Deep Red

Deep Red is a novel about anger, of the slow burn and the itch for violence, and the unexpected places that fury can take us.

Sixth grader Kanako was looking forward to her school trip, and she sure is enjoying it. At night, as she and her friends exchange scary stories after lights-out, her teacher barges into their room to summon her. Yet he seems more solicitous than scolding, and when he asks her to pack her things so he can take her back to Tokyo in a cab, Kanako realizes that something terrible has happened to her family.

Educational supplies salesman Norio Tsuzuki was bamboozled into co-signing a fraudulent loan agreement by a business relation of his to whom he couldn’t say no. Enticed by the unscrupulous entrepreneur to recover the sum by unethical means, Tsuzuki indeed descends into criminality--by brutally murdering the man and his family. The only survivor, a daughter the same age as Tsuzuki’s own, just happened to be away on a school trip...

When the orphaned Kanako grows up into a young woman, she cannot but feel vengeful toward Miho, the fiend’s daughter, and seeks her out under false pretenses. What follows is a memorable waltz of two unmoored souls.

A screen writer by trade Hisashi Nozawa wrote for TV and film since 1983. He was also known for having written the script for Beat Takeshi’s directorial debut - Violent Cop. But he would turn to the world of prose around the year 2000. In 1999 he won the coveted Edogawa Rampo Prize for Mystery Fiction. He would then go on to write Deep Red in 2000. The book was an instant hit for Kodansha and quickly was fast tracked to become a mass-media project. Unfortunately before the project would be completed in 2005, Nozawa committed suicide in his office in 2004. He would eventually write more than three dozen TV series, more than a dozen movies, and around fifteen novels before he died at age 44.