The Detective Who Understood the Human Heart

 The Detective Who Understood the Human Heart

In Memory of Keigo Higashino (1958–2026)

 

  I woke this morning to a grey, unremarkable Edinburgh sky and a phone screen that told me something rather less unremarkable: Keigo Higashino had died. Sixty-eight years old, taken by colorectal cancer on the twenty-third of July, though the world was not told until Kodansha's quiet, formal announcement four days later. There was a family funeral, already concluded, already private, already over before most of us had even learned to grieve. It struck me, reading it in my dressing gown with the kettle not yet boiled, how peculiarly fitting that was — a man who spent forty years constructing intricate puzzles for the reading public should exit so quietly, with the actual event of his death held back from us like the final chapter of one of his own novels. I confess I have rarely felt moved to write of an author's passing quite this way before. This morning, I find I owe him rather more than a review. I owe him a proper tribute.

  Higashino was, by any honest measure, one of the most widely read authors of his generation — a former engineer at Nippon Denso who abandoned a perfectly sound career to write, and who went on to produce a hundred and six books and sell more than a hundred million copies in Japan alone, over a hundred and sixty million worldwide by the time of his fortieth anniversary as a novelist last year. Numbers of that size tend to flatten a writer into a brand. But Higashino was never merely prolific; he was, I would argue, one of the very few crime novelists of the last half-century who understood that the genre's true subject was never the crime at all. It was always the unbearable weight of loving someone. That, to my mind, is a rarer gift than any prize committee can properly measure, and it is the gift for which he deserves not merely our admiration, but our genuine respect.

  Consider The Devotion of Suspect X (容疑者Xの献身), the 2006 Naoki Prize winner that first properly introduced Higashino to Western readers. It is, structurally, an inverted mystery — we know from the opening pages who committed the killing and largely how. The suspense, extraordinarily, lives entirely elsewhere: in watching a brilliant, isolated mathematics teacher quietly annihilate his own life, piece by piece, for a woman who will likely never fully understand what he has sacrificed. It is not a whodunit. It is a study in silent devotion carried to its most terrible logical conclusion, and it remains, to my mind, one of the most structurally audacious crime novels ever written, precisely because it dares to make the reader complicit in hoping the criminal gets away with it.

  Then there is Journey Under the Midnight Sun (白夜行), sprawling across nearly two decades of postwar Japanese life. It follows Ryo, the son of a murdered man, and Yukiho, the daughter of the woman police long suspected in the killing — two lives permanently, invisibly bound by that single crime, growing into adulthood without ever once being permitted to speak to one another directly on the page. Higashino denies us the intimacy the title seems to promise. Instead we watch two ruined lives orbit one another in the dark, bound by a wound neither can name aloud — and the effect is less that of a thriller than of a very long, very quiet elegy.

  

 And for those who found Higashino's darker register too much to bear in one sitting, there was always The Miracles of the Namiya General Store (ナミヤ雑貨店の奇蹟), gentler by far, in which a derelict shop becomes a conduit for letters passing impossibly between the present and the past. It is sentimental, certainly — but sentimental in the way that only a writer who has spent decades staring unflinchingly at cruelty can afford to be. He had, I think, earned his tenderness.

  I would add his 1985 debut, After School (放課後), if only because it shows us where all of this began: a young engineer, still working his day job, already fascinated by the particular claustrophobia of institutions — schools, offices, closed social systems — and the violence that quietly accumulates within them when no one is permitted to say what they actually feel.

  There is one small, human detail behind all this acclaim that deserves mentioning, and it is, I think, the detail that has moved me most this morning. Higashino's road to recognition was rather longer, and rather lonelier, than his later fame would suggest. He was shortlisted for the Mystery Writers of Japan Award five times before finally winning it in 1999 with Secret (秘密) — a full fourteen years after his 1985 debut. It was during that long, laurel-less decade and a half that his countrymen began calling him, not unkindly, the “uncrowned king” (無冠の帝王): enormously read, enormously respected, and yet perpetually denied the formal laurel. Even that first laurel, once won, did not settle matters. The Naoki Prize — Japan's most prestigious award for popular fiction — continued to elude him for a further seven years, through six separate shortlist rejections, until Suspect X finally secured it for him in 2006, some twenty-one years after he first put pen to paper. It is difficult, now, not to notice how closely those two decades of quiet, unrewarded persistence resemble the very characters he would go on to write — people who give everything, for years, without any guarantee, or even expectation, of being crowned for it. If anything deserves our respect above his talent, it is that: the discipline to keep writing beautifully while being told, year after year, that beauty was not quite enough.

  Why did the world — East and West both — come to revere him so completely? I have turned this question over rather more than once this morning, and I keep arriving at the same conclusion. Higashino refused the great comforting lie of the genre, which is that justice, once discovered, restores order. In his hands, discovering the truth rarely restores anything at all; it simply forces everyone involved to go on living with it. Western readers, weaned on the tidy closing arguments of the drawing-room mystery, found this genuinely unsettling and, in time, genuinely addictive. But it was, I suspect, always closer to home for readers across Korea and East Asia, where the notion that a wrong may be understood, mourned, and never truly resolved is not a literary innovation at all — it is simply how grief has always been carried. There is something in Higashino's quiet, dutiful killers, sacrificing everything without ever asking to be thanked, that speaks the same private language as han (한) — that untranslatable Korean residue of sorrow and injustice that asks not for vengeance but merely for acknowledgement. It is, I think, the deepest reason Korean readers took him so thoroughly to heart, and the reason his loss will be mourned there with a sincerity that has very little to do with sales figures.

  I think, in fact, of my friend Seok-won, who happened to be visiting family in Seoul the week the Korean remake of Suspect X — released there as Perfect Number — was still playing in cinemas. He went, more out of curiosity than devotion, having already read the novel in Korean translation some years before. He told me afterwards, over tea in London, that watching Ishigami's sacrifice performed in Korean, by Korean actors, in a Korean idiom of restraint and duty, felt to him less like adaptation than like homecoming — as though the story had simply been waiting, all along, for the right language to be spoken in. I asked whether he had ever seen the original Japanese film. He had not, and seemed entirely unbothered by the omission. “I didn't need the original,” he said. “I already had the feeling.” I have turned that remark over many times since.

  He is gone now, and the shop, so to speak, has closed its shutters for the final time. But I rather think Higashino would have appreciated the timing of it all — no grand farewell, no theatrical last chapter, only a private funeral concluded before the public even knew to mourn. And there is, I confess, one further detail that undid me rather more than the funeral notice itself: Kodansha reports that a new novel, Eternal Memory (永遠の記憶), is still due to reach bookshops on the fifth of August — a manuscript delivered, as it were, after its author has already gone. It is almost too apt. The man who spent a career teaching us that letters can still find their way to us from people no longer present has now, quite without meaning to, arranged one final delivery of his own.

  I do not think I can close this piece with mere analysis, as I might for any other book. What Higashino leaves behind is not simply a body of work to be admired from a comfortable critical distance — it is forty years of quiet craftsmanship, offered without complaint, to readers who often did not know how much they needed him until they had finished one of his books at two in the morning, unable to put it down and unwilling to switch off the light. That is not merely talent. That is a form of devotion in its own right, and it deserves, from all of us who were fortunate enough to read him, something rather more than applause. It deserves our gratitude and our genuine respect. Rest well, Higashino-sensei. You taught a great many of us, myself included, that the coldest cases are the ones committed entirely out of love.

 

Recommended Resources

The Devotion of Suspect X — Amazon

Under the Midnight Sun (also published as Journey Under the Midnight Sun) — Amazon

The Miracles of the Namiya General Store — Amazon

After School (放課後), his 1985 debut, has not to my knowledge received an official English edition; readers may still encounter it in Japanese or in Korean translation through domestic publishers.

Selected Screen Adaptations

Galileo (ガリレオ) — 2007 Fuji TV drama, starring Fukuyama Masaharu as the eccentric physicist-detective; the role that would later carry over into the Suspect X film.

Suspect X — 2008 Japanese film, based on the novel The Devotion of Suspect X; remade in Korea in 2012 as Perfect Number (용의자X), directed by Bang Eun-jin, starring Ryu Seung-beom, Lee Yo-won, and Jo Jin-woong. The story has travelled further still, remade in India as Kolaigaran (Tamil, 2019) and Jaane Jaan (Hindi, 2023).

Journey Under the Midnight Sun — adapted in Japan for television and remade in Korea in 2009 as White Night (백야행), directed by Park Shin-woo, starring Han Suk-kyu, Son Ye-jin, and Ko Soo.

The Miracles of the Namiya General Store — 2017 Japanese film, honoured with multiple Japan Academy Film Prize wins.

Malice and The Newcomer, both entries in the long-running Kyoichiro Kaga detective series, adapted repeatedly for Japanese television.

Ex Oriente, Lux.
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh