From the best-selling author of Tokyo Express, a chilling tale where Japanese tradition and Western crime collide – now available in English for the first time


Musashino, 1959. A young Japanese flight attendant is found strangled on the icy banks of the river. The police suspect foul play – but the deeper they dig, the more they collide with a wall of silence.
At the centre of it all stands a foreign priest and the Guglielmo Church, a charitable Christian mission. The dead woman’s connection to the church is undeniable. But what begins as a routine investigation quickly turns into something far more treacherous, entangling together narcotics, post-war relief schemes and the delicate web of international diplomacy.

As the story moves from back alleys to diplomatic sanctuaries, following the twists and turns of Detective Fujisawa's investigation, Seicho Matsumoto masterfully constructs a slow-burning procedural where truth is clear but justice is not permitted.

Translated from Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood.

Seicho Matsumoto (Author)
Seicho Matsumoto was born in 1909 in Fukuoka, Japan. Self-educated, Matsumoto published his first book when he was forty years old and he quickly established himself as a master of crime fiction. His exploration of human psychology and Japanese post-war malaise, coupled with the creation of twisting, dark mysteries, made him one of the most acclaimed and best-selling writers in Japan. He received the prestigious Akutagawa Literary Prize in 1950 and the Kikuchi Kan Prize in 1970. He died in 1992.

Jesse Kirkwood (Translator)
Jesse Kirkwood is a literary translator working from Japanese into English. The recipient of the 2020 Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize, his translations include Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumoto, Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan and A Perfect Day to Be Alone by Nanae Aoyama.