Nuclear Power and the Crab

An accident occurs at the Kujukuri Beach Nuclear Power Plant: one person is trapped inside for an entire night and is carried out with life or death unknown; the news is quickly suppressed. The victim is found clutching a slip of paper reading "The Monkey and the Crab," which leads investigators to a well-known Japanese folktale—a monkey tricks a crab out of its rice ball and kills it, and the crab's family and friends ultimately join forces for revenge. Could "The Monkey and the Crab" be another death warning in a copycat murder case? Almost simultaneously, Takase Katsuji, president of Boso Electric Power, vanishes mysteriously: ten days after his disappearance he suddenly turns up lodging at a hotel in Hakodate, and then drowns himself in the sea while crossing the Tsugaru Strait by Seikan ferry; yet rumors say his true place of death was actually the Kujukuri Beach Nuclear Power Plant, which belongs to Kanto Electric Power, the parent company of Boso Electric. Harada Kiyoshi, a reporter for a central newspaper, and Soga Akira, an editorial board member, sense a connection between Takase's disappearance and a corruption case in the Chiba local elections, and join forces to investigate; Kyobayashi, a reporter for the Chiba Daily, is independently investigating the same case but receives no support from his newspaper, so he turns to work with the two. Inside the nuclear plant—where operations are layered through subcontractors, access cards and work codes can be impersonated, and protective suits conceal identity—the killer calls himself "the Crab of the Reactor," and one murder after another occurs within the same vast "locked room." Set against the nuclear power industry, the media ecosystem, and local politics, the work uses the revenge structure of a folk tale to ask what is more disturbing than radiation. This is volume 6 of the "Midnight Library · Japanese Excellence: Edogawa Rampo Prize Masterpieces" series.