Proof of the Crime of Innocence
Synopsis
Summer of Showa 54. The dismembered body of a young girl is found on the banks of the Tama River. The victim is sixteen-year-old Sawami Minako.
Forty-seven years later, in Reiwa 8. On the eve of Nojima Shinan's appointment as Minister of Justice, an anonymous, one-word statement is delivered to the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office's Special Investigation Department. The testimony points to six people who took part in dismembering the victim, including three descendants of political dynasties, one of them Nojima Shinan.
He is arrested, then promptly released on bail. In front of the cameras, Nojima bows ninety degrees and claims this is a political conspiracy. But no one expects that this grand drama did not begin as an attempt to prove Nojima's "innocence."
Quite the opposite. From the moment he steps out of the detention center, every seemingly accidental encounter, every offhand conversation, even the security footage from a convenience store on a street corner, precisely drives him toward a truth he buried with his own hands.
Someone has spent forty-seven years arranging a trial meant to make him "confess in his own words." But the most terrifying thing is not how much evidence that person has. It's that they never intended to let him reach the courtroom alive.
Judging from the synopsis alone, it seems like a detective novel in the style of Keigo Higashino.