The Fake Image Clown

The Fake Image Clown is the seventh work in Keigo Higashino's Galileo series (also known as the Detective Galileo series), a collection of short detective stories. The original Japanese edition was published by Bungeishunju in 2012, and the simplified Chinese edition was released by Shanghai Translation Publishing House in 2014, translated by Zheng Yue. The book centers on physicist Manabu Yukawa and detective Shunpei Kusanagi teaming up to crack seemingly impossible cases: each bizarre incident that the parties involved and bystanders take for supernatural phenomena ultimately reveals a man-made "fake image" under Yukawa's cool scientific reasoning. The Shanghai Translation edition contains four stories: "Illusion," "Mind Listening," "Disguise," and "Acting." In "Illusion," a follower of a new religious group falls to death from the fifth floor of a building; the cult leader claims to have used telekinesis to make the person jump from a distance and turns himself in to the police. A weekly magazine reporter happens to be present when the incident occurs and confirms that the leader did not touch the victim. At Kusanagi's repeated urging, Yukawa confronts the leader face to face and unravels the mystery of the so-called telekinesis. In "Mind Listening," several people connected to the same company are troubled by a "strange sound" from the same source; one jumps from a building, another suffers a mental breakdown, and Kusanagi is injured while stopping a disturbance, prompting Kaoru Utsumi to investigate where the sound comes from. "Disguise" takes place at a mountain inn: Yukawa and Kusanagi are stranded by rain on their way to a wedding when an elderly couple is murdered in a nearby villa, and Yukawa spots the flaw in an anomaly in a photo of the scene. "Acting" revolves around the death of a person connected to a theater troupe; the murder weapon is a prop knife used on stage, and everyone has an alibi. The four cases are concise in length and brisk in pace, showcasing the author's charm for "short-form deduction" and standing as one of the representative texts marking the Galileo series' shift from brilliant full-length novels to short-form experimentation. (Note: The 2021 edition titled The Ugly Imp of the Fake Image, published by Beijing October Arts and Literature Publishing House, includes all seven stories per the original Japanese book, with a different table of contents from the Shanghai Translation edition.)