Notes on Keigo Higashino's Genya
Original notes here.
Masaya Mizuhara’s father, who worked in metal processing, committed suicide because of debt. Masaya believed his father took his own life solely so the family could collect the insurance payout. Masaya recalled how his maternal uncle, Toshiro Yonekura, had strongly promoted an investment scheme to his parents and had them write an IOU, only for the investment to fail. On the day of the funeral, Toshiro came as expected to demand repayment with the IOU in hand. That night, a major earthquake struck. Masaya saw that Toshiro was no longer responding, so he took the IOU from his pocket, only to discover that he was still conscious. Driven by instinct, Masaya picked up a stone and killed him.
He was not sure whether the woman at the scene had witnessed the murder. Later, he rescued her from a man who had tried to rape her. The woman was named Mifuyu Shinkai, and it was said that her parents had died in the earthquake. She later gave him a videotape recording what had happened at the scene of the murder. The owner of the tape had filmed scenes of the disaster site in the hope of selling them to a television station for money, and had therefore left part of the footage at the disaster site so that anyone interested could contact him. Mifuyu Shinkai pretended to be a television-station employee and took the tape, after which she disappeared without a trace. Toshiro’s daughter, who had also seen the footage, contacted the owner of the tape, but he kept waiting in vain for word from the television station. Toshiro’s son-in-law once confronted Masaya with photographs taken from the footage. Although this frightened Masaya, nothing came of it.
Mifuyu and Masaya fell in love and she took him to Tokyo to live. Masaya was turned down when looking for a job, but later, because an employee at the company named Yasuura injured his hand, a vacancy opened up and Masaya got the position. His skill with his hands earned him increasing recognition. One time, Yasuura was out drinking at a bar when a hostess propositioned him. After going upstairs with her, he lost consciousness and later discovered that his hand had been stabbed. Like Mifuyu, the woman had two moles on her neck. At the Hanaya jewelry store where Mifuyu worked, all the female employees were stalked by a mysterious person, and eventually the store was suddenly found to contain poisonous gas. The evidence ultimately pointed to Hamanaka, Mifuyu’s superior, who had stolen Mifuyu’s letters and insisted that he and Mifuyu had been lovers. Mifuyu denied the relationship. The poisonous-gas device was intricately made and could not have been the work of an ordinary person.
Mifuyu had Masaya investigate a hairdresser named Aoe. Once she had gathered enough information, she went to Aoe’s salon and invited him to meet her, approached Aoe with a business proposition: she would provide the capital, he would provide the talent, and they would open a salon together. She also seduced him. He agreed, and gradually drifted away from his girlfriend, who opposed the idea, until they eventually broke up. Before long, the new salon became known throughout the industry.
Masaya received a threatening letter signed in Toshiro’s name, claiming to have evidence of the murder and demanding ten million yen, or else the police would be notified. After learning of it, Mifuyu helped him analyze the situation and also offered to investigate. They finally reached a preliminary conclusion. When the deadline passed, the sender sent another letter, giving him one last chance and arranging to meet Masaya. The two of them lay in wait near the meeting place. When the appointed time came, Mifuyu called Toshiro and made sure Masaya could see the other party’s face. The two followed him. Soga was an old acquaintance of the Shinkai family. Out of kindness, he wanted to find Mifuyu and give her photographs of her with her parents. He had previously investigated and learned that Mifuyu had gone abroad for a year with a woman she had long admired, and that when she returned, that woman was no longer living at her former address. On the night of the meeting, a shop assistant told Soga that he had received a call. Soga answered, and Mifuyu said she had an urgent matter and could not come. Soga did not notice that the two were following him. Later, when Soga’s wife realized that her husband had not come home, she contacted Mifuyu. A year passed. His wife was struggling to make ends meet, but she had no intention of claiming the insurance money, and she was extremely grateful to Mifuyu for introducing her to a position at Hanaya.
Mifuyu showed Hanaya owner Ryuji Akimura the work Masaya had made from the designs she had given him, and suggested that they collaborate. At the same time, Ryuji was deeply attracted by Mifuyu’s delicate beauty. Although he had originally intended never to marry, he proposed to her and she finally accepted. Mifuyu told Masaya that marriage was merely a means of attaining happiness; what mattered most was that the two people’s hearts were together. When Aoe learned of Mifuyu’s impending marriage, he felt betrayed and demanded to leave, determined to make his own way. Mifuyu asked Masaya to help him, having already made up her mind about what to do. A female employee under Aoe was suddenly sexually assaulted and robbed, and an ornament identical to Aoe’s was left at the scene. Afterward, Aoe could not find the ornament, making him the prime suspect. Mifuyu arranged for him to return to the shop where she had met him and recover an identical ornament, clearing him of suspicion. Aoe therefore abandoned his plan to strike out on his own.
Although Hamanaka was cleared of suspicion at the time, he ultimately lost his job because of the incident and took a low-end jewelry-store job to make ends meet. This time, Detective Kato noticed the strange connection between Mifuyu, the poison-gas case, and Soga’s disappearance, and asked Hamanaka for information. Hamanaka revealed that Mifuyu had risen rapidly within the company by taking advantage of his position as the manager. From Kato’s documents, Hamanaka saw that a piece jointly produced by Mifuyu and Hanaya incorporated a design that he had shown only to Mifuyu, who had once been his lover. He turned on a recorder and confronted Mifuyu, but she flatly denied everything and drove him out. Later, he was also warned by his current superior. Kato learned from Hamanaka that when he was dating Mifuyu, he had once gone to her hometown in an attempt to understand her better, only to be furiously rebuked. Kato’s preliminary conclusion was that anyone connected to Mifuyu’s past would be forcefully cut off by her. He theorized that Mifuyu had gotten together with Hamanaka in order to rise within the company, stolen his designs, and then set him up in order to sever his investigation into her past. He also went to Osaka to find the Shinkai family’s neighbors and learned that Mifuyu had just returned there on the eve of the earthquake, and that the family reunion had been a joyful one.
Ryuji’s older sister, Yorie, instinctively felt that Mifuyu seemed to be playing a role. The fact that she had received congratulatory cards from people she had never heard of also seemed highly suspicious. She suggested to Mifuyu that they travel together to her family home in Kyoto, and Mifuyu readily agreed. Mifuyu asked Masaya to approach her. Masaya happened to encounter a con artist trying to sell her an investment scheme, and inadvertently tipped her off. In gratitude, she invited Masaya to take a pottery class with her. Mifuyu urged Masaya to sleep with the woman, who was over fifty, as a way of shifting her attention, which caused Masaya considerable inner conflict. During this period, Masaya was stalked by Yuko, the daughter of the owner of a nearby restaurant, who was in love with him, and he later visited her. Yorie invited Masaya to accompany her to Kyoto to investigate, and in Kyoto she told him everything about why she was investigating Mifuyu. Wanting to learn about Mifuyu’s past, Masaya set off without telling Mifuyu. While Yorie rested with a fever, Masaya eventually found Mifuyu’s former homeroom teacher in private. The teacher said that Kato had come to investigate three months earlier. He showed Masaya Mifuyu’s graduation photograph, but the woman in it was someone Masaya had never seen before. Masaya resolved to protect Mifuyu and persuaded Yorie to stop worrying about the investigation. On their return to Tokyo, he slept with her.
Kato’s reasoning had reached the point where he was certain that Mifuyu had an accomplice skilled in metalworking. He met Aoe and confirmed that he was not the person, and wanted Mifuyu to learn that he existed so that the accomplice would reveal himself. He theorized that Mifuyu had framed Aoe and then helped him out in order to earn his gratitude, while an accomplice had helped her produce an identical ornament to complete the setup. He attended an exhibition of pottery works and asked Yorie about Masaya’s work. From Yorie, Masaya learned that Mifuyu was on very close terms with Soga’s wife. Through Yorie’s introduction, he went to visit her, only to be shocked to learn that her husband had arranged to meet Mifuyu that very night, as well as why he wanted to find Mifuyu. Masaya suddenly understood that Mifuyu had framed him and turned him into an accomplice to Soga’s murder. He remembered that Mifuyu had invited Soga to a hotel, where Masaya had used a device to release poisonous gas in Soga’s room, then entered the room, strangled him, and dismembered the body, binding the pieces with tape. He had vomited repeatedly in the process and had been unable to eat fish or meat ever since. He had always believed that he and Mifuyu were fighting side by side to build a happy life. Now he realized that he had merely been used.
Kato had narrowed Mifuyu’s accomplice down to Masaya, but he became suspicious after learning that Masaya had asked Soga’s wife about Soga’s condition. He reasoned that Mifuyu had instructed Masaya to approach Yorie. No one was living at Masaya’s residence anymore. After learning that Masaya had disappeared, Kato went to his former employer and learned that he had bought back the blueprints, which led him to focus on Yasuura, whose hand had been stabbed. He went to see Yasuura, but Yasuura could not identify Mifuyu. From Yasuura, he learned that Masaya had not only come to buy back the blueprints but had also used the machinery for three days, and that their former employer had once had them manufacture real guns. Kato found a man who had been arrested for illegally keeping a real gun, and confirmed that ten days earlier he had exchanged bullets for Masaya’s real gun. He concluded that Masaya was planning to kill Mifuyu.
Despite Ryuji’s opposition, Mifuyu insisted on undergoing plastic surgery repeatedly. Ryuji did not dare tell her that he did not want a doll-like wife, and he increasingly came to see his wife as a terrifying woman. After disappearing, Masaya saw a new advertisement for Hanaya and estimated that Mifuyu was behind the expansion of its business. He reasoned that amid the chaos of the earthquake, Mifuyu had seized the perfect opportunity to remain conscious and impersonate someone else, then turned herself into an accomplice. Her judgment had proven extraordinary all the way to the present, while he had finally become useful by eliminating, one by one, the threats around her. He invented various stories and investigated the real Mifuyu Shinkai indirectly. From a neighbor of the real Mifuyu, whom Soga had once visited, he learned that the woman the real Mifuyu so admired was her former boss. Kato also learned from Soga’s wife that when Soga met this boss, he remarked how young and beautiful she looked. The pieces finally clicked: the “Mifuyu” they knew was an impostor—the former boss herself. At last, Masaya understood why Soga had to die. Kato met Yuko and left her with a warning to forget Masaya.
Kato concluded that Masaya would take advantage of Hanaya’s large party aboard a boat on New Year’s Eve of the millennium to make his move. That night, he posed as Masaya to the hotel staff and had them put Mifuyu on the phone. When asked about her true identity, Mifuyu agreed to meet Kato. Kato warned her that her life was in grave danger, but she remained expressionless and claimed not to know Masaya. She also denied being an impostor, saying that she had undergone repeated plastic surgery because she resembled the person she admired and wanted to become perfect. At the pier, Kato intercepted Masaya as he tried to force his way onto the boat. Watching the ship sail away, Masaya pointed his gun at Kato and pulled the trigger. The modified handcrafted pistol exploded, blowing both men to pieces. Learning of the gruesome deaths, Ryuji decided to keep it from Mifuyu. Mifuyu smiled and said that it was the first time she had seen such a beautiful night, truly “phantom night” (genya).
Written on 15/4/2018
