Moneyball

The Magic Ball is a full-length mystery novel Keigo Higashino wrote at the age of twenty-five, and the work that made the shortlist for the 30th Edogawa Rampo Prize in 1984—one step before After School, the book that officially launched his career. The story centers on two brothers who depend on each other: their father died young, and their mother raised Suda Takeshi and his younger brother Yuki on her own. The brothers make a solemn pact—Takeshi will devote himself to baseball, Yuki will study with all his might, each striving with his own gift, and together they will give their mother a better life. In his final year of high school, Takeshi, ace pitcher for Kaiyo High School, leads this little-known team all the way to the national tournament. Yet at the crucial moment, he throws a baffling "magic ball," and the game is lost anyway. Soon afterward, strange events follow one after another: first the team's catcher Kitaoka is found stabbed to death near his home, then Takeshi is discovered dead in the woods, his right arm sawn off at the shoulder and missing. The same word—"magic ball"—appears both in a photograph Kitaoka left behind and at the scene of Takeshi's death. As the investigation deepens, the high schooler's murder case draws in corporate secrets and even more dangerous hidden circumstances, and the true meaning of that "magic ball" proves heavier than anyone imagined. Higashino has said this work was the starting point of his writing, and that through the shell of a mystery he wanted to write "a monologue of human nature" and "the harshness of society." The book employs a multi-threaded, non-linear structure; it is not long, yet already shows the technique for which the author would later become known—writing a thoroughly reasonable tragedy at the point where things seem most inexplicable.