INVISIBLE HELIX

Shortly after reporting her live-in boyfriend missing, an employee of a Tokyo flower shop goes missing herself in what turns into an unusually personal case for Teito University physics professor Manabu Yukawa, aka Detective Galileo.

Sonoka Shimauchi’s family life has always been troubled and enigmatic. Her mother, Chizuko Shimauchi, was raised in the Morning Shadows orphanage without any knowledge of her parents. After Sonoka’s biological father refused to leave his wife for Chizuko, she brought up their daughter herself, giving her a totemic stuffed animal that had helped her survive her own childhood. When Chizuko died of a hemorrhage 18 months ago, she was still less than 50 years old. Sonoka’s pinned her hopes for a brighter future on Ryota Uetsuji, the independent video producer who’s moved in with her, but Ryota brings burdens of his own. The reason he’s freelancing is so he won’t have to take orders from anyone else, and a series of flashbacks shows him developing an abusive side. By that time, however, Chief Inspector Kusanagi, acting on Sonoka’s report that Ryota has disappeared, decides that the corpse found floating in Minamiboso is probably Ryota’s. Probably, because Sonoka can’t identify the body; she’s vanished herself, along with Chizuko’s old friend Nae Matsunaga, an author of children’s books who turns out to have an unexpected connection to Prof. Yukawa. Working very much at odds with each other, Kusanagi and Yukawa, both of whom take a lively interest in brothel hostess Hidemi Negishi, seek to unearth the truth about the case. Ultimately, though, that truth is hard to discover, and ambiguous even after it’s found.

A Chinese box of Japanese mystification. That invisible helix is everywhere.