The House Where I Died Before

The House Where I Died Before is a novel Keigo Higashino wrote in the 1990s, and many readers regard it as an "underrated" work in his career. The story centers on a woman named Sayaka Kurabashi, who has no memories of her childhood before elementary school and later discovers an uncontrollable violent impulse toward her young daughter. She senses that this abnormality is connected to that blank childhood. To find out who she really is, she contacts her ex-boyfriend "I," whom she hasn't seen in years, and the two travel together to a desolate old house her late father used to visit alone. It is a house that seems to have suddenly "died" at some moment: coffee cups left uncleaned on the table, a half-knitted sweater draped by a chair, a child's homework done halfway, and every clock in the house stopped at the same time. There are no traces of adults, yet diaries, photographs, and various suspicious details of daily life remain. At the piano, Sayaka is suddenly overcome by a sense of déjà vu and becomes convinced she has been here before. Unable to leave, the two can only piece together the buried past of this family bit by bit from the objects in the house and a child's diary, drawing ever closer to the truth of the event that made the people in the house "disappear." Compared with works such as Journey Under the Midnight Sun and The Devotion of Suspect X, this book has almost no complex external case or manhunt; all its tension comes from two people's conversations and deductions over a piece of paper and a diary passage, in an oppressive, chilly atmosphere with a strong psychological-thriller flavor. Higashino himself said the book contains his "various thoughts," and he has always regarded it as a work he is confident in. When the Japanese edition was published, it sold over 600,000 copies and later won the Cognac Detective Novel Prize in France; Japanese readers subsequently voted it one of the "Ten Most Underrated Masterpieces of Keigo Higashino." The simplified Chinese edition, translated by Li Yingchun, was published by Beijing October Arts and Literature Publishing House in 2018; as early as 2013, Nanhai Publishing Company had already released an edition with the same translator.