Murder in the House of Omari

About

In Osaka, dark secrets haunt the wealthy Omari merchant family across the first half of the twentieth century. In 1906, an heir climbs to the top of a panorama and vanishes. In 1914, a fight on a bridge ends in death. In 1943, wartime brings new horrors. Each incident is a piece of a larger puzzle — a multi-generational mystery that rewards the reader who pays attention to every detail across decades. Taku Ashibe writes in the honkaku tradition of Japanese detective fiction, where the puzzle is sacred and the reader is invited to compete with the detective. The structure — spanning forty years of a single family's tragedies — gives the novel an epic scope unusual for the genre, making it simultaneously a family saga and a locked-room challenge. A classic puzzle mystery stretched across a dynasty — where the solution requires not just logic, but an understanding of how secrets accumulate over generations.