Journey Under the Midnight Sun

Dark And Twisted

One of Keigo Higashino’s earlier books, The Devotion Of Suspect X made his international reputation as a master of crime fiction and his cult has only grown since.

His latest book, Journey Under The Midnight Sun (translated from the original Japanese by Alexander O. Smith and Joseph Reeder) is an intricately plotted book with unpredictable turns and a really shocking twist at the end.

The thick novel begins in 1973 in Osaka, with the discovery of a body in an abandoned building.  Detective Sasagaki gets to handle the case and he does all he can to find the killer, but every lead is a dead end. Still, for twenty years he stays obsessed with the case, long after the statute of limitation sets in.

The murdered man was a pawnbroker, Yosuke Kirihara, whose son Ryo is a sullen and strange child, who knows more than he lets on. The main suspect is a struggling single mother, who may have been the man’s lover. But then her daughter Yukiho,discovers the her mother’s corpse and the cops conclude suicide due to strained circumstances. Yukiho, a very self-possessed child, is then brought up by a kind relative. She grows up to be a smart and successful entrepreneur, but with secrets tucked away behind her beautiful (“There are thorns in her eyes,” a friend says about her) and friendly exterior.

The complex story with minute detailing (the sound of a bell tinkling in bag connects to a horrific crime, as does a broken key chain) has a cocktail of inflammable ingredients—sex, obsession, brutality, perversion, betrayal—that Higashino expertly blends. 

The book is like peeling an onion with layers and layers revealing new characters and fresh subplots, all of which are connected to the main plot. At the heart of it is a dark and twisted love story that emotionally destroys the two people involved, so that they are capable of enormous cruelty.

The story follows Ryo and Yukiho through their unsettling childhood (young girls are kidnapped and raped around their school) to adulthood. The people who love them cannot quite understand their furtive behavior or their devious minds.

As the years pass, Higashino introduces computers, gaming, piracy and computer hacking, and organized crime.  But at the centre are echoes of that that long ago murder and the link between Ryo and Yukiho. Sasagaki asks "Ever heard of the goby and the shrimp?" and explains, “Yukiho Karasawa and Ryo Kirihara have what biologists call a symbiotic relationship. One can't live without the other. They're a pair for life."

But they are never together, yet never apart. The story swirls around them, many characters enter and exit and push it towards its intriguing climax. A fascinating unputdownable read.

Journey Under the Midnight Sun 

By Keigo Higashino 

Published by Little, Brown

Pages: 554