The Red Finger

The Red Finger is the seventh novel in Keigo Higashino's "Kaga Kyoichiro series," set in an ordinary residential district in Tokyo. Maehara is an ordinary company employee with an elderly mother above and a teenage son, Naomi, whose temperament is surly, below; his wife, Yaeko, dotes on the boy, and there is deep estrangement between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. One ordinary evening, Maehara comes home to find the body of a little girl in the backyard, and the killer is his fifteen-year-old son. To protect the boy and the family's respectability, the Maeharas decide to move the body and fabricate a set of seemingly coherent statements. Detective Kaga Kyoichiro, in charge of the case, finds Maehara's account so reasonable as to be almost impregnable and the police could close the case on that basis; but while dealing with the family, he notices that Maehara's elderly mother, diagnosed with cognitive impairment, has a striking red color painted on her fingers. It is this irrational detail that makes cracks in the calm surface appear bit by bit. On the surface the novel is about a foolish and shallow body-disposal case, but what it truly explores is alienation, indulgence, and silence within the family: between husband and wife, between parent and child, between mother and son, problems avoided for years finally return to everyone in the cruelest way. In this work Higashino downplays intricate tricks and focuses on "what truly connects family members," so it is often considered his gentlest and most painful novel. This edition is the Simplified Chinese version from Nanhai Publishing Company (2016, translated by Yu Zhuang, hardcover).