After School

After School is Keigo Higashino's debut novel. It won the 31st Edogawa Rampo Prize in 1985 and marked the point at which he resigned from his job as an electrical engineer to become a full-time writer. The story is set in a girls' high school, where mathematics teacher Maejima also serves as adviser to the archery club. Behind the school's calm surface, he survives a series of near-misses: someone nearly pushes him off the platform onto the tracks, he is almost electrocuted in the shower after swimming, and a flowerpot falls from the third floor as he passes a classroom building. More disturbing still, a person is found poisoned to death in the locker room he regularly uses, with the door barricaded from inside. While Maejima calls the police and begins his own investigation, a second person dies at the school, and he himself is struck by a car on his way home at night. A chain of failed attacks on "me" leads to the real murder, as classic honkaku devices—the locked room and the cipher—are woven into everyday school life, and the unfolding solution gradually exposes the neglected sorrows and trampled dignity of adolescent girls. With this book Higashino established the human-centered focus and gift for reversal that would define his later work, and through an "unconventional motive for murder" he poses a question: when cherished memories and dreams are destroyed, hatred quietly takes root. This edition is translated by Zhao Jun and published by Nanhai Publishing Company as the third hardcover edition; it includes the author's own note on the locked room and the cipher, making it essential reading for understanding the origins of Higashino's craft.