Two recent Japanese crime novels show a double view: American genres seen through the distinctive lens of Japanese culture. The first, Seicho Matsumoto''s A Quiet Place is in an old-fashioned psychological noir mode like some of Patricia Highsmith's non-Ripley novels. A husband discovers, on his wife's death, that she has been frequenting a hotel that is nowhere near her usual territory. Investigating, he becomes obsessed with the idea that she has been having an affair, and then obsessed with the supposed partner, a man whom he begins to follow. The violent consequences and the psychological weight of the violence are inevitable, and the inevitability is a big part of the narrative. That's pretty standard territory for noir fiction in the U.S. in the '50s and 60s, but the dated quality of the plot is compensated, for a Western reader, by the glimpses into the distinctive qualities of Japanese culture, such as the dizzying series of obligations and debts surrou...