A gripping book which unfolds the mystery behind the murder of an acclaimed bestselling novelist and is also a study of the psychology of murder has been translated from Japanese to English.
Keigo Higashino's "Malice", set in 1996, has been translated by Alexander O Smith with Elye Alexander and brought out by Hachette India.
Novelist Kunihiko Hidaka is brutally murdered in his home on the night before he's planning to leave Japan and relocate to Vancouver. His body is found in his office, in a locked room, within his locked house, by his wife Rie and his best friend Osamu Nonoguchi, both of whom have rock solid alibis.
Hidaka had written a novel a couple of years earlier, "Forbidden Hunting Grounds", which was about a woodblock artist. It was supposedly fiction but its main character was based on Miyako's brother Masaya Fujio.
Masaya had gone to the same middle school as Hidaka and Nonoguchi, and a lot of what the three had done and seen together ended up in the book.
The novel reveals some things that Masaya wouldn't have been particularly proud to see in print. All of the various misadventures of his student life were detailed pretty much as they had happened in real life, including the shocking finale, where Masaya is stabbed to death by a prostitute.
The book became a bestseller. Anyone who had known Masaya could easily guess who the model for the novel's main character had been. Of course, someone in the Fujio family eventually saw it.
Masaya's father had already passed away, but his mother and sister raised a fuss. They said it was obvious that Masaya was the model for the book and that they had never granted permission to Hidaka to write such a book about him. The book was a violation of their family's privacy, and a stain on Masaya's reputation.
They demanded that all copies of the novel be pulled from the shelves, and that the novel be extensively rewritten before it was republished.
"Malice" delves into the events that led to the murder and which one of the two writers was ultimately guilty of malice. A number of issues like fake manuscripts, plagiarism and ghost writing crop up during the probe.
Higashino started writing novels while still working as an engineer at Nippon Denso Co. He won the Edogawa Rampo Prize for writing at age 27, and subsequently quit his job to start a career as a writer in Tokyo.
His "The Devotion of Suspect X" has sold over two million copies in Japan and has been made into a cult film.
