FICTION

SLOW FUSE by Masako Togawa, translated from the Japanese by Simon Prentis (Pantheon: $21; 195 pp.). Pity the young psychiatrist equipped with only the teachings of Freud and Adler who tries to solve this Japanese murder mystery. His name is Dr. Uemura, and he believes that one of two things must be true: His patient, Akio Tanno, a college student, is either crazy or a killer. The woman Tanno confesses that he shot with a “long weapon”--aha! Uemura thinks, we know what that means--is very much alive. Ergo, Tanno is crazy. But when he escapes from a mental ward and Uemura pursues him through a glitzy but depraved Tokyo subculture of pill-popping, orgies, fake identities and sexual obsessions, it’s the good doctor’s sanity that seems to be unraveling. Masako Togawa, a nightclub owner and TV personality as well as a crime novelist, specializes in emotional anomie and a chilly but disturbing seductiveness. More of a puzzle than a story, “Slow Fuse” has a plot so convoluted that after reading it, we may feel the need to read it again, backward, to see if it actually makes sense.