3.5

I wasn't at all clear about what this book would be about because I'm very good at skimming blurbs so I'm often surprised by the content.

Tokyo Swindlers is about a group of people who manage to swindle big companies out of billions of yen by pretending they own land that is actually owned by others.

I'm not clear on whether the detective Tatsu has featured in other books by this author but he plays a very minor role in this one. So don't get the idea that it's a book about bad guys getting their comeuppance - far from it.

What we actually get is two instances of how big companies are easily fooled into handing over vast amounts of cash for land that is then found to belong to someone else. Only one of the players - Takumi - seems to show any responsibility or shame for his acts but he joined the gang to expunge the shame he felt that his father had been similarly swindled many years before.

I've got to admit that the amounts involved sound utterly insane. Having bought land in Ireland (3/4 acre for €39,000) it seems ludicrous that a lesser amount of land costs the equivalent of €61,500,000. But land in Tokyo is precious so just bear that in mind when you are reading this.

What baffled me about this book is it's lack of any real direction. We get two similar swindles, we have a few deaths, we have a detective who is retiring and we have possibly the oddest (and most hilarious) sex scene at the end of the book.

I kept reading because I expected an exciting denouement but it was just as average as the rest of the book. Parts were interesting but I would not class this as a detective novel or a thriller. Perhaps its a piece of advice for Japanese city dwellers.

Thankyou to Netgalley for the advance review copy.

It’s a Japanese Oceans 11, except that it’s land transactions rather than casinos and the victims are corporations. The novel is very ambiguous as to who the reader should root for: will the swindlers manage it? Will the buyers twig that something’s up? Will the police catch the swindlers? The scenes I found most touching were those between Takumi and Nagai the reclusive programmer. A short read and something of a cautionary tale of caveat emptor. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

As Tsujimoto Takumi's life falls apart in the wake of the deaths of his wife and son, he drifts from dead end job to dead end job. At one of these jobs, he meets a man by the name of Harrison Yamanaka, who offers to pay Takumi handsomely to run simple errands. It doesn't take a genius to figure out these errands are highly illegal, but the works are not bad, and Takumi doesn't have to work any harder than necessary. Soon after he starts working for Harrison, Harrison offers him to come into his inner circle as a land swindler in Tokyo. Almost as soon as he starts in this dangerous, yet thrilling career, Takumi begins to see the same patterns in his new "job" as those that had lead to his family's death, and he begins to realize that is boss may be far worse than a man just conning some corporations out of billions.

This was a pretty straightforward heist novel. Pretty standard cast of characters for the genre, other than them being a bit older than normal (which was nice), and a predictable plot line pretty much from the minute we find out what lead Takumi's family's death. It was still a fun quick read, though, in the way a story about a bunch of con artists getting away with it can be. Especially since we find out some interesting things about the people they are swindling. The group Harrison puts together are as cold as they get and have zero remorse for what they are doing but I found that I had thanks to the information Harrison has dug up on their targets I didn't feel entirely bad about them getting robbed blind. Especially Aoyagi, dude was a grade A sleazeball and deserved whatever he got for being a moron.

Oh, and Harrison is an absolute psychopath, and while he makes up very little of the story, I think it's really important to keep in mind that he sees something of himself in Takumi.

Overall, I'd recommend this for anyone looking for a fast-paced, crime novel that's more about how low we are willing to sink when we allow our grief to swallow us.

As always, thanks to Stone Bridge Press and Netgalley for the eArc!

I found this to be quite entertaining as well as informative. An unscrupulous gang of Japanese rascals practice land swindles, employing some extremely complicated methods, but the rewards are great. What I found informative was the mathematics involved in determining the value of a piece of real estate in Tokyo currently being used as, say, a parking lot. I must admit to ignorance of the Network series, which I shall look up, and that this is based on fact. But I was entertained throughout.

Coming into this reading experience with the premise on my mind, I was excited for what was in store for me: The male MC is bound by his past and in an attempt to free himself from its clutches, he joins a team of people who commit acts of real estate fraud, bringing in large sums of money. However, something is amiss because no matter how successful these operations are, Takumi still feels an emptiness that threatens to conquer him. On the other hand, we have a retiring detective who's put on a case that he's compelled to solve - even if it means spending less time with his wife - because it'll absolve him of his past. Takumi and the retiring detective share that connection and it's all because of one person.

Now, with that in mind, I am happy to say that this book is fairly decent given its length because a lot happens. I found the storytelling to be quite interesting as it was heavily detailed in terms of setting up how these real estate fraud operations commence. Though confused at times, I also enjoyed the switches in character POVs (it made me feel like I did when I read Murakami's Kafka on the Shore - anticipating the two MCs' meeting). Additionally, despite the typos - which I get are inevitable in works of translation - this story was really well written in that it kept me engaged.

On the other hand, I felt that because this story wasn't told in first person POV, but rather third person omniscient, there was a feeling of detachment that I didn't really appreciate. This didn't help with how affected Takumi was by his past - even though I did feel for him when what happened was revealed. Even so, besides Tatsu (the aforementioned retiring detective), none of the characters were even remotely likable to me. These two things are really my only plights with the story, but overall, I had a fairly good time reading this and I'm excited to watch the Netflix adaptation!

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.