Book Review: The Final Curtain by Keigo Higashino

Ten years ago, Tokyo Police Detective Kyoichiro Kaga was unexpectedly summoned to Sendai with news of his mother Yuriko’s death. She had run away from home years earlier, obscuring her tracks so well that not even his police detective father could track her down. Yuriko had found work in a bar in Sendai, and seemed to lead a quiet life right up until her death. Her boss had done her best to locate Yuriko’s living relatives, and finally managed to send Kaga a message to come retrieve his mother’s ashes.

Fast forward to the present. Kaga’s cousin Shuhei Matsumiya is now also a detective with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, though Kaga himself has transferred to the relatively quiet Nihonbashi Precinct. Matsumiya has just caught the homicide of Michiko Oshitani, a bubbly sales representative from Shiga who had come to Tokyo on a visit. Her strangled corpse has been found in the strangely empty apartment of Matsuyo Koshikawa, who is himself nowhere to be found.

Matsumiya’s investigation leads him to a theater director named Hiromi Kadokura. She and Michiko had known one another as teenagers, till scandal clouded Hiromi’s adolescence. Hiromi had been forced to withdraw from school as dangerous men hounded her and her father Tadao:

Knowing that she was in danger, Hiromi took off at full speed. The men in the car didn’t come after her, but the terror she felt was a pure physical sensation.

 

Safely back at home, she told Tadao what had happened. A gloomy expression on his face, he sank into silent thought for a long time. Hiromi guessed that he was trying to think of a way out of their difficulties, a way for them to survive.

 

Her guess was incorrect. Not much later, she discovered what she saw in her father’s eyes was a yearning for death.

Hiromi survived her troubled childhood and worked hard to become a well-respected figure in Tokyo’s thriving theater scene. Michiko had come to see her on the day of her latest play’s premiere, stopping by the theater before subsequently disappearing. Hiromi readily admits that she’d had a conversation with Michiko about the past but is adamant that she knows nothing about what happened to the other woman afterwards. Matsumiya is inclined to believe her but Kaga, who has met her previously, is not.

As Kaga becomes further enmeshed in the investigation, the cousins make the surprising discovery that this case might very well have ties to Yuriko’s disappearance all those years ago. Matsumiya also suspects that another death five kilometers away is somehow connected to Michiko’s murder. What manner of tragedies and truths will the two detectives uncover as they strive to solve these cases and bring a killer to justice?

This novel is a gut punch of a police procedural, as the complicated emotional entanglements that eventually lead to the taking of lives, innocent or otherwise, are laid bare in its pages. Kyoichiro and Matsumiya make a great team as they explore, separately or together, the secret histories of both their suspects and the influential figures of their own pasts. Keigo Higashino expertly ties together such disparate elements as the world of theater, parental abandonment and nuclear waste disposal – all filtered through a distinctly Japanese yet universally relatable filter – in this final installment of his Kyoichiro Kaga series.

While searching for a potential suspect, for example, Matsumiya delves into the reality of what it takes to keep Japan’s nuclear power stations running, as he interviews one of his suspect’s former colleagues. The colleague tells him:

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

 

“Why do you say that?”

 

“Because we’re the dregs.”

 

“The dregs?”

 

“Fuel ain’t the only thing nuclear power stations need. Those places, they eat up uranium, but they also eat up people. That’s how they keep going. Oh yeah, they need their human sacrifices. We manual laborers, we have the life sucked out of us. You can see it. Just look at me. I’m scrap, scum, leftovers.”

Both intelligent and wise, The Final Curtain is a fitting cap to the acclaimed Kyoichiro Kaga series, even though I’m one of those greedy readers who wishes for many more of these books. Translated from the original Japanese by Giles Murray, the conversations occasionally veer exceedingly British, but overall capture the essence of melancholy that permeates this meaty tale of family estrangement and the lengths some people will go in order to find a lasting peace.