The figures arrived on 29 July, in the level prose of a bookseller's press release. Kyobo Book Centre, the largest bookshop chain in Korea, had gone back through ten years of fiction sales, from the summer of 2016 to the last week of July 2026, and ranked every novelist on its shelves. Han Kang came first, which surprised nobody who has followed Korean letters since Stockholm. Second, by a narrow margin and comfortably ahead of every other foreign writer, was Keigo Higashino, a former automotive engineer from Osaka who had died six days earlier.
I have written about Han Kang on this blog before, and the pairing at the top of that list struck me as a small puzzle worth sitting with. One is a Nobel laureate whose novels read like bruises. The other wrote paperbacks that commuters finish on the train and pass on to their sisters. And yet Korean readers, voting with their wallets for a decade, placed the two side by side. My suspicion, which this essay sets out to test, is that they had noticed something the prize juries of Japan were slow to admit: that Higashino's real subject was never detection. It was devotion, and the terrible arithmetic of what one person will spend on another.
The bare facts first, since he was a writer who respected them. Higashino died of colorectal cancer in the early hours of 23 July, aged sixty-eight. Kodansha, the publisher of his first book, announced the death on 27 July, by which time a family funeral had already been held. The notice counted 106 books to his name, excluding collaborations, from his 1985 debut After School to a new novel, Eternal Memory, which Bungeishunju is due to publish on 5 August. It belongs to the Galileo series, which means that the last story he sent into the world will be a mystery solved by the physicist who made his name. He would, I think, have enjoyed the symmetry, and distrusted it slightly.
He was born in Osaka in 1958, studied electrical engineering, and went to work for Nippon Denso, the car-parts maker now known simply as Denso. He wrote in the evenings. After School won the Edogawa Rampo Prize in 1985, the traditional door into Japanese crime fiction, and the following year he left the company, moved to Tokyo and discovered what many prize-winners discover: that a door is not a house. Korean obituaries noted, with some tenderness, how long he spent afterwards in relative obscurity. The engineer's habits never left him. His plots are built the way good machinery is built, with every part bearing load and nothing ornamental, and his prose has the plainness of a manual written by someone who genuinely wants the reader to succeed.
The prizes came slowly, and when they came, they came grudgingly. Secret won the Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 1999, but the Naoki Prize, the country's great laurel for popular fiction, was another matter. He was shortlisted for Secret in 1998, for Journey Under the Midnight Sun the following year, and then for Kataomoi, Tegami and Genya. Five nominations, five refusals. Japanese television, in its coverage of his death, replayed an old remark of his about consoling himself with a drink after each defeat. The sixth nomination, for The Devotion of Suspect X, finally succeeded in January 2006. What followed has the shape of a quiet joke. He went on to lead the Mystery Writers of Japan, and later sat for several years on the very Naoki committee that had turned him away five times. I call him the uncrowned king in my title, and that is only half true. He was crowned eventually. What interests me is the crowning that happened elsewhere, earlier, and without a committee.
The Devotion of Suspect X is the book that explains the rest. Its structure is inverted. In the opening chapters Yasuko, who works in a lunch-box shop, and her teenage daughter kill Yasuko's abusive former husband in their small flat, and their neighbour Ishigami, a mathematics teacher of genuine but wasted genius, offers to make the problem disappear. We know who did it and roughly why. The only questions left are how, and at what cost, and the novel's great cruelty is that the answer to the second question is far larger than any reader first imagines. Opposing Ishigami is Manabu Yukawa, the physicist nicknamed Galileo, who studied alongside him at university and is perhaps the only man alive able to appreciate what he has built. Their contest is conducted with enormous courtesy. It is also, underneath, a love story in which the lover never once declares himself.
I read it first in English and later, with a dictionary at my elbow, in Yang Eok-gwan's Korean translation. The English title settles on devotion, a fine word that still carries a faint scent of chapel. The Japanese has 献身, kenshin, and the Korean edition reads the very same two characters in its own voice: 헌신, heonsin. Literally, the offering of the body. What English says by metaphor the characters say outright, and the title warns us, before the first page, that a man is about to give himself away piece by piece. Reading the Korean edition, I had the odd sense that the word had come home, or at least to a house where it was spoken with the same accent.
Korean cinema seems to have understood this almost too well. Bang Eun-jin's 2012 adaptation, released in Korea as Yong-uija X and abroad as Perfect Number, makes one decision that tells us a great deal. It removes the physicist altogether. In place of Yukawa stands Min-beom, a police detective played by Cho Jin-woong, who happens to be the teacher's old schoolfriend. The duel of two geniuses becomes a clash between a policeman's instinct and a mathematician's logic, and the film leans hard into the emotional register that the novel keeps under lock and key. On balance I think the change costs more than it gains. Higashino's version depends on two minds of equal calibre recognising each other, and on the reader's slow horror that the only person who can see Ishigami clearly is the one obliged to expose him. Without Yukawa, the chess match turns into a tearful pursuit. And yet the choice is revealing. The filmmakers could lose the detective. They could not lose the devotion, because the devotion was what Korean audiences had come for.
The same instinct governs Journey Under the Midnight Sun, published in 1999 and, to my mind, the darker masterpiece. It opens in Osaka in 1973 with the murder of a pawnbroker, and then follows two children touched by the case, the dead man's son Ryoji and Yukiho, daughter of a woman the police suspect, across nearly two decades of Japanese prosperity. What makes the book unforgettable is a formal refusal. The two are almost never shown together on the page. Their bond exists only in consequences: a rival ruined here, an obstacle removed there, a pattern the reader assembles while the characters say nothing. Devotion, in this novel, has curdled into something closer to complicity, and the title's image of a white night, a darkness that never quite falls, fits it exactly. Korea made its own film of the book in 2009, White Night, directed by Park Shin-woo, with Han Suk-kyu as the detective who cannot let the case go.
If that were all, Higashino would be a superb and chilly craftsman, and I doubt he would have sold two million copies of anything in Korea. Yet that is roughly what The Miracles of the Namiya General Store is reported to have sold there since its translation in 2012, and Kyobo's figures confirm it as his most purchased book over the decade. It is also his gentlest. Three young thieves hide overnight in an abandoned shop and find that letters are arriving through the shutter from decades earlier, addressed to an old shopkeeper who once answered his neighbours' troubles by post. They begin, clumsily, to answer them. No one is murdered. The machinery is still there, a clockwork of coincidences that clicks shut in the final chapters, but the power it drives is kindness. The same figures add a detail I find telling: across those ten years, most of his Korean buyers were women, and the largest single group were readers in their thirties. That is not the audience the crime shelves are usually built for. It is an audience, I suspect, that reads a mystery less for the puzzle than for what the puzzle costs.
Why Korea, then, and why so completely? I am wary of national explanations; they tend to flatter the person offering them. But a few things can be said with reasonable confidence. Higashino wrote about institutions, schools and companies, families and police stations, and about the private debts people run up inside them. He was readable in a way literary fiction seldom troubles to be, and prolific enough that anyone who fell for one book could find twenty more waiting. Korean publishers, for their part, translated him at a pace that kept him on the front tables for two decades. On 23 July, the very day he died, the Korean edition of one of his Galileo novels, The Transparent Spiral, went on sale. It is unlikely he ever knew. Above all, though, I think Korean readers recognised in his books a moral seriousness that never announced itself. His killers are seldom monsters. They are people who have decided, for reasons the plot slowly discloses, that someone else's life is worth more than their own, and who then carry that decision to its end without asking anybody to thank them.
The English-speaking world has been slower. The Devotion of Suspect X appeared in English in 2011 and was shortlisted for an Edgar Award in America the following year, which is as near to a Naoki Prize as American crime writing offers. Yet in British bookshops Higashino has occupied little more than the end of a shelf, usually beside the Scandinavians. Our difficulty is structural. The Anglo-American tradition, from the country house to the police procedural, promises that the solution restores order. Higashino's solutions rarely restore anything. The truth arrives, everyone must go on living with it, and the detective is often the saddest person in the room. A reader raised on Sherlock Holmes can find this oddly unsatisfying at first, like a sum that balances without ever coming out even. A reader raised on Korean fiction of the past half-century, where the reckoning so often comes late and settles little, may simply find it honest.
He left in a way he would have spotted at once, and probably cut from a draft for being too neat. The man who wrote a novel about letters crossing time from people who can no longer answer them has left behind a book still in the post. Eternal Memory is due in Japanese shops on 5 August, thirteen days after its author's death. A Korean translation will follow in its own time, and some reader in Daegu or Incheon, a year or two from now, will open it on a crowded morning train without thinking of the date at all. That, I suspect, is exactly how he would have wanted it read: as a story first, and an epitaph only by accident.
It occurs to me that an obituary is an inverted mystery. The ending is given away in the first line; the reader knows from the outset who is gone and roughly how. What remains, as in Suspect X, is the only question that was ever worth asking: what did this person give, and to whom? In Higashino's case the answer runs to 106 books, forty years of evenings at the desk, and a readership that stretched from Osaka to Seoul and a good deal further. The juries took two decades to reach their verdict. The readers had reached theirs long before, one paperback at a time, and on the evidence of a Seoul bookseller's ledger they have not changed their minds.
Recommended Resources
☞ Purchase the Korean Edition: Yong-uija X-ui Heonsin (용의자 X의 헌신), tr. Yang Eok-gwan, Aladin Bookstore
An English translation, The Devotion of Suspect X, has also been published.
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
※ Published under the author's editorial persona. See the About page for how this comes to be.
Sources
- Kodansha, “Notice of the Death of Keigo Higashino” (東野圭吾さん ご逝去のお知らせ), 27 July 2026.
- Prizes World (文学賞の世界), “Keigo Higashino: Naoki Prize record and shortlisted works”.
- Herald Economy (헤럴드경제), “Keigo Higashino, Korea's best-selling foreign novelist of the past ten years” (Kyobo Book Centre sales data), 29 July 2026.