Programme

He spent his early years in Kyushu, where he was forced to leave school to earn a living as a printer and newspaper typesetter before becoming a writer at the age of forty through a contest. After publishing his first detective short story, Stakeout, in 1955, he soon made his reputation with Points and Lines, hailed as a groundbreaking work of the ‘social detective’ genre. Shifting from traditional ‘whodunnits’ to plots intertwined with themes of corruption and social exploitation, Matsumoto’s narratives often reveal the dark sides of human nature. He also authored investigative works like Black Fog over Japan and Unearthing the Shōwa Period, leaving a lasting influence on contemporary Japanese detective storywriters.