Showing results by author "Seicho Matsumoto" in All Categories

Tokyo, 1960. As the first rays of morning light hit the rails at Kamata Station, a man's body is found on the tracks: blood-stained, disfigured and unrecognisable. With only two leads - a distinctive accent and a single word, "kameda" - senior inspector Imanishi Eitaro is called in to solve the puzzle. Accompanied by junior detective Yoshimura, he crosses Japan in search of answers, determined to uncover the secrets of this gruesome crime.

In a rocky cove in the bay of Hakata, the bodies of a young and beautiful couple are discovered. Stood in the coast's wind and cold, the police see nothing to investigate: the flush of the couple's cheeks speaks clearly of cyanide, of a lovers' suicide. But in the eyes of two men, Torigai Jutaro, an old and shabby detective, and Kiichi Mihara, a young gun from Tokyo, something is not quite right. Together, they will begin to pick at the knot of a unique and calculated crime.

While on a business trip to Kobe, Tsuneo Asai receives the news that his wife Eiko has died of a heart attack. Eiko had a heart condition so the news of her death wasn't totally unexpected. But the circumstances of her demise left Tsuneo, a softly spoken government bureaucrat, perplexed. How did it come about that his wife, who was shy and withdrawn, and only left their house twice a week to go to haiku meetings ended up dead in a small shop in a shady Tokyo neighbourhood?

Onizuka Kumako is a fierce woman: tall, beautiful, and not afraid to speak her mind. In Tokyo bars, she seduces customers and commits petty crime, using her connections to the local yakuza to get by. When she meets Shirakawa Fukutaro, a rich widower desperate for companionship and unaware of her shady past, the two hit it off and are soon married. But their newlywed bliss is suddenly cut short: one rainy July evening, their car veers off course, plunges into the harbour and Fukutaro is pulled beneath the waves.