Tears of a Forensic Scientist

The Tears of a Forensic Doctor is a case memoir by Japanese forensic pathologist Masahiko Ueno. Born in 1929, Ueno served for many years as director of the Tokyo Metropolitan Medical Examiner's Office (also referred to in the book as the "Prosecutorial Medical Examiner's Office") and worked in forensic medicine for nearly six decades, conducting examinations and autopsies on more than twenty thousand bodies. The media have called him "Japan's foremost forensic doctor." Translated into Chinese by Wang Dan and published by Law Press China in 2016, the book collects thirty-five stories selected from cases he personally handled.

Each piece begins with a body: an elderly person who died alone, a baby in a coin locker, a victim in a fire, a concealed truth, death from overwork and online suicide, the tangled love and hate between parent and child... From a forensic professional's perspective, Ueno explains how causes of death are read—livor mortis, rigor mortis, patterns of injury, physical evidence at the scene—and how they enable the silent dead to "speak." Yet what concerns him more is the life behind the death: poverty, loneliness, bullying, alcohol dependence, the breakdown of family ties and the tenderness that survives it. The "tears" in the title refer both to the tears of bereaved families and investigators and to the compassion that the forensic doctor himself has never allowed to grow dull after decades at the autopsy table.

This is not a crime book that trades in sensationalism, but a work that uses death as a mirror to reflect the human world. Moving between the scalpel and the human heart, the author sets down his thoughts on survival, dignity, and farewell, allowing readers to see ordinary people's circumstances beneath extraordinary cases. At 189 pages, the book is concise and easy to read in spare moments.