The Echoes' Threshold
Synopsis
The day Suzuki Aie passed the civil service exam and joined the National Police Agency, she thought she would be assigned to the clerical division, spending her days with stamps and files. Instead, fate played a cruel joke on her: she was transferred to the Special Case Investigation Division, an unconventional department made up of five "famous detectives" with wildly different personalities, and assigned to accompany them.
Her partner is Kujo Ibuki, the most troublesome genius in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. He has a one-hundred-percent case-solving rate, yet insists that "perfect crimes don't exist, because humans themselves are echoes." To him, every crime is the remnant of some grander dissonance. His methods of solving cases are baffling: he stares blankly at a crime scene for three hours, then suddenly says, "The killer wore striped underwear today," and closes the case.
They face a string of "imperfect" crimes:
The door to a locked room is secured, but ants are crawling all over the ventilation shaft.
Beside a body arranged to imitate a murder is a copy of Kafka on the Shore, open to page forty-three.
A kidnapper demands ransom but gets the victim's name wrong.
Every case starts strong and ends in a fizzle, and every corpse seems to be part of a joke. But Suzuki Aie gradually realizes that behind these crimes, each like a defective product, lies the same strange rhythm, as if someone is deliberately creating echoes and leaving a certain frequency amid the ruins of each crime scene.
Kujo Ibuki never explains his deductions. Then one night, in the office, he says to Aie, "Have you ever heard of a canon? Every voice follows the same melody, but each one comes in a beat after the last."
"So?"
"So," he says, tilting his head, "someone is composing music with crimes. And my job is to hear the next note."
Only then does Suzuki Aie realize she has not entered an archive for "imperfect crimes." She has stepped into an unfinished work, composed by a madman from the seven deadly sins: The Echoes' Threshold.
"Perfection belongs to God. Humans can only leave echoes behind." - Kujo Ibuki
Theme: Romance and crime-solving
