The Reason

Senju Kita Miyoshi, in Tokyo's Arakawa Ward, is a sleek, heavily secured high-rise. On a stormy night, a murder occurs in unit 2025 of the west building: three people are found dead inside and one falls from the building. Following the resident list provided by the building manager, the police notify the relatives of "the Oyake family," only to discover that the four dead are not members of the Oyake household at all: they are neither the owners nor tenants, their names, occupations, and faces are hard to confirm, and they are not even related by blood. Sofas and appliances in the unit are covered with cloths, clothing is stored in portable paper bags, and no group photo or letter can be found anywhere in the apartment—as if they had been carefully borrowing the place for a time. Where have the real owners, the Oyake couple, gone? Why would a family move into this supposedly strictly managed apartment out of nowhere? The middle-aged man Naozumi Ishida, who left fingerprints while viewing the unit, disappears after the crime and is treated by the media as the prime suspect; four months later he turns himself in, and the mystery of the murder slowly comes to light. The novel uses a chain of housing disputes—buying a home, repaying a mortgage, a home being foreclosed, the previous residents refusing to move out, the new owners unable to move in—as threads that pull out the cracks in several families: buyers crushed by debt, squatters, and people who overdraw their future in pursuit of a "respectable life." With the cool method of reportage, Miyuki Miyabe lets police officers, neighbors, agents, newspaper deliverers, and delivery riders enter the narrative one by one, piecing together the alienation and coldness that occur within the space called "home." Why the crime happened, why those involved came to this point—each has their own "reason."