets translated into some kind of weird English slang that doesn't work. Second, it looks like the translation was done quickly. It's correct. Each sentence in the English matches the Japanese sentence. But the nuance isn't there. And the flow is missing. It feels like a first draft. It needed a second draft and a third draft to smooth it out and convert it from a literal line-by-line textbook translation of the Japanese to a readable English novel.

So sadly I have to say, this is not worth picking up.

This is the kind of book that I really do want to love, but I admit to having a lot of trouble getting into it. I see from other reviews that it is a drama and I'm thinking that this may be that rare exception when a story is better on screen than it is on page. However, I appreciate having it and am glad that it is in book form. Enthusiasts will want to immerse in both.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. I hope it does well.

I've become a great fan of Japanese crime fiction,both contemporary and "Golden Age", so I was looking forward to reading Tokyo Swindlers by Ko Shinjo.
Sadly while it's a very interesting look into the world of "land sharks" and the shadowy world of land fraud in Japan it's very far from thrilling. Apparently the book has been made into a Netflix story and it reads very much like "the book of the movie", making me wonder if the series or the book came first, and never quite hits the spot. That's a real shame as the plot is good,some of the characters are very interesting but it never gets beyond ,"an ok read" and there's key part that I would have thought was clever if I hadn't already read a very similar scene in the same setting in a Scandinavian detective novel several years ago.
I really wanted to like this, and fully expected to after being spoiled by several excellent Japanese crime novels recently ,but sadly it always promised more than it ultimately delivered.

I decided to pause watching the drama in order to finish the book first and I found that the show really fleshed a lot of things out more. I'm not sure if this is merely a lack of context that the text itself doesn't provide because a large chunk of the Japanese population would already be familiar with certain ideas or if it's an artistic choice, but I did find myself lost at certain points.

Unfortunately I also found it difficult to keep track of most of the characters as they didn't really have unique voices and there were multiple abrupt cuts as if I was reading the drama in novel form instead of a novel that was adapted into a drama. There's definitely a good story in here, but I'm not sure if this is the format for me in regards to this particular story.

At its best, crime fiction books around Japanese culture are a real treat. Sadly, Tokyo Swindlers felt more like a punishment. There is no tension, the characters cannot be differentiated and any plot is indistinguishable amid such an anaemic narrative. I learnt a little about Tokyo real estate but was hoping for so much more from this offering.