I have only read a few Japanese mysteries, and those, written in the 1990s, were more focused on the puzzle than motive and psychology. A couple featured eccentric buildings that no rational person would design, explicitly there to make the puzzle harder.
Malice, although written around the same time, 1996, is much more concerned with personality and motivation. It is also unusual because the murderer is arrested on about page 80.
Osamu Nonaguchi, a children’s book author, goes to visit his friend, Kunihiko Hidaka, a best-selling writer, shortly before Hidaka leaves the country to live in Vancouver, British Columbia. Later that day, Nonaguchi returns to the house when invited, only to find it shut up and the lights out. He is alarmed and calls Hidaka’s wife, Rei, who has moved to a hotel while Hidaka finishes some pages for his editor. When Rei arrives, they find Hidaka dead, possibly from hitting his head in a fall. But Hidaka, it turns out, was murdered.
When Nonaguchi is interviewed, he can only offer the information that Hidaka had an altercation with a neighbor about a cat, and that when Rei let the cat out of the house, the neighbor was talking to Masaya Fujio, who was suing Hidaka over one of his books.
Nonaguchi has known Hidaka since middle school. By coincidence, the detective, Kyiochiro Kaga, also knew Nonaguchi in school.
Although Kaga quickly identifies the killer, he is concerned with motive. Even though the killer eventually offers up a motive, Kaga is not satisfied.
This novel is written entirely in statements and interviews. Although Wilkie Collins used this method effectively many years before in The Moonstone, it makes this novel inert. Also, a problem I found in other Japanese mysteries, when the solution is finally revealed, Kaga goes over every little detail to explain it, sometimes more than once. I felt the novel was a good 50+ pages too long, and it dragged at times.
Although I liked this novel’s approach better than that of the other Japanese mysteries I’ve read, it didn’t have any action and moved too slowly.
What? Me Read? 
I liked it but I now in hindsight I agree with you that it could have less explicit explanation and maybe fewer pages too. I like the detective.
Yes, the detective was fine.
I’ve only read one of his books, The Devotion of Suspect X, and in it too we knew who the murderer was very early on. It bored me rigid, quite frankly – does he still describe the characters making instant coffee every few pages? The fact that I can still remember not only that it annoyed me but why after 14 years is pretty impressive, though – it must have really annoyed me! 😉
Oh my god, no coffee. Well, if he bored you rigid, don’t ever read anything by Yukito Ayatsuji or Soji Shimada, my only other experiences with Japanese mysteries.
Ha, noted! 😀
😉