Freezing Point
— Worth the detour
About
When Dr. Tsujiguchi’s young daughter is murdered, his grief curdles into something calculated: he secretly adopts the killer’s infant daughter and presents her to his wife as an orphan in need of a home. His wife, Natsue, names the child Yoko and loves her as her own — unaware that her husband has engineered the cruelest possible revenge. The secret holds for years, until it doesn’t. Miura’s debut was serialised in the Asahi Shimbun in 1964, chosen from 731 submissions, and became an immediate national sensation. Written by a Christian in a country with almost no Christians, it posed a question most Japanese readers had never encountered in fiction: can a child inherit a parent’s sin? The word for original sin — genzai — was so unfamiliar that many readers didn’t know how to read the characters. They learned.
