Lady First - An Inspector Inoue Mystery by Lea O’Harra

Lady First - An Inspector Inoue Mystery by Lea O’Harra

The third novel in the Inspector Inoue mystery series takes as its theme Japan’s persisting gender imbalance. As for its title, although Japanese men routinely take precedence over Japanese women in terms of privileges at home or at work, some possessing a knowledge of western ways are in the habit of ironically uttering ‘lady first’ on the rare occasions when they allow a woman to go before them: for example, on entering or leaving a room.

After young Mayumi Ikeuchi is found dead one mild April evening, stabbed in the back of the neck in a park in the little town of Fujikawa, Chief Inspector Inoue finds, once again, that there is no shortage of suspects. These include Mr Tani, her boss at the nightclub in a neighboring city where she’d started working only a few days before her murder, notorious for sexually harassing the female staff, and Atsushi Taniguchi, an office worker who lives in Mayumi’s neighborhood and has a habit of beating up his wife. There is also Nose-san, a middle-aged loser who inhabits a shabby little house with an elderly, sickly mother just opposite the park where Mayumi’s body is found.