The Eye of Death

Shinsuke Amemura is a bartender at an upscale bar in Tokyo. Late one night after work, he is attacked by a stranger and left gravely wounded, nearly dead; the attacker later takes his own life at home. Days later, as Shinsuke gradually regains consciousness and cooperates with the police investigation, he discovers that part of his memory is missing: he has forgotten that he was the driver in a hit-and-run on a rainy night, a crash that took a woman's life. The case seems as if it should end there, but a mysterious woman appears at the bar. Shinsuke is drawn to her at first sight, yet she keeps no fixed whereabouts, appearing only at night. As he tries to piece that night back together from fragmentary memories, he notices the people around him behaving more and more strangely: some deliberately conceal things, others hesitate to speak. As he follows the clues toward the past of Mineko Kishimi, the victim of the crash, the "eye of death" left in the dying woman's gaze seems like a curse, slowly seeping into his daily life. The novel blends supernatural elements and a psychological-thriller atmosphere into its mystery framework, unfolding around guilt, revenge, memory, and self-deception. Keigo Higashino does not rest the puzzle on "who did it"; instead he presses the reader: is forgetting the wrong you have committed a kind of luck, or another form of punishment? When desire and malice entwine, the price of uncovering the truth proves far heavier than death.