Torii, a top-performing sales rep, is forced into the sales division of a murder-for-hire company in this high-speed mystery. After stumbling into a murder scene, he is given an impossible quota of 200 million yen in two weeks and must survive by turning his sales pitch and quick thinking against assassins.

The quota is 200 million yen in two weeks. Fail, and hell is waiting.

Set in late-Edo Yokohama and the brothel district of Kozukiyoshi, this is a full-scale mystery that follows Isa as she investigates the truth behind her father’s death. The novel blends political intrigue, the world of the licensed quarter, and her relationship with the British naval officer Mason into a story with both historical weight and strong momentum.

To clear her father’s name, Isa goes straight into Yukaku Island.

When popular idol Sota Omine places highly at a bodybuilding competition after only three months of training, accusations of doping spread across social media. Rookie journalist Kentaro Matsumura is assigned to go undercover at the gym at the center of the scandal, plunging him into a world where muscle and deception intersect. Winner of the 70th Edogawa Rampo Prize.

In an era of rampant fakes, the story of truth begins.

An undercover mystery following a professional baseball player’s transformation and doping suspicion.

Chasing truth in an age flooded with fakes.

In a world heading toward the end after an asteroid impact, Koharu finds a body in a trunk during driving lessons and takes on the final mystery with a former detective instructor. A Edogawa Rampo Prize-winning novel about humanity’s last serial murder case.

Her twisted justice and my hope remain in a world on the brink of collapse.

This police novel follows Rikiko Sawamura, who joined the Hokkaido Prefectural Police after earning a doctoral degree, as she confronts a five-year-old abduction case and the suspicion surrounding a leaked investigation file. Its strengths lie in the drive of the unresolved mystery and the layered portrayal of institutional friction and personal conflict.

Rikiko Sawamura steps into the truth buried beneath an unresolved case.

Watashi ga Kieru is a social mystery about Fujimaki, a former detective who learns that he has symptoms of mild cognitive impairment and investigates the identity of an unnamed elderly man known as Monzen-san at a care facility. Asked by his daughter for help, Fujimaki begins an inquiry within his remaining time and approaches a truth hidden in the man's past.

As his own memory begins to falter, Fujimaki traces the past of a nameless old man in what may be his final investigation.

Nami Nishizawa, who handles corporate crises, infiltrates a citizens' group to calm protests against a pharmaceutical company. There she is introduced to a fellow activist, Yukie Himeno, the woman with whom she grew up in an orphanage and later became lovers. Nami confronts the mystery of the material being used to attack the company and Yukie's disappearance.

Inside a protest movement shaking a corporation, Nami encounters a side of her lover she never knew.

In 2018, a charter plane on a sightseeing flight suffers a systems failure and makes an emergency landing in Antarctica. Tour conductor Takumi Mochizuki and passenger Randy Baker set out for the abandoned Pole of Inaccessibility base in search of supplies. In 1945, at a Japanese naval base on Penang Island, trainee Nobuyuki Hoshino is ordered to take a German scientist and his daughter to a Nazi secret base in Antarctica.

An adventure mystery that brings together an Antarctic survival crisis and a wartime mission to a hidden base.

QJKJQ is a suspense novel about Aria, a seventeen-year-old raised in a family that shares a history of grotesque murder. When her brother is killed and her mother disappears, Aria suspects her father and investigates her family's secrets and her own origins.

After her brother's death and her mother's disappearance, Aria steps into deeper secrets concealed by her murderous family.

In Narukawa, where video journalist Fushimi lives, a series of pranks leaves messages behind. When the death of a local ceramic artist is marked with the graffiti, 'Let us begin moral education. Who killed him?', Fushimi investigates the connection between present events and a murder from thirteen years earlier while filming a documentary about it.

Graffiti declaring the start of moral education links the present case to a murder thirteen years earlier.

Kazuhisa Murakami, who is blind, asks his brother Tatsuhiko to donate a kidney to his granddaughter. When his brother refuses even to be tested, Kazuhisa begins to suspect that the man he has believed to be his brother for twenty-seven years is an impostor. He investigates the identity of the brother who returned to Japan as a Chinese war orphan.

Is the man he has trusted as his brother for twenty-seven years truly his brother?

Shūmeihan is a psychological mystery about crimes that imitate a serial murderer executed fourteen years earlier. A message from an unknown successor reaches Jin, the twin brother of the killer's final victim; the murderer was known as the Boojum.

When someone appears to inherit the name of an executed serial killer, the case from fourteen years ago becomes unfinished.

Thirteen years after the murder of Fyodor Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov, an investigator in Moscow's Interior Ministry cold-case division, returns to his hometown. Seeking to prove his brother Dmitry innocent and uncover the truth, he begins a reinvestigation using an unprecedented method, but a new incident occurs.

A reinvestigation mystery in which Ivan pursues the true killer thirteen years after the patricide in The Brothers Karamazov.

A talisman found beside an unexplained corpse leads Daisuke Nakazawa, a cultural anthropologist who specializes in magic, to investigate a murder. As he asks whether a curse can kill, the meaning hidden in the talisman and the crime's background come into view.

The talisman left beside an unexplained corpse raises the question of where a curse ends and murder begins.

Saikai is a mystery about a handgun buried in a schoolyard by four childhood friends. Twenty-three years later, a murder brings them together again and forces them to confront who dug up the gun that connects their past and present.

A handgun fired again after many years shakes the memories and secrets of four childhood friends.

At a traffic prison, an inmate's body is found standing at attention. The scene appears to be sealed, and the escape of another prisoner forces the prefectural police to act quickly. The circumstances of traffic accident perpetrators and victims, their families, prison officers, and detectives converge as the case leads to an issue connected with Article 39 of the Japanese Constitution.

A classic mystery in which a seemingly locked-room killing and an escape at a traffic prison bring together the conflicting motives of people affected by traffic accidents.

Yūkai Ji is a suspense novel linking the kidnapping of a boy in the year after the war with a murder fifteen years later. The unsolved case, in which the kidnapper escaped during the ransom exchange and the boy vanished, begins to move again after many years.

The kidnapping just after the war seemed destined to remain unsolved, until a murder fifteen years later brings the missing boy and kidnapper back into view.

A Chinese diplomat who has defected brings word that a long-dormant spy, a chinteigyo, has begun moving in Japan. Faced with leaked state secrets, public-security detectives launch a clandestine investigation to identify the sleeper agent.

When the sleeper spy awakens, the public-security investigation begins.

Tokyo Damoi is a historical mystery linking the beheading of a lieutenant in a Siberian prisoner-of-war camp to the disappearance of a former internee in the present day. An unidentified body in Maizuru and a poetry collection recording events sixty years earlier lead the investigation toward truths buried in fading memory.

A murder in a camp sixty years ago and a disappearance in the present: memories left in frozen ground break a long silence.

Takashi Hiyama, a café manager, lives with his young daughter while carrying anger that the three boys who killed his wife were not tried under the juvenile justice system. Years later, one of the boys is murdered and suspicion also falls on Hiyama. Tracing what became of the boys, he confronts questions of guilt, rehabilitation, and the pain of bereaved victims' families.

As the boys who killed his wife die one after another, a bereaved husband's anger collides with the unresolved truth of juvenile crime.

A survey team is trapped in a cave with roughly five hours before it floods. Ryo Toma, a cave diver driven by guilt over an event five years earlier, sets out alone to rescue them, but the cave's darkness conceals the truth about the past and a murderer.

Five hours remain before the cave floods. In its darkness, the rescuer confronts the truth from five years ago.

Match Make is a combat-sports mystery about the death of a star wrestler during a match. Rookie wrestler Satoshi Yamada, who dreams of becoming the strongest, joins his contemporary Honjo to uncover what happened in the ring.

Was the death in the ring suicide or murder? Rookie wrestlers pursue the truth hidden behind professional wrestling's spectacle.

Hana Tsukimori, who works in advertising production, becomes involved in suspicious activity surrounding an old film left by her grandfather after using it in a promotional video. As she investigates the wartime events recorded on the film, a crime Japan has concealed from its past becomes linked to present-day danger.

A mystery in which wartime memories preserved on old film expose present danger and a concealed chapter of Japan's past.

Miura, a young man on parole after killing someone in a fight, and Nango, a prison officer disillusioned with rehabilitating offenders, are asked to clear a death-row inmate who has lost his memory. With three months to work, they pursue the truth through the inmate's memory of thirteen steps.

They have three months. The only clue to saving a death-row inmate without memories is thirteen steps.

Nō Otoko is a psychological mystery about a mysterious man without emotion, found in the hideout of a serial bomber. As the psychiatrist assigned to assess him and the investigators seek his identity, they confront crimes that shake the city.

A man without a heart is found in a bomber's hideout, and his presence begins to shift the course of a series of crimes.

Yuji Kasahara left comedy after a rape scandal. Five years later, the disappearance of his former partner, who has little time left to live, forces him to confront the past. Against the resentment of a man driven out of show business, he pursues the truth amid tangled relationships.

His missing former partner brings back a scandal and memories of show business that he thought he had buried.

Sakamoto, a debt-collection officer at a city bank, dies suddenly from an allergic shock and leaves behind a cryptic remark. His colleague Iki, driven by concern for Sakamoto's wife Yoko and his own doubts, confronts the bank's hidden world and its organized wrongdoing.

Following the suspicious death of a colleague, Iki steps into the deep shadows of a city bank.

A suspense novel set against the world of television news, following the gap between images and truth. A whistleblower tape leads the protagonist into her own trap.

Images do not always reflect the truth.

A detective visits Shoko Yagi, a female store security officer who apprehends shoplifters at a supermarket. The wife of a man with whom Shoko ended an affair three years earlier has been murdered, and Shoko becomes a suspect because she received substantial compensation as his mistress. To establish her innocence, she begins investigating the case herself.

The eye trained to catch shoplifters is turned toward a murder accusation she never expected.

An explosion in Shinjuku Central Park sets a man, who has hidden his past for decades, back into motion. Hard-boiled tension and melancholy run together throughout.

An explosion brings back the past he tried to bury.

A legal suspense novel set against prosecutorial investigations and the justice system.

The truth is pursued from inside the prosecutor’s office.

A short story that uses shifts in gaze and desire to depict the unease of an urban, image-saturated world and the strangeness of the body.

It is visible, yet unreachable.

Set in a postwar, desertified world, this science-fiction fantasy follows a journey centered on a divine machine shell and a sleeping girl.

A sleeping girl and a divine machine shell set a boy’s journey in motion.

白き煉獄 is recorded as a prize work, but no standalone book publication could be confirmed.

Details about 白き煉獄 remain in award records.

A literary work that follows the small dissonances and emotional shifts hidden beneath everyday life through 川沿いの町.

It carefully gathers the tiny shifts within everyday life.

The first entry in the Murano Miro series, this hard-boiled novel depicts crime and violence through a woman’s perspective.

A sharp hard-boiled novel that opens the Murano Miro series.

リセット is recorded as a prize work, but no standalone book publication could be confirmed.

Details about リセット remain in award records.

A mystery centered on 零れる闇, in which events and secrets gradually come to light.

Quiet dissonance gradually shapes the outline of the case.

A short story whose folk-tale atmosphere lets the strange and the murderous collide.

A kappa story does not end as a joke.

A long-form mystery in which a legal investigation and courtroom tension overlap with the shadows of a crime scene.

Will the truth emerge beyond the nighttime verification?

慟哭の錨――関門海峡シージャック事件 is recorded as a prize work, but no standalone book publication could be confirmed.

Details about 慟哭の錨――関門海峡シージャック事件 remain in award records.

A mystery grounded in medical knowledge. It won the 38th Edogawa Rampo Award in 1992 and is marked by a tense hospital setting.

At the end of the white corridor, the mysteries hidden in medical practice begin to unwind.

ヘルン先生行状記 is recorded as a prize work, but no standalone book publication could be confirmed.

Details about ヘルン先生行状記 remain in award records.

A mystery centered on 村正殺人事件, in which events and secrets gradually come to light.

Quiet dissonance gradually shapes the outline of the case.

A bacterium that dissolves aluminium alloy leaks from the cargo hold of an M Airlines jumbo jet. As the airliner faces the danger of becoming unable to fly, an international conspiracy over the organism brings U.S. Navy fighters, the Japan Air Self-Defense Force, and the unidentified jet Night Dancer into conflict.

An aviation suspense novel in which international intrigue and fighter engagements unfold in the sky as an airliner damaged by a dangerous bacterium must be saved.

A hard-boiled mystery about a former food inspector who digs into the black market in radiation-contaminated food.

As he traces the flow of contaminated food, the truth leads him into the shadows of politics and business.

A full-scale mystery built around a series of murders that begin at a kendo tournament. It blends the intensity of the sport with a classic puzzle-driven investigation.

Within the heat of the arena, hidden motives gradually link the clues into a murder case.

A full-length detective novel set against the backdrop of the late Cold War. It combines international tension with a suspenseful investigation into a vast conspiracy.

As the world moves toward détente, a single case begins to reveal the shape of an international conspiracy.

Set in Asakusa in the early Showa era, this locked-room mystery revolves around Enoken's troupe and the theater world. Historical drama and classic mystery fit neatly together.

Theater, a locked room, and the atmosphere of early Showa Asakusa all come alive together.

Recorded as a candidate work, but no standalone book publication could be confirmed. Award records are the safest way to trace it.

Since no book edition could be confirmed, this is a work best traced through award records.

Recorded as a candidate work, but no standalone book publication could be confirmed. Its outline is best traced through award lists and records.

The bibliographic record remains, but no standalone book edition could be traced.

Recorded as a candidate work, but no standalone book publication could be confirmed. It is best treated as a magazine-based award record.

Since no book edition could be confirmed, this is a work best traced through award records.

Hakushoku no Zanzo is a coming-of-age baseball mystery set during Japan's summer high-school championship. As two coaches who once formed a battery at a prestigious school prepare to face each other, the murder of a betting handicapper leads sports reporter Nakayama to investigate the hidden grudges and secrets behind the tournament.

A murder amid the excitement of Koshien exposes old ties and secrets within high-school baseball.

Told through a young man racing through Yokohama at night as he pursues the truth behind his mother’s death and a crime, the novel combines Rampo Award-style suspense with the feel of a fast-moving coming-of-age story. Its driving structure leaves a strong impression.

Riding a Z2, the young man chases the truth.

A classic police novel set in Shanghai, it intertwines detectives’ investigations with the mystery of a coded message. Against the backdrop of the city’s atmosphere and social texture, the story builds toward a tightly wound climax.

A code on the investigation trail at the Shanghai Public Security Bureau draws the story toward catastrophe.

One of the 1987 Edogawa Rampo Award finalists. Amazon JP, the NDL OPAC, and the publisher’s official site were checked, but no standalone book publication of the work could be confirmed.

A 1987 finalist for which no standalone book publication could be confirmed.

The 1987 Edogawa Rampo Award finalist Shanghai Catastrophe. I checked Amazon JP, the NDL OPAC, and the publisher’s official site, but could not confirm a standalone book matching the finalist’s author; only a different-author book with the same title was found.

A 1987 finalist for which no standalone book publication could be confirmed.

One of the 1987 Edogawa Rampo Award finalists. Amazon JP, the NDL OPAC, and the publisher’s official site were checked, but no standalone book publication could be confirmed.

A 1987 finalist for which no standalone book publication could be confirmed.

A full-length novel that begins with two girls sold into a Yokohama brothel and unfolds into a chain of murders and secrets in an early-Shōwa pleasure quarter. It was published as the winner of the 32nd Edogawa Rampo Award.

In a city of pleasure, desire and death bare their fangs before two girls thrown into its depths.

Recorded as a candidate for the 32nd Edogawa Rampo Award, but no standalone book edition could be found after checking Amazon Japan, the NDL, and the publisher's official sources in that order.

No book edition could be confirmed.

Recorded as a candidate for the 32nd Edogawa Rampo Award, but no standalone book edition could be found after checking Amazon Japan, the NDL, and the publisher's official sources in that order.

No book edition could be confirmed.

The Edogawa Rampo Award candidate work Taiga no Satsui was later retitled and published as Tenno no Fune. It is a mystery that connects incidents in Japan and Brazil while tracing the shadows of Japanese immigrant history.

In its retitled form, memories of migration and the mystery of the case are drawn onto a single line.

Recorded as a candidate for the 32nd Edogawa Rampo Award, but no standalone book edition could be found after checking Amazon Japan, the NDL, and the publisher's official sources in that order.

No book edition could be confirmed.

Set at a girls' school, this school mystery begins with the death of a guidance teacher and widens into suspicion before moving on to a second murder during a costume parade. The shifting gazes and relationships among the suspects create tension alongside the atmosphere of youth.

Two murders inside a closed school gradually strip away the face of everyday life.

Using a coded score hidden in Mozart's lullaby, this music-history mystery follows Beethoven as he takes on the riddle of Mozart's death. With disciples and Schubert drawn into the investigation, the brilliance and humanity of the composers cross paths in a light, playful way.

Beethoven pursues the code hidden in the score.

An Edogawa Rampo Prize-winning novel that follows the mystery of a village taboo and murder through the lens of a fated daughter.

It probes the mystery of a murder in a taboo-bound village.

A full-length mystery that combines the pursuit of Sharaku’s identity with ukiyo-e scholarship and leads into the puzzle of a murder case.

The hunt for Sharaku’s identity gradually leads into a murder mystery.

A suspense novel about murders at a ranch in Tohoku and a secret that shakes the horse-racing world.

A racing-world mystery with a buried secret.

A social-issue mystery about suspicion and intrigue surrounding the construction of a nuclear power plant.

A dark mystery of power and suspicion.

As the true identity of the legendary poet Sarumaru Tayu is sought, unexpected facts emerge before a young Orikuchi Shinobu as he investigates the death of a friend. It is an intellectually layered mystery that blends ancient poetry and folklore studies.

The shadow of a legendary poet brings a friend’s death into focus.

Set in a seaside town in the summer of 1970, the novel follows ‘I,’ who has returned home, along with his friend the Rat and a girl he meets by chance, using their drifting days to depict the uncertainty and sense of loss of youth in a dry, spare style. It is Haruki Murakami’s debut novel.

That summer wind passed by, languid and bittersweet.

A group of university students in the 1970s takes on a string of murders of high school girls inside a TV station. Against the backdrop of youth culture and mindset, the novel blends the atmosphere of coming-of-age with mystery.

A coming-of-age mystery in which a band of friends pursues a case inside a TV station.

The bodies of twins are found on the Sanriku coast. The detective assigned to the case pursues a methodical investigation, only to encounter a closed village society and an unsettling world of ancient legends.

The twins' deaths by the Sanriku sea unsettle the village's old legends.

On the day the Pacific War begins, the Japanese military raids a Beijing medical research facility to seize the fossil bones of Peking Man. The fossils have already disappeared. As the search continues, Japanese forces, the Chinese Communist Party, and the Nationalist Party become entangled in a covert struggle.

The search for vanished Peking Man fossils unleashes a chain of intrigue and death across wartime China.

After mistakenly taking someone else's bag while travelling, a person finds a letter inside. The woman who wrote it died three years earlier, and its intended recipient is dead as well. As the mystery of correspondence between the dead is pursued, the outline of a terrible past event emerges.

A letter addressed from one dead person to another calls a forgotten event back into view.

"暗黒告知" is a prize-winning work first presented in this award context.

Tracing the work's publication history through "暗黒告知".

"アルキメデスは手を汚さない" is a prize-winning work first presented in this award context.

Tracing the work's publication history through "アルキメデスは手を汚さない".

A lawyer and a real-estate broker involved in the sale of valuable land overlooking Lake Biwa are murdered. Behind the crime lie a mysterious woman and land swindlers using the law as a shield in their struggle for profit. This courtroom mystery follows testimony and evidence to uncover the truth about land fraud and murder.

Courtroom maneuvering exposes land fraud and murder carried out behind the shield of the law.

Michio Hosoi, a popular host of entertainment shows, is found dead of gas poisoning in his locked room. The police decipher a coded diary that appears to be a suicide note and close the case, but when the code proves to have a second layer, the death takes on a new mystery.

The coded diary that seemed to confirm suicide makes the locked-room death a question once again.

The autocratic president of a vast Tokyo hotel is found stabbed inside a double locked room. His beautiful secretary becomes a suspect, but she has an ironclad alibi: she spent the night with detective Hiraga. When she is later found dead in Fukuoka, Hiraga pursues the truth linking the locked-room device to the distant death.

Before a double locked room and an unbreakable alibi, a detective's determination enters the darkness of a vast hotel.

A young medical student, Mori Ōgai, studying abroad in Berlin becomes entangled in the murder of a count. Against the backdrop of a double-locked-room puzzle and the shadow of Bismarck, the novel connects historical atmosphere with detective logic.

In the fog of 19th-century Berlin, a medical student traces the shape of the case.

The daughter of the shogi prodigy Shingo Kawabe is kidnapped, and the match and the hunt for the culprit unfold at the same time. It is a thrilling award-winning novel that fuses the tension of a title match with the course of the case.

The next move may decide a daughter's fate.

A couple on a date stumbles upon a murder, and a newspaper reporter pursues the meaning of the victim's final word, "Ten." The novel races toward the darkness behind the case with brisk, propulsive structure.

The single word "Ten" leads the case into another shape.

A body is found in front of the bear cage at Inokashira Park, and the shadow of war crimes and a new-religion badge tie the case together. It is an unusual full-scale mystery where an unexpected culprit and a heavy theme coexist.

Bear claw marks and a religious badge bring the postwar darkness into view.

A managing director at an insulation-material company is killed, and suspicion falls on a lonely young man from the Tohoku region who feels isolated at work. By layering urban alienation and the mismatches of the investigation, the novel firmly establishes itself as a social mystery.

One young man's loneliness changes the way the case is seen.

Set in a building reminiscent of the Dōjunkai Otsuka Women's Apartments, the story follows a series of strange incidents in the lives of its elderly female residents. When construction begins, the past that had been sealed away gradually comes to the surface in this suspense novel.

The apartment master key unlocks the past that had been sealed away.

Soon after a wealthy overseas Chinese businessman visits Kobe, a Chinese loan shark is murdered, and the detective Tao Zhanwen closes in on the core of the case through calm, methodical reasoning. Even as a debut novel, it stands out for its dry prose, humor, and mature human observation.

In Kobe's Chinese community, quiet deduction brings the case into focus.

Around the university student Takayuki Sera, poison, a hidden birth secret, his father's death, and a will all converge into a chain of unsettling events. As the search for the culprit turns toward a staged suicide, the novel carefully traces both the fragility of youth and the killer's psychology.

Behind the packet of poison, a young man's everyday life quietly begins to collapse.

Noriko and Juri are passionately in love when a murder weighs on them as if mocking their relationship. Written with a clear, lyrical touch, this mystery follows the love between the two young women while pursuing the sinister will behind the crime.

A murder beside the young women's love exposes the darkness hidden within an apparently quiet relationship.

After moving into a hospital boarding house, Yutaro Niki and his sister Etsuko become caught up in a strange series of murders. With an ominous phone call, a secret passage, a knife coated in snake venom, and a black cat appearing at the scenes as clues, the mystery-loving siblings pursue the truth.

Each appearance of the black cat brings the hidden pattern of murders at the hospital boarding house into sharper focus.

Hayakawa Publishing Corporation received the 2nd Edogawa Rampo Award for its publication program for the Hayakawa Pocket Mystery series, rather than for an individual work.

Kawataro Nakajima's reference work offers entries on writers including Edogawa Rampo, Seishi Yokomizo, Ellery Queen, and Agatha Christie, as well as their major works, terms, and books relating to detective fiction. Spanning Japanese and international mysteries, it provides alphabetical guidance for reading the genre.

A dictionary for tracing writers, works, and terms while surveying the breadth of detective fiction in one volume.