SNA (Tokyo) — The English teacher in Japan subculture has gained a chronicler, as a murder mystery novel has been published set within their world.

A Murder in a Class by Itself presents an English language school in contemporary Tokyo as the scene of the crime. The protagonist, the irreverent English teacher Kendrick Matsumoto, a biracial former detective of the Calgary police force, is asked to solve the mystery at the heart of this page-turning who-done-it.

Author Mike Cadman himself is a working English teacher in Tokyo, having spent about twenty years in the profession, at first in South Korea but mainly in Japan.

“I’ve always wanted to write,” he says. “In the back of my mind I felt I had a story to tell, but I couldn’t quite figure out what that was.”

In the end, he settled on writing an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery, having long been “completely obsessed” with this genre.

Cadman also took seriously the dictum that you should “write what you know.” Like his character Matsumoto, he too is from Calgary, Canada, and subsists within the English teaching community in Japan.

“A lot of us live in this sort of bubble,” he observes in regard to the English teaching subculture. “I don’t feel like I live in the real Japan.” He adds that it is like “a limbo between two worlds.”

Nevertheless, English teachers too need their works of art and their forms of light entertainment: “I would be very welcoming to get some feedback from them to see if they enjoyed it and they felt that I was representing that world accurately.”

Cadman also feels that those who are simply interested in Japan but have not lived here may find interest in his work, stating, “I think the whole idea of what Japan is as a foreigner is like another character in the story.”

Japanese, too, have told him that they find the 273-page book relatively easy to read because of its familiar culture, setting, and references.

A Murder in a Class by Itself can be purchased through Kindle Direct Publishing at a reasonable price.

If the public response is strong enough and Cadman can muster the motivation, the future adventures of Kendrick Matsumoto in Tokyo may one day become a five-book series.

For breaking news, follow on Twitter @ShingetsuNews