The Gate to Murder

The Gate to Murder is a full-length mystery novel by Keigo Higashino, originally published in Japanese as Satsujin no Mon by Kadokawa Shoten in 2003. Told in the first person, it recounts the life of Kazuyuki Tajima, who from boyhood to middle age is repeatedly dogged by misfortune. As a child he lived comfortably: his father was a dentist, the family was respectable and admired. Then, almost overnight, his grandmother died suddenly, his mother ran away, his father sank into debt and ruin, and the family fell; from then on he drifted with nowhere to belong. Misfortune seemed to follow him: his first love died, his hard-earned savings vanished, and a marriage full of hope turned into an endless nightmare. More unsettling still, whenever his life began to improve, he would inexplicably fall into the abyss, and just as he was about to be crushed, someone would always "save" him. Tajima gradually realizes that someone has been manipulating his fate all along, taking whatever they please. He turns his suspicion on an old friend from childhood, Kuramochi Osamu, who now appears successful and respectable, and hatred and murderous intent grow in him like a poisonous snake. The book unfolds through a chain of seemingly coincidental events—poisonings, fraud, curse letters, the destruction of a family—and uses a manipulation spanning many years to examine how murderous intent is fed inch by inch by everyday humiliation and malice, and how a person walks along the threshold of becoming a killer.