The Wings of the Kirin

The Wings of the Kirin is the ninth installment in Keigo Higashino's Detective Kaga series and the long novel he released on the 25th anniversary of his debut; it was ranked first in the mystery category of Japan's Da Vinci magazine's 2011 Book of the Year. The story begins on a winter night in Tokyo. A patrol officer finds a middle-aged man stabbed beside the railing of Nihonbashi. Mortally wounded, the man walks alone to the bridgehead, collapses beneath the statue of a kirin poised for flight, and later dies in hospital. Police investigation places the initial crime scene in an underpass several hundred meters away—meaning that after being wounded, he endured excruciating pain to keep walking rather than call for help. More troubling still, shortly after the murder a suspicious young man, fleeing questioning, is struck by a truck and falls into a coma; among his belongings are the victim's wallet and briefcase. The two people closest to the truth have both fallen silent, and the police intend to close the case. Kyoichiro Kaga, newly transferred to the Nihonbashi station, and his partner Matsumiya cannot let it go: why did the victim spend the last minutes of his life walking back beneath the kirin statue? For whom was the message meant? As the investigation proceeds, the case draws out a company's cover-up of a workplace injury and a secret kept jointly by a father and son. In the eyes of his lover, the accused young man "would never kill anyone," while the victim's wife and daughter struggle to live under public scrutiny and blame. Higashino wraps a mystery shell around a core of family and human nature, so that solving the case and achieving redemption proceed side by side; the kirin's wings are both the dream of taking flight and the starting point for setting out again after a mistake.