In the Filipino crime writer’s new story collection, Accidents Happen (Soho Crime, Mar.), characters search for justice in the Philippines.

What drew you to crime fiction?

The first job I had out of university was for a government intelligence agency. It was coming out of the 1986 revolution in the Philippines, and there was a feeling of, ‘Wow, this is something so much bigger than myself.’ For the first four years, we were working under a reformer who was not very interested in being corrupt—pocketing funds, that sort of thing. But then someone new was elected, and the work we’d been trying to accomplish was completely gone. That sense of frustration and hopelessness is what started my first novel, Smaller and Smaller Circles. I would come home and mumble my way through dinner, and my mom would say, ‘Oh, just go to your room. You’re useless.’ And I’d start typing. I was thinking about rot and decay, and I put it on the page.

Many crime stories focus on concrete detail: what happened, who did what to whom. In most of these stories, you choose to keep things uncertain. Why?

I think it’s very much reflective of the way justice is pursued—I won’t even say achieved—in the Philippines. You have investigations with a lot of fuss and publicity, but everything ends with a whimper. You do a search on the web five years down the line to find that something is still stuck in limbo or a vital witness has disappeared. The reality, in many cases, is that you already know who’s behind it, and he’s still out there, living his life with impunity. To write clear-cut solutions about an environment like ours just doesn’t fly.

One of the stories, “The Gyutou,” is told from the perspective of a Japanese chef’s knife. What inspired that?

I was thinking about how women’s domestic labor is often overlooked. Husbands and children come home to a house that’s spick-and-span, and they have their meals ready, but the work is all done out of sight. I was drawn to the idea of an inanimate object, seeing this labor, this devotion, and valorizing it in a way.

Now that you’ve been writing crime fiction for two decades, what do you see as its purpose?

I always think about how little power people like me, ordinary Filipinos, actually have. We really have nothing. But if there’s anything that a writer has, it’s the power to seed something. I want my stories to have the curse of the familiar. If I plant a seed in your head, then maybe I’ll tickle you into anger. I’ve lived in Singapore for almost 20 years, but the Philippines is the country of my deepest wounds. I write about my country because I have no other choice. I have no other reference point. And the things that make me angriest are the things that make me want to continue writing.