The Weird Ones

The Weird Ones is a short-story collection of mystery fiction by Keigo Higashino, originally titled Ayashii Hitobito and first published in 1994; its seven stories initially appeared in the magazine Shōsetsu Gekijō. All seven revolve around a single core: someone close to you suddenly becomes a stranger. A man lends his apartment to a colleague for a date, then comes home one day to find an unknown woman lying in his bed; a man pursued by police stumbles into the home of a self-appointed judge; a workaholic boss dies in a locked break room, and everyone suspects a robot gone out of control; a man seizes his new wife by the throat, demanding to know why their daughter died; a traveler in the Northeast splits from a childhood friend, and the lighthouse holds an experience beyond words; a man receives a wedding announcement from an old friend, but the woman in the photo is an unfamiliar face; and another is drawn by the past into a cold rain in Costa Rica. Except for The Mystery of the Wedding Photo, all six remaining stories use first-person narration. Brief in length, they depict suspicion, desire, and loss of control in ordinary daily life—plain and unadorned yet tightly paced, and often called Higashino's sketches of the dark side of human nature. The book is one of the source works for Fuji TV's Higashino Keigo Mystery Theater, with adaptations starring Takashi Sorimachi, Ai Kato, and Arisa Mizuki.