Destiny

After the death of electric machinery magnate Naoaki Uryu, his successor as president, Masakiyo Sukai, is shot dead with a poisoned arrow in the family cemetery. White chrysanthemums are scattered beside the body; the poison on the arrowhead matches the crossbow that Naoaki collected during his lifetime, and that crossbow has disappeared. Clues at one point point to Naoaki's second son, Hiroaki, but at the critical moment a piece of ironclad evidence reverses the case. Assigned to investigate is detective Yuji Kazuura. At the scene he meets again none other than his old rival Akihiko Uryu—the man who had secretly bested him since boyhood and who had always come out ahead—now a brilliant brain surgeon, and who has also married Yuji's first love, Misako. Yuji had given up studying medicine because of his father's serious illness and joined the police instead, carrying half a lifetime of pent-up frustration; now fate brings him face to face with his rival in a murder case. As the investigation digs into the old affairs of the Uryu and Sukai families, a fall from a building at a red-brick hospital more than twenty years earlier comes to the surface, behind which lies a disgraceful history of human brain experiments. Yuji and Akihiko, the "eternal rivals," turn out to be tied to the same rope of fate. The story unfolds through dual narrative lines, and the solution is revealed only in the final line. This work is regarded as Keigo Higashino's transitional work from orthodox mystery toward social concern.