Silence and Mystery 
 This may be the strangest novel I have ever read, fascinating, inventive, but almost impossible to review. Visually, it is an airy book, with lots of white space and much of the text over at the right of the page like a film script, but it seems awfully weighty when you are done. There are numerous photographs, of houses, fields, even a roller coaster, but they are all of deliberately poor quality and of no apparent relevance, so they obscure the story rather than illuminating it. Although written in English by an American author, the language is curiously stilted and mechanical, as though it were an awkward translation from some foreign tongue. But the odder it got, the more intriguing it became. 
 OK, is there a story? Yes, but a strange one. In the late seventies, an undistinguished Japanese worker named Oda Sotatsu, losing a barroom bet with two friends, signs his name to a document which they then deliver to the police. It turns out to be a confession to the disappearance of eleven old people in the Narito region, and Sotatsu is arrested. But as he refuses to speak during interrogation, at his trial, or to appeal his sentence, he is condemned to death and hanged. Three decades later, an American journalist named Jesse Ball (yes), whose marriage is breaking up owing to his wife's sudden refusal to speak, becomes interested in the case of Sotatsu's silence and goes to Japan to interview the surviving witnesses. 
 What follows, organized with nerdish care, is a series of interviews, tape transcripts, newspaper reports, personal observations, and supporting documents. Over half the book reconstructs Sotatsu's life from the moment of his arrest to his execution, as told by a court reporter, a prison guard, and Sotatsu's father, mother, brother, and sister, most of whom impugn the reliability of any of the others. Ball is meticulous in noting the exact conditions of each interview, but he also gives his own estimates of the reliability of each informant. Curiously enough, once one has got used to the almost mechanistic organization, a lot of human detail begins to emerge, gathering between the lines and shimmering in the white spaces. 
 In the last fifty pages, the texture changes twice more, as Ball locates the two people to whom Sotatsu lost that initial wager. One was a girl named Jito Joo who became his most frequent visitor in prison. Her written statement takes on a lyrical tone that is new to the novel, reading at times more like poetry than fact. With the last contributor, Joo's boyfriend at the time, Sato Kazuko, the tone changes again. He is a former political radical, inspired by the Situationist movement in France. I found his philosophies pretty tough going--but then I saw that the article on the Situationists in Wikipedia has almost identical language, again as if translated from another tongue. 
 Although the novel ends in opaque style, the obvious mysteries do get cleared up, especially concerning the crimes for which Sotatsu was wrongfully hanged. The mystery of Sotatsu's continued silence is not so clear, and if Jesse Ball comes to a better understanding of his ex-wife, he keeps it to himself. Indeed he only elucidates one mystery to expose other ones: the mysteries of identity, of ambiguity, of failures of communication, of how little we know of others around us. For the answers to those, ask the silence...