Crime Novel: Proof of the Innocent
Synopsis
In the summer of 1979, the dismembered body of a young girl is found on the banks of the Tama River. The victim is sixteen-year-old Sawada Minako.
Forty-seven years later, in 2026. On the eve of Nojima Jinan's appointment as Minister of Justice, an anonymous written testimony is delivered to the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office's Special Investigation Department. The statement claims that six people took part in the dismemberment, including three heirs to political dynasties, among them Nojima Jinan.
He is arrested, then promptly released on bail. Before the cameras, Nojima bows at a ninety-degree angle and claims it is a political conspiracy. But no one expects that this elaborate drama was never meant to prove Nojima's "innocence." Quite the opposite: from the moment he steps out of the detention center, every seemingly accidental encounter, every casual conversation, even the security footage from the convenience store on the corner, precisely corners him with a truth he buried with his own hands.
Someone has spent forty-seven years arranging a trial that will make him "confess in his own words." The most terrifying thing is not how much evidence that person has. It's that they never intended to let him walk into court alive.
He must make his own choice: go on living as an "innocent man," or be utterly forgotten as a "guilty man."
A dark and incisive Reiwa-era social suspense novel, exposing one of the bleakest chapters of postwar Japan.
Theme: The beginning
