The Copycat

A woman's forearm, severed cleanly at the elbow, is found in a trash can in Okawa Park, Tokyo. Following this lead, the police conclude it is part of a series of disappearances of women, and the case immediately becomes the focus of fierce coverage by television stations and newspapers. Just then, a man repeatedly calls a live television program, claiming to be the killer who dumped the body. He recounts details only the real culprit could know, mocks the police as incompetent, scoffs at the public's voyeuristic curiosity, and even publicly announces the next "performance." Near the scene, the elderly owner of a tofu shop, Yoshio Arima, finds that his granddaughter, Mariko Furukawa, is also on the list of the missing. Shinichi Tsukada, a young man scarred by the death of his family, is drawn into the case by chance. Shizuko Maehata, a female weekly magazine reporter, persists in investigating and tries to piece together the whole picture. Three threads and dozens of related characters spread a single murder case into a net covering the entire city. The case seems to conclude when two suspects die in a fall from a cliff, but the man claiming that "the real killer is still alive" reappears, plunging society into deeper waiting and fear. At a million words and involving more than forty characters, the book uses multiple perspectives to depict how a crime is retold by the media and consumed by the public, and the long-lasting wounds it leaves on victims and bystanders. It is a representative work of Miyuki Miyabe's social-school mystery fiction. This entry is the three-volume boxed set of The Copycat published by Nanhai Publishing Company.