A Disease Called Death Penalty

A series of brutal murders struck the rice-farming villages of northern Kanto, most of the victims young people aged sixteen to twenty-three. Hazemura Yamato was arrested on suspicion of twenty-four murders, but only nine could ultimately be prosecuted, and he was sentenced to death at first instance. At this moment, Kakei Masaya, a mediocre law student leading a repressed life, receives a letter from the detention center—sent by none other than Hazemura Yamato. He admits he deserves to die but insists he committed only eight of the killings and is wholly innocent of the ninth, hoping Masaya will uncover the truth for him. What shakes Masaya is that the writer is not a stranger or a monstrous killer, but the owner of the bakery who once looked after him, gave him a warm smile and the aroma of freshly baked bread. Could the same hands have imprisoned victims and killed them cruelly? As Masaya enters Hazemura's life, he gradually pieces together the boy who grew up amid poverty, abuse and the indifference of neighbors, and gradually realizes that he is being guided and used, sinking deeper and deeper. Drawing on psychopathic personality research and the historical materials of postwar Japanese serial killers, the novel asks how evil is incubated jointly by an era and its bystanders—and once goodwill develops a crack, malice crawls in through it.