Kizuna Coastがたったの１２０円

The Kizuna Coast: A Rei Shimura Mystery (Rei Shimura Mysteries Book 11) (English Edition) (2014/12/15) Sujata Massey 商品詳細を見る

Rei Shimuraが主人公のミステリーがあることを知らなかったのですが、最新作は東日本大震災を舞台にしたもので、題名もKizuna Coastと 絆という日本語がそのまま使われるかたちになっています。興味本位でアマゾンを調べてみたら、値段がなんと１２０円、何かの間違いですぐに値段が上がってはいけないとすかさずポチりました（笑）

When a devastating earthquake rocks Japan’s northeast coast, a tsunami follows and Rei Shimura is swept into her most rugged adventure yet. The mystery begins with an SOS from Rei’s friend, the antiques dealer Mr. Ishida, trapped among thousands of displaced and dead on the Tohoku coast. Rei rushes to Tokyo, where she discovers Ishida Antiques may have been burglarized. Rei takes Mr. Ishida’s abandoned dog, Hachiko, on a volunteer bus to the ravaged town of Sugihama. But Mr. Ishida’s got more work for her, since he lost contact with his antiques apprentice Mayumi and is frantic with worry. He won’t leave Sugihama without knowing the fate of the troubled 19-year-old girl from a famous lacquer-making family.



(Wikipedia)
Sujata Massey is a mystery writer born 1964 in Sussex, England who emigrated with her family to the United States at the age of 5. She attended Johns Hopkins University graduating in 1986 and worked on the Baltimore Evening Sun.[1]
She is best known for her series featuring Rei Shimura, a Californian born to a Japanese father and an American mother. Many of her novels are set in Japan and in Washington, D.C. On her official Website, Massey states that she has begun work on a new Rei Shimura book set in post-tsunami Japan entitled The Kizuna Coast.

作家のサイトからの抜粋です。

Welcome!
The Kizuna Coast is available now!
The new Rei Shimura novel, THE KIZUNA COAST, is now available as an e-book and trade paperback. Right now, the paperback is on sale at Amazon.com, and the e-book is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Kobo. Distribution spreads to independent and chain bookstores and all Internet sales platforms worldwide on March 15, 2015. I’ll let you know later on about the various public and Internet special events in March. Hardcover and audio-book versions are coming out that month, too.

絆という感じについては以下のように説明がありました。

Kizuna means bonds of loving kindness, and was used often right after the tsunami when referring to help people gave each other. According to my friend Satoshi, the characters forming that kizuna are very old Chinese ones reinterpreted over centuries of life in Japan. On the left, the character means “thread” or “string”; the character to its right originally meant “half” but now refers to “strong feelings that tie people.”

I want to share one last kizuna story with you in 2014. It comes from Ishinomaki, one of the most devastated towns that I researched when trying to create my own fictional village in Tohoku called Sugihama.

Hamaguri Hama is an Ishinomaki café located an old Japanese house that sits on a cliff overlooking the bay. I hope this short film celebrating daily life at Hamaguri Hama will make you smile, and perhaps inspire you to visit Tohoku one day.

Thanks for stopping by. Explore what’s new, and let me know what you think.

Sujata

Hamagurihama Promotional Short from Clary Estes on Vimeo.

最初の章をサイトでも公開してくれていますが、Great Eastern Kanto Earthquakeとなっていますね。架空の地震なのか、それとも東日本大震災のつもりなのか。ちょっと読み進めてみないとわからないですね。。。

Chapter One
If you’ve been through an earthquake, you remember.
You recall where you were and exactly what you’d been doing. What you had for breakfast and the plan for the day’s activities. It’s much harder to explain the panic that rolls through you when the ground won’t stop shaking. When everything that you trusted to be safe and solid is not.

I’ve weathered a variety of earthquakes, large and small, in California and Japan. But the earthquake that still figures in my dreams is the big one: the Great Eastern Kanto Earthquake of 2011. Even though I wasn’t even there when the earth buckled.

I was perched midway in the Pacific, playing mah jongg, a thousand-year-old Asian game of tiles that moves fast and furious. That makes it all the more confusing. The mah jongg set my Hawaiian friends played with dated from the 1920s, so its 144 tiles were probably ivory or bone. This gave me the creeps, although the set’s owner, Pak Chang, argued that such old tiles carried great feng shui. But that disagreement was the least of it. Pak, my great-uncle Yosh, and their cohort, my neighbor Lilia DeCruz, continually fussed about the right rules to follow: American, Japanese or British. As a result, almost everything went–including controversial “dirty hands” played with tile pairs from more than one suit.

値段が安いですし、舞台が日本のミステリーということで、迷った方はとりあえずポチりをお勧めします。