Tracking Down the Tuna : INSPECTOR IMANISHI INVESTIGATES <i> by Seicho Matsumoto; translated by Beth Carey (Soho Press: $18.95; 314 pp.; 0-939149-28-1) </i>

When the television version of “Shogun” splashed onto our screens back in 1981 (remember Richard Chamberlain poking his fingers through Japanese shogi doors), Japan buffs were keen to know whether this popular series provided a genuine slice of late medieval Japanese life. These were passionate Japanophiles, who even then could belly up to the sushi bar, and order with the best of them.

As with their food, these people were seeking the genuine article in their fiction. Since the “Shogun” boom, America’s romance with things Japanese has only deepened, but the question of the genuineness of our Japonaiseries retains its relevance. This is because our neighbors across the Pacific have come to loom large in both our practical and imaginative lives.

Since it first appeared in 1961, Japanese readers have snatched up 4.5 million copies of Seicho Matsumoto’s masterpiece Suna no Utsuwa (Vessel of Sand)--one of the triumphs of Japanese crime fiction. In Japanese, it is a brilliant tour de force , at once a superb thriller and a marvelous literary montage of a society caught in transition between postwar reconstruction and economic takeoff. Dickens and Balzac, writers who sought to put the whole world between two covers, would approve of Matsumoto’s ambition.

Now Beth Carey’s translation of “Vessel of Sand” allows the American reader to poke his own holes in the shoji of one of Japan’s best loved light classics. But in rendering Matsumoto’s novel into English, the translator has performed a miracle of compression.

“Inspector Imanishi Investigates” comes in 314 pages of big easy-on-the-eye print. In its most popular Japanese format, it is a 760-page double-decker in the tiny print of the cheap pocket-sized editions preferred by Japanese readers, whose spectacles, it should be noted, tend to be as thick as their pockets are small.

So in Carey we have not only a skilled translator, but a master editor who has reduced the detective genre’s answer to “War and Peace” (at least in terms of length) to a single volume containing perhaps a third of the original. Purists will demur, but condensation was almost certainly the price of publication.

Was this a price worth paying? The answer depends on what you look for in your reading. But if you are a connoisseur of criminal detection with a taste for foreign settings, then “Inspector Imanishi Investigates” belongs on your book shelf next to Christie and Simenon, P. D. James and Robert Van Gulik.

The novel opens with a nervous shout, “Hey, there’s a tuna!” A “tuna” is Japanese railroad slang for a body on the tracks. The image chills, for this is not pink, fluffy tuna in a can or even a slab of blood-red maguro on two fingers of rice, but the great frozen stiffs that the burly men of Tokyo’s wholesale fish market can barely lift. Neatly decapitated, the tuna carcasses look as if they have been set on a rail, and then cleanly sliced by the sharpened edge of a refrigerator car wheel.

It is this image that sparks the panic reaction in the young brakeman who chances upon this grisly scene in the switching yard of a suburban Tokyo rail terminal. His revulsion, like ours, is largely in the imagination; the train under which the dead victim has been placed has yet to roll. Nevertheless, through the eyes of the brakeman, we have, in classic detective story form, discovered the body. But we are a long way from the drawing-room niceties of Miss Marple.

From this beginning, Matsumoto performs a tantalizing double unveiling act. His hero, Inspector Eitaro Imanishi, must simultaneously struggle to determine the identity of both the victim and his murderer. Though the crime was unobserved, the omniscient author ensures that very early the reader has a strong suspicion who the killer is because he goes on killing. But who was this first victim, this tuna?

For almost the whole story, murderer and victim are caught on parallel lines. Their paths appear never to have crossed. But for a succession of suicides and near-perfect crimes, the detective and the reader would never uncover the truth.

Imanishi is a crime fiction original. He combines the moral uprightness of Gulik’s Judge Dee with that supreme Japanese virtue: pluck. Like P. D. James’ Adam Dalgliesh, he is a skilled poet (Matsumoto’s creation is the best published haiku poet ever). He has lovely quirks, including a well-cultivated weakness for bonsai plants, and a startling penchant for uncovering clues by glancing through his wife’s magazines during his rare days at home.

But the overwhelming fact about Imanishi is that he is a policeman. Lacking either the intellect of Sherlock Holmes or the cold perception of Miss Marple, he plods. In the process, he makes us his partners in a crusade of detection that is its own kind of mental adventure.

But crime buffs are not the only people who read detective stories of this quality. There is hardly a Japanese reader living who has not spent time on one of Matsumoto’s 450 published works, and for anyone who prides himself on his knowledge of Japan, this author is required reading.

His enormous popularity points to an important truth. More than serious fiction (Mishima or Kawabata) or the polished film (even Kurosawa or Ozu), Matsumoto’s sustained meditation on the Japanese characters (warts and all), in this lightest of genres, captures how the Japanese regard themselves. His work is, therefore, a unique mirror, and thanks to Carey, the English-reader can now catch a glimpse of the reflection.

By the standards of the mainstream novel, however, “Inspector Imanishi Investigates” poses some definite challenges. First, there is the problem of dialogue. As any victim of Oriental movie subtitles knows, Japanese conversation translates rather badly into English. But having had to make enormous cuts and redraw whole scenes, Carey has tried to be faithful to what was left.

The result is distinctly stilted. This is an English, not a Japanese, problem. It plagues almost all translations of Japanese fiction, high-brow or low. A generation of superb American translators has struggled with it. It is a rare writer, such as Kazuo Ishiguro, the Anglo-Japanese author of the Booker Prize-winning “An Artist of the Floating World,” who can exploit the stilted effect of Japanese speech rendered into English to marvelous literary effect.

The point is that Carey is not to blame. Errors in translation are another matter, and the purist will be quick to pounce on her mistakes to discredit the whole work. There are inaccuracies, and I occasionally felt compelled to go back to the Japanese original only to find that a scrap of dialogue or description had slipped through the checker’s net.

These things happen with the frustrating ease that perhaps only another translator can understand. Monolinguists tend to less forgiving in such matters, but they are wrong. Every translator has a blind-spot. Carey, for example, has trouble rendering the exact nuance of conversion between males in hierarchical relationships. But these minor flaws take a microscope to find and should not intrude on the reader’s pleasures.

Because of Carey’s labors, the reader who has no Japanese can now sample the handiwork of the grand old man of Japanese crime fiction. He has woven the most intricate web of detection, and he (bless him) never leaves a false clue.