SEICHO MATSUMOTO was one of Japan’s best known and most significant 20th-century crime writers, credited with leading the break from so-called “puzzle fiction” – locked room mysteries, traditional whodunnits and the like – and instead taking the genre towards social commentary and psychological observation. 

Point Zero (Bitter Lemon, £9.99), first published in 1959, is amongst his key novels. 

Its 26-year-old protagonist marries, via a matchmaker, an advertising salesman 10 years her senior. As Teiko gets to know him a little, her hope grows that it’s a partnership which could work for both of them. But then, after only a couple of weeks of marriage, her husband sets out from Tokyo on a business trip to the north – and vanishes. As Teiko investigates she finds a tragedy with its roots in the post-war US occupation, and the ways in which women, only a generation before her own, survived both war and peace.