Japanese Crime

Japanese literary sensation Fuminori Nakamura’s latest novel is as a dark look into human psyche - what turns someone into a killer? Can it be something as small as a suggestion?

The winter of 1578, four years prior to the Honno-ji Incident. Araki Murashige has betrayed his ally Oda Nobunaga and holed himself up in Arioka Castle—but a string of unsettling incidents within the castle walls has him at his wit’s end. The desperate warlord’s only hope for solving these mysteries is imprisoned in the castle’s dungeon: a man named Kuroda Kanbei, one of Oda’s most gifted strategists. When all the conflict and intrigue come to a close, what will these two men have gained…and lost?

Yutaka Tanaka, señor feudal de la provincia de Sagami, debe vengar la muerte de su padre, asesinado por una banda de samuráis enmascarados. La investigación del crimen lo arroja a los campos de batalla, a las intrigas cortesanas y sus traiciones. Como un príncipe Hamlet perdido entre los pliegues de un país que no llega a comprender, Yutaka enfrentará la fascinación de los autómatas, las maniobras sentimentales de dama Ashikaga y los secretos del sokushinbutsu.

Inspired by the real-life Glico-Morinaga kidnapping, an unsolved case which terrorized Japan for two years, Lady Joker reimagines the circumstances of this watershed episode in modern Japanese history and brings into riveting focus the lives and motivations of the victims, the perpetrators, the heroes and the villains. As the shady networks linking corporations to syndicates are brought to light, the stakes rise, and some of the professionals we have watched try to fight their way through this crisis will lose everything—some even their lives.

Ousted by a rival cartel, a brutal drug lord flees Mexico to the distant East. An unwanted child commits a terrible deed and is locked away for years. A Japanese heart surgeon is shunned by the medical community and turns to working as an illegal organ broker. Three lives become entangled in threads of flesh and are plunged deep into a world of blood and bone. Together, they carve out a new criminal empire, but how long can a dynasty last? Destiny is not for mortals to decide. It is cast by the Night and Wind. It is cast by Tezcatlipoca.

In the wake of World War II, the Allied forces charged 28 Japanese men with crimes against humanity. Correspondents at the Tokyo trial thought the evidence fell most heavily on 10 of the accused. In December 1948, five of these defendants were hanged, while four received sentences of life in prison. The tenth was a brilliant philosopher-patriot named Okawa Shumei. His story proved strangest of all. Among all the political and military leaders on trial, Okawa was the lone civilian.

In December 1937, the Chinese capital, Nanjing, falls and the Japanese army unleash an orgy of torture, murder, and rape. Over the course of six weeks, hundreds of thousands of civilians and prisoners of war are killed. At the very onset of the atrocities, the Danish supervisor at a cement plant just outside the city, 26-year-old Bernhard Arp Sindberg, opens the factory gates and welcomes in 10,000 Chinese civilians to safety. He becomes an Asian equivalent of Oskar Schindler, the savior of Jews in the Holocaust.

―過去に重大犯罪を犯した人間が、会社の同僚だとわかったら?― ジャーナリストを志して夢破れ、製作所に住み込みで働くことになった益田純一。同僚の鈴木秀人は無口で陰気、どことなく影があって職場で好かれていない。

"Miguel Ángel", un joven de 28 años nacido en Medellín y graduado de la facultad de Derecho de una universidad bogotana, llega a Tokio en la primavera de 1992 en busca del "sueño americano en versión japonesa". Con el paso de los años se covertiría en "toda una leyenda del submundo y la vida nocturna clandestina" en el país del Sol naciente, primero ejerciendo él mismo la prostitución y luego convirtiéndose en ficha clave para la Yakuza, la más temible mafia asiática, en la trata de prostitutas colombianas en el Lejano Oriente.

Ken Hideyoshi is the new guy in Halawa Correctional Institute. He’s tough looking, a hard case. His cellmate is Cal—the mute tattoo artist of the prison who murdered his own wife. Ken, already inked with a gang symbol and a Japanese emblem, eventually asks Cal to create an elaborate tattoo on his back, in kanji script, of Musashi’s Book of the Void.

When Toru Narazaki's girlfriend, Ryoko, disappears, he tries to track her down, despite the warnings of a private detective he's hired to find her. Ryoko's past is shrouded in mystery, but the one concrete clue leads him to a compound in the heart of Tokyo, with a group that seems to be a cult led by a charismatic guru. Narazaki plunges into the secretive world of the cult, ready to expose himself to any of the guru's brainwashing tactics if it means he can learn the truth about Ryoko. But the cult isn't what he expected, and he has no idea of the bubbling violence beneath its surface.

After a brutal murder investigation ripped apart his life, Kosuke Iwata quit both his job as a detective with the Tokyo Police Department and his country, leaving Japan for the hopefully sunnier shores of Los Angeles, California. Iwata sets up shop as a private investigator. Approached by an old contact whose daughter has been murdered and the case laid to rest - unsolved - Iwata agrees to take on the case out of loyalty. But what seems initially like a cold-blooded murder takes a different turn when a homeless witness recalls the murderer’s parting words: “I’m sorry.”

Japan faces Korea in the World Baseball Classic at Dodger Stadium, and curmudgeonly gardener Mas Arai finds himself embroiled in a murder. A Japanese tabloid writer drops dead on the field, and Mas gave the victim his last drink. It turns out there's more at stake than a baseball championship - international diplomacy depends upon uncovering secrets buried decades ago.

LA gardener Mas Arai returns to Hiroshima to bring his best friend’s ashes to a relative on the tiny offshore island of Ino, only to become embroiled in the mysterious death of a teenage boy who was about the same age Mas was when he survived the atomic bomb in 1945. The boy’s death affects the elderly, often-curmudgeonly, always-reluctant sleuth, who cannot return home to Los Angeles until he finds a way to see justice served.

Danger awaits best friends on the island of Malta, where one will be accused of murder and the other of being a spy on the run. A missing journalist cannot tell the world he is still alive by becoming a mystery writer's alibi. When Hiromi came back to Paris to settle an old score, she had no idea her target might be hiding on the island of Malta. But, now, she has a chance to redeem her reputation by neutralizing a rogue agent and capturing the mystery writer who hides agency secrets in his novels.

In Murder in Manchuria, Scott D. Seligman explores an unsolved murder set amid the chaos that reigned in China in the run-up to World War II. The story unfolds against the backdrop of a three-country struggle for control of Manchuria—an area some called China's "Wild East"—and an explosive mixture of nationalities, religions, and ideologies. Semyon Kaspe, a young Jewish musician, is kidnapped, tortured, and ultimately murdered by disaffected, antisemitic White Russians, secretly acting on the orders of Japanese military overlords who covet his father's wealth.

Euphemistically labeled as the "Water Supply and Prophylaxis Administration" and "HippoEpizootic Administration" of the Imperial Japanese Army, Unit 731 and Unit 100, as well as their subsidiary branches, performed human experimentation on the innocents under the leadership of Dr. Ishii Shiro. Although the exact number of victims is unclear since the Japanese destroyed most of the evidence at the end of the war, but it ranged from 3,000-250,000 innocent men, women, and children.

不条理な暴力に私たちはどう抗えるのか――【第53回大宅賞受賞作】1972年11月、革マル派が支配していた早稲田大学文学部構内で、一人の学生が虐殺された。

金属バットで両親を撲殺、女性8人を強姦して殺害、妻をチェーンソーでバラバラに切断、教え子をソープに沈めたのち殺害……。高度経済成長やバブル景気に浮かれた昭和後期に起きた、25の凄惨な事件。

世論調査では日本国民の8割が死刑制度に賛成だ。だが死刑の詳細は法務省によって徹底的に伏せられ、国民は実態を知らずに是非を判断させられている。暴れて嫌がる囚人をどうやって刑場に連れて行くの