The initial excitement I had upon opening No Reason for Murder faded within a few paragraphs when it became clear that not only has the American translator butchered the Japanese prose, but also that no editor at the publishing company felt it necessary to step in and rescue Ms. Sono's novel.Originally serialized in the Asahi Shimbun (Newspaper), the story revolves around two very different characters - Yukiko, an honest and rather annoying stay-at-home seamstress (and Catholic...); and Fujio, a messed up but rather appealing man in his thirties who spends much of his time chasing women - some of whom he ends up murdering.Sono, herself a Catholic, is known for her preaching against social ills affecting modern Japan. In No Reason for Murder, she uses the women Fujio picks up as vehicles to deride greed, arrogance, stupidity, laziness and other such sins she sees all around her. Unfortunately, this literary tool carves out wooden characters; stereotypes rather than believable personalities.This wouldn't be such a cross to bear if the translation was even passable. It isn't. Edward Putzar (who, the blurb says, has translated another of Sono's novels!!) seems to have no concept of the novel as a single element. Instead, each word, line, paragraph, page is rendered in a style that differs from what follows and what comes before. On top of this is the serious crime of "chokuyaku" (literal translation). Couple this with gems of sentences that are nonsense at best, throw in an abundance of typos, and the result is a story that, although there are flashes of charm, is laborious to read.As a sometime J-E translator myself, I know too well how easy it is to get sucked into the whirlpool of over-explanation and literal translation. That's why publishers employ EDITORS. Therefore, although I point one finger at the 75-year-old Putzar, another I save for ICG Muse, the publisher.What a waste.