The Dreamscape

The Dreamscape is the second installment in Keigo Higashino's Detective Galileo series and a collection of short mystery stories. The book consists of five independent yet stylistically cohesive cases, once again featuring Manabu Yukawa, associate professor of physics at Teito University, and Kusanagi Shunpei, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police detective who always seems to stumble into strange occurrences. The story opens with a bizarre break-in: a young man sneaks into the home of the Soho family late at night and is shot and wounded by the girl's mother with a hunting rifle before being arrested. He insists that seventeen years ago he dreamed of this girl he had never met and that he would marry her, citing as evidence an essay he wrote in the fourth grade. The girl has just turned sixteen—how could someone who appeared in a dream exist earlier than in reality? Soon after, a murdered woman is reportedly seen outside another window at the time of the crime, as if she had "appeared as a spirit"; in one house, objects no one touches make strange noises at fixed times, like a haunting; a hotel guest is found strangled, yet a mysterious fireball had appeared by his daughter's bedside; and a frail girl claims she "saw" the scene of a suicide two days before it happened. Dreams, ghosts, poltergeists, will-o'-the-wisps, precognition—five mysteries that seem to admit only supernatural explanations are all handed to Manabu Yukawa. He speaks not of gods or spirits, but uses physics, experiments, and logic to peel away layer by layer the human hearts and tricks carefully hidden behind the "incomprehensible." The book is brisk in style and tempting in its puzzles, an important volume for understanding Yukawa's charm as a character and the Galileo series' trajectory, and it also lays the groundwork for the later full-length novel The Devotion of Suspect X.