Journey Under the Midnight Sun

In 1973, the body of a man stabbed to death with a sharp weapon is found in an abandoned building in Osaka. The police once suspect a woman but cannot close the case for lack of evidence, and it becomes an unsolved mystery. Over the next nearly twenty years, the fates of those connected to the case take strange turns one after another: some rise into high society, some struggle always in the shadows, some die inexplicably, some quietly disappear. Only one old detective refuses to let go; again and again he re-sifts the scattered clues and keeps investigating year after year. The story revolves around Kirihara Ryoji and Karasawa Yukiho. Bound tightly together by the same event in childhood, the two go on to walk utterly different paths in life: Yukiho is poised and respectable, climbing step by step, while Ryoji retreats into darkness, constantly using secret means to deal with anyone who threatens her. The book contains almost no direct depiction of the two characters' dialogue or inner thoughts; everything is assembled through the eyes of bystanders and through seemingly unrelated incidents, and readers must reconstruct the truth from the fragments themselves. Keigo Higashino combines hopeless, stubborn emotion with cool, meticulous deduction to write a social-school novel spanning nearly twenty years with a large cast of characters. It explores not only the crime itself but how dysfunctional families, social indifference, and distorted human nature push people step by step toward the abyss. The closing line, "She never once looked back," has become a scene many readers cannot let go of.