GUILT

A man and a woman work in very different ways to gather exculpatory evidence in a murder case whose leading suspect has already confessed.

It doesn’t take that long after attorney Kensuke Shiraishi is found stabbed to death in the back seat of his car for Det. Tsutomu Godai and Sgt. Nakamachi, of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, to fasten on a person of interest. Their second meeting with Tatsuro Kuraki ends abruptly when he confesses to both Shiraishi’s murder and the stabbing of scamster Shozo Haitani almost 40 years ago—a crime he tells the police he had to cover up by killing Shiraishi after the lawyer, whom he’d consulted, pressed him to turn himself over to the authorities despite the statute of limitations having run out on that earlier crime. But Kazuma Kuraki can’t believe his father would do such a thing. Neither, more surprisingly, can Orie Asaba, the daughter of restaurant manager Yoko Asaba, whose husband, Junji Fukuma, hanged himself in jail after he was arrested back in 1984 for Haitani’s murder. Working sometimes with the police but mostly on their own and independently of each other, Kazuma and Orie work to find alternative scenarios to Tatsuro Kuraki’s guilt. Why would a man confess to two murders he didn’t commit, and what evidence could they possibly dig up that’s as telling as his confession? The more holes and inconsistencies they find in that confession, the harder Godai seems to dig in his heels—until at last he’s compelled to see the force of their case in a striking denouement.

A piercing and pitiless examination of guilt in all its forms and manifestations.