The Train

The Train is a full-length mystery novel by the Japanese author Miyuki Miyabe, published in 1992 and awarded the 6th Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize in 1993; the Chinese edition was translated by Zhang Qiuming and published by Nanhai Publishing House. In the story, suspended police officer Shunsuke Honma's nephew Kazuya Kurisaka is about to get married, but when applying for a credit card for his fiancée, Akiko Sekine, he learns that she has long been debt-ridden and bankrupt; the next day, Akiko disappears. Honma is asked to look for her privately: he visits her workplace and finds her résumé entirely fabricated; he enters her home and finds traces of her life almost completely erased; he finds the lawyer who handled the bankruptcy and discovers that the real Akiko Sekine is someone else. As the investigation proceeds layer by layer, a woman pursued by debt in the era of consumer credit and constantly changing identities to flee gradually emerges. The word "train" comes from Buddhist scriptures, referring to a fiery cart that carries the souls of those who did evil in life to hell; Miyabe uses it as a metaphor for a runaway society and lives caught in the grip of debt. The book conducts its investigation in a calm, restrained tone, resting the suspense on "who on earth is she," while analyzing credit-card abuse, personal bankruptcy, and identity fraud around the collapse of the bubble economy. It is one of Miyabe's representative works of social-school mystery and was selected for The Guardian's "Top Ten Asian Crime and Mystery Novels."