A Midsummer's Equation

I remember watching the live-action movie for this one many years back when it first came out. Aside from it being set in sunny Okinawa with a lot of shots of the ocean and something about a little boy being involved, I couldn't remember a thing about it. In fact, I had a vague impression that this one didn't even have a murder in it (I was very wrong). This book departs from Higashino's usual gimmick and serves things up to us in a more conventional formula, but still with enough twists and turns along the way. I very much enjoyed this.

To start off, this book is not set in Okinawa. It's set in a rural seaside town called Hari Cove, with stunning beaches and a thriving marine ecology. Some of its residents are going head to head with a mining company who is proposing to start drilling operations in the ocean to retrieve precious minerals found on the seabed. Hari Cove is dealing with such industrial threats to its main attraction (the ocean), but also falling behind on tourist numbers and the like. The problem becomes one not just of preserving the marine ecosystems, but of sustaining the town itself.

One might think that this book would go hard on the environmental message here, but to my surprise that's actually not the case. Yukawa, our central “detective” figure and the titular Galileo, is hired by the company doing the mining in Hari Cove as a scientific expert and consultant. It appears that the company is actually not the villainous money-grabbing corporation that is usually the case in plots like these - they are investing money and effort into conducting surveys of the seabed and developing technology to ensure that the mining disrupts as little of the marine ecology as possible. But the residents are still concerned - how little can you disrupt marine ecology when you're going to be mining the seabed? We see a group of residential marine activists passionately debate the topic with the mining company.

On his way to Hari Cove, Yukawa meets Kyohei, a pre-teen boy who is about to spend his summer vacation with his aunt and uncle, Shigehiro and Setsuko, who run the Green Rock Inn. By some coincidence, Yukawa also arranges to stay at the Green Rock Inn during his time at Hari Cove. Though usually annoyed with children, Yukawa finds some joy in conducting science experiments with Kyohei, and teaching him how to do his mathematics homework. Shigehiro and Setsuko's only daughter, Narumi, also helps out at the Green Rock Inn and strikes up a friendship with Yukawa, even though she is part of the group of marine activists who are in the midst of opposing the mining operations at Hari Cove. Being a failing rural town, the only other guest at Green Rock Inn is a quiet elderly man, Tsukahara, who is later discovered dead on the seawall with a head injury.

The pacing of this book is a bit slower, and we spend a lot of time delving into the characters, their interpersonal relationships, and eventually their backstories. I never found this book draggy, however, and unwittingly finished most of this in one day. The chapters were short, and that helped it to feel choppier, even though we're not actually getting a lot done. We also see the resident police duo again, Kusanagi and Utsumi, this time conducting their half of the investigation from Tokyo rather than Hari Cove. I liked that this book had more time to talk about something other than the murder - that is, about tourism in rural towns and the importance of preservation of marine biology. I also found it interesting that instead of being hard-hitting with environmental activism, the book settled for a more neutral stance in which it encouraged open-mindedness amongst both sides so that compromises can be reached. That's certainly different from what we're used to in media nowadays.

The characters in this one were also quite memorable, particularly Kyohei and the unlikely friendship he strikes up with Yukawa. Given that Yukawa is basically an iteration of Sherlock Holmes, prickly even at his best, it is endearing and wholesome to see him somehow develop a soft spot for the boy, in his own prickly way. We also get to see a bit of development on the other characters in the novel and sympathize with each for different reasons. There aren't really any particularly unlikeable characters in this book, every one of them having insurmountable reasons for their actions.

Overall though, a great installment to the Detective Galileo series, and certainly would recommend to any fan of murder mysteries.