A story that starts like a fairy tale
I came to Keigo Higashino by accident. An Amazon recommendation for The Miracles of the Namiya General Store led me to his name, and when I looked through his other novels, Journey Under the Midnight Sun—highly rated on Douban—pulled me in.
At first the ingredients seem almost too familiar: Ryoji Kirihara, handsome and meticulous; Yukiho Nishimoto, beautiful, elegant, and clever; childhood friends who should have grown into another tender love story. If life had followed its ordinary track, that is exactly what they might have had. But the main line of the novel is cut by the childhood disasters they endure, and everything promising stops at that point.
Yukiho’s mother forces her to serve men with particular tastes. Ryoji sees his mother with a subordinate, and then witnesses his own father violating Yukiho, his first love. In fury he stabs his father to death. Yukiho, whether deliberately or not, causes her mother’s death by gas poisoning. Detective Sasagaki Junzo spends nineteen years on the two cases, while Ryoji and Yukiho live under false names and stay on the run for the same nineteen years. As the novel puts it, from then on Yukiho never shows her true face, and Ryoji keeps wandering through the dark ventilation shaft.
The light that replaces the sun
Yukiho once tells Natsumi: “There is no sun in my sky. It is always night, but it is not dark, because something has taken the sun’s place. It is not as bright as the sun, but for me it is enough. With that light I can treat the night as day. Do you understand? I have never had the sun, so I am not afraid of losing it.”
Some readers argue that Yukiho does not love Ryoji at all, that she treats him merely as a pawn in her climb out of her origins, her entry into respectable society, her laundering of identity. I do not agree. The two are undoubtedly in love, even if that love carries the weight of redemption. The two childhood tragedies mean that their love can only flower at night, in corners no one knows, never in sunlight or with other people’s blessings.
The wedding gift Ryoji gives a close friend is a paper cutout of a boy and a girl holding hands: “I hope to walk hand in hand in the sun.” When asked about his New Year wish, he says something similar to his friend.
An interesting detail: throughout the whole book the two protagonists never have a single conversation. They appear in the same frame only once, and that one time is their final separation by life and death. This is one of the author’s smartest moves. The pair conspire to remove everyone who might know the truth of the murders; they use the people around them to widen their contacts, extract business secrets, and build wealth. They must meet to negotiate such things. They are lovers, too, with obvious need for physical and emotional contact. The author does not show these meetings. Instead he relies on other people’s hints and the direction of clues, letting readers fill in the gaps. That gives the pleasure of taking part in the discovery, and it is one reason the book holds attention.
One side of them longs desperately for love and goodness; the other keeps releasing the crime and evil in human nature. This is the paradox of a life, and also a personal fate.
The cost of being cleared
At the end, when the truth comes out, Ryoji drives into his own heart the scissors that once killed his father—the scissors soaked in guilt. Facing Detective Sasagaki’s questioning, Yukiho shows no expression: “I don’t know this person.” Then: “Sasagaki staggers out of the police circle. He sees Yukiho going up the escalator, her back like a white ghost. She does not look back once.” Some read this as coldness. It is closer to profound despair. Ryoji has completed her spiritual redemption, lifting her ashore with his bloodstained hands, taking all suspicion and infamy onto himself. The only sun in her life, the person she loves, is gone forever. What does it matter if she has the whole world? What does it matter if she is cleared? She must go on living the “beautiful life” woven from countless lies until old age. Dragging out a walking-corpse existence is more painful than death.
Just now I want to guess what Detective Sasagaki feels. One line seems enough: “When I think of what he must have felt crawling through that ventilation shaft, Sasagaki’s heart is cut.”