Book Review: The Final Curtain by Keigo Higashino

Ten years in the past, Tokyo Police Detective Kyoichiro Kaga was unexpectedly summoned to Sendai with information of his mom Yuriko’s loss of life. She had run away from dwelling years earlier, obscuring her tracks so nicely that not even his police detective father may observe her down. Yuriko had discovered work in a bar in Sendai, and appeared to steer a quiet life proper up till her loss of life. Her boss had performed her finest to find Yuriko’s residing family members, and eventually managed to ship Kaga a message to return retrieve his mom’s ashes.

Quick ahead to the current. Kaga’s cousin Shuhei Matsumiya is now additionally a detective with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, although Kaga himself has transferred to the comparatively quiet Nihonbashi Precinct. Matsumiya has simply caught the murder of Michiko Oshitani, a bubbly gross sales consultant from Shiga who had come to Tokyo on a go to. Her strangled corpse has been discovered within the surprisingly empty condominium of Matsuyo Koshikawa, who’s himself nowhere to be discovered.

Matsumiya’s investigation leads him to a theater director named Hiromi Kadokura. She and Michiko had recognized each other as youngsters, until scandal clouded Hiromi’s adolescence. Hiromi had been compelled to withdraw from college as harmful males hounded her and her father Tadao:

Understanding that she was at risk, Hiromi took off at full velocity. The boys within the automobile didn’t come after her, however the terror she felt was a pure bodily sensation.

 

Safely again at dwelling, she informed Tadao what had occurred. A dismal expression on his face, he sank into silent thought for a very long time. Hiromi guessed that he was making an attempt to consider a approach out of their difficulties, a approach for them to outlive.

 

Her guess was incorrect. Not a lot later, she found what she noticed in her father’s eyes was a craving for loss of life.

Hiromi survived her troubled childhood and labored arduous to turn out to be a well-respected determine in Tokyo’s thriving theater scene. Michiko had come to see her on the day of her newest play’s premiere, stopping by the theater earlier than subsequently disappearing. Hiromi readily admits that she’d had a dialog with Michiko concerning the previous however is adamant that she is aware of nothing about what occurred to the opposite girl afterwards. Matsumiya is inclined to imagine her however Kaga, who has met her beforehand, is just not.

As Kaga turns into additional enmeshed within the investigation, the cousins make the shocking discovery that this case would possibly very nicely have ties to Yuriko’s disappearance all these years in the past. Matsumiya additionally suspects that one other loss of life 5 kilometers away is in some way linked to Michiko’s homicide. What method of tragedies and truths will the 2 detectives uncover as they try to unravel these circumstances and convey a killer to justice?

This novel is a intestine punch of a police procedural, because the sophisticated emotional entanglements that ultimately result in the taking of lives, harmless or in any other case, are laid naked in its pages. Kyoichiro and Matsumiya make an awesome group as they discover, individually or collectively, the key histories of each their suspects and the influential figures of their very own pasts. Keigo Higashino expertly ties collectively such disparate parts because the world of theater, parental abandonment and nuclear waste disposal – all filtered by means of a distinctly Japanese but universally relatable filter – on this last installment of his Kyoichiro Kaga sequence.

Whereas looking for a possible suspect, for instance, Matsumiya delves into the fact of what it takes to maintain Japan’s nuclear energy stations working, as he interviews one in all his suspect’s former colleagues. The colleague tells him:

“Hope he’s hale and hearty–however I doubt he’s.”

 

“Why do you say that?”

 

“As a result of we’re the dregs.”

 

“The dregs?”

 

“Gasoline ain’t the one factor nuclear energy stations want. These locations, they eat up uranium, however in addition they eat up folks. That’s how they maintain going. Oh yeah, they want their human sacrifices. We guide laborers, we have now the life sucked out of us. You possibly can see it. Simply have a look at me. I’m scrap, scum, leftovers.”

Each clever and clever, The Closing Curtain is a becoming cap to the acclaimed Kyoichiro Kaga sequence, despite the fact that I’m a type of grasping readers who needs for a lot of extra of those books. Translated from the unique Japanese by Giles Murray, the conversations sometimes veer exceedingly British, however general seize the essence of melancholy that permeates this meaty story of household estrangement and the lengths some folks will go as a way to discover a lasting peace.

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