Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: “Three Assassins feels like a fever dream that makes sense when you’re in it, but whose strange contours linger long after you wake up.” —New York Times

Three Assassins is the high-stakes, high-style, and utterly propulsive follow-up to Kotaro Isaka’s international bestseller, Bullet Train, a Crime Reads “Most Anticipated Book of 2021.”

Suzuki is an ordinary man until his wife is murdered. To get answers and his revenge, Suzuki abandons his law-abiding lifestyle and takes a low-level job with a front company operated by the crime gang Maiden, who are responsible for his wife’s death. Before long, Suzuki finds himself caught up in a network of quirky and highly effective assassins:

The Cicada is a knife expert.
The Pusher nudges people into oncoming traffic.
The Whale whispers bleak aphorisms to his victims until they take their own lives.

Intense and electrifying, Three Assassins delivers a wild ride through the criminal underworld of Tokyo, populated by contract killers who are almost superhumanly good at their jobs.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I read these books out of order; the fact is I didn't realize at the time I read them that there *was* an order! I strongly recommend reading this book before reading Bullet Train, because many details will make a lot better sense in the latter if you do.

A truly trippy, peculiarly anime-inflected story about...about...umm...Life, The Universe, and Everything, maybe? How easy it is to come unmoored from societal norms when they stop serving you? When an ordinary teacher's wife is assassinated, he doesn't grieve and get on with life. He turns his entire existence into a revenge-dealing machine. (Okay, okay, it's totally fridging and it's not a little icky in 2024, but the book was written in Japan in 2004; your 2020s US sensibilities are a liability in this read.)

What kept me reading in spite of feeling, quite often in fact, that I wanted to give Suzuki a hard shake and a two-cheek slap, was the inventiveness and gonzo pace of the exercise. Read it in chunks, not driblets. You'll think too much about how incredibly implausible the entire enterprise is unless you build a solid head of steam. The first ~30 pages at the least should be taken at a gulp.

A big part of the universe created here is the awful, cruel nature of modern society. The assassins who commit mayhem for money are no more horrible than corporate lobbyists who pay to pass laws that get their masters out of having to pay taxes, or damages, or take responsibilty for any awful thing that their (in)actions cause.

And that really os the heart of the book: Who are the clients for the terrible deeds that Suzuki and his co-workers are performing? Who has the money to make these terrible things happen, untraceably, repeatably, repeatedly?

Those in Control.

I'm not going to belabor this point. If you get it, you got it already. This, however, very important in the events that you're reading about in this book, and the next. The cruelty of the universe isn't personal. There isn't some vengeful gawd looking down on you and pointing an accusatory digit, using that to hurl thunderbolts and maledictions upon you more precisely. It would be, I suppose, comforting if there were.

Instead it's those in control looking at a population-level situation and moving the pieces of the solution into place. The motives, the results, the consequences...never vouchsafed to any of the victims inevitably suffering from those impersonal moves. Give someone a target for their misery and that target takes the heat and bears the blows. That's gawd's purpose in religion: the heat for the awfulness of the world is justified because gawd is mad at you, or your neighbors, or The Gays, or...the list is endless, changes with (often generational) fashions, and never includes the real culprits. If one depersonalizes, takes the face away from, the abuser, there's no outrage to build into rage, then erupt into violence.

Suzuki learns this horrible truth in the first thirty pages. No one murdered his wife. She was killed by a person, but not for a reason. Now what? Knowledge is power. Power over what you do next. Suzuki has to decide what will replace his desire for personal revenge.

And that, mes amis, is this novel's point. I'm not particularly edified by it, I'm not too happy about the violence herein so lovingly described. I was entertained by the full-throttle pace of the storytelling. I was abosrbed by this Everyman's decisions, the thoughtfulness of them, and the resultant mayhem. If you saw the westernized adaptation of Bullet Train, you have a grasp on the pace and style of events. But, and this is CRUCIAL!, you have no smallest idea of what the story is about. Read the books. ( )

La vida de Suzuki, un joven profesor de matemáticas, da un inesperado vuelco cuando su esposa muere asesinada. A partir de ese momento, Suzuki, en busca de venganza, hará lo posible por rastrear a los culpables. Lo que no espera es que en su camino se crucen tres inusuales asesinos profesionales, los mejores del gremio, y cada uno de ellos con su propia agenda.

"La Ballena", rey de la dialéctica, aboca a sus objetivos al suicidio.

"La Cigarra" habla demasiado, pero su manejo de los cuchillos es inigualable.

"El Empujón" mata a sus víctimas empujándolas con suavidad al tráfico de Tokio.

Suzuki deberá enfrentarse a todos ellos si quiere encontrar la justicia que tanto desea.

Desenfrenada y elegante a la vez, Tres asesinos es un viaje vertiginoso al inframundo criminal de Tokio, poblado por los mercenarios mejor preparados del mundo; una suerte de tragedia clásica en la que nada sobra, pasada por el filtro del mejor cine de Tarantino o los hermanos Coen.

Fans of Isaka's 'Bullet Train' will lap this up, although it doesn't quite make the same impression. Three assassins, and one widower intent on revenge on the person or people responsible for the death of his wife. Giving up his job as a maths teacher, Suzuki joins a criminal agency to get closer to the truth. OK, so it's not that probable, but go with the flow and Isaka will draw you into his crazy world of philosophising killers and oddball characters. With the narrative perspective switching between characters it's a nicely rounded story.

The blurb isn't exactly what happens in the book: Suzuki doesn't have to 'take each of the [three assassins] on', but eventually all paths collide and we barrel towards an explosive and violent conclusion.

As I said initially, for me this doesn't quite have the stunning impact that 'Bullet Train' did, but it is satisfyingly wonderful and is unlike most stuff that is out there, so it's a minor quibble.

4.5 stars, just not quite a 5. ( )

Three Assassins – Something lost in Translation

Three Assassins written by Kotaro Isaka an award -winning Japanese writer, published all over the world according to the blurb. On the evidence of this ‘thriller’ I am not sure which language he is an award winner in. It is not English and that is not blaming the translation.

The premise of three assassins at work at the behest of the rich and powerful in Japan is excellent. The delivery on the other hand is poor. The characterisation is not believable unless something has been lost in translation.

I admit I did not finish this book, getting to half- way through the book was hard enough work and took a week! I cannot see this gaining an audience in the English- speaking world, it does not match up with the thrillers that it is competing with.

If you want a thriller about three assassins, this is not the book for you. ( )