From the author of the highly acclaimed Tokyo Year Zero and Occupied City-an electrifying, mesmerizing new novel about a high-profile crime that occurs in Tokyo during the occupation and goes cold, haunting the lives of both American and Japanese investigators for the next forty years.
Tokyo, July 1949: the president of the Japanese National Railways goes missing just a day after announcing 30,000 layoffs. In the midst of the U.S. occupation, against the backdrop of widespread social, political, and economic reforms, as tensions and confusion reign, American Detective Harry Sweeney-fighting against his own disillusion and demons-leads the missing person's investigation. Fifteen years later, a resurgent Tokyo prepares for the 1964 Olympics and the global spotlight. Private investigator Hideki Murota, a former policeman during the occupation, is given a case that forces him to go back to confront a time, a place, and the crime he's been hiding from for the past fifteen years. More than twenty years later, in the autumn and winter of 1988, as the Emperor Showa is dying, Donald Reichenbach, an aging American, eking out a living in Japan teaching and translating, discovers that the final reckoning of the greatest mystery of the Showa Era is now up to him to solve.
