Soul Cage is the second Reiko Himekawa detective thriller from Tetsuya Honda.
I was struck by its strong police procedural structure compared with The Silent Dead. There is almost no back story on Reiko or her fellow investigators, only the unusual case of murder without a body.
Through alternating narrators, the story involves a construction worker who commits suicide on the job, leaving his young son Kosuke to be raised by another construction worker Takaoka, into a fine young man. Reiko and her team are called to an abandoned van near the river, where a blood soaked human hand has been found inside. The nearby garage shows evidence of a killing, and Kosuke positively identifies the hand as Takaoka's, who cannot be found. Oddly, Kosuke has a girlfriend whose father also committed suicide - a construction worker with the same company. Through daily leg work and task force meetings, the many divisions of the local and Tokyo Metropolitan Police force uncover a web of Yakuza coercion, blackmail and entrapment. As the case progresses, proof surfaces that the hand is not that of Takaoka! and that Takaoka himself is not who he was thought to be.
This story unfolds through conversation, investigation and diligent police work. There are over fifty officers assigned to the case and at times, when they are together in a task force meeting, it's hard to keep track of names. Reiko again has team partners who are either lovesick or fighting against her, and her internal thoughts throughout show she is not above acting out.
Unlike the first, this novel is all business - an extremely complex puzzle with a large cast, each with their own stories and parts in the case. It is an impressive feat when Honda brings all the threads together to reveal the truth of the crime - again, it's bloody, visceral and quite hard to read.
2007 (translated 2017) / Tradeback / 428 pages
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